The SCA and values.

by Ben Baron on Wednesday, September 23, 2009 at 10:04am ·

As I was coming to work this morning I was listening to Pres Obama’s soaring speech to the United Nations on universal human rights and simultaneously thinking of the Caer Galen Peers meeting of last night. The old bugbears of ‘fealty’ and ‘royalism’ came up at various points in the conversation, and the conflation got me thinking of something important.

Why can’t the SCA affirm our real values in the real world?

I try to make my SCA activities about the ‘real world’. Some don’t. They want to live in a fantasy land. That’s their choice, but the fantasy they choose to live is one that I sometimes find personally repugnant.

To quote Kanye: “Imma let you finish”, but ...

Firstly, there is the hypocrisy issue. In the SCA, we construct an entire edifice on believing that all Crowns are virtuous and deserving of respect, even slavish devotion. People justify this under the rubric of Royalism with a mythos that has long been demonstrated to be historically unsupportable, as though that were even a question in the minds of people writing this phony script. All it is to me is a modern world shortcut – the empty calorie equivalent of virtue. It is an easy high, feels good for a moment but doesn’t last. There is a modern world value to be supported, but real virtue is hard. It requires self-awareness and self sacrifice. It requires self-discipline, not swearing fealty reflexively or on command. Real devotion (fealty) is freely given and willingly manifested. Anything else is just extorted, or even feigned. It seems difficult to believe that people try to counterfeit something that obvious, since it can only lead to the ironic sort of statement from George Burns in a different context that “Sincerity is everything. Once you learn to fake that you’ve got it made.”

Second, the SCA can promote another virtue that we see seldom in America, as I have long observed: service. Service does not mean slavery, nor does it mean servility. It allows a man to demonstrate the reciprocal bonds of loyalty of server to client (or master) that can be a lifelong bond of mutual support. In the ‘real world’ of USA, I believe we need more people devoted to, for instance, public service – service as a civil servant, not for personal advancement, but for the common good, above our own craven desires. The worthies of this country once knew this: "I acknowledge that such a debt [of service to my fellow-citizens] exists, that a tour of duty in whatever line he can be most useful to his country, is due from every individual. It is not easy perhaps to say of what length exactly that tour should be, but we may safely say of what length it should not be. Not of our whole life, for instance, for that would be to be born a slave--not even of a very large portion of it." --Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1793. ME 9:118 Again, then, bitter to me then that some SCA people insist cravenly, again in the name of ‘Royalism’, on subverting this honest, unmet, yearning for an opportunity of service into just another assumption of unilateral servitude to the Crown.

Yet another modern value of worth is defense of the weak. Would that this were promoted more. We obviously yearn for this in our modern world. We wish for a superhero to rescue us from oppression, and most knights were the kids that grew up with a Batman poster on their wall. The elements are there. The intentions were once virtuous, so how does this get short circuited then in the SCA to knights being simply the bullies - stormtroopers of the king? The king, if nothing else, in American minds and lore, is tantamount to an emperor or dictator. Who would a real superhero less wish to support than that?

Finally, on modeling the real world in the SCA, and this is really personal and so could be considered somewhat biased and oversensitive, I had a conversation many years ago with Countess Berengaria which I have never forgotten on the subject of fascism. Not everyone will consider this, but real fascism destroyed tens of millions of people, including mine, within the last century, and many hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people were killed trying to combat it. When I see people raising their fists in a quasi-fascist salute and yelling ‘Outlands’ I must say I have never stopped being queasy each and every time it happens. Our SCA, our place of refuge and friendship, should never be ceded to such thuggery, even in sport.

Heavy thoughts, I know, for a day, but I hope this makes people think. I certainly did, and for that I suppose I can thank the King … and Obama.