OVERANALYZING THE TEXT

Marina wrote:

George fidgets in his chair, stares at his shoes, and wishes rather desperately for a dry martini.

Well, I did offer him a nice hot cup of tea, but for some reason he just didn't seem interested at the time. Silly boy.

A huge thanks to Marina for helping George to cut those apron strings! I'm feeling ever so much better about George now. In fact...

<Elkins pins S.W.E.E.T.G.E.O.R.G.I.A.N.I.S.M. badge happily to her chest>

I'm with George.

Although George will have to forgive me if I occasionally toss a few theories over to those guys out there on the Big Bang Battleship. I may like my Snape all SweetGeorgiany, but I still love my Ewwwws as repulsively Ewwww-y as they can get, and my Neville just as Bangy as can be — and I've still a lingering fondness for Bloody Ambushes, as well.

As none of those really have all that much to do with Snape himself, though, I will assume that while George may whole-heartedly disapprove, he will nonetheless refrain from putting me to the stake.

As for my quibbles about the word "visceral," I do think that this gets into the realm of...well, of quibbling. There are levels of viscerality, to be sure, and the distinction between a truly visceral response, an emotional one, and one based in moral principle or cultural upbringing is one that I don't think it is even always possible to make with any degree of accuracy — which is why the word "squeamish" can be applied to so many different types of hesitation or balking or disgust. As Marina wrote:

Some natural inclination, some visceral push is needed in order to get the moral faculty to engage.

Indeed. But if I may describe the distinction I was trying to make, I do see a difference between ones immediate emotional response to, in this case, enforcing dominance over another through pain or terror, and the secondary response of moral repugnance at having witnessed or committed such an act.

In my own experience, at any rate, these aren't necessarily the same response, and they don't come at quite the same time. Both certainly feel visceral—both hit you right in the gut, so to speak—but I do tend to think of the first response as the "visceral" one, while mentally labelling the revulsion that strikes a moment later as the "reaction of principle."

In a perfect world, of course, there would never be the slightest bit of disconjunct between the two. But people aren't always perfect, and their instincts aren't always pretty. Sometimes they can be very ugly indeed.

Um. Am I revealing far too much about myself here?

Elsewhere, Marina wrote:

See, there's cruelty and there's cruelty. A predilection for reducing people to quivering globs of jelly through dark threats, deadly insults and viciously clever mind games is not the same as a predilection for reducing people to quivering globs of jelly through pulling their intestines out through their left nostril.

Isn't it? This may be where we disagree. I tend to think of the distinction as more one of degree than of anything else. Sadism is a predilection for taking pleasure in holding others in ones power, and I don't think that it changes all that much in its fundamental emotional dynamic when the cruelty enters the realm of the physical. What changes, I think, is the recognition of the severity of trespass against the other person involved — which I tend to classify as one of those instinctive reactions secondary to, and often following just a heartbeat behind, the first "visceral" reaction.

You know, I went through a stage during my teenage years when I got pretty appallingly mean myself. My balk threshold was far lower than physical torture, of course, but it was not nearly as low as I dearly wish now that it had been. I remember once walking into the girl's bathroom in my school, only to discover that someone to whom I had just been quite verbally vicious was sitting there in a locked stall, sobbing. I mean, she was really bawling her head off in there. She was beside herself. I'd obviously really hurt her. And I felt utterly repulsed with myself. It was one of many occurrences that eventually got me to thinking that maybe my behavior could stand more than a bit of self-examination.

And yes, that revulsion did feel visceral. But it wasn't the first visceral response that I had. The first one was pure and simple pleasure. I liked the fact that I'd made her cry. I liked the feeling that my words could have that sort of power: the power to wound, the power to hurt, the power to strip someone so utterly of their self-control that they would actually have to hide away somewhere to weep. It can be really exhilirating, you know, that feeling of power. It doesn't feel bad at all. It feels good.

Yeah, I know. That's horrible, isn't it? But there you have it.

The revulsion...well, the revulsion came a heartbeat later. It certainly came in force when it did come, but it was the secondary response, not the primary one, and I don't think that it derived so much from pure instinct as it did from a more intellectualized extrapolation. ("If she's crying like that, then I must have really hurt her badly. And it wasn't justified at all for me to have done that. She's never really done a thing to me, and she wasn't threatening me...and, well really, there was just no valid reason to do that at all. I sure as hell wouldn't like it if someone made me that unhappy. Gee, you know, as fun as this sort of thing unquestionably is at times, and as personally gratifying as I might be finding it, maybe it really isn't the way that I want to be behaving towards other people.")

Now, obviously there's a considerable difference in degree between intimidating others through verbal cruelty and waging a war of terror by means of torture and murder. But then, there's also a considerable difference in degree between taking relish in making someone flinch with a carefully-aimed quip and reducing someone to a snivelling mess with an all-out verbal assault. And yet in my experience, there was no qualitative difference between the two. The pleasure I took back then in making others flinch was exactly the same (if somewhat less intense) than the pleasure I took in making people cry. It was the same thing, really. All that had really changed was the severity of the injury, recognition of which made me take stock and actually start to think, rather than merely continuing to do what I have to admit was, at that stage in my life, something that I not only found instinctive, and not only intensely pleasurable, but also a great deal of fun.

So, um. Now that nearly 4,000 perfect strangers know all about what a rotten person I am...

Marina wrote:

Now, at the time Snape joined the DE's, his moral faculty must've been taking a nap (since George maintains that Snape wasn't ignorant of what he was getting into). Something must have happened to make him sit up and start analyzing the philosophical implications of the DE agenda, and I believe that this something was his instinctive revulsion at murder and physical torture.

Based on his current canonical behavior, specifically his seeming disinterest in making even the slightest attempt to curb his psychologically sadistic impulses, I tend to suspect that his revulsion was not altogether instinctive, although as I said before, this is largely a matter of definition.

The ramifications of murder are far more severe than the ramifications of verbal cruelty and require more in the way of justification. Psychological abuse shatters people's self-confidence, erodes their self-esteem, and places them gratifyingly under your power. Killing people indeed places them most unquestionably under your power — but it also makes them dead. I don't really think that it requires much in the way of instinct to perceive a difference between the two actions and to begin to wonder whether you truly have any justification for the latter at all, other than your own selfish desire for personal gratification.

So in short, I wouldn't be surprised if murder had indeed been one of the big wake-up calls. I think that I just tend to frame the dynamic somewhat differently than you do.

But I also see a strong possibility that it could have been a change of belief about the justifications themselves, rather than anything at all about the severity of the acts that he was committing, that might have led him to reconsider. Even if you believe that physical cruelty is wrong, you can still rationalize its commission by resort to ends-means justification, and in this way comfortably avoid altogether any introspection about whether or not you actually like what you're doing. (What does it matter whether or not you enjoy it? It simply Has To Be Done, and that's all there is to it.) If you reach the conclusion that your pragmatic justification is logically flawed, however, then all you're left with as a rationale for your behavior is that you happen to enjoy it — which is far less defensible for anyone with any degree of moral integrity.

It seems quite possible to me that Snape really did at one time believe in all of that purity of blood nonsense, as well perhaps in the notion that the status quo was so deeply corrupt (Prank, anyone?) that it needed to be overthrown by any means possible. Any number of things could have set him to reconsidering those beliefs, and without them, he wouldn't have had any legitimate justification left for what he was doing.

Pleased to see, by the way, that you share my preference for viewing Snape's old DE companions as people he really did like. That's my own weird little personal Snape fetish, you know.

This is exactly what George is about, after all — the idea that Snape has put principle over sentiment.

Indeed.

::smiles down at shiny new badge::

There; I hope that cleared the waters somewhat.

It did! Thank you! And do apologise to George for me, will you, for the...er, catechism? Now he seems afraid of me, and there's really no need for him to be. I'm actually a very nice person these days.

—Elkins, who doesn't like to contemplate what her own life might have ended up like if some Evil Dark Wizard had approached her at the age of sixteen or so.