SCA: badly-behaving peers

[cellio]

A question has come up among some SCA folks, and I'm interested in hearing a broader perspective. Particularly because I've been a peer for a while and have become less active in recent years, it's possible I'm a bit out of touch.

Non-peers: to what extent do you look up to peers (define "look up" however you like)? Are you negatively affected (again, define how you like) if a peer does something bad?

Peers and non-peers: if a peer does something bad, is that significantly worse to you than if a non-peer did it? To what extent does the behavior of an individual peer reflect on his order or on the peerage in general? Does the answer vary based on what the peer did?

I'll post my own thoughts later; I want to hear others' first.

Clarification: "bad" = "behaves badly", not "produces substandard work". Sorry I didn't make that more clear.

Comments

[tangerinpenguin.livejournal.com]

I do not look up to Peers simply because of their titles. The set of people who are especially ept at things SCA, and worth looking up to for that reason, certainly overlaps a great deal with the Peerage. But it's far from a perfect match and neither is entirely a subset of the other.

Now, looking at the set of people who've amassed substantial influence, I tend to believe in a sort of noblesse oblige - the people who consistently use that to keep things fun for others, who are forces for sanity and cooperation, impress me greatly.

That's the ideal. More importantly, you have a responsibility to make sure any of your Reindeer Games aren't hurting innocent bystanders, people who don't have the political capital or chops to even be in the game, much less have coping strategies. How much I roll my eyes at "Evil Politics" versus actually getting my hackles up depends on how much it's actually hurting people that shouldn't have to be involved. After all, one of the costs of having a Big Boy's Sword instead of a feast dagger is understanding you never have the luxury of treating it like a butter knife.

[cellio]

More importantly, you have a responsibility to make sure any of your Reindeer Games aren't hurting innocent bystanders, people who don't have the political capital or chops to even be in the game, much less have coping strategies.

Yup, yup -- completely agreed.

How does an order police its own? It's one thing when the Reindeer Games are something the order as a whole is doing; what about renegades?

[tangerinpenguin.livejournal.com]

How does an order police its own? It's one thing when the Reindeer Games are something the order as a whole is doing; what about renegades?

A question with no one good answer. Shunning, mentioned elsewhere, can be useful if the peer is a glory hog, but many Problem Peers are either ornery and don't care or get all their strokes from people too junior to know better anyway. Sitting them down for a "intervention" chat may help (especially if you can leverage a Royal or former mentor who they may respect as an "elder" on some level, though sheer numbers can help too.)

Beyond that, you're into the realm of "what can anyone do in the face of other organization members being jerks." That varies greatly depending on what they've done and what the damage is. Is there continuing hemorrhaging, such that something drastic needs to happen to stop that first? Is it one big trauma that just needs to be fixed, maybe with some efforts to keep it from happening again? Is it just a matter of working with the problem peer's neighbors to "innoculate" them against a toxic attitude?

The downside, of course, is that it always takes more work and precision to fix something than it does to break it, and often you need to look carefully at how to fix things while doing as little new damage in the process. And that's almost always a matter of an individual - or several likeminded individuals working in parallel, or quietly cooperating - rather than something with the "official face" of an order.

[Disclaimer, which is no news to cellio but for anyone else: I'm not a Peer so I can't actually speak to any of the Peerage Orders from personal experience.]