Did you LIKE Snape?

[pippin_999]

No: HPFGUIDX 183155

Mike:
> 
> Along with my belief that Snape was really on the good side comes a 
> conviction that Snape wasn't an evil person. That is, Snape was 
> basically an upstanding member of the wizarding community. One that 
> had his faults and foibles like all the rest. IOW, he wasn't a Death 
> Eater at heart. This, of course, makes his decision to join the DEs 
> all the more confounding.
 
> I suspect that Voldemort was still in his charming, recruitment mode
> when Severus became enamored with the idea. Yet the name alone,
Death  Eaters, should have been a large enough red flag to warn off a
person  of Severus's intelligence. Another enigma that we won't ever
get solved.> 
> Back to my point: I didn't expect to find that Snape had joined the 
> Death Eaters. And when I found out he had, I still thought he must 
> have been different from the typical DEs, that he must have joined 
> through some kind of deception.

Pippin:
But that *is* typical.  All  the DE's joined through some kind of
deception,  multiple deceptions in fact. As Sirius says, Voldemort
doesn't bang on people's doors and order them to join him, he tricks,
jinxes and blackmails. And he lies and lies.

As you say, Snape does have a sense of the sanctity of life and of
obligation to others. Most wizards do. But he could believe, just as
Dumbledore once did, that he was acting for just those reasons.  

After all, if wizards are all basically the same, then why shouldn't
what's good for the purebloods be good for wizards in general? And if
they're *not* basically the same, if they do have different needs,
then why shouldn't the needs of the noble purebloods prevail over the
needs of the filthy mudbloods, who insist on shielding their useless
Muggle relatives to the expense and endangerment of wizards?  

As Dumbledore says, it's difficult to protect nameless, faceless
strangers over those whom we know and love. And there is an honest
debate in wizarding society, even as there is among the readers, over
whether that is in fact the right thing to do. A lot of people don't
think Dumbledore had any right to propose Harry's life as a sacrifice
to save the wizarding world, even if that was, as Harry thinks, the
path that would cost the fewest lives overall.  Those people surely
have just as much respect for the sanctity of life and the sacredness
of obligations as others -- it's just that their system for resolving
conflicting obligations is different. 

Harry's fate is of course the extreme example. But any accommodation
with others is going to entail conflict. It's seldom possible to come
up with settlements that seem fair to everyone, especially if people
are asked to sacrifice and compromise on something they hold sacred.
And make no mistake, the status quo requires a great deal of sacrifice
from wizardkind.

Life *would* in many ways be a lot simpler, safer and more pleasant
for the wizards if they didn't have to hide  from the Muggles. As we
learn in the last three books, the secret life isn't nearly so
appealing when it's being forced on you. 

Lily was living proof that the pureblood philosophy wasn't universally
valid -- that despite the difficulties of adapting to their needs, a
Muggleborn could be the functional equal of a wizard. But was she
typical, or a rarity like Dobby? Snape assumed she was a rarity, and
he trusted that Voldemort would make an exception for her if he asked. 

And that leads to the second deception.   Snape must have thought that
Voldemort would honor his word to spare Lily, or he never would have
asked for it. Of course Voldemort (Mark I) had no sense of obligation
to anyone, but he took care to conceal that, a job made easier because
wizards seem to have no concept of psychopaths in general.  

So, Snape's  awakening wasn't to the nature of evil but to the nature
of Voldemort.   It was the threat to Lily which forced him to
acknowledge that Voldemort might not keep his word. That would
probably have happened even without Lily. Most of LV's servants seem
to have  realized that they couldn't trust him, but by then their only
alternative was death. What made Snape unusual is that he loved Lily
enough to face that alternative for her sake, and had the means to
conceal his defection from Voldemort and reach Dumbledore.  

Would Snape have thought of working against Voldemort on his own if he
hadn't been impelled to seek aid for Lily? I doubt it, because all the
Death Eaters knew that if Voldemort even suspected they were working
against him, they'd be killed within days along with their entire
families. 

I'm sure Snape never thought in his wildest dreams that he would
survive for seventeen years. He was on borrowed time from the moment
(which we don't see) in which he sent his first message to Dumbledore.

Eventually Snape learned, IMO, that lives were valuable just because
they exist, and he was no longer willing to let a life be taken if he
thought he could save it. And that was not just because he was serving
Dumbledore and trying to be a good little Phoenix, because we see him
do this in defiance of Dumbledore's orders and at risk to the Order's
mission.

You might think that Snape was innately wicked not to have known this
from childhood. But as I've tried to explain, it isn't self-evident
that all lives are equally valuable, especially if you haven't been
brought up to think so. 

Many of us are taught from childhood that explicit racism is wrong,
and the thought of knowingly embracing a racist philosophy would make
us physically ill, so it's easy to think there must have been
something inherently wrong with Snape not to feel that way from the
start. But such feelings are, IMO, a result of conditioning that Snape
never had -- not until he was older, anyway.

Pippin