Anti-Climacus

A LITTLE FURTHER ENGAGEMENT: With John Quiggin on the question of Unite Against Terror. John was nice enough to respond to my post concerning his CT post on UAT which is somewhere below here. His comment, in full:

"Just to clarify, I didn't object to the petition because of who had signed it, but because their interpretation was the same as mine, that the main target of the petition was not terrorists but sections of the British left whose position on terrorism disagreed with their own.

If that was not intended, the organisers could have, as I suggested, asked them to remove their diatribes from the site and contribute something positive instead."

(which, I should point out in fairness to John, is not the interpretation given to his statements, for example, here. As far as the associational aspect goes, I think it's perfectly understandable be wary of joining the side of people with whom you have great differences. If Henry Kissinger were to sign the UAT statement this evening, I'd probably have to have a long hard think about how it was that we ended up on the same side, though in the end my decision to sign or not to sign would be unrelated to whomever else had signed, as John says he himself reasoned)

I'll confess to being a little unclear on the question of interpretation, though. So let me try to represent my thought process here and see if I can make some sense out of this claim. I thought immediately of Rousseau: I hold what is probably a minority view on him in the world of political theory, which is that he leaves unresolved a lot of tensions between the individual and society (and I think most of contemporary liberal philosophical debates (following Rawls, and especially in the area of public education) are trying to work out this tension in various other theoretical arenas), and I think that while his work is not in any meaningful sense proto-fascist, I think it's much easier to turn Rousseau's system into an autocratic or totalitarian one than it is to turn it into a democratic one. Lots of people disagree on that. We can go to various Rousseau texts and argue about what the right sort of way to interpret him is (we can argue, for example, what the meaning behind 'forced to be free' implies) and, at least in part because Rousseau is dead, we'll probably never have totally satisfactory answers to this one way or another. I know that even though mine is a minority view, there are other people who share it, some who want to make certain claims of mine more strongly, others more weakly. But my view is, ultimately, my view, and so long as I have enough textual support for it, I feel okay asserting it, and I (this is probably bad for my future career prospects) don't worry overmuch about hostile interpretations.

This ports over to the UAT case in, I think, relatively straightforward manner, with two exceptions: 1. the people who wrote it aren't dead (unless they're really sophisticated artificial intelligences, but I doubt that possibility), so we can actually repair to what they themselves said about why they wrote what they wrote and why it took the form that it did.

Now the part I'm confused about: why is the interpretation of people who did not themselves write the statement important here? I understand how this would get weight in the Rousseau example (some people have spent much more time on him than I have), but you have all the statement of intentionality one might need straight from the horses' mouths, as it were.

But I also understand Quiggin to be positing a counterfactual conditional: if it were the case that the organizers of UAT would take down the statements which attack some on the left more than the terrorists, then he would be willing to sign (or think about signing). But if the significant thing about the interpretation these people offer is that accords with Quiggin's own, how can it then be that removing these statements somehow rescues the meaning of the text in such a way that it can then be open to other, more favorable, interpretations?

Now, I also recognize that what I'm about to write could be seen as tendentious and baiting, but I want to emphasize that I mean to ask this seriously as a question, not to score a rhetorical point:

Ted Barlow here mentions the following:

"A few years ago, some idiotic war protestors, who no one had heard of and who represent no one, made a sign that said “We Support Our Troops When They Shoot Their Officers.”"

and suggests that it is unfair to categorically impugn the entire antiwar movement on the basis of the actions of a few disagreeable elements (a view which seems fair enough to me). If the meaning and seriousness of the antiwar movement as a whole can be divorced from people who take it too far (and I think it can; I'm not convinced the antiwar position was the right one, but I'm willing to concede that most people did it out of a sincere set of convictions), why can't the UAT statement have the elements which go too far similarly divorced from it?