At the risk of boring people who quite rightly point out
> For Pete's sake, lets move on, or another bunch of us will be leaving in
> droves
given the mailings requesting Bill Chambers' reinstatement, and my own
publicly stated position that I don't believe in censorship, I need to say
three things. And I say them about myself, because that's all I'm qualified
to make assertions about (though _you_ might want to ask yourself if I'd be
right if I said them of you; viz., if you agree with me.)
David Nightingale acted.
There is a view which asserts that people like me, who argue from first
principles _against_ exclusion, spend a lot of time in hiding behind that
position; but thereby _fail_ to act to the point at which the things they
value are destroyed through inattention and, conceivably, some sort of
moral cowardice. (It's so _comfortable_ to be on the side of the liberal
angels!)
His act was courageous.
I would of course ditch my sacred principles of free speech if someone,
say, advocated child molestation (or, to bring it closer to home,
threatened my own kids in any way); I'd draw the line. David chose to draw
the line in a different place on an issue about which he felt very
strongly. Good! It's one iota of experience available to me, which
encourages me to re-examine and maybe reconstrue; to question the location
at which I draw lines.
His act, unilateralist in all conscience, was done in order to preserve
something we all value, viz., a constructive _alternativist_ mode of
discourse. Has no one noticed, (all the hurts occasioned by Bill's ad
hominem style of argument aside), that _that_ was exactly the kind of
discourse which Bill could not tolerate? (One had to agree with him, or be
anathemised; indeed, many of his attacks seemed entirely gratuitous.) That
Bill would have been incapable of writing a letter like the present one,
shot through as it is with an awareness that my views are fallible, and
there's always another way of construing than my own?
*********
Of course, this (to move the argument away from Bill Chambers at last)
harks back to a logical dilemma that I've tried, perhaps rather
inarticulately, to address in the past, viz., that a constructivist
alternativist epistemology must logically admit absolutist, positivist
epistemologies as members of the set of alternatives to itself and thereby
treat them as equally possible: acceptance of which would seem to explode
the notion of constructivist alternativism....
Maybe this would be worth readdressing? (_Pace_ Beverly Walker, who
suggested my problem lies in an excessive adherence to the need for logical
consistency if I'm taking a constructivist position, which seems
reasonable; and Jack Adams-Webber, whose response led me to resolve that it
was high time I read some Lefebvre, a good intention, like so many others,
which awaits a suitable opportunity free of other committments...)
Mind 'ow you go!
Devi Jankowicz
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