Hi Rex,

Quote Originally Posted by Rex Brynen View Post
As to Phil Salzman's broader point on MESH, he's correct that scholars (and especially anthropologists) are very wary of excessively close connection with the government/military for both ideological and scholarly reasons.
I would add in "historical" as well and, possibly, metaphysical (I really don't want to get into that one here...).

Quote Originally Posted by Rex Brynen View Post
Regarding the latter, I'm struck by the extent to which--despite all the hot debate on HTTs, Project Minerva, and so forth--there has been very little substantive analysis of the pluses and minuses of the relationship, how to address the ethical issues involved, and other practical issues. (SWJ and Savage Minds being, in general, relatively rare exceptions to this pattern.)

Instead, much of the commentary and discussion remains far too polemical to be useful.
On the whole, I agree with you on that. I could point out a few more, Marcus Griffin comes to mind but, on the whole, it tends to be here and SM (and a few private lists like MilAnthNet).

I've often suspected that part of the problem is some pretty basic different philosophical assumptions about "reality". In many ways, the position taken by a lot of the extreme anti-military crowd are on the extreme end of social constructivism - "reality is a social construct". This, at least in many of the forms it shows up in, is an extreme version of "nurture" (vs. Nature) or free-will vs. predestination and one that disregards many of the scientific discoveries of the past 20 years in the area of neuro-cognition, etc.

In this paradigm, conflict cannot be "natural" since "nature" is an illusion that is used as a rhetorical device to explain the complexities of social manipulation. Since conflict arises from the social, then we must look to the social for its causes and this can only be because of the US (okay, I skipped out about 10 intermediate levels in the causal chain, but, hey, this isn't a dissertation!).

I noted that Phil specifically excepted the behavioural and evolutionary crowd in Anthropology which, on the whole, doesn't surprise me at all since these are some of the few people who still look at "nature" (read biology and neuro-biology).

As an observation, it gets really hard to argue ethics when you are coming from totally contradictory metaphysical positions about the nature of reality!