I am sitting here, in my home office, listening to a recording of Monteverdi’s Beatus Vir. Officially, I am listening to it because I will be performing it on November 24th as part of the Ottawa Bach Choir. While that is the reason I am gving my wife and anyone else, I think the reason is somewhat deeper.

I find that as I listen to the music, Monteverdi, Bach, Handel, Schutz, etc., my mind works more clearly. The structures of the music seem to reinforce certain patterns of thought - complex, interwoven and, above all, “harmonious”. That is important to me, at the moment, because of what I am writing; an article on the relationship between Anthropology and the Military for the Small Wars Journal.

What, you might ask, is an Anthropologist doing writing for a military journal? Well, the short answer is simple - I was asked to write an article. The long answer is much more complex.

I have been following what is now called the “Global War on Terror” (GWOT) since the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979. As with many in the Western world, I cheered on the Mujahadin in the early 1980’s as they harrased the Soviets. Still, not being ignorant of history, I wondered how long it would be before the jihad turned against the West. By the late 1980’s, the signs were all there to see. The jihad was not, as I had hoped initially, supporting a restoration of the Afghan monarchy but the creation of an extremist fundamentalist Islamic state under the Taliban.

The rhetoric starting to come out of the Islamic world was also become more extremist and anti-Western. The voice of moderate Islamic scholars was being drowned out, and the resurgence of Islam was being modeled not on a restoration of the Golden Age of the Caliphate but on other, extremist historical models. In the Universities of North America, we could see a similar infiltartion happening as radical groups deriving from the Muslim Brotherhood started to control the discourse in the universities.

Fundamentalist rhetoric of a decidedly political, and extremist, bent was also appearing in the West. The United Staes, the worlds strongest democracy, has succumbed to a Chrstian version of the same epistemology: Christian in name; totalitarian in values. Groups such as the Moral Majority gained a disporportionate amount of power in the US, and their successors still wield excessive power.

To my mind, there was an inevitability about the next “great” war. This time, it would not be a simple ideologcal war fought solely along Western ideological lines between official “States” but, rather, a more subtle war where the epistemologcal issues were clouded in religious rhetoric. I didn’t, and I still don’t, see this war as a “Clash of Civilizations“. Rather, I see this current “war” as a fight between two meta-epistemologies: one absolutist and totalitarian, the other open and pragmatic.

The problem is that, unlike World War II, who is on which side oin this war is, sometimes, quite difficult to determine. It would be easy to say that “they”, whoever “they” may be, are the nasty absolutists SOB’s who need to be “taken care of”. That would be comforting but, in the long run, a useless illusion that will only blind “us” to the reality that these meta-epistemologies cross all formal borders. Unfortunately, this easy solution isn’t available to anyone with two neurons to rub together - only for those who support the meta-epistemology of absolutism. Obviously, my own bias lies in opposing that particular meta-epistemology.

All of this does, believe it or not, bring me back to why I am writing this article.

The biggest problem with a “war” of meta-epistemologies lies in the fact that there are no clear “sides”.  Rather, the “fight” is over what form of perception of reality will “win”.  In the past, I have had the honour to have known a large number of people who have put their lives on the line for what they believed, fighting in wars from the First World War to Operation Iraqi Freedom.  I am not talking about conscripts or “brainwashed robots” but, rather, people who have looked at the issues of whichever was the current war and said “this is worth fighting for”. And when these people, people I respect ask me to write an article about why Anthropologists in general (not specific) won’t fight in the GWOT, I believe that I am honour bound to give them the best I can: to try and say why many of my colleagues in the Academy will not support them and will do all they can to undermine them.