This past week has been an interesting one in many ways. I was in DC on Monday and Tuesday and back in Ottawa for the rest of the week. Two capitals, two countries, and two completely different assumptions about the ethics of Anthropological engagement with the military: on Monday night, I had drinks with Montgomery McFate and her husband Sean, while on Friday night I listened to Catherine Lutz talk about “Ethnography in an Era of Permanent War”. This disjuncture really made me think about differences in “ethics”; not only in the role of Anthropological engagement with the military, but on the very different cultural bases of “ethics” between Canada and the US.

For most of my life, I have seen cultural differences between Canada and the US. Often, they are very subtle differences as, for example, the phrase “Let’s go out for a coffee” which to me means “let’s go out and drink something (including beer) and talk” whereas to my wife Leslie, who is an American from Princeton, it meant “Let’s drink coffee”. Other times, they can be quite obvious, e.g. a Republic vs. a Parliamentary Democracy. This recent trip, however, highlighted another of these differences, both structural and subtle: the social valuation of the military, underlying class differences between Canada and the US, and some very different conceptions of how “morality” is conceived and where “ethics” reside.

Before going further, I should note that I tend to use the terms “morality” and “ethics” in ways that are different from many philosophers. What many people, including the AAA, calls a Code of Ethics, I call a “moral code” since it derives from a group negotiation process based on that groups [mis-]understanding of the way “reality” operates at a given point in space and time. I use the term “ethics” in the sense of the actual “rules of the game [of life]“, and hold that the locus is within the individual rather than the group; a very individualistic orientation rather than a group orientation.

Back to the particular case…

One of the key conversations that really hammered home to me a subtle difference between the social valuation of the military vis a vis Canada and the US, was a conversation I had with my friend Andy Page. Andy, who lives in Washington, and I were talking about how I got interested in examining the military when it was obvious that I wasn’t military (might have been the pony tail that gave it away…). I mentioned that, despite the fact that I had never been in the military, both sides of my family had a tradition of serving in the Canadian Forces. I sort of jokingly mentioned that both my great grandfather and great uncle had bought their commissions in the same regiment. Andy seemed intrigued (well, “incredulous” might be a better word for it) at the idea of buying commissions, but I pointed out to him that anyone in the Ontario of 100 years ago who had any pretentions to being a gentleman did so; it was a social necessity.

My great grandfather was a rather well know portrait painter (Sir E. Wyly Grier), and the fact that he also held a commission as a Major was, to me, no surprise or conflict (I knew that he had fought in the Boer War). I did, however, recently find a speech he gave in 1906 to the Empire Club in Toronto that hammered home the point about the ties between the status of “Gentleman” and holding a commission:

It seems almost absurd that a number of gentlemen like ourselves should come together in broad noonday to discuss the defence of one of the most peaceful countries in the world.

That speech is merely an artifact of a cultural view that was and, in some parts of Ontario, still is prevalent: a “gentleman” should be willing to put his money and his life down for what he believes in. Indeed, the willingness to do so, the “natural attitude” as the phenomenologists would say, is what defines a “gentleman” as a “gentleman” and, in Ontario at least, as a member of the social elite regardless of his (or her) profession.

Andy’s reaction to this, and I didn’t give many of the details, was that this was very different from his experience with the interactions between the US military and the US elites. While our conversation then shifted topics, that stuck with me and, in the past few days, surfaced again in a somewhat different area: politics.

It is fairly well know, at least amongst people who have looked at the history of politics in Canada, that many of the same families that are “Conservative” also provided many of the founding members of the CCF and the NDP, Canada’s “socialist” party. If you dig deeper into the relationship, you will find that the disagreements are not between ends so much as between means to those ends. Indeed, many right wing Conservatives in Canada (and I specifically exclude many of the neo-Conservatives), share the same social values in terms of end states as their brethren in the NDP, while disagreeing with the means to achieve those ends. I believe, although I cannot prove it, that this general agreement on ends with the focus of debate on means, has served to colour how we, as Canadians, view ethics. I know that it colours and conditions how I view the current debates on Anthropological engagement with the military.

I also believe, although again I cannot prove it, that the “ethics” debates in the US are not so much grounded in debates over means as they are over ends. I would guess, and that is all it is - a guess, that some of this difference stems from the differing political systems. In Canada, we have quite a few political parties, while in the US there is a two-party system. In Canada, we tend to polarize to the centre, while in the US, they tend to polarize to the extremes. At least that is my current perception.

In the debate on Anthropological engagement with the military, I see this extreme polarization, which I consider to be a hallmark of US public discourse, taking place. I have seen very little significant discussion of the actual means of such engagements, at least in public (the SWC and SM being the two major exceptions). This makes me wonder as to the overall utility of the “debate” within American Anthropology and the effects of this debate on Canadian Anthropology. But that, as the saying goes, is the subject of future musings.