The personal is political

Carol Hanish (?)

I don’t usually write about politics. This isn’t because I don’t have strong political beliefs (I do) but, rather, because I prefer to devote my time and energies to other things. This wasn’t always the case, as a few of my close friends know, and I like to think that I am still engaged in a political / advocacy struggle when it comes to science and, in particular, Anthropology. I am breaking with tradition because of a recent article that showed up in Mother Jones and one, particular response to it by Max Forte.

A couple of side notes before I begin. First, I am not “picking” on Max; I follow his blog (because I think he does some really great work), but we also have a history of going head to head on certain issues. Second, I do not believe that there is anything inherently “wrong” or “Evil” with Anthropologists working with the military (although there are dangers).

Two articles

The Mother Jones article reports on the activities of a particular person, Mary Sapone who is also known as Mary McFate (Sapone, according to the article, is her maiden name). In the article, it is alleged that she was, basically, both a spy and an agent provocateur operating inside both the Animal Rights lobby and in the Gun Control lobby in the US. On the third page, the article make several direct references to Montgomery McFate:

In the 1990s—while working within the gun control community as {Mary} McFate—Sapone formed her own intelligence-gathering business. And she enlisted family members for its operations. “In our business, it’s my daughter-in-law, Montgomery Sapone [who] does all the analytic reports, forecasting, and white papers,” Sapone wrote to a client in an August 1999 email obtained by Mother Jones. “She produces a very professional product.”

In the next paragraph, the story states that

A resume that Montgomery Sapone used around 1999 describes her role within Mary Lou’s business: “Collect and analyze intelligence on European activities of major international environmental organization for a company specializing in domestic and internal opposition research, special investigations, issues management and threat assessment. Write weekly intelligence update on European animal rights and eco-terrorist activity. Assist in confidential litigation support research.”

And, in the next paragraph,

{Mary} Sapone made her gun control work a family affair as well. Around 2003, Montgomery volunteered at the Brady Campaign, according to Becca Knox, the group’s research director. Occasionally, Montgomery would also sit in for her mother-in-law at Washington strategy meetings attended by officials of the gun control movement, according to the Violence Policy Center’s Kristen Rand.

The penultimate paragraph states that

These days, Sean and Montgomery Sapone are better known as Sean and Montgomery McFate, a successful Washington couple whose current bios make no mention of any past intelligence-gathering or opposition-research work…. Montgomery has made a name for herself as one of the primary architects of the US military’s human terrain program, which teams social scientists with military units in Iraq and Afghanistan to help soldiers better understand the local culture. (The controversial program has been sharply criticized by the American Anthropological Association, which fears it may cross an ethical line, and has been described by detractors as “mercenary anthropology.”) Now a top Pentagon adviser, Montgomery also contributed to the Army’s Counterinsurgency Field Manual drafted under the guidance of General David Petraeus.

Please note that I have not included most of the references made about Sean McFate in my selective quotation from the original article. I have done so because of the association between Montgomery McFate (but not her husband Sean McFate) and the HTS. Or, as Max called it, the attempt ” to fuse messenger with message by those who believed in these activities”.

The second article in the heading is the post entitled A SPY IN OUR MIDST: Montgomery Sapone/Montgomery McFate posted on July 31st, 2008. The post starts with the following senence:

This should confirm many allegations that have been circulating concerning the role of Montgomery McFate as a spy, who in part traded on her credentials as an anthropologist.

and concludes with

Once again, a published report, made widely available, without contradiction from McFate.

Beware of who you cozy up to online, when jonesing for that position, for that publication, for an interview for your research, to be let in to her club.

I would recommend that people read the full article and all of the comments.

I also want to make several points before continuing. First, Max is openly political - this is not an indictment of his post (or him) but, rather, a point he himself makes. He doesn’t try to mask his political stance at all and it informs all of his posts. Second, Max has certain firm views about Anthropology and what it should be doing and not doing which are also quite openly stated.

Picking up the gage

In a response to one comment by Guanaguanare, Max notes

Let me start by answering your very perceptive comment this way: this is a fundamentally political struggle, and a fundamentally public one. One has to grasp this first before deciding what to do as an anthropologist, in public, in a political conflict.

I would certainly agree with Max on this; it is a political and public struggle. It is also a struggle, in my opinion, over the relationship between “Science” (in this case Anthropology) and various political interest groups and about the ethics of choosing which political interest groups one will support, what actions one will undertake in that support, and how these actions will be justified.

Max goes on to tentatively identify five different “positions” (I would call them tactics) that appear amongst Anthropology bloggers in response to such a debate as this (NB: I have changed the formatting to make it more readable, it was all in one paragraph originally; see here).

• The first is a position of fear, or apprehension: I am young, I have a lot at stake, I have no tenure, or as a student my supervisor will hate me if I say the wrong thing, this could mark me forever, things change, I better leave my options open, I should stay silent.
• The second position is that of spectator, who sits back and watches things unfold as if they were being played out for his/her amusement and entertainment.
• The third is the one whose favourite position, embodied by a messenger on the bloodied side of the argument, effects a tactical retreat into the shadows, looking to snipe in more abstract terms in the future, from the sidelines, in terms of “objectivity”, etc.
• The fourth is the apolitical intellectual, who thinks, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that one can be scientific and detached from political beings in political contexts in political conflict, a terrible mismatch that produces literally unbelievable results, as in not credible.
• The fifth, and perhaps the one I like the least of all, is what I am calling the “12th hour, 1st minute, middle messiah” — the one who decides to make an entry only après-coup. This is the person who waits for the battle to have taken its course, the sea parted by the combatants leaving a nice, clean and open platform, to step in and say, “Here I am, the calm and polite voice of reason, the synthesis, the mapper of the third way, you can all disarm now and collectively breathe a sigh of academic relief as I return you to normalcy.” That is a cynical exploiter who profits from the work of others, who has a side, and pretends to be “more” objective.

Now, Max was referring to positions held by Anthropology bloggers, but I would argue that that is just a special instance of a much more general position: the same positions can be found in any profession. Furthermore, while I would say that this list is not too bad, it does leave out several important other positions.

• The Cloistered Theologian who, safe in their assumed mantle of Orthodoxy and entrenched in an unassailable institutional position, hurls anathemas at all those who dare to disagree with their own version of the Truth.
• The Institutional Manager who, holding few passionate views, orders their stance and actions around what will best generate resources for their particular institution.
• The front line, “True Believer” who believes everything stated by a cloistered theologian and acts to destroy those who disagree with it.
• The Freelance Witch Finder who, deriving their authority from an institutional manager and their legitimacy from a cloistered theologian, goes forth into the “world” on a commission basis to hunt down, try, and execute “Evil”.
• The Romantic Paladin who, driven by an internal vision of what “should be”, rides forth to fulfill that vision, regardless of the personal cost.

I am certain that there are others as well, but this will suffice for the moment.

Setting the scene

Let me return to Max’s comment about this being a political and public struggle. As I noted above, I also view it as a struggle over the relationship between Anthropology and political interest groups and as one of ethics. I’ve talked a fair bit about ethics in other posts (here), so I will hold off on that for now and, instead, talk about the relationship between science (Anthropology) and political interest groups.

Before going further, it is probably best if I make a few statements about how I perceive social “reality” to operate. First, as I’ve implied elsewhere, I tend to see societies as operating using an ongoing process of “negotiation” which ranges from “gentle persuasion” through to violent annihilation and everything in between regardless of the “official” form of politics operating in that society.

Second, I view societies as being composed of differing groups of people organized along various sub-social lines (e.g. kinship groups, professional groups, political advocacy groups, etc.), many of which overlap and intersect (i.e. I, as an individual member of Canadian society, can and do belong to many different groups or “communities”). I would also note that the interests of many of these groups overlap in such a manner that competition is inevitable between them. In what I would consider an “ideal” or “civilized” situation, this competition is kept out of the realm of open, kinetic conflict (e.g. you don’t find bodies in the streets as a result of political “negotiations”).

Third, while I view the lack of open, kinetic conflict as a hallmark of civilization, that does not mean that I consider to to be the only one such hallmark. Raphaël Baeriswyl recently published a brilliant article entitled Use and Perception of Violence: A Girardian Approach to Asymmetric Warfare (Anthropoetics 13, no. 3 (Fall 2007 / Winter 2008; html and pdf) which, while dealing with asymmetric warfare, was, in my opinion, also providing some insightful points about the general nature of inter-group conflict. Drawing on observations by Jacques Baud, Baeriswyl argues that

The space of operations is divided into six battle spaces that are all governed by their own rules: topographic space, airspace, electromagnetic space, cyberspace, infospace, and human space.

Now I should note that while I disagree with the progress model used by Baeriswyl, I believe that this is a useful distinction to make in terms of “space of operations”. And I will go further than Baeriswyl and argue that both the concept and the taxonomy are quite useful for analyzing non-kinetic inter-group conflicts within a society (although the taxonomy needs expansion). If we adopt Baeriswyl’s model, then we can analyze where political groups operate and consider the various TTPs (Techniques, Tactics and Proceedures) they use.

Now any group will have definite preferences for their operational space. For most political groups this tends to be in electromagnetic space, cyberspace, infospace and human space or, in other words, in the realm of communications, information and “meaning” (”Hearts and Minds” to use the current military phrase). Note that I specified “any” group; politics as an activity is held in common regardless of any political stance. Which brings us back to the issue of the relationship between political groups and science.

“Science” and politics

Every political group will wish to use the optimal TTPs in order to achieve their specific political goals. Most groups also monitor their environment or, to use the politically incorrect phrase, engage in intelligence gathering. Environmental intelligence, i.e. knowing what’s happening now in your environment, is crucial for any group since, if they don’t do this, they will be caught by surprise constantly and, inevitably, loose out in the competition for resources. Often the gathering and analysis of environmental data is done by engaging “experts” in the particular fields in which the group is competing.

The role of “experts”, however, goes well beyond the collection and analysis of environmental data; frequently into the realm of constructing component areas of the environment (cf. Joel Best’s Rhetoric in Claims-Making). Sometimes, the group will create “experts” and market them to the general public (see Joel Best’s Images of Issues and Bromley, Best and Richardson’s The Satanism Scare for examples of the later) in order to reconstruct perceptions (actually, semantic-reactions) of a population towards a particular area of reality in line with the political agenda of that group.

In effect, any actions taken by experts who are involved with political groups is a use of their expertise to further political ends - unless one is suffering from multiple personality disorder, one does not loose one’s expertise when engaged in political work. Let me take this one step further: any expert work that is publicly available can, and probably will, be used by political groups in order to further their agendas even if that agenda goes against the originator. In effect, all science and. more broadly, expert-level work products, will in all probability be used by a variety of different political groups in order to meet political ends.

So we have a simple choice here. One can choose to say “A pox on all your houses, MY work will not be prostituted for sordid political ends!!!!”. Following this through, of course, means that one will never communicate any of one’s expertise. Another option is to choose the limit of ones responsibility; a choice popularized by the Gun manufacturers famous meme that “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people”. In effect, it is saying that once the expertise is “out here”, it is beyond the originator’s control and, hence, responsibility. This is, to my mind, a facile argument whether it is applied by the gun manufacturing industry, reporters who reveal the location of military units in the name of freedom of the press, or academics who deny any responsibility for damage caused by their work.

Two other options are, to my mind, much more ethical.

The first of these options is to, again, limit direct responsibility for use of an expert work product while, at the same time, seeking ways to reduce and/or limit the potential damage done by that work product. This is why I consider the concept of the Human Terrain System, despite its difficulties, to be potentially ethical on deployment (i.e., I won’t reject it out of hand despite any current flaws). This is also why I consider applied Anthropology work for corporations who are trying to produce a better product to be ethical, and it is also why I consider some advocacy Anthropology to be ethical as well (e.g. the role of “expert” Anthropologists in land claims battles who act as conceptual “translators”).

The second option, which is more personally dangerous, is to accept responsibility for your work product, engage in political efforts to reduce the potential damage from it, and to still have a political agenda. I said that this is a more “dangerous” option, and it is because of the potential effects its has on the individual: the central dangers are that a) you could sell out your principles to your political agenda or b) you can be “split” from the public perception of you. Outside of philosophy and metaphysics (to say nothig of magic and mysticism), the best description I have read of the danger was written up by one of my favorite authors, Lois McMaster Bujold in A Civil Campaign. She introduces a very nice distinction between honour and reputation (page 386 of the paperback version):

Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself…. The friction arises when the two are not the same.

In order to mitigate against this danger, the individual has to “know” themselves in the old, Greek sense of the term while, at the same time, learning to accept that they will be misunderstood and mischaracterized. The importance of honour and knowing your ground of being lies not only in dealing with this danger when it arises but, also, in knowing when to stay true to yourself even if it means giving up all or a part of your political agenda.

Conclusions

I said, at the start of this post, that I was not inherently opposed to Anthropologists working with the military. I do, however, feel that any who do so are obligated to take either the third or fourth option listed above. Which, in my usual round about way, brings me back to the topic of Montgomery McFate.

Everything that is appearing in the online discussions and in the Mother Jones article deals with her reputation and not her honour. To say, as Max does, that she “has made a career as a spy” is ridiculous. Based on the same level of evidence, I could easily say the Max is building his career of destroying Anthropology based on his own words (see his final comment here)

while I do not reject science, I am not eager to be classed as a scientist. And when it comes to “profession,” I am something far worse than “unprofessional,” I am actually anti-professional.

Does this mean that I think Max is unethical? Nope, not at all. What I do think his post on the Mother Jones article shows, however, is that he is a tactically skilled politician who will take a tool (the MJ article) that he is handed to him on a silver platter and run with it. In fact, he would be an absolute fool if he didn’t.

What I do believe, however, is that Max (and others) are engaged in a form of asymmetric, symbolic warfare against the entire concept of Anthropologists working with the military. For whatever reason, and I think there are many, Montgomery McFate has become the icon or personification of the concept of Anthropologists working with the military. And, as with any other historical incidence of this type of conflict, the best way to attack the concept is to attack the icon. To use the language current on CNN, you run a series of attack ads or a smear campaign. This is certainly a tactic that worked well for political strategists as disparate as Mao and Karl Rove.

But, standing behind the attack ads and rhetoric on all sides, there are a number of much deeper issues at stake beyond that of the relationship between Anthropology and the military. The main one I see, and the one that most engages my own political stance, is something that Max and I both agree on: the right’ of individuals to choose whether or not to take a stance in the current conflicts. The corollary of that position, however, is that people must also have the right to communicate that choice, and both those rights, in my opinion, inherently assume that the individuals who exercise them will take responsibility for the consequences of their choices.

I am concerned that the polarization of this fight, i.e. about the relationship of Anthropology to the military, is going to reduce the level of freedom to choose of Anthropologists and, at the same time, have serious deleterious effects on the discipline as a whole.

Addendum

As I was writing this post, Max made an excellent analysis of possible influences on Anthropological research.