“Can social scientists redefine the “war on terror”?” George Packer writes in The New Yorker about a new breed of cultural anthropologists who bring their analysis to bear on the current climate of ‘Islamic insurgency’, arguing that it is not ideology but social networking factors which recruit. “All fifteen Saudi hijackers in the September 11th plot had trouble with their fathers…” The thesis is succinctly put this way: “There are elements in human psychological and social makeup that drive what’s happening. The Islamic bit is secondary. This is human behavior in an Islamic setting. This is not ‘Islamic behavior’.” The social scientists, who are pitching their potential contribution to the ‘global counterinsurgency’ effort, argue the intimate need to understand local social particulars to win the ‘battle for hearts and minds.’ The US is actually serving the insurgents’ purposes by trumpeting a global ‘war on terror’, offering an inherently appealing global cause to new recruits. This is no surprise to those who have long understood how it was the Bush administration’s efforts which gave the Iraqi resistance common cause with the jihadists, or turned ‘al Qaeda’ into a franchised brand name for disparate insurrectionists throughout the Islamic world. The article likens Iraq in the context of the global counterinsurgency effort to Vietnam in the context of the Cold War, of course. The US took a long time to understand that the Cold War was only to a small proportion a military conflict or conflicts and in vast preponderance a propaganda battle.

However, I am not sure that social science substantially informed our Cold War struggle either. I was a student of ethnography and cultural anthropology in the early ’70’s before I went to medical school and became a psychiatrist; the article helped me to understand in a new way the relationship between the growing irrelevance of cultural anthropology and our defeat in Vietnam. No administration has ever embraced one of the corollaries of the light that cultural relativism can bring to bear on our understanding of ideological battles — that, if not a Manichaean battle between Good and Evil, the superiority of either side is all relative, all in the eye of the beholder. There may actually be less to choose between the two sides than the ideologues would have us believe; it is inherent that we demonize the opponent in protracted conflicts, as we did in the Cold War and are doing again. The jaded secret agent literary genre so well represented by Le Carré and, currently The Good Shepherd (although the Matt Damon character never seems to get the message despite the ongoing tutorial he is receiving from his Soviet adversary), reflected this relativistic, amoral moral calculus best. So, although I suppose it represents semantic progress to call what is happening now a global counterinsurgency struggle rather than a global war on terror (WoT®), I am troubled that this new anthropological insight seems to be being pitched as an improvement to our propaganda battle rather than helping us disengage from — and transcend — the fray.

Although Packer tries hard to read between the lines, social scientists who want to consult to the administration are of course averse to criticizing their potential bosses. There are indeed several statements in the piece to the effect that there are no prospects for a new mindset until Bush is out of office — as if anyone had any doubts on that score. It is not surprising that Bush thinks like that — let’s start, for example, with the fact that his alcoholism reflects a cognitive style in large proportion based on the effort to reduce diverse and nuanced problems to one one-size-fits-all solution. IMHO, the more important contribution social scientists could make would be to understand how such a rigid worldview as Bush’s could ever have become dominant and been allowed, unchallenged, to make such a dismal global mess of things.