GDG- Military history

[Margaret D. Blough]

I have always wary of all or nothing propositions (probably comes from coming from Anabaptist Germans on my father's side and Scots, most of the males having served in the Black Watch, on my mother's: pacifists on one side and one of the most warlike ethnic groups on the planet on the other.).  War and violence may well be part of human nature, but, to quote Katherine Hepburn's famous line as British missionary Rose Sayer in response to Bogart's Charlie Allnut's cynical views on human nature, ""Nature is what we were put on earth to rise above."<g>

Regards,

Margaret

-------------- Original message -------------- 
From: "Norman Levitt" <njlevitt at hotmail.com> 

> Esteemed GDG Member Contributes: 
> 
> 
> 
> >From: Laurence Schiller 
> >Reply-To: GDG 
> >To: GDG 
> >Subject: Re: GDG- Military history 
> >Date: Fri, 11 May 2007 21:19:06 -0500 
> > 
> >Esteemed GDG Member Contributes: 
> > 
> > 
> >Hello Dean - I think this is rather more complex than that, as Bell points 
> >out. I know plenty of 'armchair moralists', myself included, who opposed 
> >the Vietnam war but who are well into military history. This has little to 
> >do, I think, with one's political views. I don't know quite how to explain 
> >it, but suggesting the anti-war movement is responsible for the decline in 
> >the study of military history is very much off the mark. 
> > 
> >Best, 
> > 
> >Laurie Schiller 
> > 
> >On May 9, 2007, at 8:19 PM, chmbrdicator wrote: 
> > 
> >> 
> >>Many thanks to Norm for bringing this to our attention. 
> >> 
> >>Hmmmm ... looks like New Republic contributing editor Bell noticed what 
> >>John J. Miller did last September, when he published a piece about it in 
> >>National Review Online (thanks again to whoever posted it to GDG): 
> >>http://article.nationalreview.com/? 
> >>q=MTcwOGU3MzhkNmI0Y2FmZjYzNjVlOGZhYWJiZWFjYjM= 
> >> 
> >>Many a netizen might dismiss NRO as an opinion-mongering polemic E- rag, 
> >>but TNR is a little tougher to ignore. 
> >> 
> >>We seem to be reaping the fruits of the 1960s, when armchair moralists 
> >>purported to be oh-so-offended by the military industrial complex. 
> >> 
> >>most respectfully 
> >> 
> >>Dean Spraggins 
> >> 
> 
> Without wishing to get too esoteric, I think the decline of military history 
> in academic life is a consequence of the long, ongoing, and still bitter 
> argument between the "Hobbesian" and "Rousseauist" views of human nature, an 
> argument that breaks out in all sorts of contexts in lots of fields. 
> Briefly, the Hobbesian view is that depravity--greed, violence, rapine and 
> all the rest--is an inherent aspect of the human condition, which fact one 
> must accept in order to analyze human behavior at all reaistically. 
> Rousseauists, on the other hand, believe that mankind is essentially gentle 
> and generous and that historical depravity is a consequence of distorted 
> human institutions. On the former view, therefor, warfare is a natural and 
> inevitable factor that always will loom large in history, and which 
> therefore should be studied in its own terms. The latter philosophy, 
> however, thinks of war as aberrant and unnatural, an embarrassment that 
> should be kept in the background of historical and sociological studies. 
> 
> 
> In recent decades, Rousseauists have certainly been dominant in most 
> universities (a;though their behavior in the course of academic infighting 
> provides lots of support for the Hobbesian view!) It is for this reason, I 
> think, that military historians have been so marginalized and ignored. 
> 
> NL 
> 
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