Engineers of Jihad

It isn’t just Islamic fundamentalism. There is a strong link between having engineering qualifications and being either a Christian fundamentalist, or just a plain crank.

Okay, that’s anecdotal on the part of myself and my friends, but if this paper represents something more rigorous, then I would certainly welcome an investigation of equal rigour into engineering and religious/pseudoscientific crankery in the Western world.

N.B. I myself have an engineering degree… but I’m sane, honest!

Charging ahead with the pop psychology/breezy generalization that you didn’t want to encourage, two recent examples of white supremacists coming out of the engineering field come to mind: William Shockley, the Nobel laureate with the fixation on proving the inferiority of people of African descent and others on the basis of IQ tests, and Richard Butler, the founder of Aryan Nation, who gets mentioned in the paper.

I don’t know whether Butler suffered from frustrated ambitions working for Lockheed, but I wouldn’t be surprised that he found the bureaucratic limitations of a departmental approach to engineering to be insulting. Combine that with a grandiose self-image–which must be part of the makeup of any white supremacist–and I think you’ve got a start on imagining yourself to be the next Fuehrer.

Shockley certainly had the grandiosity–and even though he got a Nobel and credit for launching Silicon Valley, he apparently faced severe professional disappointments after the prize when it came to appear that he just wasn’t as good as his colleagues or his (soon to be former) employees.

But one irony comes to mind: once upon a time, before the personal became political, leftists of a certain deterministic streak used to appropriate the images of hydraulic engineering or physics to explain how society functioned. But they were dabblers, not real engineers, which may have made a difference.

William Luther Pierce of the “Turner Diaries” went to Caltech and taught college physics for a few years. On the other hand, he came from an old Confederate family.

….frustrated professional aspirations due to a lack of opportunities….

I’ve wondered whether a lot of them weren’t disappointments to families which had spent a lot of money on their educations in the expectation that they would make the family rich. On the one hand, they might be embittered, and on the other, by becoming heroes and martyrs they might at least give the family some fame.

I tutored a Saudi techie once who was tremendously discouraged about his prospects in Saudi Arabia, because he knew that his boss would be an incompetent crony from the lesser nobility. (He knew that formally, not because he had any idea who he’d be working for). He was more a liberal than a fundamentalist, but his education didn’t make him optimistic about his future at all.

Some more ignorant speculation:
Couldn’t part of this effect be more or less a response to demand? I mean, I would imagine that terrorist groups would be looking for people with engineering knowledge, as being better qualified for blowing up buildings. So are they offering special incentives, seeking out and recruiting engineers more than humanities types, encouraging those who already have jihadist leanings to study engineering, etc.?

but in large parts of the world, esp. those where education is more limited and run by a state ministry, you do not choose what you major in. in soviet union, government chooses for you.

errr.. even in the USSR, personnal choices existed within the limits of allocation.
Actually in those countries, just like in the USSR, engineering was prestigious and therefore had to select its candidates. And that’s even with the large number of engineers trained.

Or, we could consider that Islamist movements like the Muslim brotherhood, Hezbollah and Hamas are actually the progressive movements in many Middle Eastern countries, especially since secular left-wing nationalism has been discredited in the Arab world due to its collusion with various imperialisms.

Collusion ?
Where ? Who ? How ?

I mean had you made a case for egalitarianism, integrity or efficiency in the case of Hezbollah or Hamas, may be but collusion with various imperialisms ?

I’m not sure what the Hamas people are doing in the survey (81 out of a little over 400), whether these particular people did something the authors considered qualified them as “extremist” of merely that they belong to a social organization in the black book of the US State Dept. But if you segregate the Palestinians from the rest you get, for the Palestinians, a percent of engineers in those of known academic speciality 34.5% (20 out of 58), compared to a percent for the rest of 48.3% (58 out of 120). Hamas are not crazies of the ilk of the bombers they seem to be talking about, in fact they are arch-enemies of Zawahiri and his ilk. So why are they being mixed into the sample, particularly given the significantly different ratio of engineers? Doesn’t this suggest a different approach to the analysis. Is this just sloppy? Ideology? Something to do with the authoritarian mindset of western social scientists?

nu, what’s the question? You don’t think Egypt is colluding with the US, Saddam Hussein was colluding with the US, Syria was colluding with the Soviet Union, Algeria has been colluding with France, M. Abbas and the ruling elites in Fatah are colluding with Israel? You don’t agree that left-wing nationalism has been completely discredited in the Arab world? I’m not saying I’m happy about it, but it’s just a fact.

Maybe it is the other way around. Look at the ‘seeding’ of proto-postmodernism in the various anti-modern spiritual/New Age movements going all the way back to the nineteenth century.
Meanwhile, the term ‘postmodern’ appears in Toynbee quite before the movement of the ‘postmodern’

nu, yes, you are right about the origin of the discreditation of Arab nationalism. I should have said that this weakened it so much as a political force it started to collude with various outside imperial powers for the purposes of self-preservation, so it can’t be viewed as a progressive force anymore. The vacuum has, for a large part, been filled by Islamist groups, who are now (in some countries at least) the organized progressive forces in their societies. I’d certainly take Hamas and Hezbollah as examples; in Egypt, there has lately been increased cooperation between radical parts of the labor movement and the Muslim Brotherhood.

I stand by my main point, that the interpretation of the (alleged) overrepresentation of engineers in Islamist groups as “surprising”, as showing an affinity of engineers for reactionary religion, exhibits a very eurocentric point of view that doesn’t take into account the objectively progressive role Islamist movements play in many Mddle Eastern societies.

Engineering students in the U.S. tend to be exposed to a more limited selection of courses than science majors, so those who arrive in college as creationists might be less likely to encounter courses which would challenge their beliefs.

I stand by my main point, that the interpretation of the (alleged) overrepresentation of engineers in Islamist groups as “surprising”, as showing an affinity of engineers for reactionary religion, exhibits a very eurocentric point of view that doesn’t take into account the objectively progressive role Islamist movements play in many Middle Eastern societies.

Objectively progressive ?
Now that’s weird.. What makes the algerian FIS more progressive than the FFS ?
In places like Egypt or Iraq or Syria, the Islamist have an infrastructure advantage that makes them more efficient in excaping repression BUT that explains their popularity in the electorate, not among better informed, more easy to reach graduates.

I don’t interact enough with enough engineers now to have a good sense of their sundry cultures, but I grew up around JPL and Caltech, and then (through the mid-1980s or so) it was very common for engineers and engineering students to think of themselves as liberal but to hold a very technocratic approach to the world and to carry a lot of unexamined racism and other bigotry. Toward the tail end of my years of regular contact with that scene, libertarianism was catching on in a big way; I suspect that a lot of the vocal advocates of that day are part of the war party now. A lot of them were also so profoundly ignorant about religion in general that they were easy pickings for cults and fads. (There seemed to be a recurring effort to recover pre-Scientology Dianetics as an alternative to other psychotherapies, I recall.)

American liberalism can be extremely anti-technocratic and virulently anti-populist. So can Marxism, actually.

The worst engineers are those who designed your computer and ensure the electricity supply to run it.

nu, you may have noticed that FIS was not among the examples I gave. I don’t know enough about the situation in Algeria after years of brutal civil war and violent suppression of FIS to judge. But as Seth mentioned, in addition to Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Mulsim Brotherhood in Egypt, I should have mentioned Turkey.

I also didn’t claim I have any explanation for the prevalence of engineers in Islamist movements, if there is any. I merely pointed out that I think it’s highly questionable to employ that prevalence to draw any conclusions about ideological predispositions of engineers that is based on a conflation of the roles organized religion plays in Western societies and the role political Islam plays in Middle Eastern societies.

For example, I simply don’t see any connection at all with the question whether engineers are overrepresented among creationists.

To put it somewhat differently, the authors of those studies also seem to mix very different political situations when they say that engineers have not been overrepresented in left-wing terror groups (within highly developed countries). So? A more salient comparison would be third world liberation movements.

Should have been “this study”, of course. Not “those studies”.

Hmm, ok, looked at it more carefully. So there’s not a single humanities person in the sample and they do compare it to estimates of engineers and others in the whole population. So I guess you could (tentatively) conclude that having an “engineering mindset” is more conducive to joining a terrorist organization than having a “economics mindset” or a “medicine mindset”. But given that higher education as a whole is skewed towards engineering (now) relative to business, economics and medicine in non-rich countries I think the above criticism still applies. An “engineer from a non-rich country” is still roughly equivalent to “educated person from non-rich country”

And of course if engineers (and possibly natural science folks – the sample there is too small) have a better chance of rising in the ranks of the organization than economists, medics and business people, and hence have a higher chance of being “observed” then the problem is compounded.

Christian,

I actually mention Algeria because i can remember the name of their democratic left secularist party.
But those do exist in all those places and while their lack of electoral importance is perfectly accounted for, there is no reason why “progressive” engineers wouldn’t join those instead of radical islamist movements.

Would third world liberation movements be a better comparision ? No. Because those movements were often large all-encompasing alliances that splitted among ideological lines after (sometimes before) they achieve their liberating mission.

It seems fairly straightforward. The mindset needed for engineering is similar to the mindset needed for simplistic and reductionist political ideologies. Talking about whether these ideologies are left-wing or right-wing is pointless. The common factor, whether the ideology in question is American libertarianism or Islamic fundamentalism, is that these ideologies gloss over the enormous complexity of human nature and promise simple and clear rules of understanding. I suspect many engineers have autism or Asperger’s syndrome. Many of them never really felt comfortable relating to other human beings and find working with machines to be much easier. It’s not surprising that they would be overrepresented in ideologies that try to treat people like machines.

“If so, the authors’ evidence on the pronounced absence of engineers in left-wing groups from non-Muslim countries seems to refute this hypothesis,”

Any information of engineering and the left, say, at the beginning of the 20h century?

Engineers are over-represented in many groups of people who achieve tangible results. If you want books about politics and economics, go to those faculties. If you want electric light, sewers, drinking water, cheap travel or X-rays, ask an engineer. If you want something knocked down or blown up, ask an engineer.

Away from the world of glowing pixels and dissertations on Proust there’s another world of people who know how to do stuff. Those people will always be over-represented if you look at results and under-represented if you are interested in talk.

48 and 51 get to the crux of the matter. Engineers live in a world where talking about problems is just a means to an end of solving them, and the ultimate correctness of a solution is independent of its popularity or political ramifications. Great if you want to get anything done that cannot solely be accomplished by changing the way people think about things, bad if you want to sit around and collectively ponder navels.

Not at all surprising that they are over-represented among “direct action” types – they come from a world where direct action is useful.

according to this unesco report http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0014/001407/140701e.pdf

There are more arts and humanities students than science and technology (medecine+basic science+agriculture science+engineering) students in the middle east.
What’s interesting is that the further you go into studies, the ratio of science and technology increases.
And also, private universities have more Humanity and Arts and Administration and Economics departments and students while public ones tend to be more science oriented.

Does the name ‘Tatlin” ring a bell?

55 posts and no Unabomber mention yet?

Also kind of interesting on an anecdotal level that pilots universally have high engineering skills and training, and that former Vietnam War pilots seem to have a much more hawkish orientation than former Vietnam War grunts. Compare John McCain and Duke Cunningham to John Kerry, Max Cleland, Chuck Hagel, Jim Webb, etc. Though obviously this probably has a lot to do with comparative experiences of the war; there were non-hawkish ex-pilots, e.g. Pete Petersen; and Oliver North was a Marine.

48 and 51, how come there are no engineers in Western radical animal rights groups? They get results more than most left wing groups, aren’t into futility, yet engineers are very rare in that movement, and where they do exist they tend to be in the non-direct-actin part. The same would go for direct action environmentalism. Don’t you think it’s interesting that EarthFirst! had no engineers, but the anti-global warming movement is stacked to the rafters with them?

So what exactly is the fundamental difference between an engineer and an architect, a programmer, a technical VFX person or an industrial designer and how does it pertain to political orientation?

I don’t know any engineers, but I do know quite a few people from the other professions I mentioned and they’re centrists, libertarians and lefties – not one of them has an authoritarian mindset. Yet their actual work has a lot in common with the work engineers do.

Away from the world of glowing pixels and dissertations on Proust there’s another world of people who know how to do stuff. Those people will always be over-represented if you look at results and under-represented if you are interested in talk.

The RAF was comprised mainly of woolly headed humanities, social science and law students with a few genuine proletarians thrown in. They loved to talk endlessly about everything and anything, yet, there’s no denying that they were rather “successful” in getting things done, i.e. challenging the authority of the West-German state and creating widespread panic among its citizens for a prolonged period of time.

Speaking of the RAF, it serves as a good counterexample to the claim that the humanities are less likely to create an authoritarian mindset . While its members certainly had an anti-authoritarian self-image and they obviously did challenge authority in a big way, the whole enterprise quickly showed its authoritarian, militaristic and downright fascist streak both in its internal structure and its propaganda and deeds.

“Suppose you’re a person in a non-rich country with access to and talent for higher education. And let’s simplify things.
If you’re interested in studying medicine, it means you want to save lives. Hence you’re not likely to join an organization whose aim or tactic is taking of lives, or at least not achieve a position within such an organization which is likely to make you “observable”.”

The terrorist doctors in Scotland were inept. Making one point, at least.
Oh and the Yorkshire bombers weren’t really educated at all, were they? Having been through English schools in the 90s.

Higher education, especially abroad, requires a lot of funding. My impression is that the Saudi government for one is terrified of its young people being seduced by Western social sciences and philosophy, and probably natural science as robd says in 60; so they fund only intellectually unthreatening courses.
Any linkage between engineering and terrorism is therefore the result of push as well as pull factors. Adam Smith, Nils Bohr and Charles Darwin are just too dangerous, not to mention Biblical textual criticism. Some of the 9/11 bombers were training as pilots, a vocational course even more blinkered than engineering.

It may be true that there are lots of humanities students in the Middle East, but what’s the level? A sensible antiterrorism strategy would include scholarships and academic exchanges in the natural and social sciences and the humanities.

Another policy, which is needed regardless of the terrorism hypothesis, is to beef up the liberal broadly education aspect – Bildung – of technological education at all levels. Chernobyl was the result of the Soviet technical education system: everybody a specialist, nobody a critic. Perhaps its American counterpart was to blame for Enron.

SG,
What the Koran says doesn’t matter, it matters what they make of it; just like US christian fundies and the Bible.
Iran or Pakistan are not stimulating education in evolutionary biology and philosophy of sciense as much as nuclear engineering and theology.
I know the Islamic world was once a leading light in science, but al least in the middle-east not much is left.

“The pen, the set square, the paper;
the drawing, the project, the number:
the engineer thinks of the just world,
World that no veil conceals.”

Lovely. So I take it you live in Brasilia?

Henry, while it is absolutely true that they did consider alternative hypotheses, I find them far too dismissive on those points. Calling it “stupid and obvious methodological errors” would be harsh – but again, like evolutionary psychology tales, they seem in love in with their story. For example, as I noted in #16, “That engineers are mainly sought for their ability to fill technical roles is also refuted by the case of Hamas where many engineers are prominent in senior management positions with no technical function”, that stood out to me as someone who likely just missed the issue of being good at technical tasks leads to being promoted into management. I believe understand what logical chain they were drawing – idea: engineers requires for skill, observation: lots of engineers in management conclusion: not recruited for skill. But that’s like saying “Why are there so many programmers as managers in California companies? It must be because the programming mindset is particularly amenable to the corporate middle-management ideology. Programmers deal with absolutes and commands, which maps well to the imperative of a middle-manager who deals with corporate balance-sheet absolutes, as well as “commands” from upper-management” (a little statistics, and this could be a real paper!).

“Next, the technology involved in most violent attacks has been relatively simple and did not require great expertise. It is much harder to obtain good quality explosives than put them to use.”

Right, but this discounts that it helps to be COMFORTABLE doing physical things. Consider the old cliche about setting the clock on a VCR adapted to setting the timer of a bomb – it’s not that it’s high technology, but that there’s an issue in practice (i.e. bad joke: “Why do terrorist cells need engineers? Because humanities majors can’t figure out how to set the clock on the ticking time-bomb”).

“Lastly, it is doubtful that violent movements with a larger share of engineers have mustered a greater destructive power than groups without.”

I think they’re overstating the expected effect, and then refuting the overstatement.

Henry, regarding “it fails to explain why there seems to be so much variation between Islamist and extreme left wing terrorist groups” – not at all, just the opposite. Look what I said in #12:

“The problem is that “terrorist” covers a lot of ground, for a lot of reasons. It’s not that the authors don’t know this – they’re aware of it. But it seemed to be patterns-in-the-clouds.

I’d speculate it’s better to consider “high numbers of engineers” as a marker for a certain sociological type of insurgency (home-grown with support from elites), rather than make up appealing stories about why the engineer mindset is attracted to whatever ideology is driving the insurgency.”

That is, consider there are certain types of terrorist groups where engineers and other similar types have a favorable “career path” – and other where they don’t. These factors strike me as influences to look at first, before something so nebulous as “mindset”. And my point then is while yes, yes, yes, they did consider this, on examining in detail what they said, I found their discussion extremely dubious and unconvincing, as I outlined.

Heck [putting tongue a little in cheek], some (not all) of it could be as a simple as the fact that Osama Bin Laden was an engineer, so he’s a kind of role-model for aspiring terrorists, while from another direction, given the money he distributes, he makes engineering “cool” among the people who recruit for him.

the above is addressed to Henry

Maybe it’s natural slection. The leaders screen out the non-educated and the humanities people and select the technical people. Which inspires a joke:

Why are there so many engineers in terrorist organizations? Because the CIA, ISI and Saudi intelligence prefer the smart, technical people.

BTW, in order for the statistical analysis to be viable, the authors must have knowledge of practically all members of terrorist organizations. Yet nothing is being done about it. We seeem to have knowledge of every aspect of these organizations and no moves are being made against them. On the other hand, if the analysis is being made on the basis of only captured terrorists, then extrapolation is notoriously unreliable.

Henry, your exaggerated insulting manner ill becomes you, but I understand your point. You will accept the prevailing designations of terrorist groups and any challenges to the “science” based on that will be deleted.

good points, blog and barbar

Henry
Al qaeda is utopian/nihilist. Hamas is not. Is there a history of utopian/nihilist organizations and ideologies in the west? Both left and right? Yes. The Nazi ideology fits that description. Various European terrorists have fit that description. The unibomber an anti-engineer with all tha contradictions that implies fits that description to a t. Violent anticolonial movements by and large have not. Hamas is an anti colonial movement.

My counterclaims as you call them come from the available record and basic historical knowledge.ill send the links when I’m not on my blackberry. Unfortunately however badger is right.the requirements of observation are trumped by politics.

“which makes me very suspicious of it as a just-so story.”

But have you considered the Salem hypothesis angle, where Christian engineers are often seen to be strong adherents to Creationism?

I think you may be focused too much on the terrorism part, when what’s really key is the attraction to a certain style of religious belief. Should such a person be exposed to a violence-preaching authority, the engineer may be a likely recruit for terrorist organizations.

Sounds like you’ve been reading my stuff, Henry, which is good. This is the first I’ve heard about inaccuracies. I know this is your your page to do with as you see fit, but certainly don’t be shy about explaining what you mean.

This whole thing sounds like a joke. Is there a list of terrorists with their occupations? It isn’t classified top secret? Is there a list of known terrorists? Is this data available to the public? Wouldn’t it introduce a significant bias? Why aren’t they being rounded up?

careful, blog, or scientist Henry will start going after your semi-paranoid inaccuracies.

It’s not that enlightening.

The authors say for Hamas they got their data from “Rangwala (2005) Smith et al (2005) and Hamas websites”.

For Islamic Jihad “websites and literature” and

International salafi groups: Sageman (2004) combined with library and internet research.

In other words, much of this comes the internets. Jihadi chatrooms, counterterrorism buffs, who knows?

for what it’s worth, I did think through what I would say if someone wrote a piece on the ‘social scientific mindset’ with similar evidence, and came to the conclusion (as best as I can in the abstract), that I would conclude that there was likely something to it, even if it didn’t reflect my priorities, or the priorities of other social scientists who I know.

Henry, the case you outline is not hypothetical. As I mentioned above, some core members of the RAF turned to terrorism after having come into contact in one way or another with the ‘social scientific mindset’ prevalent at the time and the social sciences have been criticized by some for allegedly facilitating terrorism – unfairly, as even people as far left as Marcuse were quick to renounce the RAF.

That leaves the logic of the paper you mentioned open to criticism, though – the authors argue that there is an equivalence between the allegedly simplistic and orderly mindset of engineers and the simple answers of jihadism. The social scientific mindset of the 60s/70s on the other hand was anything but simplistic and orderly, yet, those in its thrall who turned to terrorism opted for a radically dumbed down version of Marxism/Leninism that is equal in its simplicity and orderliness to the jihadism of today.

I think the answer to this riddle is pretty clear: whatever milieu or mindset terrorists are coming from, be they as disparate as those of the middle eastern engineers and the social sciences students of the 60s/70s, in the end they need a simple and unshakeable set of beliefs in order to be able to take the extreme actions they do to so quickly and ruthlessly.

#105: The latter is just more likely to get you into trouble, to get registered and to end up in this research paper.

I meant: the *former* is just more likely…

“Iran or Pakistan are not stimulating education in evolutionary biology and philosophy of sciense as much as nuclear engineering and theology.
I know the Islamic world was once a leading light in science, but al least in the middle-east not much is left”

Quite interesting how easily people map the politics of the US to the politics of the Muslim/Third World. No, basic science/Islam incompatability (if there is such a thing; which I doubt) doesn’t have anything to do with creationism in Islam. Islam is not creationist. In fact, many of the Iranian leaders believe that evolution was foreshadowed in the Quran.

The reason there are so many technocrats (rather than scientists) is a) because weak and unpredicatble economies cannot guarantee jobs in pure sciences (or social sciences and humanities) and b) a legacy of nationalism, anti-colonialism, and ISI (industrialisation by way of self-sufficiency) which has had a VERY long life in the Muslim/Third World required loads of technocrats and technical professionals, not pure scientists.

That is why so many Third Worlders want their children to become doctors or engineers.

When I was working at a medical bookstore I was amazed at how many authors had Arabic or Persian names.

Man, engineers are touchy motherfuckers. We’re not saying you’re all terrorists, just most of you.

It’s bizarre to read all the daft generalisations directed at engineers in this thread. Wish I could say engineers weren’t equally prone to making equally daft generalisations about the chattering classes …

It’s a stretch to turn an argument about a specific contribution of a few identified socioeconomic and psychological factors (and many that presumably have gone unidentified) to hardline Islamism in a few select examples to a general argument about the “tendencies of engineers”. Everything beyond the sample space is wild extrapolation … for instance, if the data on “home-grown” terrorism in the West hadn’t been examined and shown to reject the thesis, everyone reading this thread would now be incorrectly guessing that it would support it.

EXCEPT, there’s a better case that the bigger overrepresentation is of those wussy sciences and education types, like the sociologist of the survey.

After all, arts, sciences, theology, and education summed in their sample come to –>>79

HF at the beginning- “Gambetta and Hertog use a combination of illustrative statistics, qualitative data and logistic regression to show not only that there is a strong relationship between an engineering background and involvement in a variety of Islamic terrorist groups, but to arrive at a plausible hypothesis as to why this relationship pertains.”

From the paper quoted just now by HF:
“While not disproportionately radical everywhere and all of the time in the Islamic world, radical engineers have not been prominent only in Islamist extremist activities, but also in left-wing groups at a time when these were considered, by revolutionarily inclined youth worldwide, as the best means to change the world.”

Two different claims, and the second one though vague bothers me less than the first. (and now I’m actually reading the paper) But reading it, it’s pretty vulgar. Atta in fact sounds like Ted Kaczynski while Hezbollah has no relation to Aum Shinrikyo. The same is not true however for Al Qaeda. And the level of technical expertise in Aum was widely noted at the time. So far I see none of this in the paper. As I said in #26, about Hamas, talk to Helena Cobban, who is after all, a Quaker.

I have no problem with generalizations about engineers and engineering as an intellectual model. I spend too much of my time complaining about the ubiquity of both. Utopianism annoys me, and engineered utopia is the paradigmatic modern romance. But there is a long history of reactionary modernism, though the phrase I guess is pretty recent. What else do you call Marinetti and the Futurists? Hell, what do you call T.S Eliot?
The authors refer to the engineer’s “mindset” and to “simplism.” Unlike many here I have no problem with either term. But I think they’ve given us an perfect examples of both.

Henry — I wasn’t accusing you of being reluctant to update your beliefs in the face of evidence, but rather pointing out that you would be more demanding of the evidence if you were an engineer and/or a conservative.

Once again, from the paper:

Whether American, Canadian or Islamic, and whether due to selection or field socialisation, a disproportionate share of engineers seems to have a mindset that inclines them to entertain the quintessential right-wing features of “monism” – ‘why argue when there is one best solution’ – and of “simplism” – ‘if only people were rational, remedies would be simple’.

This is awfully vivid and makes it seem like we have some evidence linking the personality traits of engineers to those of “radical Islamists.” But in reality we just have the fact that engineers are more conservative than other academics, and that right-wing extremism has significant commonalities with Islamic extremism. Which is good enough for the plausibility of the conclusion of the paper, I agree — but the presentation is still remarkably unnuanced.

#126
…and the kicker:
“if only people were rational, remedies would be simple.”

That just about covers every base: communisim to libertarianism. It’s a pocket history of simplism in the modern era.

“Gambetta and Hertog … show not only that there is a strong relationship between an engineering background and involvement in a variety of Islamic terrorist groups, but to arrive at a plausible hypothesis as to why this relationship pertains.”

Here I was thinking that the solution to Islamic extremist was to export more pr0n. It looks like instead we need to export more Star Trek remakes.

I think that culture-specific reasons are stronger explanations than those reliant on a specific engineering worldview.

“I would imagine that terrorist groups would be looking for people with engineering knowledge, as being better qualified for blowing up buildings. So are they offering special incentives, seeking out and recruiting engineers more than humanities types, encouraging those who already have jihadist leanings to study engineering, etc.?”

Couple of reasons:

1. Engineering is *way* more prestigious in the Middle East than in the UK, or even in the US: it’s on par with being a doctor.

2. At least one engineering professional society (in Egypt) was taken over by the Muslim Brotherhood.

3. It’s an apolitical degree to take, that enables you to make a living without necessarily having contacts within the government. So, if you are inclined towards radicalism, it’s a safer bet to make.

4. You’re more able to get a work visa in the West or elsewhere with a technical education (moreso even than with a medical education: there’re no guild-type barriers). So from an operational or logistics point of view, engineers are attractive because of their freedom of movement. [Western terrorist groups haven’t faced the same immigration-based constraints on logistics and movement, so that’s why you don’t see engineers overrepresented in the IRA or the Weathermen or the Red Army Faction or ETA.]

93. I think the idea here is that some engineers are attracted to belief systems that are highly deterministic and rules-based. Where if you have a question you can look in a book and find out what to do.

They may seek a set of beliefs for their own life which makes it as clear-cut as building a bridge or designing a circuit.

Building bridges and designing circuits are only clear-cut to people who have not done it themselves. There is no book containing solutions to all engineering problems.

Is there some possibility that some of this may actually be the ideological influence of american science fiction, specifically Asimov and Heinlein? I trust I don’t need to organise a scientific survey to demonstrate a correlation between being an engineer and liking sf.

Heinlein’s critique of democracy in Starship Troopers doesn’t seem a million miles off the arguments of anti-democratic islamists. In his imagined universe, democracy had been tried and failed. In-story, there was a mathematical explanation for that failure, a moral calculus providing a proof of it’s inadequacy.

Asimov’s Foundation trilogy talks about using mathematical reasoning, psychohistory, to predict that destroying the galactic Empire is, despite the short-term megadeaths, an objectively good thing in the long run. Apparently, that was a key inspiration for Aum, although aparently the post 9-11 rumour that the first book was published in Egypt under the title ‘al qaeda’ is, well, baseless.

The distillation of that kind of thinking is the 1950s short the Cold Equations, where a lot of hoops are jumped through to set up a situation where it can be mathematically proven that killing an innocent teenage girl in cold blood is the morally right thing to do.

I think there may be echoes of those ideas in superhero comics too, though I can’t quote specifics.

I’ve read they follow Qutbism, a sort of Islamic communism, but I think Osama only supports it.

Ulrich Beck. Had to look him up
“Second modernity”
Nice phrase. As is “cosmopolitan realpolitik.” But both require an understanding of the notion of “sophistication.” Better, both require sophistication itself.
Ain’t none here.

Sophistication requires not only an understanfing of dual allegiences but an admission that you’re already living them; like a military officer in a democratuc country.
To be a regionalist and an internationalist and to enjoy the conflict it brings out in you. Or a Platonist who’s fully aware that Platonism originates not in the world but in sensibility… and who is nonetheless a Platonist (absurd I know). Like a scientist who’s fully aware that the search for “truth” begins not with truth but with desire. There are no secularists here. “Faith” is the word of the day.