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.

Where it ends is in the pataphysical science of signs and naming. Take a few sense impressions and call each a given. Build a logic upon those assumptions and call it a science. The logic will conform strictly to universals, and it will, I’d never say otherwise. That gives you a sense of security. The question is what is it built on?

You operate not from observation and reassessment but from givens, as if names and labels offered stability to things they’re used to designate. Israel is a name, but it doesn’t mean to others what it means to you. “Israel” has no universal meaning, no more than IRA or RUC. It has a legal definition, but law is a social construction. And here’s some news for you. Experts agree: the Palestinian Gerry Adams will come from Hamas. There will be no Gerry Adams from Al Qaeda, ever. Al Qaeda might as well be led by Ted Kaczynski. Look at the data Henry!

It’s not that liberal intellectuals are the only ones with ideology, everyone has an ideology, but technocrats like you (and this refers to all of you at CT) are the ones who say you don’t. And this discussion is where it takes us, and this one.

You’re all so sure of what you are and what you represent, but all you know is what you want to represent, what you want to see yourselves as representing. It begins and ends with intention. Do you understand the history of intention? You’re situating yourselves in a drifting boat and calling it stability. Why is Posner like Scalia, Henry? Keiran? Harry? How is it that libertarians are both anarchists and control freaks? How is it that Brad DeLong can be so unobservant? DeLong is as subject to social determinism as the rest of us, but he doesn’t fight it. Like you he pretends he’s free. And when it’s shown he isn’t, he lies. He lied yesterday. And Henry, you lied in your response to Badger.
There is no intellectualism without intellectual history. You have none. All of you, have none. You’ve replaced it with fantasies. And to defend those fantasies you lie. Not all intellectual failures are moral failures. But some are.

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.

“There is no book containing solutions to all engineering problems.”

The second isn’t a response to the first.

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.

Agree with the engineering mindset being hyper-reductionist [albeit powerful], but can’t agree with you that they’re overrepresented in ideologies that treat people like machines. Neither the revolutionary leaders of fascism nor marxism were prone to being engineers, nor were Western engineering schools a fertile ground for left-wing groups. (Engineers did play a role in leaderships of China and the USSR, but that was after the revolution and an emphasis on more technocratic skills.)

Similarly, the Japanese terrorist group Aum Shinrikyo didn’t attract engineers more strongly than pure scientists or other disciplines.

“If you’re interested in studying medicine, it means you want to save lives.”

Rhetorical question: Who’s the Number Two in Al-Qaeda?

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.]

Seriously though, I took a look at the biographies of the politburo members, and there is very specific pattern when looking at the older members including Hu Jintao, and the generation of Jiang Zemin before them. Almost without exception, they were in charge of a factory or other industrial organization in the late 70’s when Deng Xiaoping came to power, and subsequently were appointed in relatively high government positions overseeing the industrial expansion of the 80s.

The younger members (who are not yet in the standing committee) are a much more mixed group, including many economists. They were usually still studying when the cultural revolution came and started their career afterwards, in the mid 70s. Most of them stated immediatly on some sort of political career.

My impression is that the “all engineer politburo” was a very temporary phenomenon, when the original revolutionaries form the 30’s (like Deng himself) were dying out and were replaced by the technocrats Deng had used in the 80s for his modernization of China.

The coming generation is much younger, 50 to 60, many of them are children from the new elites after the revolution, and many of them started immediatley on a government career. I suppose they are much more like western bureaucrats and politicians then the previous generations ( including the present bosses of China)

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

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.

So there could be some truth in the idea that a ‘radical islamic terrorist’ mindset makes people inclined to be an engineer, but given that almost every engineer in the islamic world is not a terrorist, I see little argument that an engineering mindset in general inclines measurably to being a terrorist.

The main difference between these viewpoints is in what they suggest about people who are not both terrorists and engineers.

The ‘terrorist mindset inclines to being an engineer’ viewpoint suggest something about other terrorists, namely that they might also be relatively engineer-like. If 4% of terrorists is an engineer (I think that was the number in the study), then for example another 4% might have considered becoming an engineer, and another 4% might have become one if they could have afforded higher education. So, this is a substantial portion of all terrorists, and useful information about islamic terrorists in general.

On the other hand, if 0.01% of islamic engineers is a terrorist ( that’s one in ten thousand), and for every terrorist there are ten people who are susceptible to becoming one but never got the opportunity, that still leaves us with 99.9% of islamic engineers who would never become a terrorist. Even if that number is lower than for other professions, it is still hardly useful information about engineers in general.

In this light, it is a bit frightening to see so many commenters make ‘I am not surprised’ comments, based on the engineers they personally know. Those engineers are probably not even muslims, and if they were would fall, with very, very high probability, in the never-ever-thought-about-becoming-a-terrorist group. There might (or might not) be things wrong with engineers in general, but being radical terrorists is not one of them.

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.