Are leftwing academics really responsible for the events of September 11? My “post below”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/003186.html on Robert Conquest attracted two “outraged”:http://www.windsofchange.net/archives/006252.php “responses”:http://www.windsofchange.net/archives/006239.php from ‘Armed Liberal’ at the popular pro-war blog, Winds of Change suggesting that indeed they are. In his more recent post, AL seems to be retreating rapidly from his forthright factual assertion of yesterday that
bq. The 9/11 hijackers found their ideological center in European universities, and took up a philosophy rooted in Western leftist thought there.
while leaving in his wake a rapidly-expanding ink-cloud of “equally interesting to note”s, “wonder if”s, “worthwhile effort to discuss and explore”s and “may have something to do with it”s. Still, even now, AL is trying to insinuate that anti-Western Nihilist academics in European universities somehow turned Arab students into terrorists, without providing either facts or testable arguments to support his case. Which is probably a good thing for him, as the facts indicate that he’s completely wrong. “Marc Sageman”:http://www.fpri.org/enotes/20041101.middleeast.sageman.understandingterrornetworks.html, who has actually done some real research on this topic, has the goods. In his network analysis of 400 terrorist biographies, he found that:
bq. Al Qaeda’s members are not the Palestinian fourteen-year- olds we see on the news, but join the jihad at the average age of 26. Three-quarters were professionals or semi- professionals. They are engineers, architects, and civil engineers, mostly scientists. Very few humanities are represented, and quite surprisingly very few had any background in religion. The natural sciences predominate. Bin Laden himself is a civil engineer, Zawahiri is a physician, Mohammed Atta was, of course, an architect; and a few members are military, such as Mohammed Ibrahim Makawi, who is supposedly the head of the military committee.
This is exactly the opposite of what you would expect to find if exposure to leftists in the humanities and social sciences caused people to become terrorists. Unless AL wants to make the case that those notorious humanist Nihilists at engineering schools, computer science departments and urban planning institutes have been indoctrinating their students with Romantic anti-Western ideas, he’s plumb out of luck. Sageman, who unlike AL has some idea of what he’s talking about, puts forward a rather more plausible explanation of how Arabs studying in the West drifted into terrorism.
bq. When they became homesick, they did what anyone would and tried to congregate with people like themselves, whom they would find at mosques. So they drifted towards the mosque, not because they were religious, but because they were seeking friends. They moved in together in apartments, in order to share the rent and also to eat together – they were mostly halal, those who observed the Muslim dietary laws, similar in some respects to the kosher laws of Judaism. Some argue that such laws help to bind a group together since observing them is something very difficult and more easily done in a group. A micro-culture develops that strengthens and absorbs the participants as a unit. This is a halal theory of terrorism, if you like.
(I’m grateful to a commenter at “Unfogged”:http://www.unfogged.com/archives/week_2005_01_30.html#002924 for the Sageman link).
Update: description of WoC changed in response to comments below.
{ 61 comments }
Sebastian Holsclaw 02.03.05 at 11:41 pm
“popular right-wing blog, Winds of Change”
Really?
They aren’t Marxist, but they are a lot closer to Geras than I am. I also think you aren’t reading their thread very closely. Did you see Joe Katzman’s extended comment.
Bill Gardner 02.03.05 at 11:55 pm
Sebastian,
Would you say more about how you understand the ideology represented by the WoC bloggers. No sarcasm intended!
roger 02.04.05 at 12:00 am
Actually, as with Kinky Friedman’s theory of why Charles Whitman shot forty people from the University of Texas tower in 1966 (“I’ll never trust an eagle scout again”), so, too, I think we can quickly come up with a theory about engineers and their fatal attraction to fundamentalisms. According to several sites that monitor the battles over ID, the purveyors of this ridiculous version of science, Protestant fundamentalism wrapped in pseudo-science, are often engineers. There was some publicity given to an ID editorial in the York, Pa paper, penned by an engineer — since York is near the Dover school district that has given its biology program over to the Pentacostals. And in Texas, Ide P. Trotter, a chemical engineering professor, is one of the movers of trying to put Genesis in the classroom. I would hazard a guess that when the Discovery institute throws out a probe in the community to find some halfwit who has some shred of scientific credibility to go up before the school board and testify for ID, they will hit upon an engineer.
Those engineers, man.
Gus diZerega 02.04.05 at 12:17 am
I was struck by the same pattern Roger was.
The fundamentalists with educations whom I know are all engineers. I didn’t realize the same was true for the terrorists, but on reflection that makes sense.
Seems to me engineering is a profession that has trouble with deep uncertainty, whereas scientists specialize in dealing with it. Engineers solve puzzles where the pieces are well defined and the answer, if found, is clear. Scientists are more likely than engineers to investigate puzzles where we may lack the key pieces and the shape of the answer is uncertain as well. The two professions breed different habits of mind.
Perhaps also, the notion of divine control has a certain appeal to the engineering mentality: what ever happens had to be planned. God as the great engineer and so on.
Sebastian Holsclaw 02.04.05 at 12:17 am
Sure, Winds of Change a bit eclectic, but it you must put a political label on it it would be pro-war liberal not right-wing. Things not typically found on a ‘right-wing weblog’ include a weekly Sufi Wisdom feature and “Armed Liberal” a pro-war liberal. It also has a weekly positive message only day.
Ginger Yellow 02.04.05 at 12:19 am
Slight tangent here, but Pinker argues that dietary laws may indeed serve to reinforce group identity, but not because they are difficult to follow. Almost precisely the opposite, in fact. He argues that a) dietary preferences and taboos are formed at a young age and are among the hardest to change (with the exception of things like preference for bitter tastes as you grow older). Those in place after adolescence are almost impossible to break. Hence they are a very good way to tell if an individual belongs to your group. If you belong to a Jewish community, for example, and find someone eating pork, he’s probably a goy. The Inquisition notoriously used similar reasoning – if someone refused pork, they must be Jewish.
Timothy Burke 02.04.05 at 12:24 am
This whole damned discussion is a fabulous example of what happens when a bunch of people with insanely oversimplified ideas about causation and punch-and-judy show partisan politics try to discuss a genuinely complex historical question.
At least Paul Berman *tried* to make a more intricate claim about the genealogy of post-1945 anti-Western Islamism. Some of the conservatives who’ve read him carelessly (or the sub-Cliff Notes redactions of him from various pundits) have come away with the gaseous nonsense we see in this conversation and many like it (including Conquest’s careless formulation cited in the previous thread).
In fact, at the level of the kind of empty conjecture that some commentators unload, you could just as easily hypothesize (with just as little evidence) that the university system was such a wonderful incarnation or representation of Western freedoms that it proved to be the straw that broke the camel’s back and drove the 9/11 hijackers into nihilistic rage at the freedoms of the West.
On the other hand, careless or casual rebuffs to Conquest’s lazy elision are not terribly satisfying. I think the intellectual history of postcolonial nationalism and its romanticism mutations (which include al-Qaeda) is immensely complex and requires a lot of attention to specificities–but there are connections. Not causal ones: I laugh at the simple-mindedness of the causal suppositions of most of the furiously empty arguments being dropped right and left around this whole discussion. But connections nevertheless: the kind of intimate, messy, filial connections that simultaneous experience of modernity has tended to produce in all the peoples who passed through the long and difficult 20th Century. In that intricate web, there may be legitimate cause for noting the strands that link certain kinds of romantically nihilistic anti-Western sentiments among American and European academics from the 1970s to the 1990s and the 9/11 hijackers. Those links aren’t causal or lineal: it’s more like the relation between second cousins once removed. I am not my brother’s keeper, and less so therefore are second cousins responsible for each other’s deeds. Still, when yer cuz gets up to no good, it does tend to make you wonder about the badness in yer own blood.
Ginger Yellow 02.04.05 at 12:25 am
I should perhaps clarify that Pinker is talking about timescales of thousands and hundreds of thousands of years, mainly trying to explain how disgust evolved. He’s not really talking about the present day. If his argument is correct, dietary “laws” precede the religions that formalised them.
dsquared 02.04.05 at 12:59 am
Still, when yer cuz gets up to no good, it does tend to make you wonder about the badness in yer own blood.
The first comment in that thread makes the point the best; if this kind of reasoning was being used to delineate the connections between US foreign policy or, god help us, the state of Israel and 9/11 we’d see it for what it was in a heartbeat. But because it’s those ghastly people the “pomos”, it’s open season. (Not to blame Timothy, and in fact I do believe that there are interesting connections to explore between our foreign policy and its traceable consequences. But not on blogs).
In general, I’ve mentioned before and one day I’ll come up with a citation to prove it: In the USA, engineering faculties are reliably more conservative and capitalist than the rest of the academy. In the USSR, engineering faculties were reliably more communist and orthodox than the rest of the academy. Apparently, in the Islamic world, the engineers have deduced, no doubt from sound principles of logic and straighforward practical common sense, that the most conservative and unquestioning version of the faith their parents brought them up with, is the truth. If we ever find a civilisation dedicated to the worship of Matthew Broderick, I will bet dollars to donuts that it won’t be the humanities faculty that has a weekly viewing of “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”
jet 02.04.05 at 1:06 am
They may have been engineers, but they had to take those damned gen ed classes. And sleep hypnothis is the most effective, I hear. Thus those who were the least interested in political science, history, or philosophy were the most susceptible to being indoctrinated by freedom hating lefty’s.
Vizzini, “He didn’t fall? Inconceivable!!”
Inigo “You keep using that word — I do not think it means what you think it means.”
Cranky Observer 02.04.05 at 1:08 am
> Seems to me engineering is a
> profession that has trouble with
> deep uncertainty, whereas
> scientists specialize in dealing
> with it. Engineers solve puzzles
> where the pieces are well defined
> and the answer, if found, is
> clear. Scientists are more likely
> than engineers to investigate
> puzzles where we may lack the key
> pieces and the shape of the
> answer is uncertain as well.
To play this game fairly, I think you have to start with some generally accepted axioms, not just make stuff up. And I think it is generally accepted that engineers take the bright, clear, perfect theories of scientists and apply them in uncertain, unknown situations – not the other way around.
Good try though.
Cranky
roger 02.04.05 at 1:39 am
Actually, I’ll admit that the KF theory that we should watch eagle scouts doesn’t apply quite as well to engineers. I imagine the right wing tendency of engineers in the states, and the communist leaning tendencies in the U.S.S.R., has the same explanation — the ineffable increase in the well being of engineers that comes whenever a state decides to spend ungodly trillions of dollars or rubles on the defense industry. In short, the Pentagon has long run a welfare system for engineers in the U.S. and engineers have reciprocated with their endless affection for American aggression in all its splendid polymorphously perverse forms. However, the simple materialist explanation breaks down with Islamist hijacking engineers. So — perhaps the explanation is that Middle Eastern countries will give you a scholarship to go to the U.S. or Germany to study chemical engineering, but not econo-mimesis in the poetry of Mallarme. So the available stock of those who can go across state lines might narrow to engineers. Those humanistic, Derrida-Marx toting terrorists find their chances of salvation lessened (reputedly, houris are supposedly very subtle parsers of the Western logocentric corporate ethos — bliss eternally!) materially by their inability to get visas.
pedro 02.04.05 at 2:02 am
I was indignant at AL’s first silly post, but concluded very rapidly that it is unreasonable to expect people over there to engage in anything but speculative “dialogue” about the plausible “connections” between anti-Western intellectual traditions and the likes of Osama bin Laden. Not one right-winger has given a sensible answer to the comments made by John Holbo. I tried to get through to them in a rather harsher, clumsier way before, but to no avail.
Ginger Yellow 02.04.05 at 2:14 am
Surely a civilisation dedicated to the worship of Matthew Broderick would be too busy pulling sickies and driving around in flash cars to have a functioning engineering faculty.
Wendy 02.04.05 at 2:17 am
I can’t speak about engineers and their attraction to fundamentalism, but I was interested in this part of Sageman:
“When [Arabs] became homesick, they did what anyone would and tried to congregate with people like themselves, whom they would find at mosques. So they drifted towards the mosque, not because they were religious, but because they were seeking friends…. A micro-culture develops that strengthens and absorbs the participants as a unit.”
Some have argued that the reason why churches have grown in number and strengthened in the more rural and exurban areas of the country is because they offer a community among people more physically distant because they live relatively far apart from each other and/or in planned unit developments in towns with few to no public spaces, and they drive around in SUVs and minivans and shop in megamarts instead of smaller community grocery stores.
The churches provide the feeling of community that is lacking in other aspects of people’s lives.
Just an interesting common characteristic.
pedro 02.04.05 at 2:21 am
As a testament of the complexity of which Timothy Burke speaks, the worldview of Osama bin Laden resembles more that of Samuel Huntington in many ways than it does Jacques Derrida’s. To purport that bin Laden is exclusively a product of Western anti-Western (concatenation of adjectives intended) intellectual traditions is simplistic at best, if not disingenuous.
Rob Rickner 02.04.05 at 2:53 am
The engineers have had it rough enough. Think this problem through, starting with why the future terrorists end up in western countries. They come to study. I doubt they trek all the way out of the Middle East to study film theory, and more than parents in the United States, your average Saudi family is not going to pay for a pomo education.
Come west for the science, get the alienation for free. If the Sageman article is correct, the growing anti-arab sentiment in Europe and the United States should kick the production of terrorists into hyperdrive.
So, does anyone else see the similarity between these terrorists and the Columbine shooters?
bza 02.04.05 at 3:02 am
I think it is generally accepted that engineers take the bright, clear, perfect theories of scientists and apply them in uncertain, unknown situations – not the other way around.
I think what Gus was thinking is that a scientist is, by profession, comfortable with present uncertainty: he or she is free to regard to regard a question as undecided for however long it takes to get a good answer (indeed, it would be a professional virtue to do so). In contrast, the questions the engineer has to confront are questions that he or she has to come up with an answer to now, even if that answer is a messy and pragmatically justified one.
Lindsay Beyerstein 02.04.05 at 3:22 am
This is pure doublethink. The Western academic tradition is usually assailed for inculcating relativism. I hold relativism in contempt, but I admit that relativism seldom motivates people to fly airplanes into buildings.
No one is willing to die on behalf of nihilism. Why would any true nihilist sacrifice himself for anything?
Religious fundamentalism antithetical to both relativism and nihilism.
Henry 02.04.05 at 3:49 am
Sebastian, I’d have difficulty myself in describing WoC as a left wing blog, but I’ll bow to your superior knowledge (to be honest, if I didn’t know Norman Geras’s past form, I’d have difficulty in identifying his blog as leftwing either, six days out of seven. Am modifying the main post to describe the blog as “anti-war” which we can all agree on I’m sure.
Timothy, I agree with you in principle, but I’m with dsquared on the practicalities here. I’ve specifically limited my responses to AL’s bogus empirical claims, b/c I think that blogs are a wildly unsuitable medium for the sort of careful sifting of genealogies of ideas that is actually necessary if we want to figure out who influenced who. The only possible result would be an unenlightening slagging match between leftwingers and rightwingers, each citing the other side as providing the ‘key influences’ on whichever dodgy Islamic thinker you’d care to name yerself. Amateur intellectual history is a mug’s game.
Henry 02.04.05 at 4:24 am
bq. They may have been engineers, but they had to take those damned gen ed classes.
jet – students in German technical universities don’t have to take general ed classes, for better or worse – it’s a purely vocational education.
ogmb 02.04.05 at 4:56 am
Nor do students at universities. Germany has a 13th year of secondary education to cover gen ed.
Russell L. Carter 02.04.05 at 5:14 am
“In general, I’ve mentioned before and one day I’ll come up with a citation to prove it: In the USA, engineering faculties are reliably more conservative and capitalist than the rest of the academy. In the USSR, engineering faculties were reliably more communist and orthodox than the rest of the academy.”
Oh Bullshit Dsquared! The single reason the engineers of my acquaintence would be “conservative” is because they had to pass Plant Design, which has a lot of emphasis on finance, which you are, uhm, a little tainted with the knowledge thereof? You know, they got to calculate things like IRR and profit and dumb things like that. And if you’re telling me that that sort of education leads to mindless allegience to the reigning political orthodoxy, irregardless of economic foundation (however tenuous to reality), I got to say you don’t know shit. Well I know you know shit. But what’s up with this shit. My undergraduate major was Chemical Engineering and my MS Math minor was Mechanical Engineering. This whole fucking ‘meme’ about engineers is bullshit. Nearly all engineers care a lot more about their temperature monitoring systems and their koi ponds than the stupid idiotic thing that for 2500 years has passed for politics. Notice I didn’t say a word about religion? NOT ONCE IN TWENTY YEARS HAS IT EVER COME UP. I wouldn’t respect an engineer who brought it up. I’ve never met one who would bring it up. Oh… to deepen my crimes, I’m married to a MS chemical engineer BTW.
Now there’s nutcases on every faculty and while working at a research post in Silicon Valley I met (and enjoyed quite fine parties with) several Stanford engineers who had reactionary politics; notibly, though we recognized that they were exceptionally fine scientists, there was no doubt they were off their rocker when it came to politics. But it didn’t matter, because we are engineers: the bridge will not fall down.
harold 02.04.05 at 5:25 am
My sister got her degree in civil engineering because it was the quickest way to get a professional salary with a four-year education.
She took some time out to have three children and then went back to grad school to get a higher degree (in engineering). She loves her work (she is the only woman in her office), and spends her evenings doing engineering problems for fun, but she told me she is appalled at the right-wingery among her co-workers.
I have great respect for engineers and what they do and even greater respect and admiration for my sister, but I get the idea that many engineers are not very educated beyond the the focus of their narrow specialty. It is a case of a broad (liberal) education versus what is really vocational training. Of course you don’t have to have a college degree to be liberally educated or to have a broad perspective, you can do much of it on your own.
T. V. 02.04.05 at 5:30 am
Regarding engineers and fundamentalisms, here’s a comment from Stephen Baum that I nabbed from Ethel the Blog in 2003 (April 4th), regarding the engineering department at his place of employ:
“I distinctly remember one mouth-breather ranting over and over, “I’d kill that motherfucker [Clinton] with my bare hands if I had the chance!” immediately after the election. And the palpable and vocal hatred barely diminished at all over the next 8 years. My shock wore off when I realized where most if not all of the gasoline for the fire came from. These people were damned near all dittoheads. They ate lunch at places where rant/hate radio was played, and they listened to more rant/hate radio in their offices all afternoon. I wasn’t exposed to this in my department (oceanography being populated by a pack of godless, hellbound commies who don’t feel the need to impose hours of talk radio on their officemates), but found out about it from sane friends in the engineering school, wherein most of the denizens owned well-stained copies of Heinlein and Pournelle, were convinced that being able to solve a static beam problem made them uber-gods, and – most of all – knew everything Rush told them was not just the absolute truth but God’s absolute truth.”
Baum’s permalinks and search functions have been broken since forever, but I copied the whole post here.
Also, since one of the endless dumb canards of anti-pomo hysteria has been that pomo’s “relativism” about objective fact somehow legitimizes Holocaust denial, I’ve always enjoyed what crypto-fascist engineer Stephen den Beste would call a “horse laugh” upon noting that the primary academic legitimacy lent to Holocaust denial in the U.S. has come from Arthur Butz, working in the epistemological bunkers of the engineering department at Northwestern University where they still respect objective facts.
Whatever one thinks of “leftwing academics,” based on my own experience I’d happily confirm the worst stereotypes being developed about engineers here, and would encourage their proliferation.
Russell L. Carter 02.04.05 at 6:11 am
I’m only now realizing that commenters here don’t understand what an engineer does. That is my failure, and I apologize. So here it is: an engineer’s job is to build some sort of thing in our society that is more good than bad.
This requires a large knowledge of science (constantly changing), and to D^2 regret, a bit of financial know how as well (If you have procurement responsibility. Often engineers do). So management tells you (usually a team) to go off and do this thing, first give us the financials and what not and then make a plan. Then make it so. Or maybe it works the otherway and it percolates up then down. Doesn’t matter. Engineers then go off and do what they do. Build bridges, not destroy them.
ogmb 02.04.05 at 7:01 am
Shorter comments so far: Engineers are right-wing nutcases and I have the anecdotal case to prove it.
Dave F 02.04.05 at 7:17 am
Just to widen this a little, it should be noted that the practical professions — engineering, architecture, medicine — are elite categories in the social milieu of Saudi Arabia, where most of the hijackers were from. of course, martyrdom is an elite category in Saudi society as well.
It is also interesting that Mohammed Atta, the ringleader, was an architect with a passion for great buildings. Given the target of the death planes, it seems not too idle a speculation to wonder if he didn’t conceive of the destruction of a major building as the most devastating imaginable to Americans.
Armed Liberal 02.04.05 at 7:21 am
Henry, I’m sorry – when you ran out the door with your ball, I assumed you didn’t want to play any more.
A few things, and I’ll expand as I have time tomorrow (assuming I get in under the Good News deadline).
1) I’m not retreating from anything; unlike you, I seem to have missed the class in grad school that suggested that I had all the answers and since I’m genuinely interested in the question, I’m more than happy to argue it and thereby see if we can all learn something. That’s a characteristic style of my blogging, apologies if it was novel or didn’t come across.
2) It’s amusing to note that very few foreign students at US or French universities (the only countries I have any direct familiarity with) – other than the elite universities – study anything but technical fields. No one at home pays for an education in literary theory. Junior is going to be an engineer, architect, or doctor.
3) It’s also amusing to note that the only mechanism of learning that anyone here seems to acknolwledge is classroom learning. Whatever happened to the University experience? The University community?
4) I’m familiar with Sageman, and have been trying to dig behind his article to see what the hard data on the mechanism he proposes looks like – i.e. did this come from interviews, third party accounts, or conjecture. I’d love a pointer at this if anyone can suggest one.
5) It’s also interesting to note that if university education (and life) does such a bad job of acculturing the students, that so much attention and effort has been spent by so many for so long in carefully tuning the culture that students are exposed to as a way of making sure that they grow up appropriately.
They rebel anyway, and the best argument against my notion may well be the increasing prevalance of right-wing students as the university communities become more solidly left-wing. I’m thinking a bit about that, and will see what I can come up with in my response.
Catch you on the next round.
A.L.
luci phyrr 02.04.05 at 7:28 am
Awesome. You know who’s worse than engineers? Computer scientists. Those people give me the creeps. Them and their fascist algoritithms.
bad Jim 02.04.05 at 9:06 am
Perhaps it isn’t the testosterone-fueled, misogynist character of engineering education after all. Perhaps it has to do with having an alien army encamped within your country. Just supposing.
abb1 02.04.05 at 10:06 am
You know who’s worse than engineers? Computer scientists.
Not to mention evil directors of human resources…
Jason McCullough 02.04.05 at 11:07 am
“So here it is: an engineer’s job is to build some sort of thing in our society that is more good than bad.”
What do you mean by “more good than bad?” Engineers work on chemical weapon delivery systems…..
Armed Liberal, did a participle beat up your Mom or something?
Oh, and is there a word for the types of phrases that let you sidle up to fascism by “just wondering” if someone’s a traitorous dog for who hanging is too good?
jet 02.04.05 at 1:34 pm
So Henry responds with the interesting news that 9/11 terrorists, those who attended University, didn’t have to take gen ed classes. So how does Conquest make his link between the terrorists’ motivations and freedom hating Poly-Sci professors? Does Conquest make a direct connection through some club or campus movement? Were the terrorists members of a campus organization? Or is it some long drawn out connect-the-magical-dots explanation where the terrorists were effected by osmosis; by sheer proximity to the dark lords of Liberal-Mordor?
And even if Conquest is right, are we willing to give up a portion of our cultural introspection because of some 7 degrees of seperation between academics who question our values and terrorists who hate our values? I, for one, wouldn’t feel safe in my premises if they weren’t constantly being questioned. Of course, anyone who feels it is safe to assume Bush knew he was lieing about WMD’s shouldn’t be teaching classes on logic and rational thinking.
Steve LaBonne 02.04.05 at 2:00 pm
Isn’t everybody overlooking the conspiratorial organization whose recruiting efforts really benefit from exposure of students to daffy academic leftists? I speak, of course, of the Republican Party. ;)
Joshua W. Burton 02.04.05 at 2:47 pm
_Engineers then go off and do what they do. Build bridges, not destroy them._
Doesn’t the adage go, “ME’s build weapons, CivE’s build targets”?
Peter 02.04.05 at 3:15 pm
Are leftwing academics really responsible for the events of September 11? I think this meme was started in rebuttal to a Colorado University professor’s essay that stated basically “we brought 9/11 on ourselves.” Here in Denver, we have daily protests by right wingers (and the state governor) demanding this professor be fired and the university to formally apologize for this
John Isbell 02.04.05 at 3:16 pm
I’d quote the Engineer’s Song in full if I could remember it. I had the wildest year of my life at MIT (not Cambridge), and am tempted to send this thread to an MIT listserv I know.
Engineer joke:
There’s a fire in the lab. The engineer grabs the fire extinguisher, put the fire out, goes outside and has a cigarette. The phsyicist goes to the blackboard, calculates the exact amount of fluid neeeded, puts the fire out with that, goes outside and has a cigarette. The mathematician (my dad was one) goes to the blackboard, calculates the exact amount of fuild needed, goes outside and has a cigarette. Engineers love to flame but are practical, there’s my generality.
Peter 02.04.05 at 3:33 pm
The whole “leftwing academics really responsible for the events of September 11” meme started when a Colorado University professor wrote an essay claiming that “the US brought 9/11 on themselves.” Here in Denver, we have daily protests by right wingers and even the governor is pressuring the university to fire the professor and apologize.
Sebastian Holsclaw 02.04.05 at 4:30 pm
I think Armed Liberal’s point on the University experience bears repeating. Are we asuming that you can’t reinforce high levels of anti-Americanism outside of the classroom yet still at the university?
pm 02.04.05 at 5:06 pm
The fundamentalists with educations whom I know are all engineers. … Seems to me engineering is a profession that has trouble with deep uncertaint
This observation, and the unfortunate comment string that it kicked off, is backwards. The observation is not about engineers but about fundamentalists.
If you are a fundamentalist and you have above-average academic potential, you really have no alternative but engineering. The humanities require you to study all kinds of “worldly” subjects and methodologies like art, literature and history that will come into direct conflict with many of your presuppositions, and then what kind of job are you going to get anyway putting that so-called “knowledge” into practice? Engineering, however, will not cause any conflicts. This motivation can be readily observed among young US Christian Evangelicals.
It’s not the attractiveness of engineering to the fundamentalist student, but the unattractiveness of anything else, that is in play here.
The majority of engineers, of course, well-adjusted, secular, modern people who just happen to be good at math, do not enter into this discussion.
Walt Pohl 02.04.05 at 5:21 pm
I haven’t read Armed Liberal in a while, so maybe I’ve missed a drift in his thinking, but I would have expected better. Now it’s somehow the left at fault for terrorism because of the mere presence of leftists at Universities. What proximity do leftists have to be to terrorists to be blamed? Is anything less than a thousand miles enough?
pedro 02.04.05 at 5:23 pm
I do find the speculations about engineers being more prone to becoming terrorists rather annoying, for the very same reason that Armed Liberal’s unsubstantiated musings strike me as irritating. It is likely that many of the Al-Qaeda engineers actually decided to learn technical subjects partly because of fantasies about acquiring the necessary know-how to inflict pain upon their enemies. To suggest that engineering school nurtures terrorism is not much better than to suggest the study of Derrida, Foucault, et al, nurtures terrorism. It may be more amusing, and much less divorced from the evidence, but it is certainly not brilliant.
Urinated State of America 02.04.05 at 7:15 pm
The fundamentalists with educations whom I know are all engineers. I didn’t realize the same was true for the terrorists, but on reflection that makes sense.
Seems to me engineering is a profession that has trouble with deep uncertainty, whereas scientists specialize in dealing with it. Engineers solve puzzles where the pieces are well defined and the answer, if found, is clear. Scientists are more likely than engineers to investigate puzzles where we may lack the key pieces and the shape of the answer is uncertain as well. The two professions breed different habits of mind.”
Spot on. I shifted from Physics to Engineering, and found the hardest part was the change in the Gestalt – the hardest part of solving an Engineering problem is figuring out the assumptions you have to make to reframe the problem into something tractable. This book> discusses the topic further.
The social function of an engineer – as Herbert Hoover said -an engineer is someone who can do for 50 cents what any fool can do for a buck – is irrelevant to this. The thinking method of an engineer is to ignore the data or concepts that (s)he doesn’t feel are relevant. Powerful in the right circumstances, but dangerous in the wrong ones. Hence the prominence of engineers in pseudoscientific areas – be it ID or amateur [and erroneous] critiques of anthropogenic climate change or in the ranks of Holocaust deniers.
Another contribution may be that engineering is a vocational discipline, like law or medicine, but doesn’t have the ‘guild’ status that those two professions have, where the state intervenes to restrict those who can practice it. Hence, law and medicine, although not as conceptually difficult as a lot of engineering, get more $$$ and status. Hence, a lot of engineers have a chip on their shoulder over their lower status relative to those other professions – an engineer is a lot more likely to see the invisible hand of the market giving him the finger than a doctor or a lawyer.
cs 02.04.05 at 8:26 pm
See, Armed Liberal is just a disinterested Thinker, who simply advances possible theories in order to advance the cause of human thought. Shame on you people for accusing him of implying anything.
Urinated State of America 02.04.05 at 9:01 pm
“Engineers solve puzzles where the pieces are well defined and the answer, if found, is clear. Scientists are more likely than engineers to investigate puzzles where we may lack the key pieces and the shape of the answer is uncertain as well. The two professions breed different habits of mind.”
Spot on. I shifted from Physics to Engineering, and found the hardest part was the change in the Gestalt – the hardest part of solving an Engineering problem is figuring out the assumptions you have to make to reframe the problem into something tractable. This book> discusses the topic further.
The social function of an engineer – as Herbert Hoover said -an engineer is someone who can do for 50 cents what any fool can do for a buck – is irrelevant to this. The thinking method of an engineer is to ignore the data or concepts that (s)he doesn’t feel are relevant. Powerful in the right circumstances, but dangerous in the wrong ones. Hence the prominence of engineers in pseudoscientific areas – be it ID or amateur [and erroneous] critiques of anthropogenic climate change or in the ranks of Holocaust deniers.
Another contribution may be that engineering is a vocational discipline, like law or medicine, but doesn’t have the ‘guild’ status that those two professions have, where the state intervenes to restrict those who can practice it. Hence, law and medicine, although not as conceptually difficult as a lot of engineering, get more $$$ and status. Hence, a lot of engineers have a chip on their shoulder over their lower status relative to those other professions – an engineer is a lot more likely to see the invisible hand of the market giving him the finger than a doctor or a lawyer.
M.C. 02.04.05 at 9:10 pm
It is also interesting that Mohammed Atta, the ringleader, was an architect with a passion for great buildings. Given the target of the death planes, it seems not too idle a speculation to wonder if he didn’t conceive of the destruction of a major building as the most devastating imaginable to Americans.
Why am I feeling thrown back to The Fountainhead?
Doctor Slack 02.04.05 at 10:23 pm
I seem to have missed the class in grad school that suggested that I had all the answers and since I’m genuinely interested in the question, I’m more than happy to argue it and thereby see if we can all learn something.
Actually, in the initial instance, you seemed quite happy to pretend you had all the answers, or at least all the significant ones. Given that you suddenly discovered the value of open, fact-based debate in an atmosphere of sweet reason [i]after[/i] you were caught spewing nonsense, it’s hard for the rest of us to take the above at face value. In fact, it seems like exactly the kind of smarmy, pseudo-intellectual posing that eventually soured me (and I doubt I’m alone) on Winds of Change.
People might be more inclined to give you the benefit of the doubt if you displayed this pattern of behaviour less often. As it stands, Henry’s characterization looks right on the money. But hopes springs eternal; let’s see what you have to say once you’ve dug into the Sageman study that you claim to’ve known about all along.
rubble 02.04.05 at 10:24 pm
As an engineer, I think Roger has a point and the other engineers here are being a bit deliberately obtuse.
Engineering is about solving problems in a domain of fixed rules. This has several ramifications:
* The problem space is completely impersonal. The requirements may be derived from humans, but from the engineer’s perspective it’s just a bunch of numbers. The people who deal with the human interface aren’t engineers, they’re designers.
* Solutions can be objectively measured and compared. Answers are either correct or incorrect; the problem is either solved or not solved; this solution is either better than or worse than that one.
I think that people who internalize the engineering mindset have a strong tendency to gravitate toward rigid, relatively impersonal philosophies. For example, from my experience, libertarianism is wildly more popular among engineers than among the population at large. In a different cultural context, I can see radical Islam filling the same role.
But at the same time, I would not claim than engineer/terrorists are more prevalent due to ideology alone. Engineers are trained to plan and build things, and to stay focused on executing a particular task; from a purely practical standpoint, they would seem to be best suited to this sort of task.
John Isbell 02.04.05 at 11:00 pm
I’d quote the Engineer’s Song in full if I could remember it. I had the wildest year of my life at MIT (not Cambridge), and am tempted to send this thread to an MIT listserv I know.
Engineer joke:
There’s a fire in the lab. The engineer grabs the fire extinguisher, put the fire out, goes outside and has a cigarette. The phsyicist goes to the blackboard, calculates the exact amount of fluid neeeded, puts the fire out with that, goes outside and has a cigarette. The mathematician (my dad was one) goes to the blackboard, calculates the exact amount of fuild needed, goes outside and has a cigarette. Engineers love to flame but are practical, there’s my generality.
Giles 02.04.05 at 11:09 pm
I think d squared has a point – people in non humanities areas tend to have more rigid political views because they spend less time thinking about them critically.
So making the argument that the terrorists were inspired by the left in academia, is not saying that that the left instructed them. So for instance arguing that Hitler was (apparently) partly inspired by the British Empire to create his own is not arguing that the British Empire was a Nazi entity. In the same way the Al Quaedists listened in on leftist discourse and cherry picked the bits they liked in order to construct, and in particular, verbalize their philosophy. But quite clearly they did not adopt the “whole†leftist package. Obviously the Al Quaedists did very much the same thing to Islam – cherry picked the bits they liked and ignored the rest.
And this is really the essence of fascism –which is what Al Quaedists are – it involves cherry picking the most “attractive†bits of other philosophy in order to disguise your basic lust for power. Nazisim was dressed initially as a sort of compromise between left and right with lots of family friendly posters. The pan arabist have done the same thing with Al Queada and the left.
Interestingly I think that this is more a good reflection on the left than a bad one – it says that their ideas and the way they are expressed are (superficially) internaitaonally attractive. By contrast there’s very little chance that say OBL will appear in his next video talking in the style of Newt Gringich – he’ll stick with Moore speak because its better.
pedro 02.05.05 at 2:34 am
I do find the speculation that engineers are more prone to become terrorists rather annoying, for the very same reason that Armed Liberal’s unsubstantiated musings strike me as irritatingly silly. It is likely that many of the Al-Qaeda engineers actually decided to learn technical subjects partly because of fantasies about acquiring the necessary know-how to inflict pain upon their enemies. To suggest that engineering school nurtures terrorism is not much better than to suggest that tenuous contact with the ideas of Derrida, Foucault, et al, nurtures terrorism. It may be more amusing, and much less divorced from the evidence, but it is certainly not brilliant.
Donald Johnson 02.05.05 at 2:43 am
Were there leftist professors who advocated terror attacks on Western targets as a sensible way to oppose Western imperialism? If so, and if Atta and company knew about them, then there might be a connection. Otherwise not, because mere harsh criticism is not taken as justification for mass murder by rational people.
Henry 02.05.05 at 3:10 pm
bq. I think Armed Liberal’s point on the University experience bears repeating. Are we asuming that you can’t reinforce high levels of anti-Americanism outside of the classroom yet still at the university?
Sebastian – would you care to
(a) describe the precise mechanisms through which this might happen.
(b) speak to how these mechanisms might have applied, say, to, Arabs at technical universities in Germany, who don’t seem to have associated much with non-Arabs.
(c ) Actually provide some evidence showing that this happened in the case of the 9/11 hijackers?
Given that there’s a good counter-theory as to where they got their orientations, which actually has strong empirical support, your statement has the same epistemological value as the statement that we can’t rule out the possibility that the 9/11 hijackers were brainwashed by Mossad provocateurs. And like the latter, it says more about the willingness of the individual making the statement to grab onto a rather offensive theory regardless of the lack of any factual evidence, than it does about the likely causal factors that made the September 11 hijackers into terrorists. As I said to AL a couple of days ago, the “it’s wrong to exclude the possibility that” line of argument has been advanced by some incredibly nasty people – most particularly neo-Nazis who don’t want to exclude the possibility that the death camps didn’t exist, or that Jews didn’t deserve what they got. I honestly don’t think you want to find yourself in that company – but fact-free and untestable assertions that suggest that we can’t ignore the possibility that _x_ group of individuals is somehow responsible for the death of several thousand people are pretty disreputable things, which a reputable righty really shouldn’t be associating himself with.
Elliott Oti 02.05.05 at 4:33 pm
Sebastian Holsclaw wrote:
I think Armed Liberal’s point on the University experience bears repeating. Are we asuming that you can’t reinforce high levels of anti-Americanism outside of the classroom yet still at the university?
You are, I think, assuming correctly that anti-Americanism (or anti-Westernism) can be reinforced outside the classroom. Though, I suspect, not quite in the manner you think.
German universities are not the same all-encompassing environments that many American colleges are. Student dorms, fraternities etc. are present, but in much smaller numbers and play a much less important role. Many community elements that Americans take for granted, such as college basketball or football, are entirely absent.
Universities are also mostly state-sponsored; the US phenomenon of alumni pouring money into libraries, societies, sports etc. is largely absent. German universities are simply not very big on extra-curricular activities.
Self-identification with their universities is not a defining characteristic of the German student, the way (say) Ivy-league graduates identify with their alma maters. The university you went to is the university you went to, nothing more, nothing less.
Undoubtedly, to some extent the milieu in which a (potential) al Qaeda sympathizer finds himself in, will define his ideas and beliefs. In Germany, this milieu will consist largely of the students such a person chooses to associate with.
My personal experience with foreign students with a religious bent is that in their cases, like very much attracts like. It’s the only way to find warmth in a surprisingly hostile world, sometimes.
If they speak with a marked accent, or speak the language poorly (passive listening and written skills being more important in a university environment than active spoken), if they look different (swarthy complexion, beard, yarmulke or what have you), foreign students will be subjected to ostracism. Non-intentional, perhaps, on the part of the white middle-class students doing the ostracism, but they will be ostracized nevertheless.
They will not get dates with white girls. They will not be asked, and they will not dare to ask. They will not get asked to parties. People will not have the patience to hold long conversations with them while they try and explain their (complex) thoughts in halting, painfully accented German. Outside the classroom people will automatically mistake them for dumb janitors and cleaners, not for smart students.
This breeds disillusionment and very deep resentment. After a year of this shit, it isn’t particularly surprising that they gravitate to the group that shows them the most warmth and companionship, a group where they are taken seriously, as equals, by peers who have walked the same miles in the same shoes.
Elliott Oti 02.05.05 at 4:51 pm
I might add anecdotally, having known a number of North African and Middle Eastern students during my own student days here in the Netherlands, that the single most important factor for their acceptance into mainstream society, was the ability to speak unaccented Dutch.
The foreign MENA students who had the hardest times, were those who were very intelligent but had poor spoken Dutch and English skills. Two I knew were so lonely and miserable they had contemplated suicide at some point.
I have also worked as unskilled labour, and less-intelligent, less-educated foreigners with poor Dutch skills don’t seem to be nearly as hard-hit.
Tom Doyle 02.05.05 at 5:59 pm
Interesting.
I’m a Ramblin’ Wreck from Georgia Tech and a hell of an engineer,
A helluva, helluva, helluva, helluva, hell of an engineer,
Like all the jolly good fellows, I drink my whiskey clear,
I’m a Ramblin’ Wreck from Georgia Tech and a hell of an engineer.
Oh, if I had a daughter, sir, I’d dress her in White and Gold,
And put her on the campus, to cheer the brave and bold.
But if I had a son, sir, I’ll tell you what he’d do.
He would yell, “To Hell with Georgia,” like his daddy used to do.
Oh, I wish I had a barrel of rum and sugar three thousand pounds,
A college bell to put it in and a clapper to stir it around.
I’d drink to all good fellows who come from far and near.
I’m a ramblin’, gamblin’, hell of an engineer.
Heh
“ Ramblin’ Wreck Song: It is doubtful that anything has ever meant as much to an American college as has this Georgia Tech fight song, a curious mixture of words and music that grew out of an old folk ballad, “The Sons of the Gamboliers.” Since the early 1900’s, it has been one of the most important vehicles in making Georgia Tech’s name known around the world and in the development of the school as one of the most cosmopolitan institutions of higher learning in America…The fame of the song spread to such proportions that in 1959 it was sung by Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev at their historic meeting in Moscow.”
Indeed
Read more here at
Ramblin’ Wreck.com – The Official Online Service Of Georgia Tech Aesthetics
Tom Doyle 02.05.05 at 6:17 pm
Sorry, the last word in my post above should have been “Athletics.”
Giles 02.05.05 at 9:59 pm
Is it possible to learn to speak “unaccented Dutch” if youre not born dutch?
Elliott Oti 02.07.05 at 8:48 am
“Is it possible to learn to speak “unaccented Dutch†if youre not born dutch?”
As an adult?
Yes, if you already speak a language with Germanic (or to a lesser extent Romantic) roots: Germans, Scandinavians, and English speakers have few real difficulties. Turks also fare surprisingly well.
It’s a lot more difficult if your mother tongue is non-West European, though.
Urinated State of America 02.07.05 at 7:12 pm
“Engineers solve puzzles where the pieces are well defined and the answer, if found, is clear. Scientists are more likely than engineers to investigate puzzles where we may lack the key pieces and the shape of the answer is uncertain as well. The two professions breed different habits of mind.”
Spot on. I shifted from Physics to Engineering, and found the hardest part was the change in the Gestalt – the hardest part of solving an Engineering problem is figuring out the assumptions you have to make to reframe the problem into something tractable. This book> discusses the topic further.
The social function of an engineer – as Herbert Hoover said -an engineer is someone who can do for 50 cents what any fool can do for a buck – is irrelevant to this. The thinking method of an engineer is to ignore the data or concepts that (s)he doesn’t feel are relevant. Powerful in the right circumstances, but dangerous in the wrong ones. Hence the prominence of engineers in pseudoscientific areas – be it ID or amateur [and erroneous] critiques of anthropogenic climate change or in the ranks of Holocaust deniers.
Another contribution may be that engineering is a vocational discipline, like law or medicine, but doesn’t have the ‘guild’ status that those two professions have, where the state intervenes to restrict those who can practice it. Hence, law and medicine, although not as conceptually difficult as a lot of engineering, get more $$$ and status. Hence, a lot of engineers have a chip on their shoulder over their lower status relative to those other professions – an engineer is a lot more likely to see the invisible hand of the market giving him the finger than a doctor or a lawyer.
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