Last week, Marginal Revolution linked to a paper by Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog, titled “Engineers of Jihad”.
When Tyler Cowen calls something “probably the best piece on terrorism I have read”, it definitely piques my interest. I finally managed to read its 90 pages today, and though I’m not in a position to judge a sociology paper as a peer, I’m impressed. The most directly interesting piece of analysis was the fact that engineers are much more likely to have a world view that is both conservative and religious than other disciplines. This appears to hold throughout the world, though it seems that the specific environment faced by engineers in NAME countries contributes to their overrepresentation among Islamic terrorists.
Their explanation of the fit between “the engineering mindset” and certain types of extremism is borrowed from an older book by Seymour Lipset and Earl Raab, which is actually about American right wing extremism, but the general features are a great fit for Islamic fanaticism:
- Monism, “the tendency to treat cleavage and ambivalence as illegitimate (…) the repression of difference and dissent, the closing down of the market place of
ideas” - Simplism, “unambiguous ascription of single causes and remedies for multifactored phenomena”
- Preservatism “aims to restore a lost, often mythical order of privilege and authority and, in the authors’ view, emerges as a backlash against displacement or status deprivation in a period of sharp social change”
Note also that unsuccessful engineers are more likely to have conservative/religious views than more successful ones, which fits pretty well with the authors’ view about the third point. How about this part?
In her detailed ethnography, Nilufer Göle found evidence of the above ideological features among Islamist engineers in Turkey: she shows that they entertain a strong belief in the superiority of logical and technical approaches towards societal issues, and see themselves as problem solvers, as “social engineers”, superior to the Kemalist elite of jurists preoccupied with debates on abstract ideas (1990: 172f.). They assume to know the “one best way” of improving society, and feel therefore entitled to speak in the interests of all (Göle 1990: 174). According to Olivier Roy, Islamist intellectuals, many of whom he says have a technical or scientific education, criticize the “messy” Western social sciences because they challenge the unity and divine order of the world, while, by contrast, the sciences, pure and applied, reflect the “the coherence of the whole, the rationality of the one [God]” (Roy 1992: 271; Hanafi 1997: 148).53 In line with “simplism”, modern radical Islamism often has little truck with the nuance and ambiguity of established Islamic theology (Roy 1990, 2004).54 When Bernard Haykel asked the engineers and scientists among the numerous fundamentalist Islamists he interviewed what it was about Salafi thought that appealed to them, they pointed to its intellectually clean, unambiguous and all-encompassing nature (personal communication, September 2007).
Ah yes. People seriously need to study the history of the twentieth century if they still believe that there is one great system that would sort out the whole mess of civilization, and which is prevented from coming about because the Evil Few [tm] benefit from the current order. We’ve been through this from two different angles already, and it should be apparent that the next One True Idea[tm] is going to fail in the same way.
Why would engineers be more susceptible to this view than, say, scientists? I suspect that it has to do with the nature of engineering education. Science, from an engineer’s view, is something that works and can be depended on. For the actual scientist, the established body of science has to be taken into account, but all the actual work is not about applying well known principles, but rather about poking holes into them and extending the frontiers. This is a much more disorderly process. In physics, for example, the student is treated to the regulated world of classical mechanics, just to have it overthrown in two mutually incompatible ways afterwards, and then left to slowly puzzle it together in elaborate and complicated ways. The central message is “damn, this is all very complex, and though we do know a lot, there’s even more we don’t”. I doubt that this is a major component of most engineering courses, particularly in an environment where engineering studies are seen as a qualification to the social elite.
What would I suggest to counteract this? I don’t have a recipe, but personally, I’m just too awed by the enormous complexity of our society to entertain the idea that I would know how to revolutionize it into something better. I think most people who think that they can change the world don’t really appreciate the awesome complexity and cooperation that go into simple acts of daily life – like your web browsing right now. Maybe a little more emphasis and embrace of all the awesome complexity that is around us – the turmoil of atoms, evolution, markets and democracy – would lead to less simple-minded radicalism?
Just to keep the flames down, I guess that computer science, though it aspires to produce an engineering branch, has not yet reached the maturity to actually have the effect that I ascribe to typical engineering subjects since the body of knowledge is too young and too rapidly changing to qualify.
Please note that I’ve known plenty of fine people in engineering, but the effects that the study finds on a large sample are rather significant and need an explanation. I’m speculating on that rather than trying to insult you.
