Engineers of Jihad: Connection between Violent Extremism and Education
press.princeton.edu
press.princeton.edu
This is a trait shared by entrepreneurs, engineers, and extremists. There's a high overlap between the three.
Social norms are powerful. People outside of them often see better ways to do things (or what they believe to be such). Constructively, they might start a business to fix the world. Destructively, they might blow up what they don't like.
That's a kind of short summary, but the book explains this much more convincingly and eloquently.
Are management-level terrorists coming from former entrepreneurs? None of the top people in al-Queda were engineers. Bin Laden did come from a family that runs a huge construction company, but he himself never did anything in that area. Within ISIS, many of the top people were either career military or religious. Shaker Wahib al-Fahdawi al-Dulaimi was a computer science student, though.
Other than earn his degree in civil engineering?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_life_of_Osama_bin_Lad...
This is different from some suburban geeky guy who likes computers and decided to study electrical engineering in university. It reflects on his personality more.
I know some Scotsmen who might be upset, but they aren't true Scotsmen.
Take a bunch of middle and upper-middle class students whose parents had remunerative but unsustainable government sinecures, run them through the university system, then drop them into a repressive government and a poorly-managed economy, and you've got a potential tinderbox there. Now have the government suppress all political dissent so that only the ideologically-committed hard core groups survive, then release the pressure just enough for them to start recruiting those disgruntled students, and hey presto, there's your generation of terrorist engineers.
> It's really more likely -- and I'm replying without having read the topic article -- that this is related to the fact that developing states with "socialist" (I use the term advisedly) bents tended to privilege engineering, medical and scientific education in its universities, while not having economies capable of effectively supporting those graduates.
And to be fair that emphasis probably really is quite rational, because engineers are probably the kind of people a rapidly-developing middle-income country most needs. Unfortunately setting up the pipeline of trained engineers isn't nearly enough on its own to ensure the rapid development, of course.
One reason I find that interpretation plausible is that this seems to have happened before:
"The writers who invented and elaborated the post-Kantian theory of the state belonged to a caste which was relatively low on the social scale. They were, most of them, the sons of pastors, artisans, or small farmers. They somehow managed to become university students, most often in the faculty of theology, and last out the duration of their course on minute grants, private lessons, and similar makeshifts. When they graduated they found that their knowledge opened no doors, that they were still in the same social class, looked down upon by a nobility which was stupid, unlettered, and which engrossed the public employments they felt themselves so capable of filling. These students and ex-students felt in them the power to do great things, they had culture, knowledge, ability, they yearned for the life of action, its excitements and rewards, and yet there they were, doomed to spend heartbreaking years as indigent curates waiting to be appointed pastors, or as tutors in some noble household, where they were little better than superior domestics, or as famished writers dependent on the goodwill of an editor or a publisher."
That's from /Nationalism/ by Elie Kedourie http://www.amazon.com/Nationalism-Elie-Kedourie/dp/063118885.... http://www.worldcat.org/title/nationalism/oclc/27812918 : he's talking about Germany around 1800. This group of radicalised students produced colourful people like Karl Sand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Ludwig_Sand , and of course an ideology which was eventually to burn Europe down at least a couple of times. And they tended to be literary-minded types who'd studied theology in university. (Though no doubt that partly reflects that fact that relatively few people did technical subjects at university at that time.)
I'm under the impression that in a lot of middle eastern countries it's not real hard to get into university. However the universities are corrupt. To get good grades means cheating and subtle and or not so subtle bribes to your professors. And once you are out if the fix isn't in for you, you're not going to get a job.
I've noted in my career that you have three kinds of engineering students. Those that go into it for the money. Those that go into it because they have some grand narcissistic idea that they'll changed the world. And those that are more or less happy to spend the rest of their career designing trash pumps. The first drift into sales and management. The second are potential a source of terrorists. And the latter are guys like me.
They study engineering for many of the reasons that we do: Aptitude in the preliminaries such as math, interest in the subject matter, practical applicability, and employment prospects.
There may be a couple of additional factors: Engineering has a cross cultural appeal, whereas fields such as the humanities and social sciences may be seen as solving "first world problems" for lack of a better term. And, engineering is in theory apolitical, meaning you can do interesting work without the risk of getting in trouble.
If I were a parent of a bright teenager living in the third world, I could think of worse things than sending them to study engineering in the West.
Besides engineering, the is another field that offers similar opportunities for upward mobility: medicine.
But medicine has a humanizing nature, just by virtue of having the betterment of the human condition as its main concern.
There are, of course, exceptions, like Ayman Alzawahiri.
But a potential difficulty interpreting data on Western extremists is that the higher education system tracks students into disciplines, to a considerable extent, based on their math ability.
The authors provide evidence showing that the effect is not restricted to engineers who studied in the West, so this hypothesis seems to have been disproven by the authors.
But hopefully, you've got a STEM degree, and can figure that fact out out yourself ;)
Sadly I bet someone in some ostensibly serious conversation will suggest increasing attention based on major (the person making the suggestion will have no understanding of statistics).
I don't think it's totally useless information as it informs us about the type of person who joins such groups. It might be useful in terms of tailoring counter-extremist propaganda. If the most susceptible to recruitment are of group X you want to make your counteroffer tailored to group X.
I can't think of a good example for transnational groups but it could be that after removing a government (or whatever you call ISIS) prioritizing reconstruction/aid projects that need local engineers is an effective way to reduce the likelihood that insurgencies start at all.
Also from the summary, if you're afraid of communist extremists you need to find work for English and International Affairs majors and you're really in trouble :)
My working hypothesis on why extremists tended to be more educated was (is at least until I read this book?) that educated people are just more likely than uneducated to do the unconventional in any sense, including extremism, since they're aware of more options and know/can learn how to pursue them.
It had occurred to me how it always seemed like the attackers had engineering masters degrees in their little [bios|obits] but I figured that for some reason I was just not noticing the social science degrees. It's nice to see this book and data in general on the subject. I find it interesting the engineers are more likely to split towards right-wing extremism when the extremist ideology is highly likely to be religious or have religious pre-conditions. I generally get the impression that engineers are less religious than their liberal arts counterparts, perhaps the engineers that remain religious are more inclined to become more so?
[0] At least in expeditionary attacks and transnational orgs like AQ, generally attacks on targets in places not at war (i.e. 9/11, Mumbai, London, Madrid etc.). I'm not 100% sure about insurgent attacks that could be termed terroristic so it might depend on the definition you're using.
'We realised immediately that this was an invasion, but we couldn't fully process the thoughts. My mother sat there shaking her head from side to side and said: 'Nothing bad will happen.' We were not Shi'ites who they hated. We were just Yazidis who they wanted to have control over.
'We quickly put long dresses over our night dresses. We then ran out onto the street to see the fighters who were approaching. They waved their black flags with white Arabic writing on them in the air.
'The first faces we saw from the passing vehicles were known to us. Regardless what jobs they did before, whether they were craftsmen, teachers or doctors, all of our Arab neighbours seemed to have joined up with ISIS.
This echoes stories from what happened in ex-Yugoslavia, Sudan, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and even older stories from Israel's independence war. The same story keeps repeating : a lot of people who lived in areas with lots of muslims suddenly found that nearly all of them hold extremist ideologies. Enough to kill and rape at least. And the thing is, we don't even know most of the time that this happens.
What I think is that most people can't be bothered to actually do anything. If the effort they'll put into their life doesn't include getting an education and the sacrifices an education demands, it likely doesn't include fighting and the sacrifices that demands.
In this sense I mean terrorist group not as a moral distinction, but as a structural and methodological one. Terrorist group in the sense I mean doesn't really hold territory like ISIS does; they hit civilian targets in order to sway those citizens' governments, not to intimidate them into accepting their own governance; they are not governments.
Once you control lots of territory where people live you'll get all sorts of people joining. The reasons people join transnational terrorist groups are very different than the reasons people join murderous super-rapey governments in the middle of a civil war.
Even if it feels emotionally correct to call ISIS terrorists it's not the best way to analyze them and I think it's part of the reason that our policies and doctrines regarding terrorism, nation-building, foreign intervention are so schizophrenic.
Not sure if it is good for my ulcer, but here goes.
I think its a bit of a jump to go from those examples to "lots of muslims".
In all instances i see situations where you have lines drawn as much, or more, based on ethnicity than religion. That the two often blend over in various places, because certain lineages has held to certain beliefs over generations, is a confounding variable, not a causation.
Never mind that i wonder how many plays along to save their own bacon. Humans will be humans when push comes to shove.
Lets not forget that Europe had its 30 year war over a disagreement on Christian doctrine.
This is the opposite of what the books claims based on the evidence they have accumulated.
But we've been pretty effective about doing away with the humanities in our culture. The sneering, the derision, the contempt in which many STEM people hold those from the humanities is disgusting, and this is one side effect of it; our best weapons to combat terror and extremism are not engineered or built -- there is nothing stopping terrorists or extremists or radicals from understanding technical facts about the world and building things according to their desires. Crafting a weapon or circuit or bridge does not require that you think critically about society or culture. Engineers even here rarely think about how their work effects others, simply about the technical problems involved (wonder why so many engineers are complicit in surveillance/backdoors/etc?) since that is how they are trained (perhaps a throwaway ethics course jammed into an already-overloaded schedule in college).
The way to combat extremism is with culture; a strong, vibrant culture with art and dialogue and critique and critical thinking. Every time a kid tells you he's studying philosophy and you say "remember in 5 years I'll want fries with that lazy humanities scum, get a real job" you're throwing our culture away.
When our culture is gone and something like ISIS comes knocking, it's difficult to point to the iPhone or reality TV and say "look, our values are different from (better than) yours". We need to point to poets, philosophers, public intellectuals, artists, and say -- look. Our people are free to create* where yours are not.
*So long as their creation has wide appeal and does not step on too many toes and can be mass-produced and turned into a viable business model.
Contrast the argument with and without the asterisk.
[1] https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/investigate/terrorism/terrorism...
No , it's just that the educated are just more likely to become ideologues (thus more dangerous) because more articulate than the common thug. Ben Laden was an educated man, al-Zawahiri is a surgeon, al Baghdadi has a PhD . A lot of them actually spent time in the West, even in US and the culture shock triggered their hatred for the western civilization, the women roaming free in the streets, uncovered, the "debauchery", ... it went all against their upbringing and they can't accept people living in a different culture than an Islamic one, and they are also worried in would "infect" the culture back home. That's partly why Saddat was murdered, because he was turning Egypt into a place way too "westernized", along with the peace with Israel.
As for the thugs who become terrorists like the ones who killed 130 people in Paris, Jihadism give them a divine justification for their violence, like religion give them a justification for their hatred of the west or their misogyny. They feel one with themselves since they can express their violence while, they think, following their religion to the letter, since the enemy is just a non-believer,worse a atheist thus can be killed and the killing be sanctioned by their "god". But these thugs aren't ideologues, they are the useful idiots that get strapped with the explosive belt, while the ideologues stay safe.
Islamist groups have certainly gotten the "best" press for a while and have the most prominent groups whose stated goals essentially boil down to "world domination" (but their plans for world domination have only slightly less chance of success than mine, so relax on that front). That, however tells us exactly nothing about the propensity of Muslims to become extremists.
Extremism is no more common among muslims than it is among any other large group unless you limit your definition of extremists to Islamic extremists.
Edit: grammar.
But this is way off topic and my argument has nothing to do with Islam. I'm just pointing out how easy it is for us to play couch sociologists when weighing the merits and problems of "Engineering" culture, vs how difficult it is to hold a similar discussion about the issues of "standard" religions or cultures.
P(Muslim | Terrorist the US currently gives a shit about) is interesting, especially given the propensity to regard certain terrorist groups as criminal elements for political reasons.
Also interesting, other countries sometimes negotiate disliked groups onto our lists to legitimize their crackdowns (ironically the crackdowns can push the group to actually become terrorists. Hi Turkey!) and make their international fundraising efforts effectively illegal.
It is important to refute you because the implicit points when you talk about "how difficult it is to hold a similar discussion about the issues of "standard" religions or cultures". It isn't difficult for scholarship to have that discussion. It has been had. It disagrees with what you suggest to be true.
Would be reluctant to read too much into personally traits, when there are convincing other explanations.
And this is without considering whether the TSA considers categories that have more predictive power than simply being Muslim, e.g. following a particular kind of Islam.
[0] http://securitydata.newamerica.net/extremists/deadly-attacks...
"From this it follows that the average Muslim is responsible for approx 48 times more deaths than the average American of any religion."
^ This statement is false as it assumes all deaths are from terrorist attacks, based on your previous statement of 48 times more likely to commit TERRORIST attacks, of which has a silly low death rate compared to ANYTHING else in the US.
[1] http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/aug/1/liberal-major...
>they find that a disproportionate share of Islamist radicals come from an engineering background, and that Islamist and right-wing extremism have more in common than either does with left-wing extremism, in which engineers are absent while social scientists and humanities students are prominent.
We are like children in a shopping cart, pretending we're at the helm - we aren't.
It's quite likely there's another label besides "Right" which would point towards the group of people in question in a way you would accept. What is really gained by trying to enforce this nefarios depiction of what "Right" means?
We're like children in a shopping cart, some of whom are hogging all the books. Or at least all the good tenure-track jobs.
Thus i wonder if what we end up with is a speculation based on the identities of those found to have performed spectacular operations in the name of some group or other.
And there i suspect we will find more engineers, because you need a certain set of skills and methodological thinking to pull them off.
Their equivalent of a engineering corps basically.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/18b/reason_as_memetic_immune_disorde...
Basically applying reason to religion might end badly if religion is not weak enough to die in the process.
Do they literally mean that the analysis was "rigorous", or do they just mean that some kind of quantitative analysis was performed?
It's only natural that someone who grew up in a shithole, that studies engineering would be attracted to terrorism as a way of solving political problems. It's the path that you can walk all by yourself.
The explanatory and predictive power of, "just sore losers" seems weak.
A review of the book (FT, paywalled) summarized other arguments about polarized, binary thinking, and an inability to accept culture, ambiguity, and a lot of what I see as sanctimonious bullshit the way non-STEM students do.
Defense of any principles (right, left, or religious) is considered extremist and dangerously reactionary these days.
One would hope that before laying the critical foundations to discredit educated conservatives (who largely take STEM degrees), academia might dedicate some thought to resolving why there are people with debt-funded $100k+ graduate degrees who read horoscopes, Piketty, and can't calculate a tip.
Economic orthodoxy being is also considered radical and extremist by the mainstream.
What does studying people who "can't calculate a tip" has to do with understanding extremism/intolerance? Seems the cap fits.
Edit: I'll also add that I'm STEM and I don't agree that "binary thinking", "intolerance of ambiguity", etc are bullshit things, so watch out when you put a whole category of people in your camp. I'm rigorous in rationality and I've come to this stuff through my own questioning, watch out because the non-conservative can also put an aggressive rethoric to use.