Would Liberal Education Prevent Terrorism?

A brief excerpt from the comment from blogfriend Charles Cameron:

“The warfare of the Aztecs, the berserkers seeking Valhalla, and most significantly today, the Islamists seeking martyrdom – these are not “rational actors” in a sense that tweaking our Prisoners Dilemma tables will not address.

To know them, we must think not merely our of the box but out of boxes, take not just the road less traveled but a path so overgrown a machete is required to cut it, and no one can say whether it was a path before, or is new found land, a haunt of owls or badgers, or an habitation of ghosts… a trackless track as zen might call it, crossing the Cartesian rift between brain and mind, passing between real and imaginal, fact and myth, story and history as easily as we might pass between Colorado and Wyoming.”

That resonated with me earlier today when I read a blurb in the current issue of The Atlantic Monthly ( who appear to owe Ralph Peters some kind of credit for their   cover story) regarding the disproportionate number of engineers in the ranks of Islamist terrorists, which led me to google these fine papers, posts and theads:

The Engineers of Jihad (PDF) by Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog-  The original paper

Soob -“Engineers of Jihad ” – Excellent analysis by Subadei’s co-blogger Munz

The Small Wars Council – “Engineers of Jihad” 

Foreign Policy – subscription required ( sorry, cheapskates)

RichardDawkins.net –  Worthless, normatively speaking but contains mocking speculation for comic relief

Belgravia Dispatch – illustrates the 4GW angle

Most MENA nations have very limited systems of public and private education and literacy rates are far lower than state figures generally admit. In some instances, Arab states may have illiteracy rates reaching into the 40th percentile.  The well educated, multilingual and scientifically trained are a definite elite in the Arab-Islamic world diverging socially and psychologically from a majority who speak only colloquial Arabic or an ethnic minority language and  (possibly broken) colloquial Arabic.  See Dave Schuler’s comments on Diglossia. Moreover censorship, repression and the boundaries of permissible social, political and cultural discourse vary significantly from Tangier to Bahrain.

In this climate, an engineering education creates a mind capable of rigorously rigid – one might say predisposed to doctrinaire – logical thinking in terms of process with an artificially circumscribed mental palette of content. Narrow vision and a powerful intellect will yield different answers to problems than will a panoramic vision and a powerful intellect. Islamism would serve to reinforce the tendency toward rigidity while ramping up the emotional intensity of the response to frustrating obstacles to solving problems.

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