Shashi Tharoor says Engineers are Terrorists!

Mr. United Nations, Shashi Tharoor, in his latest column, writes that engineers are most likely to become terrorists, and that they should compulsorily receive education in the "humanities".

There must be many reasons why some people become terrorists, but surely a degree in engineering cannot be one of them. I am not aware of a single expert on terrorism worldwide who has arrived at such an bizarre conclusion.

But then, Tharoor has been described as 'banal' before. The word means "commonplace, trite, hackneyed and stale" - and fits Tharoor's columns to a "T". I personally found it ridiculous that, after over 30 years as a babu in the UN headquarters in New York, he should return to India and write column after trite column on the "A to Z of Indianness" - and, what is even more ridiculous, that these should be published. The reader is assumed to be an idiot.

There is, of course, something extremely wrong with education in engineering, something that Friedrich Hayek first pointed out in a little book called The Counter-Revolution of Science: Studies on the Abuse of Reason. Here, Hayek traces the history of "positivism" in the social sciences to the Paris-based Ecole Polytechnique, and the sociologists Saint-Simon and August Comte. This exploration into the "history of ideas" is instructive as well as absorbing.

Later, he also elaborates on how this "science" perverted the social sciences, and our understanding of society, thereby becoming an enemy of Liberty.

It is in this book that Hayek deplores the tendency of what he calls the "engineering mindset", to support "social engineering" by the State (ideas like central economic planning) because to the engineer, the plan is quite like his "blueprint". Engineers therefore have a tendency to support totalitarian governments (not terrorism).

In India, I do believe that this book by Hayek (dated 1955) was itself "abused" by his enemies, the ruling socialists of the academia. From their inception in the 60s right up to this day, all the government-funded elite institutes of management (IIMs) have shown a marked preference for admitting engineers. It is not that engineers make better managers. Rather, engineers make better supporters of social engineering. The IIT-IIM type "misunderstands" society and economy. This misunderstanding, I allege, is deliberate on the part of the czars of Indian (government) education.

The truth, then, is that the "liberal humanities" are not taught anywhere in India, and in very few places in the world. Not only engineers and scientists - everyone needs to understand the basic conceptions of a liberal order. Unfortunately, there are very few who know this subject.

What the government of India teaches as "humanities" is the root cause of all the inhumanities we suffer from today - including terrorism, which is, more often than not, born out of a hatred for the State coupled with the inability to find any legitimate route for normal "politics".