I agree with faux-reactionary. Fundementalism is a modernist, anti-tradiontalist movement, and is thus not reactionary at all.

That said, minimizing our enemies is an old reflex. I would agree that fundementalists tend to be idealistic, but whether there is a connection to actual Aspergers (as opposed to some correlation with that end of the spectrum) is more questionable.

I suppose religion and science try to answer the same questions hence attract the same mind sets.Although we have all heard of the mad scientist,probably caused by the dichotomy of scientific ways of thinking and non-scientific ways of social interactions.Likewise religious minded people go nuts in a non-religious world.Also both groups seem to have goals beyond their ability to realize them .However it was probably easier for poor Brahmins to get into science than into the law due to the government funding in the last 50 years which has been geared to science and technology.

Posts on this topic are some of your best, Razib (see also the one on Buddhism below). Well-written, well thought out, dispassionate, and obviously reflecting a deep knowledge on the subject combined with judgement for discerning what's relevant. ("Faux-fundamentalist" -- great term.)

And best of all, you use paragraph breaks!

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Depression

I would agree that fundementalists tend to be idealistic

i would be cautious about the word idealistic. rather, i'm trying to suggest that fundamentalism arises in both a material (e.g., upwardly mobile) and psychological (i.e., a propensity toward simple propositional thinking) and culture (i.e., the rise of mass movements with grass roots elements) contexts.

re: but whether there is a connection to actual Aspergers (as opposed to some correlation with that end of the spectrum) is more questionable.

please note i said:

Though I don't want to push this line of thought too far

This post is a pretty good description of me back when I was a believer. I was never a creationist or anything like that, but I was certainly willing to take things to extremes and thought little of "cafeteria Catholics" (not specific to any religion) who would pick and choose which doctrines they thought sensible.

Razib, of course. I admire your blog & writing a lot. This post was very thought-provoking.

Similar with Islamists in the Muslim world - tend to be from a science/IT background rather than from the humanities (Mohammed Atta being a case in point).

Also relating to the issue of nerdiness, a few years ago some one published a report that found that virginal or celibate revolutionaries tend to be Right-wing, while revolutionaries with a lot of girlfriends tend to be on the Left.

I'm buying it. Nice and shrewd posting.

I wonder if the shared (or a shared) characteristic is literal-mindedness. Aspie types don't pick up emotional tones, spins, colors; metaphor is tough for them. They can't figure out why people won't say what they mean. Scientists often seem to want to grind things down to hard nuggets of eternal truth, thereby I guess to build back up some kind of complex image.

Both groups in any case often seem to want to be able to count on finite, trustworthy things. Both often seem driven nuts by vagueness, ambiguity, etc. So maybe they share a kind of strong personal drive that's akin to a religious drive -- a search for Real Meaning in an all-too-vaporous universe.

Anyway: one quick explanation for why humanities guys get laid more often than science guys is that humanities guys like vagueness and ambiguity and color. And chicks either are vagueness, ambiguity and color or they identify with it. Who knows what a woman's next feeling is going to be?

FWIW, I've run into a few scientists who 1) hated dating, 2) settled down with a woman really fast, 3) had kids, a house, a tech job, a hobby 4) assumed everything was going well, and 5) woke up one day to discover that the wife had split. Science guy had no idea she wasn't happy with the arrangement.

Humanities guys get dumped at least as often, of course, but the pattern often seems to be different.

Anyway, you've also helped me clarify one beef I occasionally have about scientists when they discuss religion. They don't get the fact that religion isn't just a series of testable propositions. It's also poetry, showbiz, music, mythology, enchantment. There are obviously some people who take their religions very literally. But there are a lot of people who succumb to the charm, who enjoy the stories, who find themselves reminded of and put in touch with feelings and intuitions they consider important (as well as obvious and true).

With regard to engineers compared to scientists, besides being more money-oriented, engineers at work tend to be more concrete and outcome-oriented, rather than exploratory or curious. Engineering work is usually disciplined and constrained by a concrete, practical project goal. Your modal engineer has a rather conventional horizon.

However, theoreticists often make too much of this. Experimentalism depends on tools, and engineers invent tools. Powerful theories also can lead quickly to powerful tools. A lot of great scientists were equally engineers, and the best engineers are scientists.

Science, religion, and ideology all frequently require you to suspend your common sense / inherited prejudice / your conventional point of view. In order to be free to discover, you disable a lot of the traditional safety mechanisms and run the risk of ending up wandering off in never-never land.

And as I've said before, religions which require to memorize a lot of arbitrary text equip you to handle the detail-work memorization part of science (e.g. organic chemistry).

Also relating to the issue of nerdiness, a few years ago some one published a report

can you dig up the citation?

I'd approach this whole thing differently:

1. Radical movements usually do not draw people from the business elite, bureaucrats or jurists, who all have very much invested in the status quo. The leadership of radical movements, will therefore consist of educated people from outside the very elite circles.

2. People of a humanities/arts background generally have a strong left and/or humanist bias, and therefore may be found among Radical groups of left/humanist thrust, but not among other radical groups (one can ask why this is so, but that is a subject for another article).

3. Therefore, people of engineering/science background, while they may not be present in right/religious radical groups more than their percentage in the population, may be more heavily represented in those groups than other educated people.

The outlier group is thus the humanities folk, not the scientists. This is born out when one considers the political views of faculty members in the universities. Generally right-of-center views are rather rare among academics in the humanities (at least when controlling for social class), while scientists are closer in their political views to the general population.

The leadership of radical movements, will therefore consist of educated people from outside the very elite circles.

i concur in the generality.

People of a humanities/arts background generally have a strong left and/or humanist bias

do you think this is a general historical trend? e.g., the terms "left" and "right" don't necessarily apply, but the confucian mandarins were generally humanists in orientation and "conservative" vis-a-vis other groups in early 20th century china, some of whom were "scientific" in orientation.

I think the humanities/ arts leftward political bias can be explained by the more limited financial outcomes of those degrees. The are certain backgrounds and personality types that can lead to lessened concern about income, and that probably create more liberals than conservatives.

Didn't Hitler and Stalin plan to become priests at some point in their lives?

Didn't Hitler and Stalin plan to become priests at some point in their lives?

stalin. but in part it was a function of his class (upward mobility) and his mother's urging i believe.

Hitler wanted to be an artist too.

I don't think, btw, that it can really be said that artists always and everywhere tend left. Though guy artists may well have tended through much of history to get more pussy than most guys.

confucian mandarins were generally humanists in orientation and "conservative" vis-a-vis other groups in early 20th century china

Isn't pre-20th c. China is one of those societies that were ruled by its intellectuals? (Big mistake if you ask me ;-). They were a group with a great deal to lose.

More generally, the terms left and right mean something only the past 200 years (though it's not clear what that something is).

Hitler wanted to be an artist too. I don't think, btw, that it can really be said that artists always and everywhere tend left. Though guy artists may well have tended through much of history to get more pussy than most guys.

Seeing as Hitler wasn't exactly the picture of normal, healthy sexuality, he's hardly a counterexample, is he?

A very well analyzed post, Razib.

I think with movements like the RSS, you are absolutely correct in pointing out the "radical-nationalist" nature that drives it, more than a "religious" nature of the movement itself. In that respect, there are many parallels with the zionist movements, where many of the leaders were not necessarily very religious, but believed in the "cultural unity of the people of Israel" (or something to that effect).