Can the liberal arts cure jihadists?

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The great truth of democracy, at least when it's working well, isn't about the levels of turnout at the polling stations or the noise from the opposition benches when someone who calls himself the leader gets carried away with his own sense of power. What's much more fundamental to the 2,500-year-old experiment of people trying to rule themselves can be found in its basic sense of humanity - the ability, as University of Chicago philosopher Martha Nussbaum wrote in Not for Profit, "to see other people as human beings, not simply as objects."

We don't do this instinctively - it takes training. Animals might be collective by nature, but they are hierarchical in their attitudes toward self-preservation and exceedingly narrow in their range of sympathetic feelings. Authoritarian cultures and regimes exploit this us-and-them survival impulse to their advantage, but a democracy glories in achieving the best version yet of the good life thanks to what are traditionally called liberal arts - the broad-based critical education that freed people from all-knowing authority and allowed them to see both themselves and others as fully human.

But the more this good life is repositioned and redefined as material goods, where objects have become more intrinsically human than people themselves, the faster the liberal arts have fallen out of favour - in the academy, the economy and society at large, where a doctor, an X-ray technician and a former engineering student are now charged with wanting to bomb us into oblivion.

Clearly jihadists are the sworn enemies of liberal democracy, but can there be a connection between the disappearance of the liberal arts and the rise of homegrown terrorism? Or put another way, can we deter violence by teaching young people to think more clearly and compassionately than they now do in a technology-obsessed society where democracy is too often defined by its unthinking excesses? Prof. Nussbaum believes so.

As the culture of homegrown terrorism was coming into being, she undertook a study of the Indian province of Gujarat, where religious violence and an ambitious modernization of the educational system starkly exist side by side. "Gujarat is a classic place," she says, "where schools have cut out all trace of critical thinking and the humanities, and placed a relentless focus on the technical training of people going into engineering and computer science and so on. I do think that is conducive to a culture where you blindly follow authority and respond to peer pressure. Lacking the empathy developed by a more critical kind of education, these tendencies reign unopposed."

In 2002, Hindu mobs in Gujarat killed 2,000 Muslims, a pogrom that Prof. Nussbaum traces to "technically trained people who do not know how to criticize authority, useful profit-makers with obtuse imaginations." We're reminded of that willing deference to higher authority and that failure of imagination when someone among us is arrested and charged with, as the law politely says, conspiracy to facilitate an act of terrorism. It's a disturbing throwback to an animalistic kill-or-be-killed relationship when the calculating minds of homegrown plotters can so casually reduce us from compassionate humanity to objects of disaffection.

Because we remain human beings, despite the best efforts of our enemies to get past that fact, we can also visualize the pain and the suffering and the horror that are the essential parts of the bomber's objectifying obliteration. This intellectual leap, sadly, is the great strength of what Northrop Frye called the educated imagination. If we've learned to share the strong feelings of characters in War and Peace and Madame Bovary, how can we not also identify with the sufferings in our own time and place.

The bombs didn't go off, and yet this reaction is distressingly powerful, at least in those who still know how to feel. But here's the essential conundrum with so-called homegrown terrorists: How do they come to be missing this visceral empathy, and how can they so easily shrug off the fellow feelings of the democracy they were raised in? Is there a hole in their soul? Something about their upbringing, their formation, their training that has gone missing or was never there?

A young man who plays a brilliant game of ball hockey, does a jokey turn for Canadian Idol auditions and has achieved all that was needed to get through McGill University medical school doesn't sound like the classic outsider. To the contrary. Khurram Sher is undeniably one of us - whoever we are, to use democracy's necessary qualifier.

So if we have a problem with him, then we should have a problem with our society and its shifting values that make it harder to decide what's good and what's bad. Is there a dehumanizing strain infecting the Western value system? The late historian Tony Judt thought so. "Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today," he wrote in Ill Fares the Land. "For 30 years, we have made a virtue of the pursuit of material self-interest: Indeed, this very pursuit now constitutes whatever remains of our sense of collective purpose."

The supreme virtue of self distorts liberal values, which strive to incorporate other people and other ways of thinking into the ongoing argument. Any education or career directed toward material enrichment is necessarily going to give short shrift to the competing needs and views of others. A humanities education is famously success-averse in financial terms, and yet, Prof. Nussbaum says, "there are reasons to think it pushes people in the direction of more empathetic relations with others."

Studies by University of Kansas psychology professor Daniel Batson suggest that those who are better able to take the perspective of other people are more likely to help them - essentially, that there's a connection between vivid, imaginative empathy and real-life moral behaviour. But achieving that high level of emotional engagement is key to motivating altruism, which becomes not a detached act of charity but a powerful human-to-human bond.

The liberal arts value emotional introspection alongside critical inquiry. Does that mean liberal-arts graduates are less likely to become cold-blooded homegrown terrorists than those who haven't read their Shakespeare? That seems a stretch, or as the scientists would say, we don't have research on that.

"Hot feelings are always going to wipe out critical thinking," says Janice Stein, director of the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs. "You can be a great critical thinker, but when you feel humiliated and marginalized, rightly or wrongly, the power of thought is overwhelmed."

Teaching Empathy The strange and interesting thing about many homegrown terrorists is that they themselves do not appear to have suffered intense humiliation and marginalization in their own lives. If anything, they have achieved the outward trappings of success.

But success is relative, as any good liberal-arts students knows. Status and money do not ensure happiness, according to psychologists who study the good life. We overestimate the happiness of big earners, without realizing that money brings pressures and conflicts that counteract the more basic and accessible pleasures of friends, family, conversation, creative idleness. Imagine being programmed for medical school from your earliest years, snaring a rare place at a good school with your A+ average, working desperately to keep up with your fellow overachievers, and then feeling empty at the end when the payoff isn't the paradise you expected. Could you talk yourself into resentment, or look for a higher purpose that would channel your feelings into someone's warped idea of a greater good?

"Once you're in medicine," says Cathy Risdon, a professor of family medicine at McMaster University, "what might have been fantasized about the power of belonging quickly dissipates, because it has the same mundane humane textures and politics and cruelties and generosities as any other field of play. I could easily imagine that the satisfaction of yearning to belong wouldn't turn out as one might expect it should. And then there are other groups you could turn to where that yearning might be satisfied more. The closeness and the secrecy and the centrality of purpose that go with people doing covert things might become very attractive."

Dr. Risdon helps to design curriculum at McMaster, and part of her goal is to find ways to humanize highly technical and authority-driven medical training. "The foundation of all the incredible technical knowledge we expect of doctors is acquired through training that is all about generalization and abstraction - personal experience is regarded as highly dubious." Her aim is to make young people who are focused on technical mastery see the particulars of the individual human being known as the patient, to turn the medical autocracy, if you like, into more of a democracy.

"We teach empathy - what would it be like if I were in this person's shoes? - as a way of working with the particulars of a human being. And I think the humanities are a way of doing that, since the narratives and stories that come from the humanities are always the particular. It does force students to think about how their own experience relates to the theme of a story, that medicine is not just about the universals. But developmentally people can have difficulty exercising that level of imagination, particularly in their 20s."

A good liberal-arts education takes these emotionally underdeveloped twentysomethings and compels them to think as if they were a character in Pride and Prejudice or Huckleberry Finn or Crime and Punishment, to mix with those unlike themselves in Dante's Inferno, Thucydides's History of the Peloponnesian War and Montaigne's Essays, to challenge their theories with unsettling particulars instead of sheltering in an authoritative generalization. It doesn't necessarily come with virtuous ethical content, but it at least promotes a variety of approaches that steer impressionable minds away from the seductive haven of the single universal truth.

Jihad is one of those all-purpose, all-powerful truths, a know-it-all answer to an equivocating liberal world. And in a faith where no one can claim orthodoxy, radical Islam has an easier job of spoon-feeding the one true story to uncritical young people. Interestingly for humanities graduates, there is something highly McLuhanistic about the improbable success of jihadists in recruiting from the impressionable West.

"Marshall McLuhan described electronic communication as a kind of external nervous system," says Feisal G. Mohamed, a Milton scholar at the University of Illinois. "The sense of connection is different from print, which created an imagined national community. Now, we're no longer nations of readers of print, but people connected by impulse from around the globe who seem to find reflected their sort of primordial instinct in co-religionists and people of the same culture. For this reason, the plugged-in generation seems more radical than their immigrant parents."

Their schooling, then, has to contend with Internet preachers who challenge them to take on the marginalization of Muslims elsewhere, a role-playing game with potentially catastrophic consequences.

The humanities' limits
But if you're going to counteract the strange appeal of jihadists, can you really hope to succeed with something like Western philosophy, the product of the kind of Enlightenment secularism that true believers despise? Or if you just want to make more empathetic doctors, is it really necessary to look outside the field to find the required humanity?

Nav Persaud, a family-medicine resident and graduate of University of Toronto medical school who also studied philosophy and psychology at Oxford, is well placed to compare and contrast. "I think I'd worry far more about philosophy students than medical students," he says. "I seem to recall rubbing shoulders with far more misanthropes in philosophy class than in medical school."

Critical thinking was a key part of Dr. Persaud's medical education, along with training in ethical behaviour. Students are evaluated according to how well they interact with patients, he says, and if people find their doctors cold and aloof, that's because "you're trained in your professional life to focus on the facts necessary to make a professional decision. But in the end, the overall goal is to help people, to be mindful of what's best for them."

Which, of course, makes it seem even more perplexing when someone like Dr. Sher is charged, or when 29-year-old British National Health Service doctor Bilal Abdullah was convicted in 2008 of trying to kill Londoners outside a West End nightclub before attempting a suicide attack on the Glasgow airport the next day.

"As a physician, I feel shame when another physician is charged," Dr. Persaud says. "There's a big disconnect. It's definitely hard to reconcile with what a doctor does taking care of patients on a daily basis."

Searching for a connection, he glimpses it not in medicine as such but in the glory perceived to be associated with the job. "Some people are attracted to the idea of becoming a doctor because it's a respected position in society. And maybe that need for recognition has a counterpart in the praise and notoriety you might get from a subset of people who support terror."

There's not much the liberal arts can do about the yearning for fame in the age of celebrity - pointing out its hollowness seems like a curiously antiquarian pursuit when even a graduate of McGill medical school currently awaiting trial on terrorism charges can be seen on YouTube singing an Avril Lavigne tune.

Edmonton-born Prof. Mohamed is convinced that there is a role for the humanities curriculum in banishing the kind of parochialism where radical Islam flourishes. But, to succeed in winning over those who resist the triumphalism of the West, he insists that the do-gooding humanities need to remake themselves.

"I think there has to be a re-enrichment of liberal education that's more alive to other traditions. You can't have a circling of the wagons around the Western tradition because you believe it has a monopoly on humane conduct. Because we know the humanist tradition is more conflicted than that. Milton, after all, was a famous champion of liberty, but he was also consistently anti-Catholic and fundamentally anti-democratic. It's not that terrorists are missing out on a traditional liberal education, that they need to learn their Plato or their Milton. The problem is that they don't know their own tradition and haven't studied the Islamic strain of humanism."

That said, at a personal level, he notes that reading the novels of Philip Roth helped him better understand his identity as an Egyptian Canadian and enabled him to realize how the minority experience of feeling isolated was part of the mainstream North American story. "One of the virtues of humanities education," he says, "is the way it reveals to us that we live in a world that is thick with culture and history." Which is why the first-generation immigrant kids in the Canadian suburbs should be learning something good and useful about themselves from the profound otherness of the Jewish-American novel.

But that means there have to be students who will shortcut their economic advancement in order to hear the tale, and a broader society that will value this liberal use of the mind not as an intellectual distraction, but as the prime component of both peace and happiness. If all else fails, there's the scare story of the man who put too much faith in the promises of the job market. Mohamed Atta, the ringleader of the 9/11 terrorists, was a quick-witted engineering student who trained in Germany but was crushed when he couldn't find work after returning to Egypt. Think of him and his frustrations when the decision-makers promise to treat higher education as job training. And think what those students are missing whose intellectual explorations are cut off by too much practicality.

John Allemang is a feature writer for The Globe and Mail.