Immigration: Religious Violence

www.immigrantscanada.comFormer Engineering Dept: 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, according to Globe And Mail. 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.” 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. 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 reported in the news.
@t sworn enemies, indian province www.immigrantscanada.com    .  .