Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress полностью

Though terrorism poses a minuscule danger compared with other risks, it creates outsize panic and hysteria because that is what it is designed to do. Modern terrorism is a by-product of the vast reach of the media.¹¹ A group or an individual seeks a slice of the world’s attention by the one guaranteed means of attracting it: killing innocent people, especially in circumstances in which readers of the news can imagine themselves. News media gobble the bait and give the atrocities saturation coverage. The Availability heuristic kicks in and people become stricken with a fear that is unrelated to the level of danger.

It’s not just the salience of a horrific event that stokes the terror. Our emotions are far more engaged when the cause of a tragedy is malevolent intent rather than accidental misfortune.¹² (I confess that as a frequent visitor to London, I was far more upset when I read the headline RUSSELL SQUARE “TERROR” KNIFE ATTACK LEAVES WOMAN DEAD than when I read RENOWNED ART COLLECTOR DIES AFTER BEING HIT BY BUS IN OXFORD STREET TRAGEDY.) Something is uniquely unsettling about the thought of a human being who wants to kill you, and for a good evolutionary reason. Accidental causes of death don’t try to do you in, and they don’t care how you react, whereas human malefactors deploy their intelligence to outsmart you, and vice versa.¹³

Given that terrorists are not mindless hazards but human agents with goals, could it be rational to worry about them despite the small amount of damage they do? After all, we are justly outraged by despots who execute dissidents, even though the number of their victims may be as small as those of terrorism. The difference is that despotic violence has strategic effects that are disproportionate to the body count: it eliminates the most potent threats to the regime, and it deters the rest of the population from replacing them. Terrorist violence, almost by definition, strikes victims at random. The objective significance of the threat, then, beyond the immediate damage, depends on what the scattershot killing is designed to accomplish.

With many terrorists, the goal is little more than publicity itself. The legal scholar Adam Lankford has analyzed the motives of the overlapping categories of suicide terrorists, rampage shooters, and hate crime killers, including both the self-radicalized lone wolves and the bomb fodder recruited by terrorist masterminds.¹⁴ The killers tend to be loners and losers, many with untreated mental illness, who are consumed with resentment and fantasize about revenge and recognition. Some fused their bitterness with Islamist ideology, others with a nebulous cause such as “starting a race war” or “a revolution against the federal government, taxes, and anti-gun laws.” Killing a lot of people offered them the chance to be a somebody, even if only in the anticipation, and going out in a blaze of glory meant that they didn’t have to deal with the irksome aftermath of being a mass murderer. The promise of paradise, and an ideology that rationalizes how the massacre serves a greater good, makes the posthumous fame all the more inviting.

Other terrorists belong to militant groups that seek to call attention to their cause, to extort a government to change its policies, to provoke it into an extreme response that might recruit new sympathizers or create a zone of chaos for them to exploit, or to undermine the government by spreading the impression that it cannot protect its own citizens. Before we conclude that they “pose a threat to the existence or survival of the United States,” we should bear in mind how weak the tactic actually is.¹⁵ The historian Yuval Harari notes that terrorism is the opposite of military action, which tries to damage the enemy’s ability to retaliate and prevail.¹⁶ When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, it left the United States without a fleet to send to Southeast Asia in response. It would have been mad for Japan to have opted for terrorism, say, by torpedoing a passenger ship to provoke the United States into responding with an intact navy. From their position of weakness, Harari notes, what terrorists seek to accomplish is not damage but theater. The image that most people retain from 9/11 is not Al Qaeda’s attack on the Pentagon—which actually destroyed part of the enemy’s military headquarters and killed commanders and analysts—but its attack on the totemic World Trade Center, which killed brokers, accountants, and other civilians.

Though terrorists hope for the best, their small-scale violence almost never gets them what they want. Separate surveys by the political scientists Max Abrahms, Audrey Cronin, and Virginia Page Fortna of hundreds of terrorist movements active since the 1960s show that they all were extinguished or faded away without attaining their strategic goals.¹⁷