Indeed, the rise of terrorism in public awareness is not a sign of how dangerous the world has become but the opposite. The political scientist Robert Jervis observes that the placement of terrorism at the top of the list of threats “in part stems from a security environment that is remarkably benign.”18 It is not only interstate war that has become rare; so has the use of political violence in the domestic arena. Harari points out that in the Middle Ages, every sector of society retained a private militia—aristocrats, guilds, towns, even churches and monasteries—and they secured their interests by force: “If in 1150 a few Muslim extremists had murdered a handful of civilians in Jerusalem, demanding that the Crusaders leave the Holy Land, the reaction would have been ridicule rather than terror. If you wanted to be taken seriously, you should have at least gained control of a fortified castle or two.” As modern states have successfully claimed a monopoly on force, driving down the rate of killing within their borders, they opened a niche for terrorism:
The state has stressed so many times that it will not tolerate political violence within its borders that it has no alternative but to see any act of terrorism as intolerable. The citizens, for their part, have become used to zero political violence, so the theatre of terror incites in them visceral fears of anarchy, making them feel as if the social order is about to collapse. After centuries of bloody struggles, we have crawled out of the black hole of violence, but we feel that the black hole is still there, patiently waiting to swallow us again. A few gruesome atrocities and we imagine that we are falling back in.19
As states try to carry out the impossible mandate of protecting their citizens from all political violence everywhere and all the time, they are tempted to respond with theater of their own. The most damaging effect of terrorism is countries’ overreaction to it, the case in point being the American-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq following 9/11.
Instead, countries could deal with terrorism by deploying their greatest advantage: knowledge and analysis, not least knowledge of the numbers. The uppermost goal should be to make sure the numbers stay small by securing weapons of mass destruction (chapter 19). Ideologies that justify violence against innocents, such as militant religions, nationalism, and Marxism, can be countered with better systems of value and belief (chapter 23). The media can examine their essential role in the show business of terrorism by calibrating their coverage to the objective dangers and giving more thought to the perverse incentives they have set up. (Lankford, together with the sociologist Erik Madfis, has recommended a policy for rampage shootings of “Don’t Name Them, Don’t Show Them, but Report Everything Else,” based on a policy for juvenile shooters already in effect in Canada and on other strategies of calculated media self-restraint.)20 Governments can step up their intelligence and clandestine actions against networks of terrorism and their financial tributaries. And people could be encouraged to keep calm and carry on, as the British wartime poster famously urged during a time of much greater peril.
Over the long run, terrorist movements sputter out as their small-scale violence fails to achieve their strategic goals, even as it causes local misery and fear.21 It happened to the anarchist movements at the turn of the 20th century (after many bombings and assassinations), it happened to the Marxist and secessionist groups in the second half of the 20th century, and it will almost certainly happen to ISIS in the 21st. We may never drive the already low numbers of terrorist casualties to zero, but we can remember that terror about terrorism is a sign not of how dangerous our society has become, but of how safe.
CHAPTER 14DEMOCRACY
Since the first governments appeared around five thousand years ago, humanity has tried to steer a course between the violence of anarchy and the violence of tyranny. In the absence of a government or powerful neighbors, tribal peoples tend to fall into cycles of raiding and feuding, with death rates exceeding those of modern societies, even including their most violent eras.1 Early governments pacified the people they ruled, reducing internecine violence, but imposed a reign of terror that included slavery, harems, human sacrifice, summary executions, and the torture and mutilation of dissidents and deviants.2 (The Bible has no shortage of examples.) Despotism has persisted through history not just because being a despot is nice work if you can get it, but because from the people’s standpoint the alternative was often worse. Matthew White, who calls himself a necrometrician, has estimated the death tolls of the hundred bloodiest episodes in 2,500 years of human history. After looking for patterns in the list, he reported this one as his first:
