Among the many good things in Steven Pinker's new book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, is his dispassionate, fact-based analysis of terrorism around the world.
The book thoroughly analyzes historical data on all categories of violence, from homicide to genocide, and terrorism stands out from all the rest. As Pinker puts it, "Terrorism is a peculiar category of violence, because it has a cockeyed ratio of fear to harm." It may be true that you're far more likely to be struck dead by lightning than killed by a terrorist, but we haven't created a vast new "Department of Lightning Security" to cope with the risk.
The situation looks even more nonsensical if you look at the actual history of terrorist movements…
First off, on the global scale of untimely death, terrorism is barely a blip; for the most part it's lost in the statistical noise.
Pinker points out that "The number of deaths from terrorist attacks is so small that even minor measures to avoid them can increase the risk of dying." It was estimated that in the year after the 9/11 attacks, 1,500 Americans died in car accidents because fear of dying in a hijacked plane caused them to drive instead of the much-safer flying.
For perspective, here are some real risks (and their annual U.S. death tolls): auto accidents (40,000), falls (20,000), homicides (18,000), drowning (3,000, including 300 in bathtubs), other accidents (17,000).
Sadly, it's been shown that humans generally suck at assessing risks. Because an event like the fall of the twin towers was horrific and memorable, it's judged to be more threatening than a "mundane" car wreck or fall from a ladder. But just because as individuals we act irrationally, that doesn't mean our government should. John Kerry was exactly right when he said in the 2004 campaign that we should treat terrorism as basically a nuisance, and address it as a law enforcement problem. Of course, that didn't stop Dick Cheney from calling him "unfit to lead."
Now, 10 years after 9/11, I wonder what it would take to look at the actual data, look at all the follow-on attacks that were predicted but didn't happen, and begin to formulate a sane policy. Unfortunately, in the meantime we've created this giant security industry that grinds on, and surely knows how to lobby for ever-greater funding.
Pinker offers some other facts about terrorism, none of them good if you're a terrorist. Again, looking at real data, it's obvious that terrorists almost never achieve their strategic aims, and eventually are killed, captured, die off, or move on to some other kind of activism. Sometimes, frustrated by their lack of progress, they start attacking higher-profile targets, which generally backfires and turns them into even greater pariahs than they already were (just as the Oklahoma City bombing took the stuffing out of the right-wing antigovernment militia movement).
So, America: relax, take a deep breath, look at the facts, and develop a rational response to the (mostly non-)threat of terrorism. Hint: Bush's "War on Terror" wasn't the right approach.