Enlightenment Now

by Steven Pinker

  * * *

  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

  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 14

  DEMOCRACY

  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:

  Chaos is deadlier than tyranny. More of these multicides result from the breakdown of authority rather than the exercise of authority. In comparison to a handful of dictators such as Idi Amin and Saddam Hussein who exercised their absolute power to kill hundreds of thousands, I found more and deadlier upheavals like the Time of Troubles [in 17th-century Russia], the Chinese Civil War [1926–37, 1945–49], and the Mexican Revolution [1910–20] where no one exercised enough control to stop the death of millions.3

  One can think of democracy as a form of government that threads the needle, exerting just enough force to prevent people from preying on each other without preying on the people itself. A good democratic government allows people to pursue their lives in safety, protected from the violence of anarchy, and in freedom, protected from the violence of tyranny. For that reason alone, democracy is a major contributor to human flourishing. But it’s not the only reason: democracies also have higher rates of economic growth, fewer wars and genocides, healthier and better-educated citizens, and virtually no famines.4 If the world has become more democratic over time, that is progress.

  In fact the world has become more democratic, though not in a steadily rising tide. The political scientist Samuel Huntington organized the history of democratization into three waves.5 The first swelled in the 19th century, when that great Enlightenment experiment, American constitutional democracy with its checks on government power, seemed to be working. The experiment, with local variations, was emulated by a number of countries, mainly in Western Europe, cresting at twenty-nine in 1922. The first wave was pushed back by the rise of fascism, and by 1942 had ebbed to just twelve countries. With the defeat of fascism in World War II, a second wave gathered force as colonies gained independence from their European overlords, pushing the number of recognized democracies up to thirty-six by 1962. Still, European democracies were sandwiched between Soviet-dominated dictatorships to the east and fascist dictatorships in Portugal and Spain to the southwest. And the second wave was soon pushed back by military juntas in Greece and Latin America, authoritarian regimes in Asia, and Communist takeovers in Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia.6 By the mid-1970s the prospects for democracy looked bleak. The West German chancellor Willy Brandt lamented that “Western Europe has only 20 or 30 more years of democracy left in it; after that it will slide, engineless and rudderless, under the surrounding sea of dictatorship.” The American senator and social scientist Daniel Patrick Moynihan agreed, writing that “liberal democracy on the American model increasingly tends to the condition of monarchy in the 19th century: a holdover form of government, one which persists in isolated or peculiar places here and there, and may even serve well enough for special circumstances, but which has simply no relevance to the future. It is where the world was, not where it is going.”7

  Before the ink was dry on these lamentations, democratization’s third wave—more like a tsunami—erupted. Military and fascist governments fell in southern Europe (Greece in 1974, Spain in 1975, Portugal in 1976), Latin America (including Argentina in 1983, Brazil in 1985, and Chile in 1990), and Asia (including Taiwan and the Philippines around 1986, South Korea around 1987, and Indonesia in 1998). The Berlin Wall was torn down in 1989, freeing the nations of Eastern Europe to establish democratic governments, and communism imploded in the Soviet Union in 1991, clearing space for Russia and most of the other republics to make the transition. Some African countries threw off their strongmen, and the last European colonies to gain independence, mostly in the Caribbean and Oceania, opted for democracy as their first form of government. In 1989 the political scientist Francis Fukuyama published a famous essay in which he proposed that liberal democracy represented “the end of history,” not because nothing would ever happen again but because the world was coming to a consensus over the humanly best form of governance and no longer had to fight over it.8

  Fukuyama coined a runaway meme: in the decades since his essay appeared, books and articles have announced “the end of” nature, science, faith, poverty, reason, money, men, lawyers, illness, the free market, and sex. But Fukuyama also became a punching bag as editorialists, commenting on the latest bit of bad news, gleefully announced “the return of history” and the rise of alternatives to democracy such as theocracy in the Muslim world and authoritarian capitalism in China. Democracies themselves appeared to be backsliding into authoritarianism with populist victories in Poland and Hungary and power grabs by Recep Erdogan in Turkey and Vladimir Putin in Russia (the return of the sultan and the czar). Historical pessimists, with their customary schadenfreude, announced that the third wave of democratization had given way to an “undertow,” “recession,” “erosion,” “rollback,” or “meltdown.”9 Democratization, they said, was a conceit of Westerners projecting their tastes onto the rest of the world, whereas authoritarianism seemed to suit most of humanity just fine.

  Could recent history really imply that people are happy to be brutalized by their governments? The very idea is doubtful for two reasons. Most obviously, in a country that is not democratic, how could you tell? The pent-up demand for democracy might be enormous, but no one dares express it lest they be jailed or shot. The other is the headline fallacy: crackdowns make the news more often than liberalizations, and the Availability bias could make us forget about all the boring countries that become democratic bit by bit.

  As always, the only way to know which way the world is going is to quantify. This raises the question of what counts as a “democracy,” a word that has developed such an aura of goodness as to have become almost meaningless. A good rule of thumb is that any country that has the word “democratic” in its official name, like the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (a.k.a. North Korea) or the German Democratic Republic (a.k.a. East Germany), isn’t one. Nor is it helpful to ask the citizens of undemocratic states what they think the word means: almost half think it means “The army takes over when the government is incompetent” or “Religious leaders ultimately interpret the laws.”10 Ratings by experts have a related problem when their checklists embrace a hodgepodge of good things such as “freedom from socioeconomic inequalities” and “freedom from war.”11 Yet another complication is that countries vary continuously in the different components of democracy such as freedom of speech, the openness of the political process, and the constraints on its leaders’ power, so any tally that dichotomizes nations into “democracies” and “autocracies” will fluctuate from year to year depending on arbitrary choices about where to place the countries that hover near the boundary (a problem exacerbated when the raters’ standards rise over time, a phenomenon we will return to).12 The Polity Project deals with these obstacles by using a fixed set of criteria to assign a score between –10 and 10 to every country in every year indicating how autocratic or democratic it is, focusing on citizens’ ability to express political preferences, constraints on the power of the executive, and
a guarantee of civil liberties.13 The sum for the world since 1800, spanning the three waves of democratization, is shown in figure 14-1.

  Figure 14-1: Democracy versus autocracy, 1800–2015

  Source: HumanProgress, http://humanprogress.org/f1/2560, based on Polity IV Annual Time-Series, 1800–2015, Marshall, Gurr, & Jaggers 2016. Scores are summed over sovereign states with a population greater than 500,000, and range from –10 for a complete autocracy to 10 for a perfect democracy. The arrow points to 2008, the last year plotted in fig. 5–23 of Pinker 2011.

  The graph shows that the third wave of democratization is far from over, let alone ebbing, even if it has not continued to surge at the rate of the years surrounding the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. At that time, the world had 52 democracies (defined by the Polity Project as countries with a score of 6 or higher on their scale), up from 31 in 1971. After swelling in the 1990s, this third wave spilled into the 21st century in a rainbow of “color revolutions” including Croatia (2000), Serbia (2000), Georgia (2003), Ukraine (2004), and Kyrgyzstan (2005), bringing the total at the start of the Obama presidency in 2009 to 87.14 Belying the image of a rollback or meltdown under his watch, the number continued to grow. As of 2015, the most recent year in the dataset, the total stood at 103. The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded that year to a coalition of organizations in Tunisia that solidified a transition to democracy, a success story from the Arab Spring of 2011. It also saw transitions to democracy in Myanmar and Burkina Faso, and positive movements in five other countries, including Nigeria and Sri Lanka. The world’s 103 democracies in 2015 embraced 56 percent of the world’s population, and if we add the 17 countries that were more democratic than autocratic, we get a total of two-thirds of the world’s population living in free or relatively free societies, compared with less than two-fifths in 1950, a fifth in 1900, seven percent in 1850, and one percent in 1816. Of the people living in the 60 nondemocratic countries today (20 full autocracies, 40 more autocratic than democratic), four-fifths reside in a single country, China.15