Terrorism overreaction: a more detailed look

One of the causes I champion here on Internal Monologue is our need to deal with terrorism sensibly and rationally (see this post, for example). Right now, terrorism just isn't that much of a problem compared to things like automobile accidents. It's more on par with getting struck by lightning: horrible, yes, and worth taking some precautions to prevent. But not worth upending our lives or slowing our economy to deal with.

Of course, the genuine concern is that the terrorism of the future will be much more deadly and destructive, so we should react to that danger, rather than the paltry one we currently face. But to do so requires us to figure out what these potential threats are, which are most likely to actualize, and then to take actions that will actually diminish the likelihood of those threats coming about without making other threats more likely. Our current approach seems to be exactly the opposite: disporportionate flailing that attacks flies with sledgehammers, and doesn't even swing at the flies that are actually biting us.

Via Steve Sailer, I came across this paper, "Six Rather Unusual Propositions about Terrorism" by John Mueller (Department of Political Science, Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, USA) which is a welcome breath of fresh air on the subject of terrorism. Here's the abstract:

The costs of terrorism very often come mostly from the fear and consequent reaction (or overreaction) it characteristically inspires (qualities stoked by the terrorism industry), not from its direct effects which are usually comparatively limited. Therefore, policies designed to deal with terrorism should focus more on reducing fear and anxiety as inexpensively as possible than on objectively reducing the rather limited dangers terrorism is likely actually to pose. Doing nothing (or at least refraining from overreacting) after a terrorist attack is not necessarily unacceptable, and, despite U. S. overreaction, the campaign against terror is generally going rather well because, no matter how much they might disagree on other issues (most notably on war in Iraq), there is a compelling incentive for states to cooperate to deal with a common problem.

I think this irrational fear of terrorism might be another example in support of my "fish-out-of-water" hypothesis: that our visceral insticts like fear were calibrated to work in the ancestral condition (small tribes of low-tech hunter-gatherers), and are completely inadequate for dealing with modernity. In the ancestral condition, if you heard about an episode of murderous violence against your tribe, it is very likely that you yourself would be under direct and immediate threat. It would make sense to cast aside all other concerns to deal with the enemy. In the modern condition, a few thousand people dying isn't even data, it's noise. It's too small an event for a rational actor to consider in decision making. When it comes to things like being struck by lightning or drowning in our bathtubs, we seem to be able take the possibility of random death in stride (when it comes to car crashes or heart disease, we're perhaps irrationally complacent). But when it comes to terrorism, we don't.

The possibility of dying in a terror attack looms much larger in our consciousness that it merits. It triggers all kinds of fears and xenophobic insticts that may have been highly adaptive in the paleolithic era, but are now enormously counterproductive. Mueller gives a few examples to illustrate this:

The costs of reaction outstripped those inflicted by the terrorists even in the case of the September 11 attacks, which were by far the most destructive in history. The direct economic costs of September 11 amounted to tens of billions of dollars, but
the economic costs in the United States of the much-enhanced security runs several
times that. The yearly budget for the Department of Homeland Security, for example, is approaching $50 billion per year while state and local governments spend additional billions.25 The costs to the tourism and airline industries have also been monumental: indeed, three years after September 11 domestic airline flights in the United States were still 7 percent below their pre–September 11 levels, and one estimate suggests that the economy lost 1.6 million jobs in 2001 alone, mostly in the
tourism industry.26 Moreover, safety measures carry additional consequences: economist Roger Congleton calculates that strictures effectively requiring people to spend an additional half hour in airports cost the economy $15 billion per year; in comparison, total airline profits in the 1990s never exceeded $5.5 billion per year.

What is the solution to this "fish-out-of-water" problem? One solution is education and training. Humans can learn to overcome their instincts. We have an innate fear of heights. One can easily see how this would be adaptive in the ancestral condition, as falling off a cliff generally has a negative impact on one's reproductive success. And yet humans can build skyscrapers, jump out of planes, climb mountains, and bungee jump if they train themselves to do so. Humans have an innate fear of dying, and yet people can give their lives willingly for a stupendous array of causes; noble, vile, and everything in between and sideways. If we can do these things, surely we can overcome our inability to think rationally about large numbers. Insurance companies manage to think rationally about the real odds of people dying and thereby make billions of dollars in profits. Maybe we as a nation can learn to do so to avoid wasting billions of dollars (to say nothing of lives and moral standing).

Another more radical solution would be to tinker with human nature directly via genetic engineering, neural implants, or other interventions. It could be that our instincts regarding human violence are simply too strong to be overcome by any educational program or regimen of training. Or more likely, societies don't care enough about learning to give their members a powerful enough education to actually deal with the modern world (though as I've pointed out before, societies that do will probably be at a big competitive advantage). So maybe we just need to change our natures. It's like education on steroids. (If you're interested in this kind of idea, Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near may be of interest to you).

The sad thing is that it is much easier to take advantage of people's "fish-out-of-water" predicament than to correct it. Why spend so much time and effort to get people to react to terrorism rationally, when for a fraction of the work you can instead exploit that fear for political or financial gain (and are those two ever far apart?).