Life and Risk-? by munificent Blog entry

Blog: Quantum Intelligensia
by munificent

Life and Risk-?

The bleeting of the small mind, the reactionary I Q, the lesser human is the reaction of those who may have something to gain

Date: 7/9/2005 9:26:29 AM ( 19 y ) ... viewed 1366 times

The Terrorist's Rationale

Published: July 9, 2005
In "The Secret Agent," published almost a century ago, one of Joseph Conrad's characters remarks that a terrorist act "must be purely destructive."

"It must be that, and only that," he wrote, "beyond the faintest suspicion of any other object. ... Madness alone is truly terrifying, inasmuch as you cannot placate it either by threats, persuasions or bribes." There is nothing remotely articulate in bombings like the ones that took place in London on Thursday. But there is nearly always a goal behind terrorism. In Conrad's day, it may have been to persuade ordinary people of the implacable madness of terrorists. We still use that language - madness - because it still applies to the murder of innocent people.

But the madness that is truly terrifying is not that of the terrorists. It is our own. The only "purpose" the London bombings can be said to have is to puncture the veneer of civilization, to show us what the terrorists hope is the madness that lies behind it. That ordinary life merely disguises the ferocity, the irrationality, of human nature is a common enough trope in the modern world. It crops up again and again in literature and the movies, and in our own fears. It crops up as well in the religious fervor of our times. The blasts that echoed through the Underground and across the quiet squares of London were meant to show us how little we can rely upon the edifice of normality and, in turn, how little we can rely upon ourselves. The purpose of terrifying us is to turn us loose among our own emotions, to undermine our ability to reason with ourselves and with each other.

But it's always surprising how quickly something like normal life resumes after a terrorist incident. By the next morning, many London trains were running again. People had resumed some semblance of a Friday life. It's tempting to assume that this is just force of habit, covering over a wound in time, or the result of realizing that the risk to any one individual is very low. But what it also reflects is the fact that the veneer of human civilization is not shallow.

We do not teeter on the brink of madness or catastrophic irrationality. We are not natively fallen, hopeless or utterly dependent on forces larger than ourselves. We may find ourselves flung into our fears for a time. But as London itself has shown us in the past, to be flung into our fears is a way of discovering who our adversaries really are - and that they are not ourselves.