Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

The third column shows that for all the recent anguish about terrorism in the West, we have it easy compared with other parts of the world. Though the United States and Western Europe contain about a tenth of the world’s population, in 2015 they suffered one-half of one percent of the terrorist deaths. That’s not because terrorism is a major cause of death elsewhere. It’s because terrorism, as it is now defined, is largely a phenomenon of war, and wars no longer take place in the United States or Western Europe. In the years since the attacks of September 11, 2001, violence that used to be called “insurgency” or “guerrilla warfare” is now often classified as “terrorism.”⁵ (The Global Terrorism Database, incredibly, does not classify any deaths in Vietnam in the last five years of the war there as “terrorism.”)⁶ A majority of the world’s terrorist deaths take place in zones of civil war (including 8,831 in Iraq, 6,208 in Afghanistan, 5,288 in Nigeria, 3,916 in Syria, 1,606 in Pakistan, and 689 in Libya), and many of these are double-counted as war deaths, because “terrorism” during a civil war is simply a war crime—a deliberate attack on civilians—committed by a group other than the government. (Excluding these six civil war zones, the terrorism death count for 2015 was 11,884.) Yet even with the double counting of terrorism and war during the 21st century’s worst year for war deaths, a global citizen was 11 times as likely to have died in a homicide as in a terrorist attack, more than 30 times as likely to have died in a car crash, and more than 125 times as likely to have died in an accident of any kind.

Has terrorism, whatever its toll, increased over time? The historical trends are elusive. Because “terrorism” is an elastic category, the trend lines look different depending on whether a dataset includes civil war crimes, multiple murders (which include robberies or mafia hits in which several victims are shot), or suicidal rampages in which the killer ranted about some political grievance beforehand. (The Global Terrorism Database, for example, includes the 1999 Columbine school massacre but not the 2012 Sandy Hook school massacre.) Also, mass killings are media-driven spectacles, in which coverage inspires copycats, so they can yo-yo up and down as one event inspires another until the novelty wears off for a while.⁷ In the United States, the number of “active shooter incidents” (public rampage killings with guns) has wobbled with an upward trend since 2000, though the number of “mass murders” (four or more deaths in an incident) shows no systematic change (if anything, it shows a slight decline) from 1976 to 2011.⁸ The per capita death rate from “terrorism incidents” is shown in figure 13-1, together with the messy trends for Western Europe and the world.

Figure 13-1: Terrorism deaths, 1970–2015

Sources: “Global Terrorism Database,” National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism 2016, https://www.start.umd.edu/gtd/. The rate for the world excludes deaths in Afghanistan after 2001, Iraq after 2003, Pakistan after 2004, Nigeria after 2009, Syria after 2011, and Libya after 2014. Population estimates for the world and Western Europe are from the European Union’s 2015 Revision of World Population Prospects (https://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/); estimates for the United States are from US Census Bureau 2017. The vertical arrow points to 2007, the last year plotted in figs. 6–9, 6–10, and 6–11 in Pinker 2011.

The death rate for American terrorism for the year 2001, which includes the 3,000 deaths from the 9/11 attacks, dominates the graph. Elsewhere we see a bump for the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 (165 deaths) and barely perceptible wrinkles in other years.⁹ Excluding 9/11 and Oklahoma, about twice as many Americans have been killed since 1990 by right-wing extremists as by Islamist terror groups.¹⁰ The line for Western Europe shows that the rise in 2015 came after a decade of relative quiescence, and is not even the worst that Western Europe has seen: the rate of killing was higher in the 1970s and 1980s, when Marxist and secessionist groups (including the Irish Republican Army and the Basque ETA movement) carried out regular bombings and shootings. The line for the world as a whole (excluding recent deaths in major war zones, which we examined in the chapter on war) contains a spiky plateau for the 1980s and 1990s, a fall after the end of the Cold War, and a recent rise to a level that still falls below that of the earlier decades. So the historical trends, like the current numbers, belie the fear that we are living in newly dangerous times, particularly in the West.