Mumbai and Batman

A guest post by JS:

Yesterday, Israel buried 6 victims of the Mumbai terror attacks. Ever since the attacks occurred, I've been struggling with what to feel. Aside from the deeply philosophical and religious questions that always arise at these moments, I wonder whether our priorities are misaligned.

On Sunday, November 30, immediately after the attacks, Haaretz had its weekly news flash on the number of fatalities in traffic accidents that occurred over the weekend:

Sun, 11/30/2008 - 03:17
Six people killed in road accidents across Israel over the weekend (Haaretz)

I was struck by the coincidence of six victims in the terror attack and six victims in traffic accidents. The former receives international attention and mourning and inspires questions of divine justice and the latter receives a news blip that, until now, no one even saw.

The movie "The Dark Knight" addresses this issue head on. The movie portrays the Joker as a terrorist whose sole goal is to use fear to upset the natural order of society. In one of the movie's most memorable quotes, the Joker explains the terrorist's creed:

Look what I did to this city with a few drums of gas and a couple of bullets. Hmmm? You know... You know what I've noticed? Nobody panics when things go "according to plan". Even if the plan is horrifying! If tomorrow I tell the press that, like, a gang banger, will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will be blown up, nobody panics, because it's all part of the plan. But when I say that one little old mayor will die, well then everyone loses their minds! Introduce a little anarchy. Upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos. I'm an agent of chaos.

In a book I read about the history of mankind's understanding of risk ("Against the Gods" by Peter Bernstein), the author discusses the failure of invariance - how human nature interferes with the proper management of risk. We fear the psychologically terrifying and do anything to avoid it. Thus, a person will expend more to avoid a highly unlikely, but horrific outcome but expend less to avoid a likely, but merely bad outcome (e.g., a person will carefully guard against one's child being abducted, but not carefully guard against one's child breaking a limb).

Are we merely doing the same thing with terror attacks? Attaching too much weight and signifigance to a death merely because it took place in such a horrific manner? Isn't a death a death? Doesn't the family experience the same loss regardless of how the death occurred? When a bus is blown up by a suicide bomber and 12 people are killed, why do we feel differently if instead the bus had flipped over and 12 people are killed? Both terror attacks and traffic accidents are caused by man. Does it matter that one is deliberate and the other an accident? What if the car driver was drunk?

Is the Joker right? And if so, should we change our behavior? Should we just view plane hijackings as a necessary evil of air travel in the same way that we view car accidents as a necessary evil of automotive travel? By being terrified and terrorized are we just giving the attackers what they want? If we viewed the 6 terror attack victims in the same way as we view the 6 car accident victims would we remove the incentive for terror?

But, even if it did remove the incentive for terror, would this come at too high a cost? Do we deny our basic humanity by not being terrified and terrorized?

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Buy DB's book. (please)