Times such as the aftermath of the last month’s terrorist attack in Brussels lay bare the grinding duality of arguably the most devastating humanitarian crisis of our age. In it, we find our emotions caught in a perplexing blend of agitation and empathy as a series of horrendous terrorist attacks keep occurring against a backdrop of desperate women, children, and men running for their lives seeking refuge in Europe.
Abominable though they might be, terrorist attacks fortunately remain relatively rare occurrences. All the while though, the deluge of heart-wrenching accounts of refugees has been pushing our sensory thresholds to ever-higher levels. By now, we might have already reached a point where it feels as though especially gruesome stories were required to make us recognize their full humanity. Nonetheless there is a strong concurrence between terrorist attacks and the dwindling awareness for the refugee crisis in that both point in the same direction: We are losing empathy for millions still alive for the sake of a couple dozens already dead.
At the root of all this lies a false choice according to which our capacity to feel sympathy toward others and our own grief were somehow zero-sum. A nifty approach to keep different oppressed groups from uniting in their struggles, demagogues throughout history have a long track-record of framing real issues as they were “either us or them.” There, fearmongering serves as just another tool to fuel this perception, occasionally all the way to a point where it starts to have a real shot at becoming zero-sum.
Of course one may reserve every right to get outraged at the “flippancy” of these lines and warily point to the hundreds of millions at risk of an imminent terrorist attack. Continuing further down on this track however, we might as well just start dismissing any moral argument as all rainbows-and-puppies even plain idiocy, and suggest focusing instead all our concerns solely on our own safety and well-being.
For the sake of argument, let’s descend now into the rabbit hole of self-centeredness and see where it takes us.
A little back-of-the-envelope doodling can help us catch a whiff of the madness we are up against here. The fact that some of the numbers let alone the “model” are helplessly arbitrary compels me to settle anything vague in such a way that it works against the case I am aspiring to make (aka. worst-case scenario). Time to fess up: I would very much like to demonstrate here just how awfully fearmongering exacerbates matters.
So what exactly happens when terror strikes?
People grow more miserable, that’s what happens.
For the sake of a smidge more precision, this particular misery on the one hand is made up of the loss of the victims and also the sorrow of the people who used to be any close to them. On the other hand though, there is misery the rest of society feels.
Enter fearmongering.
Much as there is justifiable grief out of sympathy for the victims, most of society is in fact so removed from them that some of their misery is just trumped-up agitation. This in turn falls on the fertile ground of our own narrow-mindedness cultivated by a sensationalist media.
Now, let’s dive into the nitty-gritty. If the misery that we earn equals the period of time (T) we get to spend in a mood of diminished (D) happiness, then we have Misery = T × D. For the sake of simplicity, let’s say that the mood available to humanity (as does D itself) runs on a scale from 0 to 100 stretching from the state of complete and utter misery all the way to Denmark.
First, have a look at the victims.
Their misery is the amount of happiness their untimely deaths deprive them of for the rest of their lives.
Time is easy enough to estimate here by subtracting the median age (42.2 years) from life expectancy (80.6 years).
However, putting a number on the “mood of death” seems to be a somewhat trickier task.
For that, we can rely on our gut feeling (as anyone with severe abdominal pain can attest) that spending time in complete and utter misery is probably worse than not spending any time at all.
In that spirit, let total misery substitute being dead, and perfect happiness the mood in which the victims would have spent the rest of their lives (D = 100).
As for the number of victims, we can use the average death toll (49) of the three major terrorist attacks of late: the Charlie Hebdo massacre, the Paris attacks, and the Brussels attacks just recently.
This altogether gives us misery:
(80.6 - 42.2) × 100 × 49 = 188,160
Now, on to the friends.
Driven by the principle of “Six degrees of separation,” we can safely stop considering people to have ever had the chance to be any close to the victims at a distance of three people away from them.
Accordingly, consider two tiers of acquaintances: close friends (immediate) and second-tier “friends” (one mutual friend).
As for the close friends, we assume rather preposterously that someone’s closest friends are their Facebook contacts.
All 338 of them.
Assume furthermore that on average, they spend just enough time (6 months) in grief to develop a medical condition known as “Complicated Grief Disorder.”
As for the the second-tier “friends,” while there is a whole 114,244 of them out there, we assume that they “merely” hold their grief for the median amount of time that people who lose one of their own do. According to the findings of George Bonanno, a clinical psychologist at Columbia University, this happens to fall around one month.
Regardless if any of them have ever been that happy, let’s say people in both tiers lose half of all happiness there is (D = 50).
These altogether give us misery:
(338 × 1/2 + 114,244 × 1/12) × 50 × 49 = 23,738,867
Finally, there’s the case of fearmongering with the rest of society. Since telling real sorrow and fearmongered agitation apart might just be impossible to do, let’s ask a different question here:
“How much fearmongered misery amounts to the sorrow of one terrorist attack?”
A society spends the aftermath of an attack in an atmosphere consumed by the event. But then comes a point when the deluge of news starts to subside and the heightened attention finally comes to an end. To assess how much time this takes, let’s assume that fearmongering corresponded with media attention. It settles on the first week where the volume of attack-related news pieces published is not significantly less anymore as was on the week before; a sign of stabilization. The Guardian shows the following number of weekly articles on the three major attacks:
Charlie Hebdo shooting (20 victims): 457—228—99—46—68
(2.5 weeks)
Paris attacks (137 victims): 652—363—240—174—110—76—68
(6 weeks)
Brussels attacks (35 victims): 466—169—131
(2 weeks)
Weighing by the death tolls, this gives us an average span of 4.9 weeks to be spent in an agitated state per attack.
Now we can see how much fearmongering (i.e. diminished happiness D) it takes to buy the 508 million residents of the EU (excluding the people directly affected) one terrorist attack’s worth of misery:
(188,160 + 23,738,867)
/ ((508,000,000 - 49 × (1 + 338 + 114,244)) × (4.9/52))
= 0.505
Since the average happiness in the EU is 71 rather than a 100, a loss of 0.505 from perfect happiness (100) means a 0.711% drop in Europe’s actual happiness.
What this all means is nothing short of harrowing: we bring 1.4 terrorist attacks’ worth of misery upon ourselves with each percent of fearmongering we are letting in!
(In case it seemed unreasonable to think that we would cede even a single percentage point of happiness in the wake of a terrorist attack to a frantic media, try certain members of family or co-workers. You know exactly whom I’m talking about.)
Now, regardless of how precisely this quasi-utilitarian number-futzery applies to reality, we can have a rough idea how devastating our attitude of exposing vast numbers of people to a shrill xenophobic hysteria is. Make no mistake here: Not only is this a poor show of humanity, but precisely because terrorism is something we may never have the ability to completely prevent, any “effort” beyond sensible measures seems to be a fool’s errand.
Now bear in mind how all this calculation leaves out the threats and harassment millions of Muslims have to put up with on a daily basis. And while the majority of us can easily adapt to make ourselves feel safer, many of them increasingly cannot.
Unless...
Unless they turn inward even more. Problem is this might only further entrench what “ghettoization” factor there is to religious extremism, all the while feeding into the narrative of a zero-sum reality. It was this specific concern that inspired a famous quote of Angela Merkel’s in which she admonished that “multikulti is dead.” Its unfortunate ambiguity made it a favorite soundbite of the European extreme right giving them a rich vein of justification for a severe case of xenophobia ever since the line was uttered.
Even as I keep clinging on to a general sense of optimism, at the end of the day it may still be the case that the shrill voices are right and Europe is in fact headed to the brink. But please understand that if that is so, it is mostly because we, old Europeans, keep pushing it there.
This is about as far as my best effort to avoid sounding preachy or just plain distasteful (not to mention rambling) took me.
Correction: In a previous version of this piece, I was overly generous in considering Danish levels of happiness to be at twice the EU average. Even the Danes are Human, it transpires.