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

by Steven Pinker

Instead, countries could deal with terrorism by deploying their greatest advantage: knowledge and analysis, not least knowledge of the numbers. The uppermost goal should be to make sure the numbers stay small by securing weapons of mass destruction (chapter 19). Ideologies that justify violence against innocents, such as militant religions, nationalism, and Marxism, can be countered with better systems of value and belief (chapter 23). The media can examine their essential role in the show business of terrorism by calibrating their coverage to the objective dangers and giving more thought to the perverse incentives they have set up. (Lankford, together with the sociologist Erik Madfis, has recommended a policy for rampage shootings of “Don’t Name Them, Don’t Show Them, but Report Everything Else,” based on a policy for juvenile shooters already in effect in Canada and on other strategies of calculated media self-restraint.)20 Governments can step up their intelligence and clandestine actions against networks of terrorism and their financial tributaries. And people could be encouraged to keep calm and carry on, as the British wartime poster famously urged during a time of much greater peril.