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Jessica Stern Fearing Evil Evil doers are evil dreaders. —Sixteenth-century proverb A M E R IC A N S ARE LIVIN G IN A D RE AD FU L AGE: OF “ SHOE B O M B E R S” and orange alerts, of suicide-murderers and poisonous bombs, of pronouncements by our enemies that they will destroy our will as well as our countiy. We are unaccustomed to living with such dizzying uncertainty. For the first time in histoiy, American citizens feel vulner­ able in their own homes to international terrorists determined to hurt them. Innocent civilians are not collateral damage in the terrorists’ war, but the preferred target. We are vulnerable where ever we go—at home, at work, on the subway, in shopping malls and football stadi­ ums. The terrorists are not just those coming in from abroad, but they are already here, the government tells us, sleeping in our cities, ready to strike at any moment. At the same time, there is growing suspicion that the government sees value in making us more afraid and distracting us from foreign policy errors that are making America more hated and Americans less safe. When Attorney General John Ashcroft pronounced, in May 2004, that Americans faced a summer of terror and that that he needed citi­ zens’ help in locating terrorist suspects, it was difficult not to wonder why he was suddenly sharing this information. Six out of seven names revealed by Ashcroft had been known to law-enforcement authorities for months or even years. Police departments in the target cities of Los Angeles and New York had not been notified of the new threat and were informed at the same time as the public. Many analysts attrib­ social research Vol 71 : No 4 : W inter 2 004 1111 uted the threat warning, and its timing, to the Bush administration’s desire to refocus public attention away from the continuing strikes by insurgents in Iraq and the crimes of American interrogators and on the broader war on terror (see, for example, Clift, 2004). Before September 11, we had grown used to complex villains whose wickedness could be explained away by appealing to compet­ ing priorities, consequentialist intentions, or cultural norms. The truly wicked had the good sense to practice their evil arts mostly overseas. “Those whose conceptions o f evil were always simple and demonic were happy to see them confirmed” by the September 11 attacks, philoso­ pher Susan Nieman tells us. But for those of us whose conceptions of evil had not been shaped by Hollywood but by Vietnam, Cambodia, and Auschwitz, this “single-mindedly thoughtful evil” caught us entirely unprepared (Nieman, 2002: 284-285). The terrorists plotted their attack for years. They may have felt themselves grievously wronged by US poli­ cies, Nieman argues, but their victims were not responsible for creat­ ing or implementing them. The attackers issued no ultimatum. Many o f the victims were not American. Malice and forethought, the classic components of evil intentions, have “rarely been so well combined,” Nieman notes (Nieman, 2002: 284-285). It has long been observed that the things that frighten us most are often quite different from those most likely to harm us. Risk analysts have also observed a tendency for policymakers to respond rapidly to visible crises, even if the baseline rate of danger has not changed. The dynamic encourages reactive “risk of the month” policies crafted in the wake of visible or highly publicized events, resulting in ad hoc poli­ cymaking with little regard to competing interests, as John Graham and Jonathan Baert Wiener have found with regard to environmental and health policy (Graham and Wiener, 1995: 234). This tendency may partly be explained by what Anthony Patt and Richard Zeckhauser refer to as “action bias”: decision makers’ penchant for taking action with­ out necessarily considering long-term effects, coupled with a tendency to choose those actions for which they are likely to receive the most credit (Patt and Zeckhauser, 2002: 265-302; Graham and Wiener, 1995: 1112 social research 234. “Action is consolatory,”Joseph Conrad tells us in Nostromo. “It is the enemy of thought and the friend of flattering illusions.” When dangers evoke...

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