The Age of Terror

This week's heated debate on the Terrorism Act reminded me of a pertinent, if affected, post on the subject of terrorism from nine months or so ago, and especially the fine article by Slate's William Saletan that it links to.

Saletan's point (and mine) is this: that it is impossible to stop every terrorist attack, just as it is impossible to stop every child being hit by a car, or every married man looking at another man. The likelyhood of each can be lessened (in the case of terrorism, hopefully to a very low threshold; in the case of the other man, realistically to a slightly higher one ), but eventually the law of diminishing returns makes further expense of blood and treasure (on the man or the mission) useless, at best.

Given this reality - that after a certain point more and more resources must be consumed, and more and more liberties curtailed, to chase a "safety" that is impossible - our society has to consider not only how to absorb, deter or neutralise evil, but how to foster good, in our own and in our culture's communal lives. Bolstering society's positives will in fact advance the former.

"In a liquid world," Saletan writes, "you can't seal off evil." And it's not a bad Lenten thought to remember that there's a little evil incorporated into all of us. The point of every enduring system of human belief, is to overcome that evil not by ignoring it, dwelling on it or violently suppresing it. The point of overcoming evil is to accept its existence, be aware of its effects, and work tireless to shun it, marginalize it, diminish it, and deal with it without fanfare if it grows too prominent.

We will never be rid of evil, in the body personal or the body politic. But we'll never be bereft of good either, and that's what we have to nurture, support, encourage, celebrate and exhalt.

I believe, and always have, that our criminal justice system and its thousand years of juridical evolution has determined quite a fine balance between our liberties as people and the duties of our state. Measures such as "preventative" arrests, the holding of people indefinitely without trial, or the suspension of the writ of habeus corpus don't just upset that balance - they deny its relevance and even its existence. They threaten to undermine our entire civil process because they hamstring one of our most successful, and flexible tools of the greater good - a rule of law that has at is centre two vital tenets, the presumption of legal innocence, and an individual's trial and examination by a body of their peers.

Saletan ends his article with a quote from Charles Darwin: "It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change." Everyone knows there's truth in this. But we as a species are unique for one reason only: we have some small ability to respond to change with new changes of our own, to create change proactively. This means we, as people and as a people, must become better at bending, not breaking; and turning and turning, until we come round right.