It is a blow to the heart: An atrocity whose purpose was to kill and maim as many children and teenagers as possible. No parent, hearing the voices of those still seeking news of their children, could fail to imagine the frantic play of hope and despair, the terrible wrenching of attachment. The person or people who did this meant to hit where it hurts most, and they succeeded.
The purpose of terrorism, whether perpetrated by lone attackers, organisations or states, is not only to change political outcomes: It is to demoralise the people at whom it is aimed, to erode and degrade their humanity. Attacking a concert crammed with happy young people, detonating a bomb apparently stuffed with nails and bolts, is the clearest possible statement of such intent. It also allows us to see how we should respond. The terrorists want to drive us apart, to sow suspicion and fear, to oblige us to replace liberty with security and answer them with bombs and bullets of our own. For a terrorist organisation, any of this, if implemented, would mean mission accomplished.
So we should do the opposite. We defy them by proving that this is not what we are. And the proof is everywhere. Human cooperation and reciprocity are so normal that we scarcely seem to notice them. We hardly see the daily acts of kindness that mark our species: People helping strangers to lift their suitcases on to a train, carrying pushchairs up flights of stairs, giving way to each other in traffic and on the pavement, listening to friends, volunteering for charities, giving their money to causes from which they cannot possibly benefit.
We might stop to notice the remarkable people who foster children or who take refugees from halfway around the world into their homes, and treat them as members of their families. But we see their tendencies as exceptional, rather than as unalloyed examples of the way that humans are naturally inclined to behave. Because our minds are attuned to danger and difference, events like the attack on a concert in Manchester dominate perceptions of our species.
We look back on the Charlie Hebdo killings in Paris in January 2015 and, remembering the perpetrators, tell ourselves that there is something evil lodged in the human mind. Less salient in our memories are the 3.7 million people in France who took to the streets to march in solidarity with the victims, and the millions who did the same elsewhere in the world. These people, not the few terrorists, represent the human norm.
This norm — cooperating with unrelated members of our own species — is, as a review article in the journal Frontiers in Psychology notes, “spectacularly unusual when compared [with] other animals”. It is a norm that is also innate. Empathy, the paper explains, appears to exist even in the earliest stages of infancy. Newborn babies become distressed by the cries of other babies. By the time they are 14 months old, children try to alleviate other people’s distress, by comforting or helping them, or by sharing possessions with them. Unlike any other species (as far as we know), we are also able to imagine the emotional state of people we cannot talk to, or even see, and can place ourselves in their minds.
Moral norms
This is why we enjoy novels and films: Without this capacity, stories would be dead to us, as our emotions would not resonate with those of the characters. We reinforce these tendencies with moral norms, which are, again, unique to human beings. These encourage us to stand together against the threats posed by the very small number of people who, either as a result of an inherent deficiency or through immersion in an extreme ideology that dulls their moral senses, exhibit no apparent concern for the lives of others. So powerful are these tendencies that post-traumatic stress disorder is often caused by witnessing dreadful things that happen to others. Harm to other people tears a hole in our own well-being.
I lived opposite the estate from which April Jones, a five-year-old girl, was abducted and murdered. In the winter that followed, other people on the estate, in the Welsh town of Machynlleth, appeared to age 10 years. Something seemed to break inside everyone, even those who scarcely knew her. This is why terrorism happens: Those who perpetrate it know that an attack on one is an attack on all. People are killed or injured in order to maximise the distress suffered by a far greater number — and to induce us, blinded by outrage, to forget our humanity and to lash out. This then cultivates a political environment in which terrorists prosper: A nation dominated by fear, a cycle of revenge, and the escalation of conflict.
Altruism and empathy are what bind us together, and what define us. We should let no one distract us from this central fact of our nature: Neither terrorists nor those who, in response to them, demand that we slam our doors in the faces of an entire community or an entire religion.
Our humanity, in both senses of the word, is on display all over Manchester. You can see it in the queues at the blood donor centres, in the hotels and the private houses that have been thrown open to people stuck in the city after the concert, in the messages posted on social media to help people find missing members of their families, in the donations that thousands of people have made to support victims of the attack, in the taxis giving free rides to hospitals and homes. As one of the taxi drivers explained: “We will show whoever’s done this that it doesn’t matter because Manchester — we’re glue, and we stick together when it counts.” But it’s not just Manchester: Almost everyone, everywhere, behaves like this. And it is when horrors such as the bombing strike that we remember it. Our task now is not to become the society the terrorists want to create. So let us celebrate what we are. Let us stand in solidarity with the victims of the attack, while ensuring that justice reaches the perpetrators. And let us not allow either a tiny number of psychopathic murderers, or those who in response to them wish to suppress our humanity, to distract us from the magnificent facts of our nature.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
George Monbiot is the author of the best-selling books Feral: rewilding the land, sea and human life, The Age of Consent: A Manifesto for a New World Order and Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain.
