First principles, Clarice. Read Marcus Aurelius. Of each particular thing ask: what is it in itself? What is its nature? What does he do, this man you seek?
Strange but true: I used to write training manuals for a private security company. One of those manuals was about protecting against and responding to terrorism.
Working on that handbook was a fascinating and sometimes terrifying project as I got to interview several security experts, each of whom had his own nightmare scenario, each of which really induced nightmares. These guys were an interesting bunch. Ex-Marines who had guarded embassies in dangerous places. Ex-special forces guys who just glared at you like you were crazy if you asked them where they had served or what they had done there.
One of the latter said to me something like this, "Look, if you want to stop theft, you can't think like a security guard, you've got to think like a thief. Same thing with terrorism. You want to stop terrorism, you've got to think like a terrorist."
He did not mean, as the Bush administration seems to think, that we ought to adopt the methods or the morality of the terrorists — embracing indiscriminate killing, abandoning the rule of law and dismissing the Geneva Conventions as a "quaint" luxury we can no longer afford. He meant getting inside their heads and imagining how and why and what they're thinking. He meant stepping back and seeing ourselves through the eyes of a hostile outsider.
He meant viewing our enemies with empathy.
The idea that we should consider our enemies with empathy is often mocked as the ultimate form of squishy, bleeding-heart liberalism. Such mockery is both foolish and dangerous. Such empathy is not a sign of weakness, but of wisdom.
It's easy enough, and far more pleasant, to try to understand what our friends are thinking. It's also not really necessary to do so. They are, after all, our friends, and they have our best interests in mind.
It's much more difficult and unpleasant to imagine what it is our enemies might be thinking, and why, but being willing and able to do so may be the only way to ensure our safety.
The objection to this seems to be that our enemies don't deserve such consideration. That's beside the point. What they do or don't deserve really doesn't matter. It's not about them, it's about us.
What do terrorists want? What are they thinking? And why?
Such questions are often dismissed out of hand: "I don't care what they want. I don't know and I don't want to know." That's an option, a choice. But to choose "I don't want to know" is, by definition, to choose to be ignorant. The fact that such ignorance is deliberately, even defiantly, chosen doesn't make it any less stupid.
Refusing to view your enemies with empathy limits you, not them.
I suppose the real worry behind this objection is the fear that empathy will, inevitably, lead to sympathy. It sometimes does. It often doesn't. It often, instead, clarifies how very urgent it is that some people be opposed. ("To know all is not to forgive all," Quentin Crisp said. "It is to despise everybody." A bit overstated, but often accurate.)
But whichever way empathy leads — toward sympathy or toward antipathy and a heightened, informed vigilance — it is better to know than not to know. It is better not to choose ignorance.
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