On Vengeance
Vengeance has always interested me with a certain
peculiar force. While I've never had the sort of thing happen to me or mine that
would really trigger it--no murders, rapes or other outrages to me or those
close to me that would even tempt me to pick up a gun--I am a person of
progressive values who's nonetheless devoted a large part of my life to writing
stories centered around violence and vengeance. I remember an episode of TV's
Kung Fu which had an aggrieved character say, "well, if
I'm
not entitled to revenge, then who is?" and David Carradine said in that
Chinese-in-everything-but-accent voice say "No one." I knew that that should be
my ideal, shared by so many of my friends--but the satisfaction of a good
superhero vengeance was something I enjoyed--and wrote--again and
again.
And of course there's 9/11, which has
turned out to be a fusion and confusion of righteous thirst for vengeance,
cynical manipulation thereof, and horrible misapplied and misdirected vengeance
that looks a lot like simple evil.
But
Vengeance is a strange thing, an impulse that, on the surface seems to be a
desire positioned halfwat between hatred and justice, and so thought of either a
poisoned version of the desire for justice, or hatred tempered by (or using as
an excuse) the sense of justice. Most folks look at it as a simple mix, with the
usual justice=good, hatred=bad valuation, and so don't worry about it, with the
belief that justice combined with love would be the antidote to vengeance, and
the answer to it, if we could only grow up as a
species.
But I think that it's not that
simple, that there's something else going
on.
It's true that there are legions of
people for whom there's no difference between justice and revenge, that any
wrong done them is to be returned, and returned tenfold or a hundredfold. To
most cultures, that's simply pathology, and I'm not really interested in what
Tony Soprano thinks is justice (or
vengeance).
But there are also legions of
people who are kind, moderate, gentle, and careful in judgement, who also at
certain times and in certain situations passionately want vengeance. That's the
core of the super-hero story, or a certain kind that's become more popular in
recent decades--where the justice and the reason beneath it fail, and vengeance
is what's called for. Exit the courts, enter the Batman or the
Punisher.
I'm convinced that this is not the
desire on the part of readers to indulge in hate. For one thing, there's a
desperate human feeling to the passion for vengeance, a vulnerability, a
yearning, that doesn't go with plain hate or
anger.
It finally struck me recently that
things become a lot clearer when you make a distinction between two views of
crime.
There are two visions of wrong done:
crime as
theft
and crime as
cruelty.
It's
possible (and it's the dominant mode in many cultures) to view all crime as
theft of one sort or another. Western civilization does come out of the Northern
culture of the weregild: kill a man, and pay a certain fixed amount to his
family. Justice is served, and the matter iss supposed to be closed. Vendettas
that lasted for generations were in a way a long process of approaching zero by
a convergent series, a centuries-long wobble. It's deep in our language, too.
"I'll make them pay!" and then you set out to compute how
much.
The problem is, while there's vast
areas of wrong done where the theft model works, there are places where it
doesn't. You might formulate it that there are cases where the theft is
infinite, which sets up that only complete destruction will be compensation (and
not even then)--but that's not right either. Among other things, that even with
a wrong that one can't put a weregild on it, there are still limits: it varies
with cultures, but in ours, even if a man commits a horrible
rape/torture/murder, the person doesn't demand the man's children be killed or
his house burned down, which would make sense if you were trying for infinite
recompense. No, something else is at
work.
What does the ordinary decent person
want when a terrible wrong is done? When it goes beyond
recompense?
If a horse tramples a child,
killing the horse doesn't satisfy. Even further, you don't smash a car to pieces
if its emergency brake slips and crushes your
child.
I mean, what's the
point?
If you have in your power the man who
sodomized, tortured an killed your ten-year old daughter, and he just sat there,
responding to all the blows cuts and pain you could inflict on him with a
defiant stare and died under your hand with a sneer on his face (or a
good-soldier impassivity)--would you feel your thirst for vengeance assuaged at
all?
Not in the
least.
If the man's mind snapped, and he
started gibbering nonsense, even if he started crying--if say, the crying jags
were interspersed with laughing, and he started singing nursery rhymes, would
that answer the desire for revenge? It's damage done in return, after
all...
But no, The reaction would be that
you'd been cheated of your vengeance.
What
does this mean?
The part of crime that
is not served by the model of crime-as-theft is the part that is
crime-as-cruelty. It's what makes a crime monstrous. It's the inflicting of fear
on the helpless, of grief, of misery on the undeserving. Cruelty is hard to deal
with. (I will say as a corollary that all cruel people view crime only as
theft.)
What do we want as the redress
of cruelty?
The answer on the surface
comes readily enough: we want the arrogance to be broken, we want the
callousness to be stripped bloodily and painfully away--and we want them to feel
misery, and fear, and despair and
pain.
As I pointed out above, we don't
want them to drop into madness. We don't want them to feel just any misery and
fear, we want them to feel
the
misery and fear.
And this is the point
of all this, not obvious, but I think true:
we want them to
understand.
Not
to understand intellectually, or even to repent their sins or regret their
actions. None of that is good enough. I think we know on a very deep level that
the only response to cruelty is to know
directly
what they have done and know it for what it
is.
Without that understanding, no
recompense--not even execution--will
suffice.
And this, I think, is why
vengeance is almost always outside the law: because understanding plays no part
in the crime as theft model of justice that is the structure of our law. It's
impossible to quantify, or even to determine in an abstract way---and it goes to
the heart of the mystery of what we are. And it's also, I think, why the thirst
for revenge, while it seems to be like hatred, really feels like something
else--something non-savage and about as far from hatred as you can
get.
Posted: Sunday - May 08, 2005 at 06:24 PM