A dish best not served

“An eye for an eye will make the whole world blind.”
-Mahatma Gandhi

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Last night I watched a great movie: The Brave One, in which Jodie Foster plays Erica Bain, a radio host who, having recovered from the physical wounds of a brutal, random attack, struggles with her new life and becomes absorbed into a new persona: a self-loathing vigilante. There are several things I loved about the film, including its provocative tagline: How many wrongs to make it right?

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The movie got me thinking once again about revenge. Retributive violence is often called, with morbid irony, "justice". It is the only aspect of our culture that I can think of that justifies, if not encourages, taking pleasure from the misery or destruction of other human beings. Normally sadism is regarded as evil in its purest form – in fact, that is precisely why those who willingly inflict harm on others are seen as monsters in the first place. According to common wisdom, sadistic acts are a perfectly acceptable method of bringing closure or comfort to the victims of sadistic acts. Two wrongs really do make a right. Well, no they don't, says I.

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Retributive violence seems like it would have created a genetic advantage for our ancestors, so it seems highly plausible to me that the lust for revenge was hard-wired into our brains, coded into our genes. If that’s the case, it’s not surprising that revenge has been considered an accepted, even institutionalized, form of human behaviour for so long. It also means that revenge is not only deeply ingrained as a behaviour in our culture, but also as a primal urge – like hunger or sexual lust – in our psyches. In the movie I mentioned, Foster's character needs to avenge herself (and her fiancé, who also died in the attack) before she can regain her peace of mind.

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I should note at this point that most aspects of human psychology and behaviour can be traced back to our evolutionary heritage, the good and the bad. Explaining something’s evolutionary origin shows us why it exists in the first place, but it doesn’t give us any help in deciding whether it is beneficial to human well-being – or even whether it was beneficial to our ancestors’ well-being, rather than just their reproductive fitness. Revenge may be deeply instinctual and natural, but it is also deeply irrational and immoral.

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The Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins, has written about the backwardness of revenge on Edge’s World Question Center:

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Retribution as a moral principle is incompatible with a scientific view of human behaviour. As scientists, we believe that human brains, though they may not work in the same way as man-made computers, are as surely governed by the laws of physics. When a computer malfunctions, we do not punish it. We track down the problem and fix it, usually by replacing a damaged component, either in hardware or software.

Basil Fawlty, British television’s hotelier from hell created by the immortal John Cleese, was at the end of his tether when his car broke down and wouldn’t start. He gave it fair warning, counted to three, gave it one more chance, and then acted. “Right! I warned you. You’ve had this coming to you!” He got out of the car, seized a tree branch and set about thrashing the car within an inch of its life. Of course we laugh at his irrationality. Instead of beating the car, we would investigate the problem. Is the carburettor flooded? Are the sparking plugs or distributor points damp? Has it simply run out of gas? Why do we not react in the same way to a defective man: a murderer, say, or a rapist? Why don’t we laugh at a judge who punishes a criminal, just as heartily as we laugh at Basil Fawlty? Or at King Xerxes who, in 480 BC, sentenced the rough sea to 300 lashes for wrecking his bridge of ships? Isn’t the murderer or the rapist just a machine with a defective component? Or a defective upbringing? Defective education? Defective genes?

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Along with our innate proclivities towards hatred, tribalism, greed, and blood lust, we should throw revenge into the trashcan of our primitive past – and that’s a death we can all take pleasure from.