RUNNING AWAY FROM REVENGE
Let’s take a tour through the head-spinning, backpedaling, morally ambiguous alleyways of revenge. Don’t be afraid. I know vengeance conjures many mixed feelings and raw emotions. It’s more acceptable to confess to having a kinky taste for porn than to acknowledge harboring feelings of revenge. Vengeance occupies a dark and deeply buried shelf inside the closet of cultural taboos. Rarely is it discussed openly where reputations can be ruined and bad opinions formed. We tend to speak about revenge hypothetically, jokingly, as if we’re not to be taken seriously:
“What I am about to say is just between you and me.”
“Surely you know I would never do such a thing.”
“I’m ashamed to even think it. But I wouldn’t mind seeing——receive what is coming to her.”
For Jews around the world who are members of the Conservative denomination, the High Holy Days of 2010 represented yet another death blow for revenge. After nearly forty years (when it comes to the Old Testament, forty years does seem to possess certain magical, symbolic significance), the prayer book, known as the mahzor, which is used during the Days of Awe—the period in the Jewish calendar extending from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur—was updated with a new edition. Aside from its more user-friendly appearance there were some significant changes in substance, too. For instance, no longer would God be described as “awesome,” since, in modern times, awesome is the word of choice—for Chosen teenagers as well as Gentiles—to describe just about anything. God shouldn’t have to compete with pizza or a pair of jeans, and that’s why the mahzor now refers to God simply as “awe-inspiring.”
As for other modernizing changes, the prayer book is now more gender neutral and even acknowledges the death of a gay partner. What’s more, God himself was not spared a makeover. Apparently, a vengeful God no longer favorably represents the Jewish faith well enough. In the solemn prayer, Avinu Malkeinu, a line that asked God to avenge the killing of Jews, was deleted.
Louis D. Levine, a congregant of Temple Israel in White Plains, New York, wondered about the wisdom, not to mention historical accuracy, of this drastic change in the liturgy. “I am not a warmongering, right-wing nut,” he said, “but that line represented a real historical response to the horrors visited upon Israel.”1
But it also made God look unhinged, so it was removed. The God of the Jews was almighty and, apparently, unavenging, as well. For several thousand years, religions, and then governments, issued commandments, edicts, dire warnings, and, ultimately, mixed signals about vengeance. Now Conservative Jews were being asked to edit their own central texts lest they be reminded that the language of revenge had once been very much part of the prayers of the Jewish people.
Vengeance: expunged from ancient texts, ridiculed as a holdover from a primitive past, and yet longingly stored in the memory bank of humankind. The advance of civilization marches on while the revenge impulse stubbornly refuses to civilize and subside, to simply give up its enduring influence on the human psyche. Vengeance can be curtailed and suppressed, but it can never be truly undone, nor should it. Whether we admit it or not, whether we are permitted to act on it or not, revenge brings order to the moral universe, establishes the proper measurement of our loss, gives voice to indignity, and serves as a necessary equalizer when victims have been rendered low.
Despite all the warnings about revenge and the prohibitions against it, everyone practices it on some level, applauds it when properly exercised, and even dreams about it in their sleep. We see it daily in schoolyards, sports arenas, and halls of Congress; we know that it lurks within the messy details of international affairs, domestic relations, business dealings, and, of course, legal battles. Revenge is life’s ultimate dirty little secret and guilty pleasure. In so many dramatic and unavoidable ways it has defined our civilization, influenced our politics and culture, informed our literature, and dominated our private fantasies.
And, yet, there is also a curious schizophrenia about revenge, loopholes where vengeance slips through even amid all the proclamations that revenge is wrong and that justice is a far more important human value than getting even.
A few recent stories of revenge will reveal a culture in conflict with itself when it comes to the proper role that revenge plays in society and in the lives of individuals. They also demonstrate a fundamental confusion about the relationship between vengeance and justice. Everyone makes distinctions between them, with the search for justice widely accepted while the pursuit of vengeance roundly condemned. But are these two concepts so very different? When individuals are in desperate need for justice they qualify their obsession by categorically denying that they are out for revenge. Yet in a very real and unacknowledged sense they believe that they are entitled to both; they simply can’t say so in polite company. And that’s where the distinction between justice and revenge becomes more of a linguistic exercise than a hard truth. Every effort to mask the human impulse to feel avenged by hiding behind the robes of justice is like a bait and switch among the morally wounded. We know what we mean; we just can’t express it openly and honestly.
Several weeks after 9/11, with plans already underway to bomb Afghanistan in retaliation for the most devastating act of terrorism committed against the United States on its own soil, President George W. Bush addressed a large gathering of employees of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)—the very same body, along with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), that had failed to gather the necessary information and take the appropriate measures to foil al-Qaeda on 9/11.
In explaining the reasons behind the “shock and awe” that America would soon visit on the Taliban in Afghanistan, the president said, “Ours is a nation that does not seek revenge, but we do seek justice.”2
The audience erupted with applause, and millions of Americans watched highlights of the speech on their nightly news broadcasts or read about it in the morning newspapers. An auditorium packed with FBI agents who despised Osama bin Laden for murdering nearly three thousand American citizens in less than two hours cheered the president for the actions our nation was about to assume and the purported reasons for doing so. Surely the FBI had taken the murderous events of 9/11 personally—almost as personally as the families of the firemen, office workers, and airline passengers and personnel who lost loved ones on 9/11. After all, the FBI had been made to look like bumbling bureaucrats who allowed terrorists to learn how to fly commercial jets under their watch. Naturally they would have profound feelings of anger and hatred. The auditorium may have been filled with men and women of the law, but those badges and shields weren’t going to temper their more immediate and impassioned cries for revenge.
Nevertheless, the president was careful to couch our retaliatory response as an act of justice and not as a demonstration of American vengeance.3 Applause would naturally follow the words of someone who sought justice rather than revenge, even though the feelings that justice and vengeance provoke, in many cases, feel similar. The Taliban were not going to be taken to trial. Conventional justice, as reflected in the powers of subpoena and the procedures of due process, was being subordinated to the more immediate powers of war. Indiscriminate bombing sure looks a lot more like vengeance than like the more measured application of the rule of law.
Why all the misdirection and doublespeak? Why not simply say what was on everyone’s mind anyway? The president pulled his punches and chose to recast the reasons why America now found itself duty-bound to unleash such a lethal spectacle. George W. Bush made a distinction between justice and revenge as if everyone was in agreement that the former was socially acceptable while the latter was morally despicable.
The FBI may have grossly mismanaged its intelligence gathering prior to 9/11, but the agents who cheered the president were not stupid. Surely they knew that what was about to happen in Afghanistan wasn’t being done in the name of justice alone. Constitutional protections weren’t on anyone’s mind at that time—including the leadership of Human Rights Watch and the ACLU. Neither the Taliban nor al-Qaeda were going to be given an opportunity to testify in a court of law, to explain why America was Satan and Americans were infidels who all deserved to die.
Moreover, the massive monetary reward that would soon be placed on the head of Osama bin Laden through the Rewards for Justice Program would be claimable by any bounty hunter who could successfully infiltrate the caves of Tora Bora and make certain that bin Laden never made another trash-talking video again.4 This government-sponsored, nonjudicial program of targeted assassinations resembled vengeance more than justice. It might as well have been titled Rewards for Revenge.
Justice in Afghanistan would come in the form of lethal bombs, not legal tribunals. And ten years later, the war in Afghanistan, and America’s progressive withdrawal, still didn’t approximate anything that looked like Nuremberg, The Hague, or the International Criminal Court—the familiar faces of “justice” in the global community. The war in Afghanistan, not unlike all retaliatory wars, was to be fought as a legitimate expression of just deserts, a term of art that is often synonymous with revenge—but revenge that is fully legalized and morally accepted.
And yet the president addressed an audience that had been conditioned to view revenge—no matter what form it took—as unbecoming of a great nation. “Shock and awe,” for better or worse, sounds like the language of revenge, with those declarative vowels that easily collapse into a closed fist. These words don’t evoke the tranquil inner sanctum of courtrooms were judgment is based on reason and deliberation and where punishment is neither random nor immediate. The president was forcing a distinction between justice and revenge that sounded presidential and diplomatic but in the moral universe didn’t actually exist. He was speaking in code, feeding his constituents a familiar line, winking at the nation all the while. The assembled FBI agents, and the rest of America, for that matter, acted as if they were in denial—mindlessly clapping in favor of justice, signaling to the world that we were most assuredly not a vengeful nation. But in the chaos of post-9/11 hysteria, who could really tell the difference anyway?
When Osama bin Laden was finally assassinated by a team of Navy Seals that had infiltrated his Pakistani compound on May 1, 2011, many people in the United States pumped their fists in the air and even celebrated in the streets. Were they cheering the delivery of justice, or merely releasing the emotions associated with vengeance? Some criticized the celebrations as undignified, as if America were a nation of brutes with a bin Laden blood-lust. But just because they felt jubilation didn’t make them very different from decent, fair-minded citizens who knew that justice was finally being done and bin Laden was receiving the payback he richly deserved.
Many, however, were left confused, not exactly sure how to feel. President Bush had promised that we would one day have our justice, and when it finally arrived it would most definitely not be in the form of revenge. We would take pride that we had forsaken our vengeful impulses in favor of the justice worthy of a great nation. Years later, however, a new president, Barack Obama, a former professor of constitutional law, was able to announce triumphantly that justice was, indeed, finally done—bin Laden had been judged and punished by a sharpshooting Navy Seal.5 Apparently a bullet to bin Laden’s head was the justice we had all been waiting for. Nonetheless, most people experienced the assassination with all the emotion and exhilaration that generally accompanies revenge.
Others wondered how President Obama could possibly frame the killing of bin Laden in the language of justice when the terrorist wasn’t captured and brought back to stand trial in the United States. Fifty American commandos overtook the compound, which was fortified only by bin Laden’s wives and a teenage son, with little resistance. Surely he could have been abducted and tried in a civil courtroom as a criminal defendant (or as an enemy combatant before a military commission). Such a trial, any trial, would have displayed more of the attributes of justice than did the summary judgment that took place in Pakistan. And there still would have been cheers after a guilty verdict was announced, and that, too, would have seemed a lot like revenge.
Now a detour from the roving battlefields of counterterrorism to the gridiron of America’s favorite sport.
National Football League (NFL) quarterback Brett Favre already had a Hall of Fame career with the Green Bay Packers when he retired from football in 2007, only to change his mind several months later. The problem was, the Packers didn’t want him back. They had committed themselves to Aaron Rogers, Favre’s backup, who several years later would lead them to another Super Bowl victory. It was Rogers’s team now. Favre went on to sign with the New York Jets for one year, and then, after that season was over, retired once more only to change his mind, yet again. This time, however, rather than signing with a team from a different conference, Favre returned to the National Football Conference—to the very same division in which the Packers played—and joined their most dreaded rival, the Minnesota Vikings. As the newly installed Viking quarterback, Favre would have to play his old team at least twice during the 2009 NFL season.
Wearing the purple uniform of the Vikings before his first game against Green Bay’s green and gold, Favre said the following in response to whether he was motivated by revenge: “No. That has nothing to do with it,” but he soon added, “it’s human nature to feel, I didn’t use the word revenge, but to prove that you still could play. To prove someone wrong, . . . So you can call it what you want.”6
Terry Bradshaw, himself a Hall of Fame quarterback, said on Fox’s NFL Sunday, “Oh, really Brett? It’s not about revenge? I’m sorry but no one believes that this time around.”7 Another former NFL quarterback, Ron Jaworski, said on ESPN’s coverage of the NFL, “Brett Favre is going to approach this game and he’s going to be angry, he’s going to be vindictive and he will come out smoking.”8 And his partner on ESPN, former NFL coach Jon Gruden, said, “I can only imagine how Brett Favre is (feeling). He’s going to be so excited to compete against the team that let him go. There’s going to be a lot of emotions that go into this. Is it revenge? Whatever you want to call it, this is really going to be appealing.”9
At the end of the game, with the Vikings having won and with Favre having delivered one of the finest performances of his career, Jaworski was asked how he thought Favre was feeling at that moment: “I don’t think he would admit it,” he replied, “but I’m sure Brett is feeling that he finally got his revenge.”
All this hemming and hawing and backpedaling from quarterbacks who are usually more nimble in dropping back to pass, and yet here, with so little on the line—unlike America’s response to 9/11—they were so visibly clumsy, fearful to admit that there are scores to be settled that never show up on a scoreboard. There is pay dirt, which is part of the game, and there is payback, which can be just as important. What did these football TV analysts expect: When it was time to finally face the team that cast him aside, Favre would have no special feelings about it, no incentive to prove the Packers wrong, that he would treat the game as any other on the Vikings’ schedule?
Obviously, it’s not just NFL quarterbacks. We are all, seemingly, invested—if not culturally programmed—in the self-denial of revenge. It’s difficult if not impossible to have honest conversations about revenge. Retaliation must be reserved for more noble and lawful reasons than mere vengeance. And so we memorize the disclaimers and rehearse the verbal gymnastics. We want revenge but know not to ask for it. Instead, we demand justice, which we can safely say without appearing demented. The distinction between justice and revenge may actually be artificial, but it is undeniably everywhere.
Clara Schnorr’s daughter was murdered outside of Chicago in 1985. After the man who killed her was sent to prison, Ms. Schnorr said, “There is no way that he can be punished enough for taking our Donna away from us. Yet we want justice, not revenge.”10 Another grieving mother shared a similar view. In 2008, Hudson Post, from Nevada, was killed by a drunk driver who was sentenced to five years in prison but ended up released on house arrest after serving only three months. Post’s mother, outraged by the lack of accountability for those who commit vehicular manslaughter, said, “It’s the system that’s the problem. It’s not about revenge. It’s about justice.”11 In 2009, Ellen Harrington’s son was murdered in Oakland when he refused to hand over his wallet during an armed robbery. Her son’s murderer was sentenced to life imprisonment without parole. Ms. Harrington said, “I don’t believe in vengeance. . . . But I’m glad that no other mother will have to go through this.”12
In these measured words spoken by anguished relatives lies a concession that justice is not to be taken privately through self-help13—no matter how wounded or aggrieved the victims might be. The rule of law must prevail, and citizens will accept the verdicts that emanate from courts of law. But the very foundation of justice that is being invoked in these statements shares the same qualities of vindication that is found with revenge. In proclaiming that they seek justice and not revenge, these victims are speaking not to the formalism of legal trials but to the human longing for justified payback, in whichever way it is delivered, so long that it is delivered. For them, justice must produce the same levels of emotional satisfaction as revenge. It is for this reason that, for most people, justice is just revenge by another name.
The state of Connecticut tested its moral tolerance for the death penalty in 2010 when jurors convicted Steven Hayes of numerous capitol felonies in connection with the brutal murder of a mother and her two daughters. Working with a partner, Hayes broke into the Cheshire home of the Petit family, beat the father senseless, raped the mother and eldest daughter, and sexually abused the youngest daughter, age eleven. He then strangled the mother and tied the girls to their beds, dousing them with gasoline before setting the home on fire. The father, Dr. William Petit, survived the attack only to discover that his entire family had been tortured and sadistically murdered.14
The jurors ultimately sentenced Hayes to die by execution while his accomplice, Joshua Komisarjevsky, received a subsequent, separate trial that resulted in the same outcome. Komisarjevsky instigated the home invasion and was, admittedly, the more irredeemable of the two—if such a distinction can even be made when dealing with men who were truly first among equals in their evil. For this reason, the jurors showed little hesitancy in scheduling them to die. Dr. Petit said that he favored the death penalty over life imprisonment without parole, but not because it would avenge the loss of his family. “That’s between Mr. Hayes and the Lord. Vengeance belongs to the Lord. This is about justice.” But he also said on hearing the verdict, “I’m glad for the girls that there was justice.”15 These statements appear contradictory, or at least suggest a man in conflict over how he was expected to respond to the legal system’s decision to execute the men who he had every moral right to execute on his own. His daughters surely received “justice,” but it was not so very different from the vengeance that their murders warranted.
In the same year, a Kansas City family faced a similar vindication and an equal aversion to loose talk about vengeance. Bob and Janel Harrison finally received the sentencing decision they believed their daughter’s killer deserved. Robert Nunley was scheduled to be executed for kidnapping fifteen-year-old Ann Harrison while she waited for her school bus. Along with an accomplice who today remains on death row, the two men brought Ann to a house, raped her, then coaxed her into getting inside the trunk of the car where they each used kitchen knives in stabbing her to death. The Harrisons were pleased that at least one of Ann’s killers would finally pay the ultimate penalty for the ultimate crime. But like so many, they weren’t quite sure how to characterize their true feelings, as if they, too, were being judged—not for wanting to see justice done, but for celebrating the delivery of that justice. “Some people call this seeking revenge,” Janel Harrison said about her daughter’s murderer now facing his own death. “I call it seeking justice for the victim.”16
Why isn’t that the same thing? From the point of view of a grieving mother, a murderer is going to die for having raped and then taken the life of her teenage girl. All the same, Harrison believed that the justice owed to her daughter was somehow incompatible with the sense of vengeance that she and her husband understandably felt but could not freely admit.
When bestselling writer of thrillers Tom Clancy was asked whether his fictional character Jack Clarke was motivated by revenge for the death of his wife in an earlier novel, Clancy, not wishing to offend anyone who might think him an intemperate man, joked, “Have you been reading books in psychology or something? It’s justice, not revenge.”17
Jenny Sanford was publicly humiliated when her husband, South Carolina governor Mark Sanford, carried on an affair with an Argentine woman and, along the way, misappropriated state funds. The governor did not seek reelection but chose to serve out the remainder of his term as both a lame duck and an even lamer husband. His wife, however, the first lady of South Carolina if not the first lady in her husband’s heart, ended up writing a book about her experience as the victim of marital betrayal. She insisted, however, that the book was not written out of any personal need for vengeance. “It was really written to help other women,” she said without any bitterness or irony.18
Sometimes there is a slip of the tongue and citizens forget themselves. Their true feelings surface as they cry out for justice with the more genuine tears of revenge.
In 2009, New Yorkers faced the possibility of a civilian trial against Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11. The trial was to be held in Foley Square, just a few short blocks from where the World Trade Center once stood. There was widespread disagreement, however, in New York City and all throughout America, whether terrorists should even receive civilian trials. Many believed that military commissions were more appropriate, largely because suspected terrorists were enemy combatants in the war against terror. They did not deserve the full sweep of constitutional protections offered to ordinary defendants in federal courthouses.
Michael Curatola was one New Yorker who wanted to see justice for the atrocity that was 9/11. In fact, he very much wanted to participate in the delivery of that justice—as a juror in a civilian trial should one have been convened in Foley Square. For him the trial was a symbolic way to honor and remember his former neighbor, Pablo Ortiz, who was forced to leap from the eighty-eighth floor to his death. Here is what he said about wanting to stand in judgment of those who killed his neighbor: “Just to get vengeance for my dead friend who’s not here anymore.” But then he quickly caught himself and restated his intentions. “But the word ‘vengeance’ sounds too much like a personal vendetta. I mean justice.”19
One of the DC snipers who, during a three-week period in 2002, terrorized the area around the nation’s capital by killing ten people, died from lethal injection in November 2009. Robert Meyers wanted to watch the execution of the man who murdered his brother, Dean, who had been shot in the head while filling up his car at a gas station. But he was careful not to come across as bloodthirsty when he said, “We’re expecting justice being done, but not from a vengeful standpoint. It is more about the payment of his debt to society, because that was decided by others.”20 For Meyers, by allowing others to decide the fate of the man who murdered his brother, he could not experience the sensations of just deserts from a “vengeful standpoint.” He simply had to embrace the concept of justice alone, without the emotional satisfaction that comes with revenge. But no one can reasonably believe that the execution wasn’t satisfying on an emotional level, as well, since it vindicated his brother’s memory. He surely was allowed, if not altogether expected, to savor the justice his brother’s murderer received—regardless of the form in which that justice was delivered. And the savoring would share all manner of common features with the sweetness of revenge.
Sometimes score settling can’t be so easily framed in the language of justice. Sometimes it’s just garden-variety revenge. This can happen when the insult or injury isn’t technically a crime. There are many injuries that result in wounded pride and diminished self-worth, but despite all the damage, no laws are broken. The wrongdoer is deserving of some comeuppance, but legal justice isn’t the appropriate avenue for achieving it. The avenger will have to devise another way of getting even. Words matter, but the one word never uttered is revenge.
Kenneth G. Langone, the billionaire cofounder of Home Depot, Inc., had been the head of the compensation committee for the board of directors for the New York Stock Exchange. In 2004, New York Attorney General, Eliot Spitzer, had named Langone in a lawsuit in connection with the $187.5 million pay package that the committee had approved for the former chairman of the Exchange, Richard Grasso. In 2006, when Spitzer was seeking the Democratic nomination in his election campaign for governor of New York, Langone and his family gave $64,000 to Spitzer’s opponent, Tom Suozzi, and urged friends and associates to donate to him as well. The problem was that Suozzi didn’t have a chance of winning. Langone and his friends and family were throwing away their money. For someone so good at making money, Langone’s behavior was irrational. But he didn’t seem to care. In fact, he admitted that the impossible odds of a Suozzi upset were irrelevant to him. “I thought it was time to stand up to [Spitzer] and demand accountability,” he said. “It wasn’t revenge, it was principle.”21
But what’s more principled than vengeance? The endgame for the avenger is always a matter of principle—and that principle is, in fact, vindicated by revenge. As many people now know, Eliot Spitzer ultimately won that election but resigned in scandal not long thereafter when it was revealed that he was Client 9 in a high-priced prostitution ring. Many on Wall Street who Spitzer had prosecuted when he was known as the Sheriff of Wall Street gloated, shamelessly, at the governor’s downfall. (Eliot is a friend, and, to my mind, New York lost a most talented public servant.) But none would have dared to admit that his misfortunes resulted in their vicarious revenge. Yet some actual principle was being vindicated (honor over hypocrisy?), but no one knew what to call it.
It’s not just Wall Street titans who become tongue-tied when forced to recast the feelings of revenge into the loftier ideals of justice. In 2010, Thomas Blatt, an elderly Holocaust survivor from a Nazi death camp, flew from his home in California to Berlin to witness the trial of John Demjanjuk, who was a guard at the Nazi concentration camp, Sobibor, in 1943. Demjanjuk was accused of participating in the mass murder of 27,900 people. In an interview, Blatt wanted to make clear that he was seeking “justice, not revenge.”22 He provided the expected disclaimer, but he shouldn’t have had to, and surely no one bought it. He survived a death camp, after all. It was an added miracle that he lived until 2010 to witness Demjanjuk finally about to be punished for his crimes. Just because he sat in a courtroom didn’t mean that he had to have been stripped of all vengeful feeling. Such a compartmentalized division between justice and vengeance is not only unlikely but inhuman as well.
When the Nazi death camps were first liberated soon after the end of World War II, Jewish prisoners—essentially human corpses with a pulse—were sometimes given an opportunity to take vengeance against the guards who had tortured and tormented them. An escaping guard would be brought back to the camp by either the Russian or American liberators, thrown inside one of the barracks, and greeted by a number of Jewish skeletons who proceeded to tear the guard to pieces. Vichy collaborators experienced a similar fate when they were strangled on the streets of Paris shortly after the city was liberated—not by Jews, but by French citizens. Whether these lawless acts of retribution are examples of justice or revenge didn’t seem to matter much to anyone since no one—except Nazi guards and Vichy collaborators—complained about it. Most people believed that these sporadic, improvised acts of vengeance were completely just and justified given the enormity of evil, and the scale of mass death, that the Nazis and their abettors had visited on Europe.
In spite of that, sixty-five years later, Blatt, a Holocaust survivor, sat in a German courtroom and with an accusing finger pointed at a mass murderer, wanting everyone to know that his reasons for attending the trial were all the more credible because he was motivated by justice solely. Doesn’t that make his explanation sound incredible? Surely he must have been guided by the emotions of vengeance, too. Either his desire for revenge had dissipated after six decades of waiting for Demjanjuk to finally receive his due, or he simply did not allow himself to have such feelings—even for Nazi guards. It’s more likely he was certain that civilized society would not grant even a Holocaust survivor the satisfaction of having his revenge and stating it so unabashedly. Ironically, one of the Israeli judges who sat in judgment of Demjanjuk when he was tried and convicted before an Israeli court in 1988 (only later to have won his release on appeal) recalled that when the verdict was announced, cheers erupted in the courtroom. “They were survivors, what could you do?” she said knowingly. “They wanted vengeance.”23
When it came to the postwar fate of Nazis who managed to escape justice and live quietly in nations that didn’t seem to mind giving sanctuary to mass murderers, no one spent more time documenting their crimes, pinpointing their locations, and compiling evidence against them, than the famed Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal. Wiesenthal devoted his entire life after being liberated from the concentration camp Mauthausen to tracking down Nazis, the most infamous of whom was Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Final Solution. Yet, Wiesenthal titled one of his books Justice Not Vengeance, in case anyone should doubt that the dossiers he kept on ninety thousand Nazi fugitives was inspired by the former and not the latter. And all that time, haunted by the moral outrage of unpunished murderers, somehow all he managed to think about was the unbearable injustice rather than the unrealized revenge.
Susan Jacoby, in her groundbreaking book Wild Justice: The Evolution of Revenge, recalled that in 1972 a number of Holocaust survivors testified in a deportation proceeding against Hermine Braunsteiner Ryan, an officer of the Maidanek death camp. (She, too, was identified by Wiesenthal.) Braunsteiner Ryan’s lawyer accused the victims who had been called to testify about his client’s brutality as being “out for revenge.”24 His argument, apparently, was based on the premise that vengeful people are not reliable truth-tellers. Their jittery, wrathful emotions will cancel out whatever oath they are required to take before settling into the witness stand. Objectivity is impossible for them. They can’t, or simply won’t, think clearly and rationally. They may be eyewitnesses to a crime, but what they purport to have seen will quite possibly be contrived, their eyes clouded with rage, their memories contaminated by loss.
Faced with this accusation and sensing that the legal burden had somehow shifted to them—as if they had to reestablish their credibility as impartial witnesses to a genocide—the survivors of Maidanek were compelled to say that all they wished to see was justice done. This would satisfy the judge and the jury that they could be trusted to speak the truth, their testimony protectively sealed away from the emotional influences of revenge. Victims are always placed on the defensive whenever they testify against wrongdoers who are being judged under the law rather than through the quick fix of self-help. Once legal proceedings commence, vengeance can no longer be what victims hope to achieve. Placing their faith in the law means playing by a different set of rules. They must, humbly, stand in the line that waits for justice and hope that justice comes.
In the case of these Maidanek survivors, they were being asked to recall the horrors they had once experienced without betraying any personal desire for vengeance. A long-overdue reckoning with a mass murderer was imminent. But it was not to be enjoyed. Such is the emotional paradox that exists in revenge-averse societies.
More recently, during the criminal sentencing of Bernard Madoff in 2009, the attorney who represented the world’s greatest Ponzi schemer argued that his client should be spared having to serve 150 years in prison. Nearly all of Madoff’s victims, however, made plain their wish, either through their written letters or in their remarks before the court during the sentencing hearing, to see him receive the maximum penalty allowable under the law. Madoff’s attorney, Ira Sorkin, said that these requests amounted to a “type of mob vengeance,” given the fact that his client, already seventy-one years old, surely would not be able to serve out the entirety of a sentence that would end in 2159.25
Judge Denny Chin, then a federal district judge who presided over the Madoff case, disagreed, reminding Sorkin that rather than resort to mob vengeance, the victims “are doing what they are supposed to be doing—placing their trust in our system of justice.” For Judge Chin, the mere presence of a courtroom signifies the very opposite of revenge. Vengeance, after all, takes place outside of courtrooms. But just because the law is being given an opportunity to run its course doesn’t mean that victims are not relying on the law to achieve the private vengeance they were forced to surrender when they placed their faith in the legal system to avenge their losses. And that’s precisely what made Judge Chin’s ruling just: it properly and symbolically addressed the moral outrage of the community and private pain of victims, which satisfied both justice and vengeance.
Two years later Judge Chin reflected on the Madoff sentence and the reasons why he rejected any consideration that Madoff should receive a lighter punishment. The reasons for mercy may have been trite, but they were not without some appeal. Madoff was an old man, after all. There was a numerical limit to how much he could be punished. An even more fundamental question was whether the maximum penalty would do society any good. Why not give him the hope of one day emerging from his confinement? It was here that Judge Chin invoked the word “retribution,” the principle that “a defendant should get his just deserts” and “be punished in proportion to his blameworthiness.” This was especially true here, he added, given the “extraordinary evil” of Madoff’s crimes.26
Judge Chin distinguished retribution from revenge, the latter he rejected in favor of the legality of the former. This is the way the legal system ordinarily makes these distinctions. Retributive justice and vengeful impulses cannot coexist in the same system. In choosing the law, one necessarily selects legal retribution over moral revenge. Retribution becomes the weapon of choice. But make no mistake: it, too, is a weapon. It is not to be lightly regarded as a weaker cousin in the family of punishments. To exact retribution is to avenge, although apparently with more elegance. Retribution is vengeance made respectable, vengeance stripped of emotional commitments and removed from the responsibility of avengers, taken up, instead, by austere and impassioned jurists. Retributive justice is not something the public can experience personally. It just happens, like garbage collection and postal delivery. Justice is done for the benefit of all without anyone in particular savoring any personal victory.
But it is simply not true that human beings have no emotional involvement in how they experience justice. Crime victims, and even the general public, have their own personal investments in seeing punishment carried out. No one is indifferent to injustice. Retribution carried out by legal systems can’t be neatly divorced from the feelings that justice, true justice, evokes in former victims and ordinary citizens. At the time of sentencing, Judge Chin dismissed the idea that his harsh symbolic punishment of Madoff was vengeance with a legal face. Two years later, however, he made it plain that Madoff received no mercy; legal retribution required a sentence consistent with just deserts. Madoff deserved a 150-year sentence regardless of whether his victims fortuitously derived some emotional benefit from this strictly legal outcome. Legally, Madoff got what he deserved. Morally, his victims were avenged. So wasn’t Judge Chin’s retributive objective somehow advancing their vengeful one? Victims invariably partake in the ancillary benefits of retribution, getting their revenge secondhand, but it is still potently felt. Legal retribution indirectly placated the vengeful wishes of Madoff’s victims. Perhaps their letters to the judge, and the statements they made in open court, were indicative of mob vengeance after all.
The judge who sentenced Madoff proved himself as a dispassionate jurist handing down a sentence in keeping with the retributive mandate. Madoff’s victims accepted the court’s decree without resorting to self-help. Justice was thereby served. But so, too, was revenge.
The judge who sentenced Madoff is not alone in running away from revenge while anchoring himself securely within the big-top tent of legal justice. All judges routinely invoke the cool, rational disclaimer that revenge plays no role in their decision making.
Most recently, the judge who sentenced Jerry Sandusky to thirty to sixty years in prison for having molested ten boys over a fifteen-year period was, not unlike Judge Chin, faced with a high-profile trial and an equal moral outrage that cried out for revenge. Sandusky, a former assistant football coach at Penn State, all but single-handedly brought down its storied program, and ended Joe Paterno’s once illustrious career, on account of acts of molestation that had taken place on university grounds and under its watch.27 Many people, however, wondered whether Sandusky’s punishment didn’t send a strong enough message to him and to others contemplating such despicable crimes. Judge Chin had sentenced a seventy-one-year-old Madoff to 150 years in prison; Judge John M. Cleland, who presided over the Sandusky trial, stated that he was “not going to sentence you to centuries. It makes no sense for a 68-year-old man. This sentence will put you in prison for the rest of your life.”28
But what about the feelings of the victims—their need to be vindicated—and the moral disgust of the community? Here Judge Cleland made it clear that “we do not consider vengeance, and we do not consider retaliation.”29
Lester Munson, a writer for ESPN.com, wondered why the judge felt it so necessary to project such an aura of circumspection, if not emotional obtuseness. He wrote, “Cleland’s sentencing calculus would work well in garden variety cases. But there is nothing garden variety about the crimes of Jerry Sandusky. How about a little vengeance? How about some retaliation? Is there anyone who would object? Would a higher court criticize ‘centuries of incarceration’ for Sandusky?”30
Judges all over the world are quick to assert their legal gravitas whenever there is a need to explain away a jail sentence that appears to be both morally vindictive and legally vindicating. In such cases they will utter all the right words to automatically confer the public legitimacy extended to law, all the noble reasons why governments punish its citizens. And they will distance themselves from any possibility that their judicial temperament has betrayed a vengeful streak.
In 2009, twenty-seven defendants, all French Muslims, were prosecuted in a French courtroom for having participated in kidnapping, torturing, and murdering a young Jewish man, Ilan Halimi, in 2006. The justice minister of France, Michele Alliot-Marie, persuaded the public prosecutor to appeal the sentences of fourteen of the defendants that were patently unjust (some only of six months long, which were then suspended), given the brutality, gruesomeness, and anti-Semitic nature of the crime. Halimi’s family, along with French Jewish associations, praised the actions of the justice minister.
Hundreds of demonstrators marched the streets of Paris carrying white flowers, French flags, and portraits of Halimi, shouting “Justice for Ilan!” But the magistrate’s union, comprised of the French judiciary, strongly disagreed with this Euro do-over, this attempt to punish the defendants even after they had already been sentenced in a court of law. The law, after all, exists not to placate victims but to render justice. “Justice is different from vengeance,” said Emmanuelle Perreux, the union’s president.31
Sometimes a victim will invoke an even more specific value than justice, something even more altruistic and impersonal to justify revenge. In 2010, in England, a twenty-nine-year-old DJ, Sami Sharif, was beaten so severely by two men outside of a London nightclub that he was left paralyzed and unable to speak—all because of an argument over a spilled drink. One of his attackers was sentenced to a mere three-and-a-half years in prison. Decrying the punishment as a “miscarriage of justice,” Sharif’s father, Joseph, said, “I have no feelings of revenge—all I want is to make sure that other people do not fall victim to the leniency of this sentence. It doesn’t act as a deterrent.”32
Anguished parents are often placed in the awkward position of having to downplay their vengeful feelings by adopting a more dignified, law-abiding stance. The call for justice is infused with altruism. Preventing others from experiencing the same fate becomes the overriding societal value. Private pain is subordinated to the greater good. Justice radiates for the benefit of all, and the deterrence of future crimes is how most people receive that benefit. Deterrence becomes the primary calling card of justice. Grieving parents can demonstrate their commitment to justice by reconfiguring their vengeance as deterrence. Who can really tell the difference anyway? Justice seems to be malleable enough so that avengers can easily avoid any unfortunate slip of the tongue.
A former Indonesian government official, Antasari Azhar, was convicted in 2010 of plotting the murder of a businessman. He was sentenced to eighteen years in prison. In handing down this punishment, Judge Herri Swantoro said, “The sentence is not intended as revenge, but to make the defendant aware of his mistakes.”33 Yes, legal systems do offer wrongdoers an opportunity for self-reflection. Long jail sentences give criminals a lot of time to contemplate where they went wrong. There is justice in setting an example, and there is justice in taking personal responsibility. But these lofty virtues of justice are never far removed from the more lowly vices of vengeful fury.
These statements of legal purpose betray the Janus face of the justice/vengeance paradox, rationalizations that depend on mixing metaphors and taking cover inside the legitimacy of the law. Harsh punishments are not awarded merely to deter future crimes by drunken louts who loiter outside of British nightclubs. Sami Sharif’s father wanted revenge for his son’s senseless loss of a precious life; the shocking leniency that the wrongdoer received offended the moral universe. And the punishment of a murderous politician was justified for reasons apart from merely notifying him that he had made a mistake. Revenge colored these rulings just as much as any other retributive, legalistic value.
At least there’s one candid government official who is without the forked tongue that slides all too easily into the doublespeak between justice and revenge. In urging the incoming administration of the Philippines to recover the ill-gotten wealth stolen by former president Ferdinand Marcos, Benigno Aquino III said in 2010, “Justice has a nice ring to it but what critics really want is revenge.”34
Why does talk of revenge bring out the hypocrite in so many of us? Why is the revenge impulse worn like a grotesque mask that isn’t allowed to see the light of day? So many people, from American presidents to NFL quarterbacks, from grieving mothers to anguished Holocaust survivors, twist themselves in knots in order to avoid having to admit that only vengeance will satisfy their loss and relieve their suffering.
Biblical people didn’t bother with these distinctions. For them, justice and vengeance were synonymous. Long before imaging technology allowed for pictures of and insights into the human brain, and even before governments decided that human beings could no longer be trusted to help themselves to vengeance, the people of the Bible and tribal societies developed their own systems for getting even with wrongdoers. They equally knew how to balance the consequences of going beyond even—when the scales of justice tipped unfairly in favor of the avenger.
The Bible was not averse to establishing ground rules for punishing those who have done wrong. God tells Noah after the flood: “Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed” (Gen. 9:6). The Torah lists more than thirty offenses for which death is the prescribed penalty. Biblical tribes understood that the consequence of harming another meant that the victim, or his family, would be morally entitled, if not duty-bound, to retaliate.
In cases of homicide, two separate laws specifically impose the responsibility to punish a wrongdoer who has committed intentional murder on a single individual—the “avenger” (Deut. 19:1–13) or the “blood avenger” (Num. 35:9–28). Such a job is not for the community. The avenger is an individual charged with a duty to right a wrong. There is no reason to appoint a governing authority to commence a public trial, pronounce a judgment, and deliver a sentence. All you need is a blood relative. If the victim is unable or unwilling to avenge himself, the blood avenger will know what to do.
And he will also know what he is. Not all avengers are alike. Biblical laws distinguished between murder and manslaughter. When it came to the former there were no exceptions—the wrongdoer who intentionally took a life must himself die at the hands of the avenger. With regard to the latter, the unintentional, inadvertent killer is exiled to a city of refuge where he will be safe from either the avenger or the blood avenger.35 A beth din, or rabbinic court, often pronounced judgment on who was entitled to remain in the city and who, given the intentionality of their crime, should receive no protection and must be tossed out. And as for the unintentional killer who misguidedly decided to leave the city, he would become a marked man, always vulnerable to vengeance, always in the sightline of the justified revenge taker.
Cities of refuge were established not only as safe havens but also as places for atonement. The Bible leaves room for repair and rehabilitation in the aftermath of manslaughter. Such is not the case for the cold-blooded murderer, however. Nothing more is expected or demanded of him other than to run and hide.
Most important, the very fact that biblical people created cities of refuge serves notice that the murder victim—and by mandated proxy, his avenger—has rights. He or she is entitled to redress. A victim is not to be forgotten or ignored. And the primary right he or she possesses is one of revenge. The intentional murderer will lose his own life; the unintentional murderer will lose his freedom. There are no exceptions, no biblical plea bargains, and no deal-cuttings that will leave the victim un-vindicated. And when carrying out this duty the avenger isn’t crazy, or deluded, or irrational, or especially lusting for blood. He is merely doing his job, a job that must be done because it is owed to the victim, and it is the very thing that a balanced moral universe requires.
Whether one looks to the Old Testament, the Koran, or even Hammurabi’s Code, ancient people treated revenge not as an expression of irrational madness but, rather, as a quite rational, self-regulating necessity that ensured fairness and justice. It also kept the peace by deterring future crimes, as wrongdoers realized that their misdeeds would not be forgotten, that someone would be deputized to avenge the wrong. Observing that justice and vengeance were not incompatible ideas in early civilization, philosopher Robert C. Solomon has pointed out that “vengeance is the original meaning of justice. The word ‘justice’ in the Old Testament and in Homer virtually always refers to revenge. . . . Not that the law and the respect for the law are unimportant, of course, but one should not glibly identify these with justice and dismiss the passion for vengeance as something quite different and wholly illegitimate.”36
Yet, several thousand years later President George W. Bush and NFL quarterback Brett Favre repeated the “justice not revenge” mantra as if it had always existed as a biblical alternative to “an eye for an eye.” But it hadn’t. The people of the Bible didn’t maintain such artificial lines, stripping justice of its vengeful dimensions. Justice, in order to be just, had to include the moral clarity, emotional closure, and symbolic vindication that comes with revenge. Vengeance was an article of faith among the newly faithful; the only consideration was who was to perform it, whether it was deserved, and how it was to be measured.
Ultimately as civilization advanced, from biblical tribes to the Dark Ages and then on through the Enlightenment, human beings were forced to surrender their right and obligation to seek revenge. The march of time resulted in the retreat of vengeance. The eighteenth-century philosopher of the Enlightenment Cesare Beccaria wrote in his 1764 treatise, On Crimes and Punishment, “The right of punishing belongs not to any individual in particular, but to society in general, or the sovereign.”37 This theory of the social contract, which has many fathers from John Locke to Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Thomas Jefferson, required citizens to give up certain individual rights in exchange for the government’s promise to assume responsibility for the liberties that citizens would come to forfeit. Revenge is one of those rights of man that gave way to the rule of law. Governments assumed the role of surrogate avenger, minus the emotional involvement that a true avenger would naturally possess.
The drum roll for revenge turned into its own death march. Civilization gave up on vengeance and replaced it with something altogether different: judgment and punishment that is state sanctioned, emotionally dispassionate, victim insensitive, and procedurally obsessed. Governments maintained a monopoly on revenge by substituting something far more inaccessible, impersonal, and all too often innocuous—justice. And, in doing so, it turned justice into something that bore little resemblance to the vengeance that had sustained humankind from time immemorial.
Justice, and all that it implied, exerted a magical hold on modern man. The mere mention of justice triggers a Pavlovian response, an instant sense of public legitimacy and purpose. By contrast, talk of revenge nowadays leaves many repulsed. Given the distinction that everyone seems to make between justice and revenge, it would appear that their differences are vast, that they lie on opposite ends of a continuum of human behavior that defines how we respond to loss and right another’s wrong. On the one end is justice, with its cool judgment, level-headedness, emotional detachment, and strict focus on the general welfare of all citizens; and on the other lies revenge, stewing in the hot juices of personal resentment and private pain, unwilling to reason, implacably committed to a course of action that leads to spilled blood, broken bones, and the recycling of still further revenge.
Ultimately, though, this is a false distinction. The call for justice is always a call for revenge. Despite all the wordplay and mind games, there is no difference between justice and vengeance. They are one and the same no matter how much we run away from revenge while falling into the arms of justice. There is no justice if wrongdoers go unpunished and victims do not feel avenged; and revenge—restoring honor, evening the score, ensuring that wrongdoers receive their just deserts—is inseparably linked to living in a just society, one that is honest about what must be done to those who do harm, and the opportunity that must be given to individuals to redress the indignity caused by another.
Speaking to the fundamental role of revenge in our conception of justice, Robert C. Solomon writes, “to seek vengeance for a grievous wrong, to revenge oneself against evil—that seems to lie at the very foundation of our sense of justice, indeed, for our very sense of ourselves, our dignity, and our sense of right and wrong.”38
Yes, wrongdoers must serve their debt to society. But there is yet another debt—one that exists on the balance sheet of the moral universe—the one that is personally owed to the victims of that wrong. In the moral universe such debts are not dischargeable simply by making the wrongdoer repay the public at large. A wrongdoer cannot get away with paying less than what is owed, and he cannot ignore his personal obligation to the one who he has wronged.
All ledgers remain open, but the primary debt is always owed to the victim, and victims are usually in no mood to offer discounts. He or she is the proper lien holder; only the victim can decide whether the ledger gets wiped clean. Legal systems can serve as repositories of grief and resolvers of disputes, but the power to punish—the very reasons to punish—cannot be exercised without the victim foremost in mind. Societies that treat moral injury too blithely and focus only on legal retribution end up with victims who are forever resentful, untrusting of courtrooms, and unable to live with injustices that have only compounded the original injury.
Those who do harm must be held to account. Payback is not optional but obligatory. Victims must be vindicated—their dignity restored and honor reclaimed. These are not just idle wishes of the spiritually wounded. They are basic human needs and moral imperatives. And vindication cannot be performed by proxy alone. Courtrooms are fine for blind justice, but victims have to see what’s going on, they must be reassured that the crimes committed against them are being taken seriously. Some emotional investment is necessary to make certain that justice has, indeed, been done. The assurance and delivery of justice is always the correct outcome because it is what both the victim and his wrongdoer rightly deserve.
But this is not what we are told. The law, we are told, runs its course on an assembly line of shared societal values, each one disconnected from private pain. We can look to the law for justice, but we can’t expect it to satisfy our desire for private vengeance, nor should we. If revenge is so wrong, however, why do human beings find the settling of scores so emotionally and morally satisfying? We are not all savages at heart, consuming beverages but secretly thirsting for blood, our revenge impulse unquenchable. We simply expect to see wrongs righted and moral balance restored. Instead, the law denies victims the satisfaction that would otherwise accompany revenge. And, in doing so, legal systems ultimately fail in the delivery of justice. It is an incomplete justice; the satisfaction of the state is not shared by the true targets of the injury. What the public sees is a self-congratulatory justice that is without the moral closure of revenge. Perhaps this is why so many victims walk away from courtrooms disgusted, or refuse to enter them in the first place.
And so the public is forced to look elsewhere, somewhere other than a court of law. And that search for moral clarity is often conducted inside, of all places, movie theaters. The longing for justice has, over the centuries and across cultures, found expression in the world of art. This is where fairness is reinforced, wrongs get righted, and those who deserve be punished receive their due. The purpose of such art is not to achieve a happy ending but rather a righteous one. Avengers are paid back what they are owed because that’s what the moral universe demands. Sadly, and all too often, no such similar mandate emanates from courts of law.
In art, revenge is played out in overdrive, and revenge is, undoubtedly, the artist’s best friend. The legal system insists that we seek justice only through its corridors and always accept its decrees, which often means reconciling ourselves to unjust outcomes. Our culture, however, tells a different story. All forms of art—low and high, literary and pulp, theatrical and cinematic—have glorified the fate of the ordinary person who refuses to accept the law’s failure, cannot ignore his loss, and is forced into a life of revenge.
It’s probably safe to say that there has been an inverse relationship between injustice under the law and the abundance of revenge novels, plays, and films that spring from the imagination of artists. If the legal system didn’t treat emotion as contraband, if it better appreciated the human need to feel avenged, vengeance wouldn’t have become such a staple of our common culture. Our revenge cravings become ravenous whenever justice is left undone. These very same emotions are quarantined from courtrooms, a consequence of the state’s monopoly over revenge and the mandate that crimes not be personalized. Tears of human emotion are not permitted to rust the grinding gears of justice. But these primal human instincts are permitted an outlet—one that is lawful—and open for business during weekend matinees.
Art comes to the rescue, not unlike the avenger himself. Artists have supplied humankind’s revenge fix, feeding an addiction that has the virtue of being both emotionally necessary and entertaining. Perhaps it would be better for judges to simply convert their courtrooms into arenas where revenge can be played out emotionally and harmlessly. At the very least it would reduce our dependence on fictional stories of revenge, our only assurance that justice is, indeed, possible. Courtrooms, after all, rarely showcase such emotional power and moral purpose; damaged dignity is scarcely, if ever, given a day in court.
Cultural depictions of vengeance are the only reliable way for scores to be settled fairly and finally. But while tantalizing when projected onto screens, revenge can be deadly and destabilizing if practiced freestyle as unregulated self-help. We don’t want citizens unleashing their revenge instincts onto the world like crazed vigilantes. Surely it is best for courts to handle the messy business of prosecution and punishment. After all, what is morally necessary for the individual may not be best for all of society. A victim might end up vindicated and avenged at the expense of the general welfare of everyone else. Vengeance can escalate into blood feuds and honor killings, a problem more commonly found in developing nations, but the presence of the Hatfields and the McCoys of an earlier era (adapted recently into a TV movie for the History Channel), and the Crips, Bloods, and Latin Kings of present times, demonstrates that America, too, has glimpsed the revolving consequences of unchecked revenge.
And, yet, the very idea of vengeance shouldn’t remain such a cultural taboo and social stigma. That has not served us so well, either. There are moments when the taking of revenge is necessary, when there is no choice but to retaliate. For this reason, the judicial system must recognize that citizens can’t be expected to so casually accept unjust outcomes. The law should always be given the first chance to balance the scales of justice, and victims should be allowed to participate in that justice. But if justice is not done, then justice must be made possible in some other way. Injustice invites a second chance, and vengeance is the realization of that chance.
Most important, we must take more seriously what it means to be victimized—first by a wrongdoer and then once more when snubbed by the law. Everything must be done to spare victims a lifetime of victimhood. But that can’t happen when legal systems remove the matter from the hands of the victim and then pronounce justice to have been achieved—in name alone. Justice occurs only when, reasonably, the victim says so, when the victim declares himself to be satisfied. Robert C. Solomon has written that “the problem is not that in vengeance we take the law ‘into our own hands’ but rather that without vengeance justice seems not only to be taken out of our hands but eliminated as a consideration altogether.”39
And we also have to be honest about the ways in which we permit the law to sneak revenge through the back door, creating revenge exceptions that confuse us even further. Capital punishment, victim impact statements, self-defense laws, and temporary insanity pleas are all ways in which revenge resides inside courtrooms without acknowledging that the moral need to feel avenged—and its attendant feelings of satisfaction—is, in fact, understandable and proper.
The hope with this book is to liberate vengeance from all the silence and hypocrisy that prevents it from openly informing public debate about the deficiencies of the legal system. Vengeance teaches a great deal about the moral development of mankind, and the interplay between humanity and inhumanity. And, beyond that, its denial is futile. Vengeance is everywhere, as a stealth human instinct, deeply internalized and powerfully felt. It was present in the war in Afghanistan and in the sentencing of Bernard Madoff.40 We see it in the barely concealed satisfaction that many experience when watching those who break laws and breach the public trust receive their due. And vengeance provides the backdrop for so much of our popular culture and high art. Rooting for the avenger has become an American pastime—the fictional revenge taker is allowed a life that we all too willingly deny ourselves.
In the hit CBS TV series The Mentalist, Patrick Jane is a former con man psychic who now, as an independent consultant, assists California homicide detectives in solving crimes through his astute powers of observation and insight into human behavior. He’s also determined to find the serial killer who murdered his wife and daughter. With his unorthodox methods and ulterior motive, he often finds himself at philosophical odds with the head of the police unit to whom he has been assigned, Teresa Lisbon. In one scene, Jane, the aggrieved husband and father, speaks honest words of moral injury that Lisbon is trained to cancel out in her line of work:
TERESA LISBON: Jane, we’re officers of the law.
PATRICK JANE: You are. I don’t care about the law. I care about justice. And justice says Machado deserves to suffer.
TERESA LISBON: That’s not justice; it’s vengeance.
PATRICK JANE: What’s the difference?41
Revenge is the one human instinct that dares not speak its name. The mere mention of it is widely regarded as undignified—barbarism at its most naked, one of those nasty impediments to civilization itself. And yet, even as our better angels whisper that we should look away from revenge, our human nature reminds us that we cannot.
Throughout history rubbernecking at revenge has remained a beguiling spectator sport. Vengeance brings out the voyeur in each of us—even in the best among us. That’s largely because revenge, like love, is a human instinct that doubles as an addiction. From neuroscience and the anatomy of the human brain we have learned that the very same sectors that respond to addictions are similarly primed to react to altruistic punishment—the impulse to see a score settled even if it produces no direct personal benefit and even if there are costs to the punisher. The knowledge that a wrongdoer has been punished is its own reward—punishment for altruistic, rather than selfish reasons. We are all better off when the bad guy is punished. Revenge is, indeed, sweet. It’s not just a metaphorical saying; it’s a scientific fact. The consumption of chocolate and the witnessing of justified payback register similar levels of neural satisfaction in the human brain.
Yet society has worked especially hard to eradicate revenge or, at least, to suppress the desire to retaliate. As proverbs go, “don’t get mad, get even,” doesn’t stand a chance against the more measured voices intended to diffuse the taking of revenge, such as, “what goes around comes around”; “forgive and forget”; “let bygones be bygones”; “living well is the best revenge”; and “I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of knowing that he hurt me.”
Revenge is a response to a moral injury, an attack on a human dignity. We all know the vital importance of maintaining one’s dignity. The legal system, however, is far more concerned with the rights owed to the accused than with the honor that must be restored to the victim. The debt that is created from a criminal act requires a form of repayment not fully addressed by a jail sentence, and surely not from compensatory damages. The physical loss always has a spiritual dimension. And the damage done to the human spirit is what animates the impulse to avenge. The moral universe is in the business of measuring hurts and grievances, where feelings are registered and moral debts repaid. Vengeance has always been with us, a partner in our evolutionary history, a mainstay of our DNA. The tension between what is in our nature and what is purportedly in our best interest goes to the very heart of why civilization has worked so hard talking us out of our need for revenge. And it is also why, against all odds, we have been conditioned to run away from it—all the while doubling back, in demand of justice.