Payback: The Case for Revenge

OTHER CULTURES AND REVENGE

It’s fair to say that certain cultures around the world sure know how to give revenge a bad name. It certainly hasn’t helped that the Western world has for several hundred years poisoned the well against revenge. This is one of the reasons why societies that still practice revenge are blackballed from civilized life, treated as rogue people, not to be taken seriously within the global community. But it’s also true that in some cultures the vengeance that passes for justice is no justice at all and, therefore, neither can it be classified as moral revenge.

Certain revenge practices provoke a fair amount of squeamishness. Everyone knows that “eye for an eye” retribution can be gruesome, even if deserved. The very fact that vengeance can bring about a blood feud is an unsavory reminder that revenge is often violent and, from the perspective of Western societies that hold to the rule of law, senseless. But even those who possess only mild sympathies for vengeance, the very ones who love a good revenge movie or silently applaud seeing someone receive his just deserts, nonetheless still shudder when confronted with vengeance in the modern world that has all the markings of a barbaric past. And it is particularly troubling, not to mention confusing, when the vengeance is actually being delivered as judgments in a court of law.

In 2010, a Saudi Arabian judge, operating under strict Islamic law, asked several hospitals whether they would be willing to carry out a very specific, court-ordered punishment—to literally cut the spinal chord of a man who had just been convicted of a crime.

The law of the talion’s lineup of symmetrical punishments begins with a “life for a life” and descends to an “eye for an “eye,” after which limbs and other human body parts are matched up correspondingly. Ancient peoples surely got the idea of how the rule worked with its easy formula of bodily equivalence. Losses must be reclaimed in kind, measure for measure, the hallmark of equitable retribution. Modern people understand the talionic concept, too, but sometimes recoil at the grisly precision—whether it is Shakespeare’s “pound of flesh” or, in this case, the Saudi court’s ruling of a “spine for a spine.”

The Saudi judge wanted a hospital to permanently damage the defendant’s spine and render him paralyzed as an equivalent punishment for the defendant having once left a victim paralyzed after attacking him with a cleaver. The victim’s brother, Khaled al-Mutairi, said, “We are asking for our legal right under Islamic law. There is no better word than God’s word, ‘an eye for an eye.’”1

In such a case of legal retribution, many Western observers and human rights activists would wonder why depend on a court to mete out justice if it is going to be no more merciful than the most thuggish of biblical avengers. This Islamic court, no doubt, believed that it was exercising restraint and civility by not putting a cleaver in the hands of an avenger. Let a professional handle it. At least the hospital can assure precision in carrying out this especially tailored sentence. Placing the wrongdoer in the same position as his victim undoubtedly has talionic appeal, but many would have preferred for the court to impose a stiff jail sentence instead. A less bloodier outcome, for sure, but would it have been equally just? Was the Saudi court taking the talion to illogical extremes, or was it spot on? After all, the victim is forever paralyzed. Why should the wrongdoer receive a penalty lesser in degree than the damage he had already inflicted on his victim?

In August 2010, Bibi Aisha, an eighteen-year-old Afghani woman, wound up with her face on the cover of Time magazine. She wasn’t being featured as a cover girl, although the press attention she received was all on account of her looks. Aisha’s face—disfigured and grotesquely missing a nose and ears—brought her unwanted worldwide fame. Living in the Taliban’s version of the twenty-first century—a Pashtun tribal society in a remote region of Afghanistan—Aisha, at the age of twelve, and her younger sister, were awarded to the family of a Taliban fighter in settlement of a tribal dispute. Aisha’s uncle had killed a relative of the Taliban fighter and, pursuant to the custom known as baad, the girls were given over to the victim’s family to settle the blood debt.

When Aisha reached puberty she married the Taliban fighter, but since he was off fighting wars against the West, she and her sister were housed with the livestock of her in-laws, routinely beaten, and used as slaves. Eventually they tried to escape, but her husband tracked her down, cut off her nose and both of her ears and left her for dead. In Pashtun culture, a husband who has been shamed by his wife is thought to have lost his nose. The husband was therefore permitted, under religious law, to punish his wife in kind. He carried out a religious custom that would have made even a barbarian blanch—in taking a “nose for a nose.”2

Of course, Aisha’s husband still had his nose. Whatever wounded pride he felt in having a wife, who was being treated no better than a barnyard animal, try to leave him surely could not be the equivalent of cutting off her nose and ears. In the moral universe, and in any sensible reading of the talion, wounded pride is not equated with body parts.

Miraculously, Aisha survived this savagery and, aided by the charity of some who were horrified by what had happened to her, traveled to the United States to undergo eight months of reconstructive surgery. Quite unintentionally she emerged as the poster girl for a more complex appreciation of America’s war in Afghanistan. In addition to whatever justified vengeance 9/11 had provoked, there was also a pressing human rights concern. Women forced to live under Taliban rule were without legal rights, and virtual death sentences, like the one Aisha had received from the hands of her own husband, were all too commonplace.

Aisha was disfigured and dismembered under color of law, legitimized by the imprimatur of an alleged legal system—the Taliban fighter carried out what the law allowed as his remedy. But color of law in certain societies has no shadings, or the courts are truly colorblind, but only in the most warped and sadistic of ways. The Saudi court that imposed the sentence of a severed spine at least referred to the elegant logic of talionic law. The same could not be said for Aisha’s husband, whose understanding of proportionate punishment was neither moral revenge nor legal justice.

Afghanistan is also the site where those who commit “social crimes” are frequently sentenced to public executions by way of stoning. In August 2010, a twenty-five-year-old man, Khayyam, and a nineteen-year-old woman, Siddiqa, were sentenced to death for having an illegal sexual relationship. Khayyam was married and had two children and Siddiqa was engaged to marry, but the very idea of his divorce and her breaking off the engagement was impossible under Islamic law. So the couple eloped and ran away. The Ulema Council in the Kunduz Province determined that under Islamic law the proper penalty for such an offense was death by stoning. A spokesman for the Taliban said, “According to Islamic law, if someone commits a crime like that, we have our courts and we deal with such crimes based on Islamic law.”3

The couple was persuaded to return by their relatives, who also promised to acknowledge their marriage. On their return, however, the Taliban and two hundred villagers, which included Khayyam’s father and brother and Siddiqa’s brother, captured Khayyam and Siddiqa, and the lovers were stoned to death. One witness reported the crowd as being festive and cheered the stoning as if they were watching a true blood sport with a lethal end. “People were very happy seeing this. The couple did a bad thing.”⁴ That same month in the Badghis Province, a forty-one-year-old widow who was made pregnant by a man who had promised to marry her was convicted of fornication by a Taliban court. Her punishment: two hundred lashes with a whip followed by being shot to death.⁵

Such penalties under Shariah law are not uncommon throughout the Middle East and Persian Gulf. Many forget that Saddam Hussein ordered the beheading of over two hundred women for alleged acts of adultery, the only evidence coming from their husbands, who were not required to produce any evidence of infidelity. Their uncorroborated word was enough. In 2010, a Saudi Arabian court punished a female journalist, Rozanna al-Yami, with sixty lashes for working on the set of a television program where the male host discussed human sexuality, even going so far as to display sex toys. Rozanna, however, did not appear on camera, only worked as a television program coordinator, and had no involvement at all with the offending episode.⁶

In yet another 2010 case, a Saudi woman who was found sitting in a car with an unmarried man was gang raped by seven men (the man with whom she was sitting in the car was raped as well), and then sentenced to ninety lashes. (Her attackers were sentenced to prison for between ten months and five years.) A strict interpretation of Wahhabi law makes it a crime for a woman to be alone with a man who is not her husband or relative. When her lawyer appealed the decision on the grounds that the penalty was both excessive and nonsensical, the court increased her punishment to two hundred lashes and sentenced her to six months jail time. What’s more, the lawyer’s license was suspended.7

The rule of law can also become a rule of revulsion.

In another Saudi case invoking that same law that prohibited women from mingling with unmarried men who are not their relatives, a seventy-five-year-old widow was sentenced to forty lashes and four months in jail for having two young men bring loaves of bread to her home. One of the men was her nephew, but apparently he wasn’t a sufficiently close enough relative to spare her from this punishment.⁸

In Pakistan a woman who is raped will find no justice under the law. Until recently she had to overcome the Hudood ordinance, where, in order to prove rape, a woman was required to produce four witnesses. If she couldn’t do so, she was likely to be charged with adultery. The stigma of the rape and the likelihood of a failed prosecution was so great that few women tried.⁹ (The attempts to amend the rape laws in 2006 have done little to stem the problem, since rape victims are still too afraid to come forward, and the amended law added a new prosecution for fornication.) Thousands of women had been punished under the Hudood ordinance.

The story of Mukhtar Mai is emblematic of this widespread outrage. In 2002 she was ordered to be gang raped by a village council in retaliation for an alleged wrong committed by her brother. Ever since then she has been an outspoken critic of Pakistan’s legal system, calling worldwide attention to the crimes against women under the Hudood ordinance. Along the way she has become a hero to the human rights movement. At enormous personal risk she worked tirelessly to bring the six assailants who raped her to justice. She is still waiting for that justice. Pakistan’s highest court upheld the acquittals of five of the six men. Responding to the legal system’s outright failure to do justice after all these years, she said, “I am deeply upset by the decision of the Supreme Court. Now I don’t have confidence in any court. The Supreme Court will be responsible if something happens to me or my family.”10

Another less infamous rape in Pakistan, this one taking place in 2004, involved Ghazala Shaheen, whose uncle eloped with a woman from a higher social caste. The woman’s family demanded revenge, and a dozen men raided his niece’s home and kidnapped Ghazala and her mother. They were held for eleven days, and Ghazala was raped by two men. The local police made only two arrests and reported the matter as a kidnapping, intimidating Ghazala into not pressing charges for rape.¹¹

An Afghani woman, Gulnaz (who only used one name), was imprisoned for adultery after reporting that she had been raped. She was nineteen at the time and was sentenced to three years in prison. When she appealed the decision she was awarded a second trial, which resulted in another guilty verdict and an increase in the sentence to twelve years. While she was in prison she gave birth to the rapist’s child. The Afghani government granted her a pardon in 2011, but with the explicit understanding that she would marry the man who raped her. Gulnaz’s experience with the justice system of Afghanistan was all under color of law. “My rapist has destroyed my future,” she said. “No one will marry me after what he has done to me. So I must marry my rapist for my child’s sake. I don’t want people to call her a bastard and abuse my brothers. My brothers won’t have honor in our society until he marries me.”¹²

The loss of honor is invoked all over the world as a legitimate basis for vengeance. And there’s a natural coherence between revenge and justice, whether achieved by avengers or courts of law. Nonetheless, these penalties, issued under color of law, feel morally inconsistent with both justice and revenge—satisfying the criteria of neither. In some of these cases, actual judges imposed the sentences in courtroom settings, with lawyers present. Most important, the punishments were supported by actual laws, contained in sacred texts that have been recognized for over a thousand years. But despite the legal formalities, were these cases examples of justice simply because they involved court personnel, invoked codified rules, and were subject to judicial review, or were they acts of mindless revenge that violated the core principles of proportionality?

A court of law doesn’t necessary guarantee justice. These rulings were issued in the name of justice, and yet they clearly do not comport with any fundamental understanding of justice as practiced by constitutional democracies. Operating under the guise of law doesn’t automatically render the decrees of a court just. The same is true of revenge. Revenge that is unjust or excessive is not revenge, any more than stoning or beheading as a penalty for adultery can be recognized as justice in the moral universe. Private settlements of disputes that lack fairness are no less morally offensive than court orders that bear no relationship to justice—that, indeed, smack of injustice. There are as many examples of unjustified revenge as there are travesties of law. Legal systems are not exempt from moral scrutiny; and no authority can claim the moral high ground when its delivery of justice shocks the conscience and violates the very moral principle that justice must uphold.

Regardless of whether justice takes place in a courtroom or is placed in the hands of an avenger, the goal of vindicating victims is ever present. The pounding of a gavel or the delivery of a court decree cannot override this obligation. A final judgment that leaves victims very much in a state of irresolution can never be final, no matter how it is declared by a court of law. And it won’t be honored by those who experienced and witnessed the injustice firsthand. Similarly, any private act of vengeance that ignores the essential, predicate elements of revenge can never be justified. Prosecutors and judges should be held to the same exacting standards as any righteous, deputized avenger. In the cases discussed above, the injustice of the court decrees suffers from the same failing as unjustified revenge: the claimed moral injury did not exist and there was no true wrong that needed to be punished; and even if there was a wrong, the penalties—the removal of a nose and ears; the medieval lashings and stonings conducted by an entire community—were excessively disproportionate.

When discussing the conditions that justify revenge, it always seems to come down to honor, but honor goes both ways: the loss of honor that must be restored to victims; and the honor that compels revenge seekers and justice providers, whether they be private citizens or court officers, to undertake the duty to avenge and to do so honorably. Neither the avenger nor the judge receives an automatic pass in his delivery of justice; both are subject to the oversight and scrutiny of the moral universe. Avengers can go too far—the law of the talion becomes transgressed—and they lose their entitlement to take revenge; and courts can be unjust in underpunishing wrongdoers and ignoring the vested interest that victims have in seeing that justice is done. The righteous avenger and the judicious judge each share an inexorable obligation to get it right.

Courts of law are empowered with great responsibility. Whether they like it or not, judges, prosecutors, and the police are morally obligated to carry out their duties with a full appreciation of the stakes that are involved for victims. Blind justice means that the law will not prejudge the parties before the court; it does not mean, and should not mean, that the legal system is blind to the emotional realities of how the parties ended up in court in the first instance.

It can be understandably confusing when honor is invoked so liberally in connection with revenge. Lost honor gives rise to the demand for justice, but are all claims to lost honor the same? To self-servingly purport to have been a victim of a moral injury is not enough. Not all subjective feelings of shame can justify a retaliation. Cultural relativism aside, there is no license to an unqualified green light to seek vengeance for anyone who claims to have suffered an indignity. Moral injury must be held to some objective standard, otherwise every imagined slight, every perceived dis, ends up as a permissible justification for a reprisal.

If revenge must stand the test of entitlement, so, too, must the initial source of moral injury. It, too, has to be objectively reasonable—there must be an actual moral injury, otherwise the claimed right to vengeance will not be justified. In order to prevent sham acts of vengeance, the defense of one’s honor must be in response to a true loss of honor. Were that not the case, otherwise unprovoked, illegitimate attacks would unjustly cling to the imprimatur of vengeance. Revenge, and its relationship to justice, is subject to rules. Punishment is deserved precisely because the avenger has earned the right to punish.

Bibi Aisha’s husband invoked Islamic law in justifying the removal of his wife’s nose and ears—all on account of his lost honor. Whether this was accomplished by court order or by self-guided vengeance, the punishment was disproportionate and unjust. Subjective claims to lost honor must not elide the moral authority of revenge and cannot circumvent the rules of ven geance. In civil lawsuits brought in Western courtrooms, frivolous claims are routinely dismissed, with prejudice, and the attorneys who bring them are often sanctioned. The reasonableness of revenge should be held to no less of an objective standard.

What about honor killings and blood feuds? It is estimated that nearly half of the world’s peoples once practiced feuding. In many cultures around the world, especially among tribal societies and more remote states, honor killings are still the preferred manner to restore order and reclaim honor. Do these societies have a better handle on revenge and are they more honest about resorting to it, or are they simply stuck in a time warp, living in a forgotten world where civilization had not yet directed its wronged and wounded into modern courthouses?

In Iraq and Kurdistan, between the years 1991 and 2007, more than twelve thousand women were killed in the name of honor. And these honor killings continue. In 2010, Sirwa Hama Amin and Aram Iamal Rassool, two neighbors in northern Iraq, fell in love. But they never told their respective families. Instead, they carried on in secret, professing their love through text messages and e-mail, the only safe haven for those living in repressive societies where star-crossed lovers (along with freedom fighters) would be lost without access to social media.

Sirwa’s brother observed her texting Aram, and he, along with other relatives, threatened to drown her. She became both a prisoner of her own home and a battered sister. Eventually, she managed to escape and joined up with Aram. They went to the police and explained that their lives were in danger all because they wished to marry. Instead of finding sanctuary they found themselves arrested. But after appealing to a court they prevailed and were lawfully married—without the approval or consent of their families. Sirwa’s family finally agreed that if she and Aram left the village and never returned, they would not be hunted down. For nearly four months they lived but an hour away. One day, however, Aram opened the door and was met by several men, including one of his own brothers and his brother-in-law. Before a greeting was exchanged, seventeen bullets were fired into his chest. Sirwa survived the shootings although she was shot four times in her leg and hip. Today she lives with her young son and doesn’t leave the house without an armed escort.

One of Sirwa’s brothers said, rhetorically, “Why should she live after she has been that irresponsible about the honor of her family?” A neighbor of both families said, “The girl and the boy should be killed. It’s about honor. Honor is more important for us than religion.”13

Was Amram murdered in an act of justified vengeance for having dishonored the tribal customs of Kurdistan? Or was his death simply yet another tragic and confounding example of moral relativism being used to excuse practices that would be criminal in any other context?

Unjustified, disproportionate killing is killing, which can’t be sanitized by calling it revenge and thereby insulating murderous cultural practices from moral scrutiny. The moral purpose that gives rise to justified revenge should not be confused with “honor killings” that are empty of honor and set in motion by those who refuse to mark themselves present in the twenty-first century. These practices fail the basic tenets of the talion—they are disproportionate and provoke the recycling of unending blood feuds. Scores remain unsettled. Debts never get redeemed. Instead, the stakes are always raised, which makes peace impossible.

But this isn’t true of all societies who resort to vengeance. Some get it right, where honor is invoked honorably. There are locales all throughout the world that are without legal institutions and the rule of law. In spite of that they are, miraculously, not lawless. What they have is a working knowledge of the talion and a venerable history of honor killings. In such situations justice and revenge are more strikingly identical because, absent revenge, there would be no justice at all.

As Christopher Boehm pointed out in his classic anthropological study of feuding in Montenegro, “In many respects the morality of several thousand people who are living in a permanently settled tribal territory is unlike our own morality. There is less concern for legalistic maneuvering, and more for personal and clan reputation. There are no specialized police officers or judges, nor are there any prisons. But there are very powerful sanctions that shape behavior, and these operate both directly and indirectly, intentionally and automatically. Feuding was essentially a positively valued institution insofar as the moral system was concerned, in that it involved the upholding of honor. . . . In addition, . . . feuding served as a kind of sanction, because it suppressed certain kinds of immoral behaviors that people knew were likely to start feuds. They also knew that feuds were dangerous, stressful, economically costly, and generally inconvenient from a practical standpoint. . . . Feuding served as a substitute for such authority in that the probability of lethal retaliation and then a costly feud sharply curtailed certain socially disruptive behaviors.”14

Indeed, social anthropologist Max Gluckman labeled this phenomenon “peace in the feud,” the self-regulating principle that, while there are certainly costs and risks associated with defending one’s honor through retaliation, the outcome would be far worse in future encounters if the victim decided to remain passive and merely hope for the best.¹⁵ In many cultures around the world, the defense of honor supersedes all other values, including fear. And in cultures where honor killings are customary, there is always the anticipation of vengeance, which operates as its own deterrent. Failing to retaliate when it is expected and deserved only invites further harm. This is exactly the ethos that still governs inner-city drug dealers and Mafia wise guys and was once practiced widely by the highlanders of Scotland, Balkan clansman, Indochinese Mantagnards, Druze and Bedouin tribesman, and the frontiersmen who settled in the Appalachians and in the Wild West.

Each of these cultures adopted the same strategies for survival, in part because they had nowhere else to turn for justice but also because there was no better way to announce to their neighbors that toying with this tribe would be a deadly mistake. Taking matters into the hands of the tribe was not just a matter of honor, it was the only way to survive in otherwise violent, lawless societies. Steven Pinker observed that survival meant “cultivat[ing] a hair trigger for violent retaliation . . . against anyone who would test their resolve by signs of disrespect that could reveal them to be easy pickings.”¹⁶

Once again, such a tribal, tactical survival strategy contradicts the conventional thinking that vengeance, by definition, is always emotional, impulsive, and irrational, that it is a product of momentary rage, that on reflection no rational person would ever resort to it. Like the fallacy of the rational actor model as applied to revenge, here, too, when cultures encourage self-help, refuse to allow wrongdoers to get away with murder, and make it widely known that defending the tribe’s honor is a badge of honor and a reputation worth having, the reasons to avenge are just as much steeped in logic as in emotion.

William Ian Miller explained the linguistic origins of the apparent paradox of finding peace in the feud. The Hebrew word “shalom” shares the root for the words “peace” and “pay” with similar words in Indo-European languages. Miller observed that, “‘Shalom’ means to pay, to make whole, a term that could be equally substituted for ‘revenge.’ It means to be made whole again, to be paid back in kind, and it’s still the modern Hebrew word for ‘pay.’ It’s also the word for ‘peace.’ Why? Because once you’ve been adequately compensated, once the balance is even, there can be peace.”17

Revenge is a way to keep the peace—especially in societies where private citizens must secure their own safety because there are no public peace officers. The more isolated the region, the more insulated it is from the outside world, the more underground it remains from the mainstream, the more likely that vengeance will determine how order is kept and disputes resolved. Repayment must occur; the only question is: Who is obligated to do it? This is why no nation, culture, or people on earth are strangers to revenge. Justice must be delivered in some morally recognizable form.

In various corners of the world, revenge that occurs outside of courtrooms and judicial systems is still very much real. For certain tribal societies it wouldn’t be possible to fully renounce private vengeance. Doing so would result in chaos, which is ironic since Western societies believe that allowing citizens to take the law into their own hands is the very essence of chaos, a quickstep to moral surrender. And yet the private settlement of disputes still functions as a workable system of justice in many parts of the world.

Actually, for many of these societies, America’s outright ban on vengeance is an example of moral confusion, where some rights are valued above others. In the United States, certain liberties, such as speech and religion, are deemed fundamental and inviolable under the Constitution. The rights of victims to have wrongdoers properly punished are not regarded as rights at all, however. In fact, they are sacrificed to other considerations—judicial economy, administrative efficiency, and the general presumption of innocence, which highlights a long list of rights granted the accused. Guilty people are so often set free, and many more will not be punished commensurate with their crimes. What is legally acceptable in the United States can be found to be morally intolerable in other parts of the world. In societies where the repayment of moral debts through vengeance is the very pinnacle of justice, America’s judicial system can seem lacking, if not altogether misdirected. After all, the justice that wrongdoers deserve and that victims demand is a right that a moral society should not take so lightly.

In Sicily, not unlike the portrayals of the Mafia in The Godfather and The Sopranos, no one looks to the law for justice and legal authorities are relied on for neither vengeance nor justice.18 The core principle of omerta obligates Sicilians never to cooperate with the legal system. In Montenegro, it is morally incumbent to retaliate with a revenge homicide following the killing of a member of their society. Christopher Boehm explains that, “after a first killing had occurred, the retaliatory homicide that followed was considered not only to be reasonable and proper but also to be morally necessary by traditional Montenegrin standards.”¹⁹ Savo Todorovic explained the meaning of osveta (vengeance) as “a kind of spiritual fulfillment. You have killed my son, so I killed yours; I have taken revenge for that, so I now sit peacefully in my chair. There you are.’”²⁰ Milovan Djilas, an avenger from the Balkans, described the emotions generated by revenge as “an overpowering and consuming fire. . . . Vengeance is not hatred, but the wildest, sweetest kind of drunkenness, both for those who must wreak vengeance and for those who wish to be avenged.”²¹

And what about the ditherers, the hapless Hamlets and the nervous wrecks? The poor soul who neglects to avenge a father, a murdered relative, or a deceived daughter “can no longer appear in public. Nobody speaks to him; he has to remain silent. If he raises his voice to emit an opinion, people will say to him: avenge yourself first, and then you can state your point of view.”²² In Corsica, the reluctant avenger is exposed to a serious form of public reproach known as rimbecco, which takes place either by way of small insults or the moral revulsion of the entire community. To fail to avenge a murdered father essentially makes it impossible to show one’s face. The son might spend a lifetime surrounded by a community of cold shoulders and icy stares.

J. Busquet notes that “the rimbecco can occur at any moment and under any guise. It does not even need to express itself in words; an ironical smile, a contemptuous turning away of the head, a certain condescending look—there are a thousand small insults which at all times of day remind the unhappy victim of how he has fallen in the esteem of his compatriots.”²³

This concept sounds so foreign and strange, and it is, but it’s not entirely unfamiliar. The recently remade film True Grit seems so fanciful and curious to modern-day audiences. As revenge movies go, this one stands out because the putative avenger is a young girl. Generally speaking, it’s easy to root for the avenger because his or her quest is so righteous. But not all avengers are equally believable. We can appreciate their heartache and their sense of duty, but we doubt their capacity to accomplish their aim. We believe that Dirty Harry and Rambo are capable of triumphing over impossible odds in order to even the score. But what are we to make of a fourteen-year-old girl, in the Wild West of all places, who insists on avenging her father? What does teenage vindication look like when one is neither a wizard from Harry Potter nor a vampire or werewolf from Twilight?

Mattie Ross, the heroine from True Grit, travels far to make sure that the man who murdered her father is brought to justice.²⁵ The local sheriff, however, doesn’t want the job of tracking down her father’s killer. The wrongdoer, Tom Chaney, has already decamped into Indian territory. The sheriff has his own townspeople to protect, and chasing after Chaney will be dangerous and possibly futile. He suggests that the young girl simply go home to her mother and younger siblings. But Mattie can’t go home; she won’t go home and she will not accept that the justice owed to her father is not achievable. There is no going home without Tom Chaney being made to pay the price for the debt owed to her family. In refusing to turn back, Mattie knows that she must find someone of sufficient true grit who will assist her in doing her duty. And she even brings along her own gun just in case she will be called on to settle the score herself, the duty falling squarely on her teenage shoulders.

What else can a daughter do? The law wouldn’t fulfill its obligation so the daughter must find her own outsized grit to perform the obligation herself. There is no other place to turn. And she can’t simply return home—not because she would be exposed to a cowboy version of a Corsican’s rimbecco but because her father’s memory, and the moral outrage that his killer managed to go unpunished, would forever haunt her. To be worthy of her father’s love Mattie must honor his memory and settle his accounts.

The moral and cultural obligation of family members to avenge their murdered loved ones is powerful indeed. It crosses all cultures and applies to all nations. The fictional Hamlet and Mattie Ross lived in different centuries and continents, and they went about avenging their fathers quite differently, but yet they both understood, along with all those who rooted them on, what must be done without having someone remind them. This self-knowledge, this most innate of all intuitions, goes to the very essence of what it means to be human. And it is imbedded in the complicated circuitry of the human brain. Those who choose to ignore the signals and set aside the obligation will be forever plagued by worst kind of Fifth Commandment violation—the dishonoring of an unavenged parent. Spouses and children are deeply mindful of this rule. This is why victims expect so much from police, prosecutors, and judges: they are plainly aware of their duty; they know the absolute importance of what they have delegated to strangers; and they have every reason to insist that justice be done right.

The deep-seated relationship among honor, family obligation, and revenge is the lifeblood of blood feuds and honor killings. In Albania, which has been the setting of blood feuds for more than three thousand years, revenge is codified as the law of the land, the customary law that has been observed for centuries by the northern clans of the Albanian highlands.26 Not unlike the citizens of Sicily, no Albanian truly believes that the government is a credible or reliable provider of justice. It makes far more sense for the populace to rely on a system based on the canonical past—medieval as it may be. As one Albanian, Sophie Arie Puke, explains it, “Everyone knows the law doesn’t work here. You can bribe your way out in no time. . . . The only way to make killers really pay is to take back the blood.”²⁷

The lesson, time and again and all over the world, is that when the law fails and victims are deprived of the leveling that comes with revenge, the aggrieved will invariably resort to other time-honored methods of making things right—even if it requires resurrecting ancient norms or resorting to street justice.

The Kanun, or the canon, is the Albanian code that regulates blood feuds, along with other aspects of human behavior. Humanitarian groups estimate that a thousand Albanians are killed each year from this widely accepted practice of vendetta killings, all mandated under the Kanun.28 It begins with the following principle, Albania’s version of an eye for an eye: “Whoever kills will be killed. Blood is avenged with blood.” The death of a victim can be avenged only by taking out a vendetta against the killer. In fact, there are 168 rules on how vengeance can properly be undertaken—including the manner of retaliation and the amount that will satisfy the moral debt.²⁹ Even women are deployed in this ritual, not as revenge takers but as revenge cheerleaders. If the Albanian justice system happens to get to the wrongdoer first, the duty of the family to avenge is not extinguished. When the wrongdoer is finally released from prison he knows that his debt to the victim still survives. Vengeance alone can cancel the debt. One of the victim’s relatives, assigned the task of settling the score, will be waiting to greet the wrongdoer on his release.

Such a scene nearly played itself out not in Albania—but in present-day Rhode Island. In 1975, Michael Woodmansee was sentenced to forty years in prison for gruesomely murdering a five-year-old boy, Jason Foreman. (Woodmansee ate the boy’s flesh and shellacked his bones.) Rhode Island has an “earned time” law, which permits the early release of prison inmates for good behavior and for having worked prison jobs during their incarceration. Woodmansee, scheduled to be released in August 2011, would have served only twenty-eight years of his negotiated plea. From the moment of sentencing, with the trial aborted for a plea bargain, Woodmansee had already shortchanged the state of Rhode Island and the boy’s father, John Foreman, of what he had owed. Now it was measurably worse. On hearing that his son’s murderer was soon to be a free man, Foreman said, “If this man is released anywhere in my vicinity, or if I can find him after the fact, I do intend to kill this man.”³⁰

By sheer coincidence and without any fanfare, a long-standing Albanian custom was almost adopted by an aggrieved Rhode Island father. And whether one is Albanian or not, most people around the country sympathized with Foreman’s ordeal and wondered whether he shouldn’t have been the first to greet his son’s murderer on release from prison, where the debt could finally be redeemed.

With the fall of communism in Albania (the last of the Eastern Bloc countries and perhaps the most oppressive of them), a democratically elected government came to power, along with functioning institutions and a justice system that was supposed to extend throughout the entire country. But corruption has been rampant, and the people who live in the mountainous regions of northern Albania continue to resort to the Kanun to resolve their disputes. The government has been ineffective in stopping it. What worked in Albania’s medieval past continues to be relied on even into the twenty-first century.

And the reasons are obvious and unsurprising. What all revenge societies have in common is either a nonexistent legal system or an ineffectual one. If not given a meaningful opportunity for justice, the avenger is left with no other choice. The moral imperative of justice, which is cross-cultural and truly global, is never negotiable. Governments may routinely cheapen justice with the discounting formula of plea bargains, but victims know that guilt can’t be negotiated downward, that punishment in the moral universe can’t be reduced merely to free up a jail cell. If governments truly wish to take vengeance out of the hands of individuals, legal systems will have to become more dependable in delivering justice. The deficiencies and moral corruptions of the law serves notice to individuals that this most vital responsibility of the state might be better trusted to the hands of a truly dedicated avenger.

The irony is that, despite their archaic appearance, revenge cultures have much in common with ardent free-market capitalists. The inefficiencies and incompetence of controlled economies is the best justification for the free hand of laissez-faire. And, here, too, the failure of governments to deliver justice consistently provides a justification for individuals to keep their options open when it comes to revenge. The private enterprise of vengeance becomes a far more reliable dispenser of just deserts. And in some cultures where there isn’t even the pretense of a legal system, individuals are forced into the business of handling justice privately. Remember Bonasera’s wise words: “For justice, we must go to the Godfather.”

In some nations around the world other than the United States, it’s even worse.

The villagers of northern Albania have been placed in the unavoidable position of revenge takers, with predictable results. Since the reinstatement of the Kanun, twenty-eight hundred feuds have broken out across the Albanian countryside. Families have gone into hiding; boys have stayed home from school, knowing that they are likely targets of retaliatory revenge. Albania is one contemporary example of what happens to an entire nation when the state refuses to take its revenge responsibility seriously.

The pervasiveness and social cost of blood feuds, vendettas, and honor killings is too much for most people to stomach. There are sensible reasons, owing much to our aversion to the ghastly and the gruesome, why we should prefer assigning vengeance to professional authorities. Leaving it up to morally wounded individuals can seem downright savage. As William Ian Miller suggests, “Conventional wisdom conceives of vengeance cultures as barely cultured at all, all id and no superego: big dumb brutes looking for excuses to kill.”31 And as sociologist Roger Gould observes, revenge is the default position for many societies. “What may look like savagery to people accustomed to rational-bureaucratic justice systems,” he writes, “is often the only sensible course of action in a context in which disputes are inevitable, third-party intervention is unavailable, and a failure to retaliate might invite further offenses.”³²

Even if we were to accept that these worldwide, time-honored, and time-tested principles of revenge actually work, and even if they achieve a moral clarity that byzantine legal systems never come close to obtaining, how can we allow individuals to go off the prix fixe menu of justice and order up their own revenge à la carte? After all, we still live under a system of laws even if the application of those laws has not always improved on the justice of an earlier age. Our first inclination is to say: This is the system we have; it’s surely not perfect, but a system of laws depends on the acceptance and consensus of its citizens to obey those laws and, when necessary, learn to live with its mistakes.

But that’s not a natural impulse, especially when the operation of the legal system so often trivializes the plight of victims forced to endure a lifetime knowing that they had abdicated their responsibility and allowed a moral injury to go unanswered. We don’t wish to witness barbarism masquerading as vengeance, but neither are we able to tolerate a moral outrage pretending to be justice.

In 2003, in a Bronx, New York, courtroom, Rasool Ashishi, from Brooklyn via Yemen, was convicted of manslaughter in the shooting death of his uncle, Abdullah Hassian. He was sentenced to eighteen years in prison. Ashishi confessed on the night he was arrested that he took a cab from Brooklyn to his uncle’s store in the Bronx. When his uncle arrived he called out his name and fired several bullets, fatally wounding him in the neck. Ashishi said that his brother was killed in Yemen by one of his uncles (not Hassian, but a different uncle), and the custom in Yemen obligated him to avenge the death of his brother by killing some other member of the wrongdoer’s family.33 When such cultural customs make their way over to the United States, emigrating with the same adaptability as a suitcase or a music craze, people naturally recoil in horror. Such lawless practices should not be swallowed whole within the melting pot, celebrated like the Feast of San Gennaro or the Chinatown Lunar New Year Festival. Self-help shouldn’t be one of those cultural customs that are allowed to pass through Customs.

Dexter Filkins, at the time a reporter for the New York Times, is an old-school war correspondent. In his book The Forever War, he recounts his experience covering the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and their devastating implications both within and beyond the Green Zone. His anecdotes of what he witnessed have the same emotional resonance of other wartime reportage, but in Iraq and Afghanistan, there is not just the madness of war but also the conflict of cultures, the sense that what is being seen is not just surreal, but virtually from another planet.

Filkins tells a story about the Sunni Awakening and how at least some of the motivation of the insurgents had less to do with retaking control of the country than with the settling of family debts. Abu Marwa, an insurgent with the Islamic Army of Iraq, killed two Syrian members of al-Qaeda. These two confirmed and strategic kills, however, were only incidentally related to the greater conflict. In addition to fighting al-Qaeda, Marwa sought to avenge the murder of his uncle. And he wasn’t satisfied with just restoring his family’s honor. Vengeance would not be complete unless he delivered the blood of his uncle’s murderers in vials to his widowed aunt. “She drank the blood of the Syrians,” Marwa said. “You see. We were for revenge. She was filled with revenge.”34 A reviewer of Filkins’s book, Lee H. Hamilton, a former congressman and the cochairman of the Iraq Study Group, wrote ruefully about Marwa’s declaration, “These are haunting words amid claims of ‘victory’ in Iraq.” His point seems to be: How could we claim to be winning a war in Iraq if those fighting beside us would drain the blood from our enemies, bottle it up like Coke, and have their aunts drink it down in celebration? Hamilton wondered whether Marwa was an honorable military officer or an insane nephew; what kind of wartime partners are these people?

Clearly, the former congressman rejected any possibility that Marwa’s gesture, which seems extreme when viewed through Western eyes, could actually be a rational one—what a man of honor is expected to do in that part of the world. In his review, Hamilton also recalls another of Filkins’s anecdotes, this one a 1998 public execution in Kabul, Afghanistan, in which over the loudspeakers one could hear the chant, “In revenge there is life.” Hamilton sums up by stating the obvious, “This maxim is . . . foreign to American ears.”³⁵

Yes, that is true. Given how squeamish and intellectually dishonest Americans are when it comes to vengeance, it is unlikely that in carrying out a death sentence at a state penitentiary, the warden would openly broadcast the words, “in revenge there is life” just before inserting the lethal injection. Preachers from every corner of the country would whip out their books of Matthew and invoke the words of Jesus to “love one’s enemies” and “to turn the other cheek.” Daytime TV talk shows and talk radio would pronounce this episode of lustful vengeance as still another example of America’s moral decline. Others would simply be revolted by such a shameless expression of raw vengeance.

Yet, if the family of a victim whose life was taken by an inmate on death row came to watch the execution and issued the statement, “in this act of justice there is finally closure and the possibility of moving on with our lives”—words not so very different from those that blared through the loudspeakers in a military complex in Kabul—there would have been no public outcry. The cultural context was different, for sure, but the meaning was the same. With justice as the stated value behind the statement, no one would have given it a second thought—the very utterance of the word itself is always self-validating. But the outcome and the motivation of the speaker were identical. In the end all that mattered was that the death was deserved and justice was done. Bear in mind, though, one incident sounded of bloodlust, while the other spoke words of closure and repair, which made the latter acceptable even though both speakers were merely out for the same vindication.

Around the world there are, actually, revenge customs that would be regarded as more civil than what we have just discussed, in part because they mirror the civil remedies offered in American courtrooms. Blood for blood certainly makes many people cringe. However there are other types of exchanges that satisfy the law of the talion without insisting on an exact equivalence of body parts. A rough measure sometimes serves equally well and it doesn’t require having to open the spigots to a blood bath.

Many cultures allow for blood money to be paid in compensation for loss and in satisfaction of a revenge debt. Icelandic tribes created an elaborate compensatory tort model, establishing valuations for any number of losses and injuries—the earliest known worker’s compensation laws or strict liability rules where damages are predetermined.36 These Icelandic tribes produced a compensatory system that resembled civil remedies in tort. One should not have to receive an actual limb to satisfy the avenger’s duty to get even, with precision—measure for measure. A monetary value can be placed on every conceivable loss or injury. Taking its cue from ancient Iceland, the tort lawyers of today who deal in bodily injury and worker’s compensation can instantly recite the value of an index finger on the right hand of a machinist who is fifty years old and earns $75,000 a year. There are also punitive damages in civil tort cases, where the assigned value is not just to compensate the victim but also to punish the wrongdoer. The objective is to attach a monetary sum of such magnitude that it reciprocates the hurt.

Other cultures refuse to accept money because to do so devalues the debt—precisely because it reduces the injury to money. Money cannot adequately compensate for true loss, and so it cannot be a replacement for a true talionic remedy. All monetary remedies in such cases are, by definition, unfavorable discounts, dishonoring the memory of the victim by trivializing his or her experience of being victimized. Many Holocaust survivors, for instance, refused restitution payments from Germany because it would be tantamount to accepting blood money—allowing the Germans to settle their debt to the Jewish people and thereby assuage their collective guilt. Since true compensation in such instances of atrocity is impossible, and the unfortunate German word for these payments was Wiedergutmachung, which means “to make whole or well again,” many Jews simply wouldn’t let the Germans off so easy. After all, “reparations” means to repair, and the consolidated annihilation that was the Holocaust was most definitely beyond repair. The Jewish people would never be “made whole again.” If revenge and justice is obligatory, then it can’t simply be bought off—it has to be performed and paid back. As one Albanian said: “It’s never settled with money. Because it’s a shame to settle for money. I have never seen it settled without blood.”37

Perhaps this is what Quentin Tarantino had in mind in bringing Inglorious Basterds to movie screens, or what was behind the recent film The Debt (2011), and what motivated the true story depicted in Rich Cohen’s seminal book The Avengers.

But why should victims stand on ceremony and deny themselves monetary compensation and at least some relief all on account of principle? Why insist on receiving nothing if not blood?

In Iran, the families of victims are offered blood money as compensation, a prescribed payment based on who the victim was—male or female, child or adult. But the wrongdoer still must go to jail. It is a Persian mix of civil and criminal law. Money cannot cancel out a deserved punishment. And the victim’s family retains the option to seek a higher level of punishment, which, if he or she chooses, might even include the death penalty.³⁸ Iran is not a model society of human rights or, for that matter, the rule of law. But oddly enough, when it comes to punishing wrongdoers and satisfying victims, it surely is unique among many nations of the world. Bizarrely, at least with respect to the obligation of the legal system to avenge victims, Iran comes closest to getting it right.

In Iranian criminal courts, the victim is always the centerpiece of a trial—not just Exhibit A, the complaining but emasculated witness, but a full partner in the proceedings. In a case of premeditated murder in which the crime was proven in a court of law, the decision to sentence the wrongdoer to death is made by the victim’s family—all under the supervision of a judge. The surviving family might refuse blood money because it would insult the memory of the deceased by cheapening a life and allowing the wrongdoer to avoid punishment with a bribe. In such circumstances, the government will gladly perform the necessary and final act of revenge on the victim’s behalf, treating it as a morally legitimate request carried out with the force of law. And all throughout, victims are welcomed as equal participants in the prosecutorial and sentencing phases of criminal justice.

In 2004, Ameneh Bahrami was blinded when a fellow student at the University of Tehran poured a bucket of acid on her face. During the two prior years she had rejected the unwanted advances of Mojid Movahedi, and for this he decided to ruin her life. The attack left her not only blinded but horribly disfigured as well. In 2008, an Iranian court convicted Movahedi of the crime. Bahrami insisted that the court issue a sentence that would force Movahedi to suffer the same fate: a legally supervised blinding with a doctor dropping acid into Movahedi’s eyes. “Precisely what he did to me, he should suffer himself,” Bahrami said. “That is what I continue to live for.”39 The court agreed with her eye-for-an-eye punishment, finding support for this ruling under Islamic law. When it finally came time to carry out the penalty in 2011, with a physician standing ready to even the score, Bahrami suddenly had a change of heart. “I have drawn back from vengeance,” she said, “but perpetrators of crimes should know that this is their true punishment.” Movahedi was directed to return to prison where he will remain until he can come up with $200,000 as a restitution payment to the woman who spared his life.⁴⁰

Once again, when we think of revenge, we instantly imagine societies that have not kept pace with the march of time. If we are moving forward and other countries and cultures are standing still—or, even worse, taking a step backward—then their version of vengeance must not be something to emulate. If one accepts as true that justice is simply revenge by another name, then the way vengeance is performed around the world is further proof of the talion’s versatility. We’re all ultimately committed to the same goal—justice. We just take different paths, even while some of those paths frighten us. Revenge and justice mirror the moral relativism debate. In some cultures revenge is bloodier—hence, blood revenge. But we’re all, ultimately, wishing to do what’s just. And, yet, we want to believe that a legal system such as ours, flawed though it might be, is superior, in an absolute sense, to any honor culture or revenge society that would empower its people to punish one another—and to do so with such avowedly vindictive enthusiasm.

In Tuscany, a vendetta can be delayed for thirty years in order to drive the wrongdoer mad and to preserve the memorial power of the deed. In Iceland, a severed head was used to inflame the revenge passions of the kinsmen. Similarly, in Corsica, Albania, and Scotland, the victim’s bloodied shirt was paraded around to remind the community of what was done and what now must be done in retaliation. One revenge technique that was popular in Sicily was called goating, which involved binding the wrongdoer’s feet to a rope that was also attached to his throat.41 He is then placed inside the trunk of a car. If the unfortunate wrongdoer moves, he strangles himself. But when revenge societies resort to such sadistic methods of obtaining vengeance, those who live in “civil” societies have a hard time not judging the avenger as harshly as the original wrongdoer—sometimes more so. Perhaps there is comfort in knowing that guns still remain the favorite weapon of choice for Sicilian revenge. Goating seems prehistoric and irredeemable by comparison.

And women are not exempt from these practices. Some cultures encourage female dirge singers at funerals. Women in Southern Greece sing lullabies of revenge to the sons of fathers who have been murdered.⁴² The songs are intended to insure that the children will always remember how and why they became fatherless. On reaching adulthood they will have been subliminally conditioned to do their duty and to take their revenge. Sicilian mothers would also sing lullabies to their children as a reminder of their duty to honor their dead fathers by redeeming the payback owed to them. Apparently there are no hesitant Hamlets among the Greeks and Sicilians. The idea of inheriting the obligation to avenge was common among many cultures. The practice in Bedouin tribes is still to bequeath grudges to succeeding generations. There is an old proverb: “If a man takes revenge after forty years, he was in a hurry.”⁴³

Evolutionary psychologists Martin Wilson and Margo Daly have observed how universal these rituals can be. “In societies from every corner of the globe, we can read of vows to avenge a slain father or brother, and of the rituals that sanctify those vows—of a mother raising her son to avenge a father who died in the avenger’s infancy, or graveside vows, of drinking the deceased kinsman’s blood as a covenant, or keeping his bloody garment as a relic.”44

Albanians would boil the wrongdoer’s blood after the taking of revenge.⁴⁵ Montenegrins regarded the boiling of blood as a psychological necessity.⁴⁶ In New Zealand, when a rival chieftain was killed during a war, his body would be chopped up, roasted, and eaten by the victorious tribe.⁴⁷ Southern Slavic women were known to have their infant children sleep beside the bloodied shirt of a murdered father.⁴⁸ In nineteenth-century Corsica, revenge was preceded by a ritual ceremony in which the avenger publically proclaimed his notice of intent to seek revenge.

Cambodians have taken the talion and turned it, literally, on its head. In Cambodian culture an eye for an eye is an inappropriate, insufficient standard of measurement in determining what constitutes justifiable revenge. Indeed, Cambodians are firm believers in disproportionate retaliation. Why should the victim only be made even? A victim who is morally obligated to repay shouldn’t simply settle the score. He or she should run up the score. Settlements usually mean settling for less—whether it be for love or in revenge. But with revenge, the victim is a casualty of another’s wrong. He did not consent to being made part of a revenge story. If there is a revenge debt to be repaid, the honor culture of Cambodia requires that interest be paid along with the principal—tacked on as a bonus, for the trouble of having to undertake the laborious and emotionally wrenching work that is demanded of the avenger. Call it an eye for an eye, plus interest.

Vengeance in Cambodia surpasses the original harm and produces a lopsided measurement—more like a head for an eye, tit for tat with an extra jab for good measure.⁴⁹ Victims who must become avengers would never have found themselves in the position of creditor had it not been for the wrongdoer’s debt. Cambodians claim a premium for interrupting the life of an otherwise unsuspecting avenger. To be made a victim is always a severe imposition, so getting even can’t possibly be enough to settle the score.

It is not at all surprising that Cambodians take their revenge so seriously or have doubled-down on the principle of proportionate punishment. In the aftermath of the Cambodian genocide and the mass murders inflicted by the Khmer Rouge, the sheer massive scale of the crime required an expanded vision of the talion, which the culture of Cambodia had already long recognized. Cambodians may not have all availed themselves of this remedy, since most were willing to allow the judicial system to resolve such matters, but most everyone was certain of their entitlement to the full measure of the relief, and then some. More about this later. This quirky take on the talion, however, demonstrates once again that the amount of vengeance one is permitted to take is always a subtle undertaking. One person’s nominal interest payment is another’s highway robbery.

These various examples of how vengeance is practiced in certain cultures, however, can make even the most ardent avenger sprint over to the local courthouse, plead for mercy, and surrender the job. The rule of law, by comparison, even at its most chaotic, always comes across as more sober and sedate. Maybe human beings can’t be trusted with revenge on their own terms. “Wild justice,” as Sir Francis Bacon once famously wrote about revenge, suggests that even if revenge and justice are the same, vengeance carries with it a native wildness that civilized people abhor.

In spite of all the revulsion, there are certain things constitutional legal systems can learn from the gritty world of honor killings. After all, what makes tribal cultures resort to revenge is precisely the absence of legal authorities that could be depended on to operate just as reliably as righteous avengers. If governments could promise to do it, and do it well, there would never be a need for self-help.

And that’s why self-help is typically deployed in urban underworlds and rural frontiers, regions where there is no reliable external and coercive authority that can provide justice. These are places that are beyond the reach of the law, where women and children are vulnerable and where private property can be easily stolen. Without vengeance there would be no limits on bad behavior. And in such places groups resort to their own versions of self-help, known as blood revenge—blood is shed, sometimes vicariously by blood relatives. Yes, where there is vengeance there is also often blood, but not always wasted blood. Justifiable revenge demands only that there be blood for blood; a blood bath is neither required nor allowed. Everyone is on notice that when a moral debt is created, any member of the wrongdoer’s family can become a target for retaliation.

In each of these instances, whether in tribal societies, urban ghettos, or the blood feuds of Eastern Kentucky, the honor of the group is primarily what is being tested: Will it show itself to be capable of defending its members should one of them come under attack; will it develop a reputation for standing its ground, which is the only way to ensure that its assets won’t be stolen?

Some anthropologists, historians, and sociologists, such as Heinrich Brunner and F. W. Maitland, have argued that vengeance was always an irrational and crude method of legal redress.⁵¹ Primitive societies would naturally dispense with revenge once a legal system presented itself as a more viable and civilized alternative. Blood revenge also confounded the rational choice theorists, who reasoned that since vengeance always involved unacceptable risks, no one in their right mind would knowingly engage in such self-defeating behavior—no matter what the governing ethos of the tribe.⁵²

Not surprisingly, even in the United States there are wide regional differences in the acceptability of certain practices and in the attitudes of its citizens toward revenge. Steven Pinker has observed that southern states, for instance, have placed fewer restrictions on gun ownership, have allowed homeowners to shoot an assailant or burglar without having to retreat first, are more likely to tolerate spanking and corporeal punishment, tend to be more hawkish on issues of national defense, and, finally, are much more predisposed to execute their homicidal criminals.⁵³ Moreover, southern states permitted the practice of dueling to a larger degree, and it lasted much later in time, as an honorable, efficient, and low-cost way to resolve the private settlement of disputes.

England and France, of course, experienced a longer history of their citizens reclaiming their honor by way of dueling. Challenging an antagonist to a duel was widely accepted as the preferred blood sport practiced by men of honor. America contributed its own mark to the culture of dueling, and added a political dimension, as well: various political figures, and even one arguable Founding Father, settled their differences with pistols at dawn. President Andrew Jackson won two duels and tried to provoke a third. Up north in New Jersey, the very first treasury secretary of the United Sates, Alexander Hamilton, was not so fortunate. Hamilton was killed in a duel with then Vice President Aaron Burr.54

Around the world and across cultures, vengeance served multiple purposes: it kept the peace and restored honor; it provided a sum certainty of justice; it served as the very instrument and measuring stick of justice; it deterred crime and gave necessary pause to evil intention; and it kept memory alive by obligating relatives and tribal clansmen to embrace the moral duty to avenge their dead.

And there was something else, too. Vengeance taught the world about collective responsibility, which is an invaluable lesson for a species so prone to obsessive blame shifting and the avoidance of guilt. One way to keep the peace and discourage bad behavior is to enlarge the circle of intimates who might ultimately become the targets of revenge. Make people responsible not simply for their own misdeeds but also for the criminality, indiscretions, and poor judgment of those, technically, under their watch. In societies that practice blood feuds, maintaining law and order and settling scores are not confined to the wrongdoers who initiated the feud.⁵⁵ The deterrent effect was enhanced by imposing a punishment of collective responsibility on the relatives of wrongdoers. The binding of liability, making it self-executing among family members, forced everyone to exercise greater caution and to use better judgment—to think twice before committing crimes. The wrong may have commenced with an individual act that created a debt, but many people might be called on to pay the price for that debt. Everyone was placed on notice that the price of harming another could prove very costly for an entire family.

As Charles K. B. Barton notes, “Any member of the offending group constitutes a legitimate target for revenge because they are all guilty on account of their shared group identity.”56

Assuming moral responsibility, much less legal guilt, for the actions of others is an alien concept in American jurisprudence. In the United States, as well as in most Western nations, citizens are judged as individuals and liability is assigned and guilt proven based on overt, voluntary actions. Without an affirmative act, no legal duty can be expected of someone who is merely standing around, minding his or her own business. One has to move a muscle, initiate some action, and take a step forward. Only then can his or her actions be counted. We are most certainly not our brother’s keeper under American law. We are truly free agents, responsible only for our own voluntary, individual acts. And we cannot be judged unless judgment is based on something we have actually done, and only in connection with our individual deeds. Unless a person chooses to act and her actions are the proximate cause of a crime or results in harm, she cannot be held legally responsible. A conspiracy among confederates who all agree to participate in a crime is typically the only way for an individual to be held culpable for the actions of another. Without an overtly criminal or tortuous act that has a causal connection to a loss or injury, one is unlikely to ever be a defendant in an American courtroom. Guilt is a legal term; responsibility is a moral one, and under the law they have very little to do with one another—the legal basis on which people are judged stands apart from moral concerns.

But this is not true in revenge cultures and feuding societies. By virtue of their self-regulating existence, these societies increase the numbers of people who can be held responsible for committing a wrong. Families and communities are tied to one another not just by blood but also by a broad sense of duty. A community cannot blithely pretend that individuals are free to commit crimes against others without the consequences of those actions being shared by all.

In such societies, moral responsibility is not so easily set apart from legal duty. In fact, in tribal cultures where individuals are permitted if not expected to take the law into their own hands, moral responsibility supersedes legal duty. The boundaries of moral responsibility are enlarged. Legal duty holds too few people ultimately accountable. In revenge cultures, everyone knows that they might become the target of a relative’s revenge debt. And for this reason all family members must be kept in line; the deviants must be doubly watched. No one can be permitted to act in complete, reckless disregard of what his harmful actions toward another could mean for the entire group. There is the archetypal account of the kindly uncle who is willing to pay off a loan shark in order to clean up a no-good nephew’s gambling habit. The stakes are much higher in revenge cultures. An uncle might have to give up much more of himself to cancel out the consequences of his nephew’s poor choices.

This expansive application of vengeance can become the ultimate deterrent: the knowledge that one’s family will become equally vulnerable to the righteous claims of the avenger, that the debts of the fathers are collectible against their wives, brothers, sons, and daughters, are powerful incentives to never find oneself in moral debt to another. In revenge societies the target of vengeance might not be the actual person who caused the original loss or injury but, instead, someone in close enough relational proximity to the wrongdoer to be held equally responsible. The family, no matter the composition and character of its individual members, is never presumptively innocent; they all, automatically, become accomplices to the misdeeds of their weakest genetic link.

In Montenegro, the retaliation can be delivered against the wrongdoer or his father or brothers.57 The Yanomamo Indians of Brazil allow for vengeance to be taken against anyone within the wrongdoer’s community.⁵⁸ Among the Berbers, the ten closest, most immediate male relatives are deemed “equally culpable.”⁵⁹ Jibaro Indians of Ecuador and Peru take revenge against any member of the wrongdoer’s family because individual actions are inseparable from the whole.⁶⁰ The Maori tribesmen of New Zealand insist on utu—repayment for an insult. The responsibility for seeking or taking utu falls on the entire family of the victim. Any one of them might one day be required to serve as an avenger. Similarly, the responsibility for having caused the injury is enlarged to include the family or group of the wrongdoer. Any member of the wrongdoer’s family might become the subject of retaliatory vengeance.⁶¹

There is both collective responsibility and collective obligation in revenge cultures. Sons avenge their fathers; and sons become revenge targets because of and in place of their fathers. There is always mutuality and codependence. Individual actions reflect back on the group. Payback for harm long since inflicted can be collected against a relative who is otherwise innocent. No one is regarded as having acted alone, and no one can claim that a debt owed to one is not collectable against a wider circle of familial associates.

But the underlying rules of vengeance still apply: the retaliation must be just and proportionate. The only difference is the number of people against whom the penalty can be exacted. The examples discussed earlier of punishments delivered by Islamic courts violate the principle only insofar as stonings, lashings, and dismemberments are without proportion to the originating crime. No talionic principle ties the lost honor of an abandoned husband with the severed nose and ears of his fleeing wife. The fact that the moral debt is collectable against an entire family is consistent with the enlarged mandate of collective responsibility, however. But as Jacob realized in the book of Genesis, revenge is never justified if it goes beyond what is deserved.

In China, under the Ming and Qing dynasties, certain acts of revenge were excused under the law.62 Indeed, vengeance was integrated within traditional notions of Chinese justice, incorporated into the law itself. Doing so created a greater synthesis between justice and revenge. Chinese law recognized that when provocation and moral urgency are great the law shouldn’t stand on ceremony and prevent righteous action. For instance, the legal system during that era of Chinese history adopted a rescue/revenge statute, which provided that vengeance can be justified and found excusable in circumstances where a son or a grandson comes to the aid of a parent or grandparent who is being attacked.⁶³ Regardless of whether the rescuer causes serious injury or even kills the wrongdoer, the law automatically mitigates the punishment. And if the killing arises in the heat of the moment, the rescuer is exonerated or is given the lightest sentence possible under the law. There is no legalistic charade of treating the avenger as if he had committed an independently separate crime divorced from the reality of the situation, which is generally what happens under American law. Nor is there the intellectual dishonesty of requiring the avenger to plead temporary insanity. Instead, Chinese law recognized circumstances where there are moral obligations to avenge, especially when a relative is in harm’s way. Even more important, it recognized that vengeance is an act of virtue and not criminality—albeit an act with its own set of complications.

As much as governments have an interest in curbing individual acts of vengeance, they have an equal obligation to protect it—to make it relevant in the lives of its citizens. States need to provide permissible legal pathways through which vengeance can be properly exercised under the law. Maintaining law and order in traditional Chinese culture did not mean that revenge had to be banished from courtrooms and the emotional lives of men and women. Instead, Chinese law embraced revenge and made a place for it in its body of laws, not unlike the ancient Greeks and the role reserved for the Furies in the administration of justice. The Chinese understood that rescue and revenge can take place in the same act. And an act of vengeance is not so far removed from the imperative to do justice. To believe otherwise is to ignore the larger truth that the call for justice and the impulse to avenge share similar features. And for this reason, as the Chinese once proved possible, revenge should be incorporated into the law, with the state playing a necessary supervisory role rather than banishing vengeance from courtrooms and consigning it to the streets.

There is an irony, however, in the way the Chinese associated rescue with its close moral cousin, revenge. Any law student can tell you that in American jurisprudence there is no duty to rescue. To rush to the aid of another in peril may be a moral duty, but it is surely not a legal requirement under common law. In fact, the rescuer is generally held liable in tort for whatever excess injury is caused should his rescue efforts fail—his gallantry notwithstanding, otherwise unappreciated. The message is clear: Don’t even consider coming to the aid of another. By not compelling citizens to rescue, the law encourages indifference and neglect, narcissism and selfishness, moral obtuseness and the worst possible kind of legalistic thinking.

Perhaps the best evidence that the American legal system is not guided by moral criteria can be found in the law’s bizarre, counterintuitive treatment of rescue and revenge. There is no legal duty under American law to rescue even though there surely is a moral one. Similarly, morally we realize that there are times when vengeance is appropriate, and yet, legally we are cautioned that self-help and private justice are prohibited and will give rise to an independent, perhaps even more severe act of criminality. The moral urgency that naturally attaches to rescue and revenges receive no quarter in American courtrooms, although each is infused with profound moral obligation. Rushing to the aid of another in a time of peril, avenging a horrific crime committed against a loved one—performing these righteous acts is the way most people wish to see themselves. Such heroism is the embodiment of the virtuous life. Yet, the legal system commands us to neither rescue nor avenge. Indeed, those who do so will be punished for their acts of virtue. How can the legal system hope to encourage decent, moral behavior if it actually punishes those who are inclined toward decent, moral behavior?

The law either sanctions moral failure or prevents moral righteousness. Revenge is morally right and the failure to seek vindication is a sign of moral neglect, a dishonoring of the dead, an abandonment of the moral obligation to memorialize loss. There is a moral duty to stand up for oneself and to come to the aid of another. Despite the simple truth behind these principles, rescue is not required under the law; revenge is repudiated under the law—yet both are necessary features of the moral universe.

Traditional Chinese law recognized the moral relationship between rescue and revenge. And by enacting a rescue/revenge statute, it acknowledged the fundamental truth that, morally, the obligation to avenge is not easily avoided, so the law shouldn’t label it a crime. The natural impulse to retaliate is itself a form of rescue, because retaliation, by definition, arises in response to the harmful actions of another. If the wrongdoer or tortfeasor had not acted, either criminally or negligently, the avenger/rescuer would never have been motivated to respond.

This reasoning is in many ways no different from a legal claim of self-defense, which justifies actions otherwise criminal but made necessary due to the act of another who created a danger that a reasonable person would naturally have been expected to defend against. In cases of rescue, however, it is the defense of another rather than oneself that is being justified. Coming to the aid of a father or a son, for example, should not be treated differently under the law than defending oneself. The Chinese understood that in such instances, revenge and rescue are the same—driven by the same impulse, motivated by the same imperative. Retaliatory vengeance supplies its own extenuating and mitigating circumstance. The avenger feels obligated to communicate to the wrongdoer why his act of revenge is necessary: “What did you expect me to do, stand by and do nothing?” And these same words should apply for the rescuer, too. There would have been no need to rescue had the victim not been imperiled, no need to avenge had the crime not taken place and had the wrongdoer not acted maliciously, callously, or murderously toward another.

In 2008, a feature article in the New Yorker by noted author and biologist Jared Diamond recounted the dramatic story of just one of many tribal honor killings among the New Guinea highlanders.64 Papua New Guinean Daniel Wemp described a vicious and spiraling cycle of vengeance between the Handa and Ombal clans, resulting in six years of fighting and forty-seven dead—all on account of a pig that had purportedly ruined a garden. When Wemp’s uncle, Soll, became one of the casualties of this blood feud, Wemp inherited the duty to avenge his uncle. In the New Guinea Highlands, tribes and clans still observe the ritual that all homicides naturally give rise to a retaliatory revenge killing. From there, however, it escalated into an unappeasable tribal blood feud. Wemp explained that sometimes determining who is to inherit the obligation to avenge is a complicated matter. Whoever is entrusted with the duty eventually becomes the “owner of the fight.” Many others are recruited, even from other clans, to join in with what eventually can evolve into a large-scale clan war.

In an explicit rejection of the rational actor model as it applies to vengeance, Wemp, the Handa clansman and nephew who owned the fight—an inheritance of a murdered uncle—explained why he didn’t save the time and expense and avoid the risk altogether, by simply letting the law handle the matter: “If I had let the police do it, I wouldn’t have felt satisfaction,” he said. “I wanted to obtain vengeance myself, even if it were to cost me my own life. . . . The best way to deal with my anger was to exact the vengeance myself.”⁶⁵

Diamond unearthed a society organized around the concept of vengeance. No matter how many lives were claimed, or how long it would take for the blood feud to come to some conclusion, personal dignity and social peace were very much dependent on revenge practices that had been in existence for generations and still flourished separate from the official laws of New Guinea. Daniel Wemp’s tale had the makings of a great story, which Diamond contrasted with his father-in-law, a Holocaust survivor who never sought retribution for his own losses even when an opportunity presented itself to do so.

One year after the New Yorker story first appeared, however, Wemp, and Isum Mandingo, the man who Wemp was purportedly required to kill in their generational stage of the feud, sued Diamond and Advance Publications, Inc., the owner of the New Yorker, in the amount of $10 million for defamation.66 Wemp alleged that the story printed in the New Yorker was completely false and caused the men great harm by portraying them as barbarians who resort to such murderous practices.

Diamond and the New Yorker stood by the story. They produced notes and recorded conversations that Diamond had had with Wemp in which the Papua New Guinean gave vivid details of how he organized a war of tribal retribution to avenge his uncle’s murder. Wemp now claims that he made it all up, and anthropologists have noted that young men of the Papua New Guinea are known to exaggerate their tribal exploits. Diamond’s mistake, some have suggested, was an utter failure to fact check what he had been told. Complicating matters further, other anthropologists acknowledged that the Papua New Guinea do, in fact, still engage in blood feuds like the one described in the New Yorker. In one province alone, three hundred tribal wars have taken place and claimed the lives of four thousand people since 1991.

The lawsuit was dismissed in July 2010, but the question left unanswered remains: Did Wemp tell the truth but sued Diamond and the New Yorker anyway, motivated by the possibility of a windfall settlement? Or did perhaps Wemp avail himself of America’s courtrooms out of shame? Once the honor killings of the New Guinea highlanders were exposed to the world in a magazine of such wide reach and renown as the New Yorker, perhaps Wemp was simply too embarrassed to have his name associated in the Western world with something as crudely primitive and socially unfashionable as revenge.