Revenge and Remorse

Jared Diamond's thought provoking essay on civilization and revenge in the 21 Apr New Yorker managed to sneak by me for a while. Since Diamond is writing it, it's pregnant with insights into human nature and culture, but it left me wanting to argue.

The principal focus is a war of revenge fought between two clans in the New Guinea highlands.

In 1992, when Daniel Wemp was about twenty-two years old, his beloved paternal uncle Soll was killed in a battle against the neighboring Ombal clan. In the New Guinea Highlands, where Daniel and his Handa clan live, uncles and aunts play a big role in raising children, so an uncle’s death represents a much heavier blow than it might to most Americans
. . .

Daniel told me that responsibility for arranging revenge usually falls on the victim’s firstborn son or, failing that, on one of his brothers. “Soll did have a son, but he was only six years old at the time of his father’s death, much too young to organize the revenge,” Daniel said. “On the other hand, my father was felt to be too old and weak by then; the avenger should be a strong young man in his prime. So I was the one who became expected to avenge Soll.” As it turned out, it took three years, twenty-nine more killings, and the sacrifice of three hundred pigs before Daniel succeeded in discharging this responsibility.

The tale should be read in full, but the first punchline comes when Diamond asks about Daniel's reaction to his success:

Only one arrow hit Isum, but it was a bamboo arrow, flat and sharp as a knife, and it cut his spinal cord. That’s even better than killing him, because he’s now still alive today, eleven years later, paralyzed in a wheelchair, and maybe he’ll live for another ten years. People will see his constant suffering. Isum may be around for a long time, for people to see his suffering, and to be reminded that this happened to him as proper vengeance for his having killed my uncle Soll.”

When I asked Daniel how he felt about the battle in which Isum became paralyzed, his reaction was unapologetically positive: a mixture of exhilaration and pleasure in expressing aggression. He used phrases such as “It was very nice,” and his gestures projected euphoria and a huge sense of relief.

I felt that it was a matter of ‘kill or else die by suicide.’ I was prepared to die myself in that fight. I knew that, if I did die then, I would be considered a hero and would be remembered. If I had personally seen the arrow go into Isum, I would have felt emotional relief then. Unfortunately, I wasn’t actually there to see it, but, when I heard that Isum had been paralyzed, I thought, I have everything, I feel as if I am developing wings, I feel as if I am about to fly off, and I am very happy. After that battle, just as after each battle in which we succeeded in killing an Ombal, we danced and celebrated and slaughtered pigs. When you fight with thinking and finally succeed, you feel good and relieved. The revenge relieves you; now it can be your turn to help someone else get his own revenge.

The second story Diamond tells is that of his father-in-law. The father-in-law's family was in Poland when Germany and Russia both invaded. He was captured fighting the Russians, but later fought for them against the Germans.

His mother, sister, and niece had been hidden, but thieves found them, assumed that as Jews they must have gold, and eventually killed them when they turned out to have nothing. The father-in-law caught the man he believed to be the murderer, thought about murdering him, but eventually turned him over to the authorities. He was imprisoned briefly, but otherwise went unpunished.

Diamond contrasts his father-in-laws bitterness and regret at the loss of his family and the fact that the presumed murderer escaped with Daniel's satisfaction and pleasure at his revenge.

On other occasions, he admitted to Marie, “Every day, still, before going to sleep, I think of my mother’s death, and of my having let her murderer go.” Until his own death, nearly sixty years after the murders of his parents and his release of his mother’s killer, Jozef remained tormented by regret and guilt—guilt that he had not been able to protect his parents, and regret that he had failed in his responsibility to take vengeance. That was the responsibility that Daniel had satisfied, and the terrible burden that Daniel had spared himself, by personally orchestrating the shooting of Isum.

Diamond's clear implication is that if his father-in-law had just whacked the suspect, he would have spared himself all that grief. Maybe so, but I'm not so sure. Remorseless murderers exist in all societies, and in Daniel's it was a survival trait. Daniel felt remorse neither for the man he caused to be crippled nor for the two dozen others on both sides killed by the way. Would it have worked that way for his father-in-law? Maybe, but maybe not.

Neither does Diamond consider the possibility that the man that the villagers his father-in-law terrorized gave up might not be the real murderer.

His theme, though, is characteristically insightful. The desire for revenge is a powerful one, one that has been somewhat submerged in our society by the combination of law and Christianity, but it's no less there.

If we had realized it a bit more clearly we might never have elected the very stupid and self-centered man who now leads our country. Because he is stupid, he never realized that our occupation of Iraq would trigger a powerful desire for revenge among the population. Because he was self-centered he chose his desire for revenge against Saddam's supposed crimes against his father over the country's desire for revenge against those who attacked it.