Vengance!

Some time ago, never mind how long precisely, Jared Diamond published a long meditation on revenge and the thirst for it in the New Yorker. (The story has since been taken off their site). Since I no longer have access to the story, some of the following will be based on my highly fallible memory, but as I recall it, there were only two featured characters. The principal one was Daniel Wemp, a native of Papua New Guinea. In Diamond's account Wemp told a tale of war and revenge, and of his great satisfaction in crippling an uncle who had organized a fight that killed another favored uncle. Diamond's own uncle, by contrast had a lifetime of bitter regret about failing to murder a man he believed murdered some of his relatives. Diamond draws far reaching conclusions about the nature of revenge and its role in human affairs from these two stories, and they made a big impression on me when I read them.

It seems, however, that much of Diamond's story is not true. Daniel Wemp, whose real name was used in the story, and the supposedly crippled but actually hale uncle who was the supposed victim are sueing Diamond for ten million dollars (h/t Brad DeLong, Crooked Timber and a long chain of links). Some of Diamond's old enemies have gotten in on the feeding frenzy, and he is being accused of everything from bad journalism to racism.

The substantive critique is that Diamond told these stories without even a minimum of fact checking or review by those who would know (like Wemp and his uncle). Various idiots seem greatly impressed with the fact that Diamond attributes a number of improbably literate quotes to a jeep driver whose main languages are not English. I never took the quote marks literally - anymore than I take the speeches Thucydides attributes to his protagonists. Diamond should have mentioned that his story was reconstructed after the events, though.

Wemp himself reportedly admits that he told Diamond the stories, but that Diamond changed the list of characters. I find it more plausible that it was Wemp himself who changed the stories to make himself the hero, but this hardly excuses Diamond's carelessness. The story of subjects feeding improbable stories to credulous anthropologists is way too familiar now for anybody to allow themselves to be fooled in that way.