In a recent piece in The New York Times, writer Kate Murphy looked at why exacting vengeance is a fool's errand. Murphy — whose piece is titled "The Futility of Vengeance — looked at a biological basis for our revenge quests, as well as why score-settling fails to restore our honor.
"Most of our first-person experience with revenge is usually over relatively trivial, and often emotional, matters. Responses can be overt or covert, harsh or more measured — everything from throwing a punch to posting nude photos of an ex online," Murphy wrote.
Harvard Business School historian Nancy Koehn said recent snowstorms in Boston may provoke a desire for vengeance — against plow services, the MBTA, or Mother Nature herself. Koehn said it reminded her of a scene in Little House on the Prairie.
"Pa is ... shaking his fist at the snow coming down on the Dakota prairies in the late 19th century, and screaming at the winter, 'You will not beat us!' Vengeance may be closer to all of us in relation to the weather, at this moment in Boston history, than many of us would like to admit."
Koehn traced the notion of revenge back to the Book of Exodus and its admonition to seek "an eye for an eye." Such a concept, according to historian W. Gunther Plaut, has antecedents in Babylonian law. There are poignant examples of that brand of justice in recent weeks, too.
"One of the animating fires in the steel mill of terrorism: it's a kind of lust for vengeance," Koehn said. "Think about Charlie Hebdo. The whole attack on that paper was about vengeance for journalists and cartoonists who the perpetrators thought had committed wrongs against [Islam]."
"We're living in a moment where revenge is a very popular subject," Koehn said, referencing the ABC show Revenge. "Clint Eastwood's early movies were all about vengeance — Dirty Harry, 'make my day.'"
But a new film may be the antidote to commercialized revenge fantasies, Koehn said. Selma dramatizes the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s struggles for justice. King advocated for non-violence, even in cases where severely marginalized people deserved Old Testament-style retribution.
"One of the things that King understood early on — and some of it was tactical, but some of it was much more what we're talking about — was that, as Mohandis Ghandi said, 'an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind,'" Koehn said. "There's an escalation here. What is the line from Kant? 'To only act on those actions that you are prepared to see generalizable.'"
"When we're all looking for our pound of flesh, what are we doing? We're raising the level of violence, and the level of harm being perpetrated on others. And does it give us back anything like the cost of doing that? I'm really not sure at all."
>>Nancy Koehn is a professor of history at the Harvard Business School. She joins Jim Braude and Margery Eagan on Boston Public Radio every Tuesday. To hear the entire interview with Koehn click the audio above.
