Winding down a tediously long essay describing in detail the vengeance driven tribal battles in New Guinea, Jared Diamond finds in them a justification and need for bloodthirstiness:

Annals of Anthropology: Vengeance Is Ours: The New Yorker

[…]

We regularly ignore the fact that the thirst for vengeance is among the strongest of human emotions. It ranks with love, anger, grief, and fear, about which we talk incessantly. Modern state societies permit and encourage us to express our love, anger, grief, and fear, but not our thirst for vengeance. We grow up being taught that such feelings are primitive, something to be ashamed of and to transcend.

There is no doubt that state acceptance of every individual’s right to exact personal vengeance would make it impossible for us to coexist peacefully as fellow-citizens of the same state. Otherwise, we, too, would be living under the conditions of constant warfare prevailing in non-state societies like those of the New Guinea Highlands. […]

My conversations with Daniel made me understand what we have given up by leaving justice to the state. In order to induce us to do so, state societies and their associated religions and moral codes teach us that seeking revenge is bad. But, while acting on vengeful feelings clearly needs to be discouraged, acknowledging them should be not merely permitted but encouraged. To a close relative or friend of someone who has been killed or seriously wronged, and to the victims of harm themselves, those feelings are natural and powerful. Many state governments do attempt to grant the relatives of crime victims some personal satisfaction, by allowing them to be present at the trial of the accused, and, in some cases, to address the judge or jury, or even to watch the execution of their loved one’s murderer.

This smells of biologism (or biological determinism if you prefer). We find it abhorrent when used in various forms in EP and elsewhere to “explain” rape or other acts frowned upon in society. And if we are able to demonstrate that there is no rape instinct to counter that wonderful biologism, but not so with Diamond’s claims above, Diamond still commits what is otherwise rejected as the “naturalistic fallacy”. There are probably better defences (see Kant) of “retributivism” but this one IMHO fails miserably. And it is an insult to those who either do not share the bloodthirstiness of Diamond’s “we”, or consciously seek to rise above it, not “ignore” it.

In the USA, the norm is anything but not “permit[ting] our thirst for vengeance”. As the line in the movie rendition of the life of Hurricane Carter goes, the norm is “any black man will do”, created and promoted by the very vengefulness that Diamond wants to give primacy, under terms such as “victim’s rights” and “survivors rights”. It is not an exaggeration to summarise the mood as one where it is considered that it is better to hang someone, than let a crime go unpunished. So we have the FOP and the victim continuing to deny the innocence of the young black men who spent many years in jail before being exonerated and released, in the “Central Park Jogger” incident which prompted full page ads from billionaire Donald Trump lusting for a hanging. This state sanctioned attitude is the direct result of encouraging (rather than discouraging) the need for vengeful satisfaction. Here is the New York Times:

… Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey observed at the time…: ”You rob a store, rape a jogger, shoot a tourist, and when they catch you, if they catch you . . . you cry racism. And nobody, white or black, says stop.”

And:

[T]he brutalization of the victim demonized the suspects and seemed to make any presumption of innocence impossible. Donald J. Trump bought full-page newspaper advertisements demanding the death penalty and rejecting assertions (from Cardinal John J. O’Connor, among others) that society shared the blame for conditions that breed crime.

”I want to hate these muggers and murderers,” Mr. Trump wrote. ”They should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes.” (What if the jogger had died and the five young men had been executed, Mr. Trump was asked the other day. ”If they were convicted and weren’t guilty the government would’ve made a tragic mistake,” he said.)

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