pecking order and dominance hierarchy beginning in the 1960s, and alpha male in the 1990s.159 Joining them in the 1980s was the facetious pseudo-medical term testosterone poisoning. Each of these phrases belittles the stakes in contests for dominance. They imply that the glory men seek may be a figment of their primate imaginations—the symptom of a chemical in their bloodstream, the acting out of instincts that make us laugh when we see them in roosters and baboons. Compare the distancing power of these biological terms to older words like glorious and honorable, which objectify the prize in a contest of dominance, presupposing that certain accomplishments just are glorious or honorable in the very nature of things. The frequency of both terms has been steadily falling in English-language books for a century and a half.160 An ability to hold our instincts up to the light, rather than naïvely accepting their products in our consciousness as just the way things are, is the first step in discounting them when they lead to harmful ends.
REVENGE
The determination to hurt someone who has hurt you has long been exalted in purple prose. The Hebrew Bible is obsessed with revenge, giving us pithy expressions like “Whoso sheddeth blood will have his blood shed,” “An eye for an eye,” and “Vengeance is mine.” Homer’s Achilles describes it as sweeter than flowing honey welling up like smoke from the breasts of men. Shylock cites it as the climax in his listing of human universals, and when asked what he will do with his pound of flesh, replies, “To bait fish withal: if it will feed nothing else, it will feed my revenge.”
People in other cultures also wax poetic about the settling of scores. Milovan Djilas, born into a feuding clan of Montenegrins and later a vice president of communist Yugoslavia, called vengeance “the glow in our eyes, the flame in our cheeks, the pounding in our temples, the word that turned to stone in our throats on our hearing that our blood had been shed.”161 A New Guinean man, upon hearing that the killer of his uncle had been paralyzed by an arrow, said, “I feel as if I am developing wings, I feel as if I am about to fly off, and I am very happy.”162 The Apache chief Geronimo, savoring his massacre of four Mexican army companies, wrote:Still covered with the blood of my enemies, still holding my conquering weapon, still hot with the joy of battle, victory, and vengeance, I was surrounded by the Apache braves and made war chief of all the Apaches. Then I gave the orders for scalping the slain.
I could not call back my loved ones, I could not bring back the dead Apaches, but I could rejoice in this revenge.
Daly and Wilson comment: “Rejoice? Geronimo wrote these words in a prison cell, his Apache nation broken and nearly extinct. The urge for vengeance seems so futile: There’s no use crying over spilt milk, and spilt blood is equally irrevocable.”163
Yet for all its futility, the urge for vengeance is a major cause of violence. Blood revenge is explicitly endorsed in 95 percent of the world’s cultures, and wherever tribal warfare is found, it is one of the major motives.164 Revenge is the motive of 10 to 20 percent of homicides worldwide and a large percentage of school shootings and private bombings.165 When directed against groups rather than individuals, it is a major motive of urban riots, terrorist attacks, retaliation against terrorist attacks, and wars.166 Historians who examine the decisions that led to war in reprisal for an attack note that it is often befogged in a red mist of anger.167 After Pearl Harbor, for example, the American people were said to react “with a mind-staggering mixture of surprise, awe, mystification, grief, humiliation, and above all, cataclysmic fury.”168 No alternative to war (such as containment or harassment) was ever considered; the very thought would have been tantamount to treason. The reactions to the 9/11 attack were similar: the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan the following month was motivated as much by a sense that something had to be done in reprisal as by a strategic decision that it was the most effective long-term measure against terrorism.169 The three thousand killings on September 11 had themselves been motivated by revenge, as Osama bin Laden explained in his “Letter to America”:Allah, the almighty, legislated the permission and the option to take revenge. Thus, if we are attacked, then we have the right to attack back.