Vengeance

“Vengeance is mine.” God claims in the Bible. [Deuteronomy 32:35, and many other places]

“God is a mean-spirited, pugnacious bully bent on revenge against His children for failing to live up to His impossible standards.” Walt Whitman

 

Image courtesy Robert Hatfield

I wish moral vengeance was a natural law like gravitation. The law of gravitation will wreak its revenge on you if you try to fly from the top of a building. Similarly if there was a natural law for immoral acts, there would be no evil in the world. For example, if you do evil to a person nature will punish you with a proportionate evil.

But nature knows no such morality. On the contrary, nature has an unbalanced proportion of evil. Human civilisations have been relentless efforts to bring nature’s evil under man’s control. And morality is man’s effort to bring under control the evil within himself. Religions are supposed to assist man in the process of making himself virtuous. That they have failed in it miserably is a different matter.

“Should we take revenge? Or forgive and move on? Or tolerate and stay?” This is the prompt of the latest edition of In[di]spire. My personal feeling is that vengeance is evil. It is returning evil with evil. Thus the sum total of evil increases. As the Mahatma said, an eye for an eye will make the whole world blind.

Moreover, there is something terribly paradoxical about vengeance. Vengefulness makes you dependent on those who harmed you. You believe that your release from pain will come only when your enemy suffers. I wouldn’t like my happiness to be dependent on any other person, particularly those who harmed me.

However, what will I do if someone wreaks havoc in my life? Am I magnanimous enough to forgive and move on? Or even tolerate and stay? I’m not sure. No one has wreaked such havoc in my life so far and hence I can’t speak from experience. My gut feeling is that I’m not so magnanimous.

When I watch movies of vengeance where the protagonist decimates the villain[s] I feel the act is justified. There are certain evils which call for vengeful retaliation, my guts tell me. But my rational mind revolts against vengeance too merely because more evil is not the remedy for evil. But would I tell that to Othello if he decided to decimate Iago having come to know the whole story? Nope. Iago deserves decimation. The world will be a better place without Iagos.

In other words, when it is a question of removing certain big evils from the world, vengeance is vindicated as far as my morality is concerned. That is what the protagonists do in movies.

In real life, villains rule the roost, however. We live in a Machiavellian world. Machiavelli counselled the extremes of ‘caress or crush’. If you leave a person with a minor injury, he will return to take revenge, advised Machiavelli. Hence cripple them so much that they are rendered impotent to take revenge. We are actually witnessing this principle in practice nowadays. The present political system in the country seems to be highly Machiavellian. A few are caressed and the majority are crushed. That is why I wish nature had a moral system.

I know that my wish will never, never materialise. So I choose to go with Marcus Aurelius [whom I celebrated in a short story, Marcus Aurelius Dies]: “The best revenge is not to be like your enemy.”

Afterthought: Has it ever struck you that India is increasingly becoming like its enemy? That’s why Shashi Tharoor called it ‘Hindu Pakistan’. Are we taking revenge or are we admiring our enemies by emulating them?