Laura Blumenfeld’s father is shot at an already inauspicious time in his life. He and his wife are separated; she’s moved in with another man, and the father, it is strongly implied, never quite got over her. When Blumenfeld discusses the event with her father twelve years later, after they have both remarried, he remembers calling his wife to tell her he’d been wounded. “She put me down. She belittled it,” he recalls. “How can you be married for twenty-five years and not care if your husband was shot?”

As she goes searching for the shooter and learning about revenge, Blumenfeld realizes that there is a strong connection between revenge and family ties. “If no one cared, if no one remembered, if no one demanded justice, then the value of life was empty,” she writes after hearing her father’s haunted reminiscence. “If meant the people who were supposed to love you did not.”

The family connection becomes especially apparent when Blumenfeld learns that the terrorists responsible for the shooting spree have been imprisoned, in a high-security facility that only relatives can visit. So instead of visiting the terrorists, she visits their relatives, saying simply that she’s an American reporter researching a book about revenge. They pride themselves on their filial loyalty. It is, in fact, the brother of the group’s mastermind who gives Blumenfeld the line I quote in my first post about this book, to the effect that Westerners’ unwillingness to avenge their families shows how selfish they are.

Despite seeing the dark side of this — apart from the fact that the family supports a terrorist, she also hears about domestic violence from the women — to some extent she envies this solidarity. For a while she entertains an idea of rallying her whole family against his family, trying to get her nerdy brother into the vengeful spirit. “In seeking revenge I could confound the truth that our family had disappeared,” she reflects. “We might have scattered … but as long as we fought for each other, our family lived on. That, in itself, was a tantalizing goal. What was the definition of a family, anyway? In aboriginal Siberia, the word for kindred families is cin-yirin, meaning ‘collection of those who take part in blood revenge.’”

Again, her family reminds me a lot of mine, and I can recognize the feelings in a slightly different form. It actually kind of reminds me of the dinosaurs chasing me around the house, and the realization that the family unit actually meant more to me than my parents’ marriage per se. But her cultural observations make me wonder just how much the disintegration of the vengeance culture is related to the disintegration of family bonds — and if so, which came first. I don’t think I’ve ever heard an advocate of traditional family values wanting to return to the days when family members would avenge each other. Yet that was, not all that long ago, part of Western culture. According to a sixteenth-century English law, Blumenfeld writes, a son who did not avenge his father could not collect his inheritance.

It does seem to me that one reason modern secular society has trouble understanding these things is that it places a relatively low value on loyalty in general. Not only do people leave their spouses with some regularity, but we take it as a matter of course that we will leave our employers, or they will leave us, and that we change out our politicians and vendors and friends and whoever else when they are no longer working for us. It’s nearly impossible to defend the inherent value of loyalty from the standpoint of rational self-interest, and difficult even from a utilitarian standpoint of maximizing happiness. But what is it that makes people happy? Is the smoothness of a relationship always more important than its permanence? Is there a way for people to feel solidarity without always fighting something? And this, too, seems to rely on the assumption of social and physical mobility that I mentioned in the first post, not to mention a high population density. If one relationship ends, it is assumed, we can find another that is more satisfying. Not everyone in all places and times could assume such things. And even people like Blumenfeld and me, I think, find that not everything is replaceable.

Laura Blumenfeld’s odyssey of revenge starts right after her marriage to Baruch, a young federal prosecutor. At the time of their marriage he’s working on a big case against boxing promoter Don King, which provides a narrative counterpoint to Blumenfeld’s primeval desire for vengeance. “In ancient Athens,” Blumenfeld writes, “civilization was said to flourish once the Furies, avenging spirits with snakes in their hair and whips in their hands, were subdued, once Athena had institutionalized them under due process of law.”

The American justice system has gone a long way towards depersonalizing retribution. As King points out, the case is called The United States of America vs. Don King, with the actual victim put somewhat on the sidelines. But there are other places in the world that are in between, retaining both strict legalism and elements of personal vengeance. Blumenfeld, ever the intrepid reporter, goes to visit some of them.

Probably the most surreal episode in the book so far is her visit to Albania, a post-Communist country where a weak government encouraged a return of the old vengeance codes. This situation led to the formation — as if by some strange convergence of the Mafia and the Quakers — of the Blood Feud Committee. (This is one place where I feel the reportage is lacking. Who appointed this committee? Do they get paid?) Albanians follow a canon on revenge compiled by a fifteenth-century nobleman, which sounds as long and detailed a folk code as the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition. Precept No. 906 deals with the type of head-grazing shotgun wound Rabbi Blumenfeld suffered, and calls for “three purses” in payment. This leads to a discussion among the committee members as to what that would be after inflation.

Blumenfeld writes that Albanian revenge is driven less by the sort of overwhelming emotion that she feels, than by a sense of duty. You don’t really have the option not to take vengeance, if you value your honor and your family ties at all. She does visit another place, however, where victims have some discretion as to the punishment. Curiously enough, it’s Iran.

Iran’s legal system seems to be somewhere in between the Albanian one and the American one. Islamic law believes in courts and evidence, not vigilantism. But once the sentencing arrives, victims can help determine the punishment and, if the wish, participate in carrying it out. When someone is convicted of murder, he has a chance to plead for mercy from the victim’s family. If they grant it, he pays a fine and goes to prison. If they don’t, he’s executed.

The process apparently goes for lesser offenses also. One ayatollah Blumenfeld talks to describes a case of a woman whose husband threw acid into her face, blinding her. (Oddly enough, I read this just after reading Johann Hari recount a similar incident in Bangladesh. Do Asians just have vats of acid sitting around the house for some reason?) The husband offered to pay damages, but the wife insisted that he should be blinded just like she was. The ayatollah talked her down to taking out just one eye. She performed this office herself: “The woman’s relatives guided her wrists, helping her find her husband’s eye socket. She used a metal spoon to dig.”

As much as people accuse Americans of having a cult of victimhood, it’s difficult to imagine Americans empowering victims in quite this way. Back when I was in college — and I assume, even now — there were feminist legal groups devoted to springing women from jail who’d killed their abusive husbands. But I doubt even they would go for the eyeball-scooping method of justice. It does underscore how detached most Americans are from our own penal system, which doubtless allows many of us to think of ourselves as more civilized than we are. Once offenders are locked away in prison, we can ignore what sort of life our laws and taxes are providing them. The sort of choices that Iranian justice gives you, I suppose, lets you find out just what you are capable of.

But oddly enough, this folds back on my movie violence post, because the movies are one place in American culture where gruesome revenge fantasies roam free. I am reminded of the middle section of Carol Clover’s Men, Women and Chainsaws, comparing the infamous low-budget rape-revenge movie I Spit On Your Grave with the big-budget Hollywood courtroom drama The Accused. I don’t remember it in detail now (and I haven’t seen either film, which doesn’t help) but I remember Clover describing how the former ends with a close-up of the victim’s face, while the latter ends with a high-altitude shot of the courthouse. That, to her, summarizes aptly who the heroes of the two films are. So which one is really more empowering to women?

Not that I’m claiming the Iranian justice system is especially empowering to women. Apart from the ayatollahs, Blumenfeld talks to a woman who successfully got her ex-stepson imprisoned for killing her daughter, but can’t hang him because a male life isn’t considered an even trade for a female one. (It’s not impossible, but she’s have to pay compensation for it.) But it is interesting to look at how other legal systems compromise between personal feelings and the impersonal rule of law. There’s no one way to do it, and none of them is perfect.

This was one of those fortuitous library finds: a book I’d never heard of before, but that seemed to address a subject of great interest to me at the moment. The anniversary of 9/11, along with the various reviews coming out of Christopher Caldwell’s Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, got me to thinking about how one would defend certain Western values to, say, an Islamic fundamentalist. On some subjects, like slavery and democracy, I was educated fairly clearly about how my society arrived at its position on them. But others not so much. Like, why does our criminal justice system work the way it does? Why don’t we punish most criminals corporally like we used to and like Islamic law still demands? Why imprisonment? It’s not that I haven’t heard plenty of personal opinions on the subject; but why do we believe in it?

Revenge: A Story of Hope isn’t exactly about that, but it is a deconstruction, in a sense, of Western attitudes about justice. The father of the author, Washington Post reporter Laura Blumenfeld, is an American rabbi who got shot in the head while visiting Jerusalem in 1986, as one of a series of victims of a local Palestinian gang. Fortunately for him, the terrorist’s aim was bad enough that it just left a furrow in his scalp. Yet his daughter has a burning desire for vengeance, which, in true Western reporter fashion, she turns into a book project that involves going to the Middle East and both studying revenge in general, and personally tracking down her father’s shooter.

The result is a strange hybrid of a book, an examination of some of the most savage emotions in humanity in which one of the savages is the author herself. She comes across almost like her own psychotherapist, describing her anger with a clinical detachment. I’m only about a third of the way through it, so I don’t know where it’s heading, but it’s already provided plenty of food for thought.

Blumenfeld grew up in a family that sounds, in many ways, like my own — liberal, educated, upper middle class, and strongly believing themselves to be civilized. As a result, they don’t really understand her desire for vengeance, not even the father himself. They don’t seem to have forgiven, she notes, so much as forgotten — moved on with their lives. Blumenfeld records a frustrated entry from her diary at the time: “He blots out the memory and continues on his merry way … The opposite of revenge isn’t forgiveness. It’s shopping. It’s being busy with the practical, shallow now.”

While she doesn’t get much sympathy from her family, Blumenfeld’s interviews with various people in other cultures find a similarly contemptuous attitude towards those who will not take vengeance. One Palestinian she meets diagnoses Western culture this way: “Westerners don’t get revenge for their families, only for selfish reasons. They don’t have family ties like us. In America, when someone’s killed the only people who care are the police and the insurance company.”

There’s an annoying germ of truth to that assessment. People like me and Blumenfeld were raised to think that our people don’t do revenge because we’re enlightened, but it’s also true that revenge is awfully inconvenient. Early in the book, Blumenfeld describes two eleven-year-old girls engaged in a long feud, of the sort we all know: they remember various slights and insults, and avenge themselves through public humiliation and turning friends against each other. Such things certainly went on in my schoolyard, but the adults, for the most part, didn’t want to deal with it. Parents were off dealing with their own lives; teachers had classrooms to keep orderly, and they did not want to take sides in such squabbles. At any rate, soon enough the school year would be over, people would move on to different classrooms and even different schools, and the conflict would resolve itself.

Thinking about this makes me wonder how much the school experience has shaped not only our views of revenge, but of authority in general. For traditional Christians, Jews and Muslims, the most advanced being in the universe is one who remembers every sin and deals with it justly. For the post-Christian world, an advanced being is someone more like Klaatu, who doesn’t care what we’re fighting about so long as we don’t drag it into his space.

But when I think about it, probably the motto that best sums up how I was raised was, “Living well is the best revenge.” Americans who can expect some upward mobility in their lives tend to channel their anger into achievement, regaining their lost honor through money and status. It’s a function not just of social mobility, but physical mobility: after leaving school behind, most of us can hope to find a profession or social scene in which our talents will be appreciated, and we can earn respect. If another fight breaks out there, we can move into another field. Be defiantly happy to those who want to see you suffer.

Of course, not everybody in the world has this mobility. Heck, not everybody in America has that kind of mobility. It brings some bite to Blumenfeld’s remark that our solution to revenge is shopping. And I suspect that, in a subtler way, we don’t actually leave our old scores behind us but try to settle them in new fields. One of the most striking lines in the book so far is when a rabbi tells Blumenfeld, “The state of Israel is revenge for the Holocaust.” On one level, that doesn’t make sense: shouldn’t revenge for the Holocaust be taken against Germans? But it actually is revenge in the Western style: move to a new place, work hard, and set up a new order with yourself at the top. One wonders how much of Western history has been driven by it.