Geronimo in 1886 (from wikimedia.commons)
It’s an understatement to note that the killing of Osama bin Laden has made some ripples. One of them, less predictable than most, has been agitating the Native American community: Specifically, governmental use of the code name Geronimo when referring to the now-deceased terrorist. As it turns out, however, Geronimo is more relevant to recent events in Abbottabad than most people realize … not because the great Apache war chief was a terrorist, but quite the opposite, because the real Geronimo’s motivation a century and a half ago closely paralleled that of the U.S. government in killing bin Laden.
One day in 1858, a squadron of Mexican cavalry ambushed a group of Apaches, in peacetime, while the men were away. The following year, a large force of Apaches, looking for revenge, caught up with a detachment of Mexican soldiers—who may or may not have been those who committed the massacre—and a young man named Geronimo was given command. Why him? Because his mother, wife, and three young children were amongst those slaughtered the previous year. Here are Geronimo’s own words, recounted in his autobiography:
I was no chief and never had been, but because I had been more deeply wronged than others, this honor was conferred upon me. … In all the battle I thought of my murdered mother, wife and babies—of my father’s grave and my vow of vengeance. … 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 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.
The entire Mexican force, two companies of infantry and two of cavalry, was wiped out. Apache losses were also high, but for Geronimo and his fellow Apaches, it seems to have been worth it.
The Apaches were responding to a deep-seated inclination, a tendency that is found not only cross-culturally among human beings (including Americans post-9/11), but among many animal species as well. After they have been attacked, living things show a predictable tendency to engage in one of the following: retaliation (prompt tit-for-tat response directed toward the aggressor), revenge (a delayed response, again toward the aggressor), or redirected aggression (responding violently toward a third party, often an innocent bystander). None of these behaviors are admirable, but in different ways all appear to be make a kind of biological sense. My wife (psychiatrist Judith Eve Lipton) and I call this phenomenon “passing the pain along,” a new formulation of the Three Rs: instead of reading, writing and ‘rithmetic, make it retaliation, revenge, and redirected aggression.
As for immediate or “proximate causation” of the Three Rs, consider this observation. To be attacked successfully is to suffer “subordination stress,” involving a syndrome of physiological responses including hypertension, increased cortisol secretion, and diminished sex hormone levels. Interestingly, however, when victims engage in one of the Three Rs, their stress response is substantially diminished, suggesting that in passing their pain along to someone else, they are essentially ministering to their own distress. What about the evolutionary, or “ultimate” explanation for the Three Rs?
In highly social species, such as human beings, individuals are exquisitely aware of who is doing what to whom, who is up and who is down, who attacked whom and what, if anything, happened as a result. And the animal data are increasingly clear (from my own research as well as others) that when an individual has been attacked and fails to engage in one of the Three Rs, he or she is more likely to be victimized, yet again, by others in the social group.
Essentially, it seems that by striking out after being injured, victims are essentially delivering the message that “I may have been victimized once, but don’t get the wrong idea: I’m not a patsy.” This appears to provide the adaptive significance for what otherwise seems such a peculiar, even comical behavior pattern, especially in the case of redirected aggression, which resembles the old Three Stooges routine in which Moe wallops Larry who turns around and slugs Curly.
Americans felt immense pain after 9/11, a pain that the Bush Administration shamelessly exploited in “responding” to that horrifying event by attacking Iraq, which was essentially an innocent bystander. The invasion of Iraq was a classic case of redirected aggression. And for all its ethical, economic, geostrategic and military idiocy, as a (temporarily correct) reading of America’s need to pass its pain along, it was downright brilliant. Despite protestations to the contrary, our killing of bin Laden—like the real Geronimo’s war on Mexican (and subsequently, American) cavalry—was a classic case of pain-passing; in this case, revenge pure and simple.
To be sure, revenge has acquired a deservedly bad rap, but it’s worth bearing in mind that there may also be more than a bit of biosocial wisdom in reducing a nation’s (or a tribe’s, or an individual’s) subordination stress while at the same time announcing to the world that we aren’t patsies. As Mario Puzo put it in The Godfather, “Accidents do not happen to people who take accidents as a personal insult.” Just as an understanding of the Three Rs and the biosocial forces underlying them helps clarify why turning the other cheek is so terribly difficult, it also helps illuminate why revenge and retaliation in particular feel so good … at least for a little while.
Personal note: the above material helps power my most recent book, Payback: why we retaliate, redirect aggression, and seek revenge, co-written—I am proud to say—with Judith Eve Lipton M.D., and just now being published by Oxford University Press.
