No, it isn’t Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, or Anne Coulter (although these three would top my list). It’s Casey Anthony, and my wife and I were recently invited on talk radio to try and explain why.
The answer, of course, is that Ms. Anthony is widely believed to have murdered her young daughter, which, if true, is an exceptionally vile and inhumane act. But a major contributor is doubtless the fact that she was found innocent. And why should that be so important? Because once someone is perceived to have violated basic societal norms, there is a deep demand for justice … which is to say, for seeing that the presumed perpetrator suffers in turn.
The reason for our appearance is that our recent book, Payback: Why We Retaliate, Redirect Aggression, and Seek Revenge (Oxford Univ. Press, 2011), speaks directly to this sort of thing. And my reason for writing about it isn’t simply self-promotion—although perhaps a bit of that—but because I truly believe that this issue (the tendency of living things to pass along their pain, not simply the case of Ms. Anthony) is genuinely important. Thus. it is widely known that violence produces pain. Less apparent, but no less significant, is that it works the other way, too: Pain produces violence.
After they have been attacked, living things, and significantly, not just human beings, show a predictable tendency to pass the resulting pain onto someone else, resulting in a novel variant on The Three Rs: Instead of reading, writing and “rithmetic, it’s retaliation (prompt tit-for-tat response directed toward the perpetrator ), revenge (a delayed and often exaggerated response), 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 make a kind of deep, biological sense.
To be attacked successfully is to suffer “subordination stress,” involving a syndrome of physiological responses that includes 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 to someone else, they are essentially reducing their own distress. And when a child is murdered, society itself suffers genuine agony, which demands the kind of redress via pain-passing that is typically designated “justice.”
There is supposed to be a big difference, of course, between justice and revenge, with the former universally adjudged laudable and the latter, despicable. When crime victims testify, for example, during the penalty phase of a trial, they never, ever, say they are seeking revenge; always, the watch-word is “justice.”
In addition to the immediate or “proximate” factors leading to our species-wide craving for justice, there are also evolutionary, or “ultimate,” explanations. Thus, 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 that when an individual has been attacked and fails to engage in one of the Three R’s, he or she is more likely to be victimized, yet again, by others in the social group. This appears to provide the adaptive significance for what otherwise seems such a peculiar behavior pattern, especially when it results in redirected aggression … which resembles nothing so much as the old Three Stooges routine in which Moe wallops Larry who turns around and slugs Curly.)
There is a large store of wisdom decrying the human penchant for responding to pain by inflicting yet more of it. Thus, Francis Bacon noted that “A man that studieth revenge keeps his own wounds green, which otherwise would heal and do well,” a sentiment stated even more strongly in the Chinese proverb, “When you go out to seek revenge, dig two graves.” And even the best-known English language maxim on the topic (“revenge is sweet”) is in fact a blatant misquotation. The original, in Milton’s Paradise Lost, actually reads: “Revenge, at first though sweet/ Bitter ere long back on itself recoils.”
On the other hand, there may also be more than a bit of biosocial wisdom in reducing society’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.” And our current understanding of the Three Rs helps clarify why leaving crime unpunished or turning the other cheek—whether wise, blessed, or foolish—is so terribly difficult.
Redirected aggression (the Moe-Larry-Curly effect) may also be involved, insofar as Americans are currently frustrated, angry and feeling a lot of pain: right-wing anger at the President, left-wing anger at the Tea Party, widespread pain at the current economic situation, anti-science anger at those worried about global heating, pro-science anger at those denying its reality, and so forth. With so much pain floating around, its not unlikely that we are eager for scapegoats, whether innocent or guilty.
America breathed a collective sigh of relief when Osama bin Laden was killed, since whether justice or revenge, it felt good to know that the perpetrator of so much pain had “gotten what he deserved” … which is to say, we got the satisfaction that the pain of 9/11 necessitated. By contrast, Casey Anthony’s alleged crime (if in fact she actually committed it) was much smaller than Osama’s, but it now appears that America will not get the pain-passing satisfaction that our biopsychology demands.
