It was never likely that Chris Huhne’s agonies over what will sooner or later be called Penaltypointsgate would arrive unaccompanied by a rash of commentary about revenge.
It was never likely that Chris Huhne’s agonies over what will sooner or later be called Penaltypointsgate would arrive unaccompanied by a rash of commentary about revenge. All of three hours elapsed before ‘Hell hath no fury…’ — now so over-used that we have to tail off into a sheepish ellipsis after the first few words — appeared in a Fleet Street headline. This has been followed a series of columns ranging from the lip-smacking (‘those classic revenges in full: (1) Othello…’) to the pious (‘Vengeance is mine,’ saith the Lord, ‘I will repay’).
But — and this distresses me — behind the scandalised delight with which the press greets the savaging of any top politician, there has been a hint of faint but persistent disapproval towards his assailant too. Words like ‘embittered’, ‘obsessive’ and ‘venomous’ are tossed lightly in the direction of Vicky Pryce, Mr Huhne’s estranged wife. Revenge is assumed to be ugly: an unedifying human compulsion diminishing those it grips. The Testaments Old and New take a dim view of such feelings, and the Shakespearean assumption in our contemporary moral culture, too, is that when one individual exacts revenge upon another, both are the losers.
In fact, friends of Ms Pryce tell me that she’s not the bloodthirsty obsessive-compulsive type at all, just unsqueamishly businesslike. Destroying her husband, says one friend, will have been added to a list of little jobs of the sort one might felt-tip onto a to-do pad on the fridge door: ‘Buy cat food; Milk — 3 pints; Destroy husband; Query gas bill…’. But the impression we’d prefer is of a woman spoiled: eaten up by vengeful anger, the rest of her life hollowed out by an all-permeating red mist.
Well, I take no view of the rights and wrongs of the Huhne-Pryce affair and have no idea what actually happened, but I’m sorry to see revenge as a human emotion being denigrated. Ms Pryce’s instinct is normal and healthy for an intelligent human being, and for society as a whole.
Revenge is driven by two compulsions intertwined: first, by the highest of all human aspirations, a craving for abstract justice, central to the culture of any successful community because no rule-based civilisation can function if its members feel no inborn respect for the idea of rules. Second, revenge is equally driven by a knee-jerk instinct to hurt when hurt: to retaliate. The instinct to bite back is a tremendously important part of the equipment of any viable higher primate because, to survive, you need to be dangerous.
Darwinian selection has contrived to couple these two driving forces — justice and retaliation — by implanting vengefulness in the human breast. This lends an individual peculiarly well-placed to seek justice, a personal motivation for doing so. Revenge may feel good in an animal way, but it also feels fair and right in a deliberative way. The human species would be poorer and less successful without this potent coupling of equity with retribution. Apart from Homo sapiens (I learn), only in chimpanzees has evidence of this sophisticated drive been observed.
All animals are capable of feeling pain. Higher animals are capable of remembering pain and associating it with particular actions or events; and then (like Pavlov’s dogs) anticipating future pain in consequence. This is called education. With pain-avoidance and pleasure-seeking comes (in the highest animals) an idea of fairness, the apportionment of responsibilities: entitlement as a social animal and, with entitlement, obligation. This is called justice.
Revenge aims, of course, to achieve for the vengeance-taker the satisfaction that comes with justice done, plus the crude animal pleasure we naturally feel at hurting someone who has hurt us. But it has the important secondary function of educating our fellow men and our potential enemies. You toucha my car I smasha your face. Any journalist or politician will confirm that in our trades certain individuals get a reputation for hitting back hard, and never forgetting an injury. Others are more relaxed. I’m afraid it’s a fact that the first group gets the kid-gloves treatment: ‘he always sues’ are three words that strike fear into the heart of any journalist. ‘Gordon never forgets an injury’ is the only possible explanation of why so plainly dysfunctional a politician achieved his mysterious grip on a big gang of acolytes.
I’ve never been a vengeful man. Partly this is because I’m dreadfully absent-minded and tend to forget who has injured me, when, and how; if only I could remember to take a note. Partly, too, it’s because I’ve been so tremendously lucky all my life that I’m suffused by a general feeling of goodwill towards a world that has treated me well. But if I’m honest, I must confess that the idea of forgiveness is wholly alien to me — I’m not conscious of having truly ‘forgiven’ anyone for any injury I can remember. What would forgiving someone feel like? I haven’t the least idea. One is merciful, of course; one tries to be good-mannered; one pardons, forgets, or agrees to overlook; one gets things in perspective; but it would be a foolish creature that retained no mental record of a wrong done, or whose behaviour toward the wrongdoer was not modified. Scars heal, but a scar is a scar.
Besides, anyone I’ve seriously disliked in a sustained way and for good reason has (so far) always come to grief without any need for a push from me. I hope this testifies to my perceptive judgment rather than some awful voodoo effect of which I’m subliminally capable by volition alone. So I drift around being broadly benevolent and good-natured — because I can. But I’m conscious of the debt people like me owe to people like Vicky Pryce, who patrol societal standards with sharper attention and a readiness to administer justice. It must be tiring. It will invite some dislike. That being so, it is very selfless of her to do it in the interests of society generally. The Church should designate a Saint of Revenge. St Victoria has a stern and satisfying ring.
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