Review of Beyond Revenge in The Buffalo News

Wednesday 04 June 2008 at 09:03 am

Beyond Revenge received a very nice review in The Buffalo News last week. Here it is:

NONFICTION

Revenge is a dish best not served at all, author says

By Scott Thomas NEWS BOOK REVIEWER Updated: 05/25/08 7:42 AM

For those who imagine the human condition as a struggle between the wild-eyed child of our baser impulses and the monk‟s robes of higher morality, “Beyond Revenge” is a healthy challenge.

We might think that vengeance is the “natural” response when we‟re victimized, from getting cut off in traffic to suffering the national tragedy of a terrorist attack. We might think that forgiveness is the luxury of the morally advanced soul — it may be possible, but revenge is always more tempting and more satisfying. That impulse plays big at the movies, in the gloriously violent tradition of Charles Bronson and Rambo.

But author Michael McCullough, a University of Miami psychology professor and researcher, argues that it‟s forgiveness, not revenge, that‟s wired most deeply into our brains. The invisible hand of evolution, he says, has privileged individuals and societies that have made forgiveness work.

The prevailing view, McCullough says, is a “disease model” that sees revenge as an unhealthy element in society, and sees forgiveness as the cure for that illness. But, he argues, both the desire to take revenge and the ability to forgive are hard-wired into us because, at times, each has helped our ancestors solve social problems that threatened their survival and their ability to produce descendants. “The capacity to forgive,” he writes, “is every bit as authentic, every bit as intrinsic to human nature, and every bit as much a product of natural selection as is our penchant for revenge. . . . Rather than thinking of the relationship between revenge and forgiveness as one of disease and cure, or poison and antidote, we‟d do better to think of revenge and forgiveness as a team of midwives that helped give birth to human beings‟ ultra-cooperativeness.”

So, for example, when “group-living animals” including humans learn through the trial and error of evolution to forgive, they discover that forgiving an outlier who has wronged you preserves important relationships that help you survive. If you‟re on the outs with the other apes, they won‟t cooperate with you in finding food and watching out for predators; forgiving them now means a full belly tonight. Reconciliation also has been shown to reduce anxiety, freeing up energy for life-promoting activities.

Alas, he says, not all relationships are worth building or rebuilding: “The terrible things that humanity most desperately needs to forgive — violence, homicide, genocide, war, political persecution, and disenfranchisement based on religion, nationality or race — are typically not perpetrated by our parents, brothers, sisters, loving spouses, good friends or neighbors — people whom we most easily experience as care-worthy, valuable and safe. Instead, they‟re perpetrated by strangers, enemies and people whom we hate. The people whom we most need to forgive are the people for whom the psychological building blocks of forgiveness are naturally in short supply.”

The solution, McCullough says, is one that all religious faiths (and Charles Darwin to boot!) have taught: to recognize that “the psychological mechanism that sorts our social worlds into „friends and neighbors‟ versus „strangers and enemies‟ ” can be overcome with the truth that we‟re all in this together. “Us versus them” is unsustainable; as a pithy bumper sticker puts it, “There is no them.”

"Beyond Revenge” packs a lot of social science into its pages; it‟s accessibly written, though definitely not beach reading. It raises important issues — the vengeance of war, the honor/shame culture of inner cities, the retributive impulse of the death penalty. And the possibility of forgiveness is crucial if we are to hold on to hope that humankind can get better at the messy task of living together in peace.