Friday 07 November 2008 at 4:08 pm
Quick note to let everybody know that this week’s edition of the NPR show “Speaking of Faith” is an interview with yours truly about the science behind humans’ tendency for revenge and our ability to forgive. The interviewer (and editor) of the program were very generous, and they gave me lots of time to talk at length about Beyond Revenge and some of the lessons science has shown us for making the world a less vengeful, more forgiving place.
The show plays in 200 U.S. markets, and you can find out when and where it’s playing here:
http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/
You can also just listen to it on line here:
http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/2008/revenge_forgiveness/
Enjoy!
~M
Thursday 28 August 2008 at 11:58 am
Here's something in honor of this week's Democratic National Convention and the upcoming RNC. I put this post up on my Huffington Post Site a couple of days ago. I'll be putting things up over there from time to time, but will continue to blog on my Beyond Revenge Site as well.
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Sunday 27 July 2008 at 9:29 pm
Last night I did my first bookstore event on Beyond Revenge at Books and Books in Coral Gables. It was really fun!
Books and Books is an oasis for books and culture in Miami. In fact, Bill Clinton spoke there not too long ago, and Garrison Keillor will be there in a couple of months. So as I told the audience, they could go home after my presentation and, without exaggerating, report to their friends and family that I had been "somewhere between Bill Clinton and Garrison Keillor."
I feel honored that I was given the opportunity to tell people a bit about Beyond Revenge and why I wanted to write it. Lots of good questions after the presentation, which I am still thinking about today.
So thanks to all of you for spending your Saturday evening with me!
By the way, today Thierry Tamers sent me this article from the New York Times from a couple of weeks ago. I don't know how I missed it, although I wasn't reading the paper very carefully while I was in Amsterdam. This story is really relevant to how revenge is still practiced today in many parts of the world. Well worth a read, and very similar to some of the dynamics I discuss in Beyond Revenge.
Off now to mess around with with my Amazon Kindle, which I received today as a present for my 39th birthday, which was today.
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.
Monday 19 May 2008 at 3:23 pm
Yesterday the NY Times magazine published, in abbreviated form, my letter regarding Alex Kotlowitz's piece about epidemiologist Gary Slutkin and his program to reduce inner city violence by conceptualizing and treating it as a communicable disease ("Blocking the Transmission of Violence, NYT Magazine, May 4). Here's the full text of the letter that I sent.
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