Posts Tagged ‘vengeance’

Jared Diamond and Revenge

Friday, April 25th, 2008

Jared Diamond is an anthropologist at UCLA who has written a couple of excellent books, one of which, Guns, Germs and Steel , I used heavily in writing the chapters of my book on prehistoric man. He is an authority on New Guinea and the highlands culture that was only discovered since the Second World War.

He has an article in New Yorker this month on the basic human need for vengeance that is excellent. Until I got to the end, I was afraid he was going to use the usual leftist cop-out but he didn’t. The failure of governments to punish evil-doers in the 1960s led to the lawlessness of the 1970s. One reason was the failure to convince those tempted to break the law that it was too expensive. The other reason was the failure to convince the victims and their families that justice had been done. This is a powerful explanation of how that worked.