Justice and Vengeance
Notes from Nina: Week of May 27, 2024
Man is a sacrificial animal. This goes infinitely more so for our supposedly rational, “post-Christian,” quantitive age. As René Girard put in 1972’s Violence and the Sacred, “as soon as the judicial system gains supremacy, its machinery disappears from sight. Like sacrifice, it conceals—even as it also reveals—its resemblance to vengeance, differing only in that it is not self-perpetuating and its decisions discourage reprisals.”
If sacrifice in primitive societies picks the “wrong” victim, or selects a stand-in, a burnt offering, instead of trying and punishing the guilty one, we come to believe that our system “is founded on a unique principle of justice unknown to primitive societies,” and is thus superior, even though at the same time, “we can hardly be unaware that the judicial process is more concerned with the general security of the community than with any abstract notion of justice.”
The transition from human sacrifice to animal substitute is one of the greatest anthropological shifts of all. It preserves the necessity of the expiating and redemptive quality of the shedding of blood (present in every sacrifice) without requiring murder. Christ’s sacrifice is made once, as the sacrifice of the innocent for the guilty, that redeems mankind.
As Joseph de Maistre wrote in his essay “On Sacrifices in General” (1821): “The choice was always made from animals that are the most valuable because of their utility, the gentlest, the most innocent, those nearest to man…. Not being able to immolate men to save men the most human victims in the animal kingdom were chosen.” Without Christ’s sacrifice and the revelation of God there is only paganism: “We know by an experiment of forty centuries, that wherever the true God is not known and served by virtue of an express revelation, man will always sacrifice men, and often eat them.”
Are we re-Paganizing? As Girard noted, secular justice omits—either deliberately or accidentally—to understand the violence-limiting function of sacrifice:
If primitive man insists on averting his attention from the wrongdoer, with an obstinacy that strikes us as either idiotic or perverse, it is because he wishes above all to avoid fueling the fires of vengeance. If our own system seems more rational, it is because it conforms more strictly to the principle of vengeance.
If we don’t have a system of justice, but rather a system of vengeance, we must ask: Who or what is being avenged? In a secular age, it is the social as such, or “the public,” a kind of phantasm consisting of opinion, feeling, and desire, manipulated by an extraordinary media and political apparatus. Who or what is guilty? It is the one who is most human, the one who best encapsulates the spirit of the social. America is entrepreneurial, swaggering, expansive, new and free, cinematic and extremely proximate to its founding violence, which other countries bury in history and lore.
Donald Trump is the lamb of America!
As Girard explained, the legal system rationalizes revenge in the context of social pressure—and what better figure to sacrifice than a partying, property-dealing mogul who defeated those elites who should have “rightfully” claimed the American presidency?
As Compact founding editor Sohrab Ahmari wrote in his response to the Bragg verdict on Thursday, this has been a long time coming: “Ever since 2016, Democrats, the security establishment, and their media allies have sought to nail the Orange Bad Man, and the effort finally paid off on Thursday.” This was an act of revenge, no doubt about it. As Girard put it:
Instead of following the example of religion and attempting to forestall acts of revenge, to mitigate or sabotage its effects or to redirect them to secondary objects, our judicial system rationalizes revenge and succeeds in limiting and isolating its effects in accordance with social demands. The system treats the disease without fear of contagion and provides a highly effective technique for the cure and, as a secondary effect, the prevention of violence.
By recreating the cowboy-as-beyond-the-law, the US is testing to the limits the idea that the prevention of violence is built into the legal system. Lawfare threatens to become (internal) warfare, because there is no chance of arresting the spiral of retributive violence, even, or especially when we can’t imagine actual civil war, because everyone is on their phones and overweight. And how utterly, and shockingly, cinematic the Trump story all is, how like a Western.
As Compact contributor Walter Kirn put it post-verdict: “An outlaw president was probably our cultural destiny all along.”
Latest pieces in Compact
This week we revisited the philosophy behind “effective altruism” and Sam Bankman-Fried’s all-too-successful attempt to enact its principles at all costs. Elizabeth Bachmann argued that:
effective-altruist and longtermist thinking push all the consequences far into the future, decoupling intention from measurable outcome: They require risking money in-hand for larger quantities of money you might have in the future. In Bankman-Fried’s case, this amounted to risking the life savings and happiness of current people for the sake of people who aren’t even alive yet.
Ashley Frawley tackled the current cultural fixation with “neurodivergency,” arguing that what we are seeing is in fact a crisis of socialization: “What might feel instinctive to the well-socialized individual—like understanding conversational cues or basic etiquette—is experienced as foreign and anxiety-inducing.”
Daniel Kipnis revisited the controversy over Jonathan Glazer’s Oscar-winning recent film, The Zone of Interest, arguing that “it isn’t just a movie about Nazi psychology or a prism through which to view the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It is also a Polish movie.” Kipnis examined the Polish attitude (and even laws) relating to complicity in the Holocaust in the wake of the film’s success.
Darel E. Paul reviewed historian Melissa Teixeira’s new book, A Third Path: Corporatism in Brazil & Portugal, writing that “The Estados Novos of both countries created a vast social infrastructure of producer organizations, courts, and state bureaucracies whose goals were to debate, identify, and secure just wages for workers, just profits for capitalists, and just prices for consumers.”
And finally, Christian Parenti responded to the Trump verdict: “Unless someone assassinates Trump, we will find out what all this lawfare amounts to in November.”
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This week I visited London’s Natural History Museum to see their Birds: Brilliant and Bizarre exhibition. Despite the hectic half-term and summer tourism of South Kensington, the bird show was relatively peaceful and charmingly old-fashioned, keeping the focus on our feathered friends rather than bashing the visitor over the head with unnecessary moralism or spurious analogies. Thus, we were treated to taxidermied eagles, swifts, humming-birds, spoonbills, and a baby albatross, which looks like a cloud with a beak.
Some amazing fossils were on display, before the great meteorite and after, and truly lovely facts, like the birds who sing to their embryos in egg, triggering a genetic response that encourages the unborn chicks to stay cool enough. A stork with an African spear through its neck (a Pfeilstorch) provided evidence of migration patterns to the Germans in the early 19th century—there are several documented examples of these birds with spears, and one of them is here.
Trippy birds like the vampire ground finch of the Galápagos Islands—to return to blood sacrifice for a moment—who sometimes drink the blood of other birds, and brood parasites such as the cuckoo are on show, as well as the African greater honeyguide, which works together with tribesmen in Mozambique to locate the bees’ nectar. The quaintness and genuine desire to inform made the show stand out: the beauty and uniqueness of animals should not be invoked to dignify human behavior. They’ve sacrificed enough already!
Until next week—Nina.
Yeah, the sociopath was unfairly treated, but he’s still a sociopath.
I do persist. your course on iconography or something. or wrong person wrong course
https://davidmacgregor.substack.com/p/i-fell-darpa-in-love-with-you?r=patn2