What brought this on?
This evolutionary biological/psychological/physiological look at revenge via one of my always reliable wiki-sources. Damn. I know I'll have to post on it sometime or other, but for now, I'm too lazy, and am satisfied with pinto beans and muffins.
First reaction though: It pays insufficient attention to the moral element in the spontaneous celebrations of the demise of OBL/UBL, and treats the phenomenon as akin to certain mindless quasi thermodynamical social hierarchical sorting processes that animals go through. This seems to be a common paradigm in these sorts of evolutionary/psychological hypotheses. I don't know how you go about verifying or falsifying such speculations. Be that as it may, there is a decidedly normative element to the human phenomenon, at least in the case of U/OBL and cases like it. Is there also some schadenfreude? Yes. Is that necessarily a bad thing? No. The writer seems to think differently.
And I don't share the hand wringing attitude evinced in this bit:
There is, nonetheless, something uniquely dismaying in the exorbitant glee shown by so many Americans in the immediate aftermath of bin Laden's death, just as there was in the celebration by Al Qaeda sympathizers after 9/11, and in the oafs and thugs who revel in TV reports of a state-sanctioned execution.
Why does he consider the celebrations "exorbitant"?
And, this closing passage beggars explanation:
In killing Osama bin Laden, the United States may or may not have achieved justice; we have definitely obtained a measure of revenge. But it remains to be seen what we shall do, and what others will do, with the rest of our lives and theirs.
"..may or may not have achieved justice"? Is there a question about this? I think it is safe to say that in the eyes of most, the converse of this puzzling statement is true, i.e., "In killing OBL the U.S. may or may not have achieved revenge; we have definitely obtained a measure of justice.."
But, enough for now.
More later.
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