It's Always Revenge

Against doing bad things because the other guys did it

The Israeli Palestinian conflict is perhaps the most controversial conflict in the world. And this is remarkable because of how little disagreement there is about the facts.

Oh sure, there’s some disagreement about the facts. Israelis say that in 2000 they offered the Palestinians a generous, magnanimous proposal—a pile of land the size of the continental United States, but the Palestinians turned it down because they love terrorism. The Palestinians, in contrast, claim that the Israelis offered them 12 small tents as a state, each surrounded on all sides by Israeli settlements, and then called it a day.

But mostly, there’s agreement about what happened, and disagreement about whether it was justified. It’s uncontroversial that the Arabs in Palestine declared war on the Israelis in 1948 because they were opposed to Israel becoming a state, and that the Israelis displaced about 700,000 of them in the war, not allowing them to return. It’s uncontroversial that innocent civilians were killed on October 7th, and that more were killed in response to the Israeli reprisal. It’s uncontroversial that Israelis have built settlements, and that Palestinians have fired rockets into Israel, and that Israel has retaliated with barrages of rockets that have killed thousands.

Most of the disagreement is about whether this stuff is justified. “Sure,” say proponents of Israel “we expelled 700,000 Palestinians in the so-called Nakba, but that was in response to a war of aggression—and we had to to prevent the guerilla warfare tactics from succeeding.” “Sure,” say those on the Palestinian side, “we attacked in 48, but that was because you stole our historic homeland by setting up a state.”

Everyone agrees both sides have caused immense harm to the other. But they differ about whether that’s justified. Each side thinks that the harm they cause is justified as a response to a previous wrongdoing—a wrongdoing that the other side regards as permitted, because it was in response to an even earlier wrongdoing.

Now, I don’t intend to adjudicate which of these narratives is correct—I like to avoid controversy, which is why I only talk about uncontroversial things, like the idea that factory farming is the worst thing in history by an order of magnitude or that only around half of murders turn out for the worse. But my point is that if you justify doing bad things in response to other bad things, you will justify a neverending cycle of wrongdoing and vengeance, as each side interprets their retaliation as a response to previous wrongdoing of the other side. If two people who adopt a strategy of tit-for-tat get into a fight, their conflict will never end.

Recently, LibsOfTikTok got a Home Depot cashier fired for expressing on FaceBook that she wishes the Trump shooter hadn’t missed. Many on the right rushed to defend this decision, writing a genre of article that’s become all too common on the so-called dissident right: waxing poetic in defense of obviously unjustified viciousness. Lots of people on the right feel disgust and revulsion towards the left, so of course a cottage industry has sprung up of people defending pointless vengeance.

What good came out of firing the cashier? Her life was made considerably worse, other people are now less likely to say anything politically offensive online, more likely to speak in vague, milquetoast platitudes for fear of losing their jobs, less likely to say anything remotely interesting or controversial, more likely to affirm obvious inconsistencies like that while Trump will end Democracy, we should all pray for his good health.

I’ve talked about this at more length in this article, as well as this one. Scott also recently had an excellent article about the foolishness and immorality of right-wing cancel culture, and more specifically the Home Depot cancellation.

The right-wing defenses of this behavior are fairly uniform: they did it to us, so we get to do it back to them. Now, as Scott notes, this is disastrous and counterproductive for a bunch of reasons. But there’s something worth noting: this is a recipe for endless war.

The left can defend their cancellations as a response to McCarthyism. The right can defend McCarthyism as a response to communism. The left can defend communism as a response to the excesses of capitalism, and so on. If all it takes to justify severe harm is the claim that it’s a response to the other guy’s bad behavior, that is a recipe for every norm breaking down—for endless retaliatory political violence, for civil war.

The reason the Israeli-Palestinian conflict seems hopeless is that every violent action is justified as a response to previous wrongdoing. October 7th is seen, by many Palestinians, as a justified response to previous Israeli aggression—Israelis see previous Israeli actions as a response to still earlier Palestinian aggression. If every cancellation is justified by reference to a previous cancellation done by the other side, that is a recipe for endless cancellations, for everyone who ever expresses anything controversial or offensive facing a concerted effort to get them fired.

Every aggressive action by Russia is seen by the Russians as a response to still earlier U.S. aggression. Every aggressive action taken by the U.S. is seen as a justified response to Russian aggression. When history is complicated and has lots of wrongdoing on both sides, retaliation is a recipe for endless bloodshed.

Civilization ressts on a long and delicate series of shelling fences—of times when, though you could take some vengeance, you don’t do it because we have norms against it. Instead of beating up the members of the family of the guy who mugs you, you call the police. As Scott says:

Instead, I think of unfreedom of conscience as a scourge that has troubled humanity throughout history, like famine or plague or war. As with all scourges, very-long-run progress coexists with occasional disastrous relapses. The solution isn’t to get the other side and balance the ledger, it’s to keep developing the physical and social technology that’s gradually improved things in the past.

The remarkable thing about civilization is that we’ve pretty much ended endless vengeance cycles. While agents following a pretty simple and natural game theory strategy—tit for tat—will endlessly fight if they get into a conflict, we don’t do that. This is unbelievably historically rare—when Iraq engages in wrongdoing, we don’t send armed barbarians to kill all their men and rape their women. When a person commits rape in our time, we send them to prison. In the time the Bible was written (Genesis 34, to be exact), here’s how they did it:

34 Now Dinah, the daughter Leah had borne to Jacob, went out to visit the women of the land. ² When Shechem son of Hamor the Hivite, the ruler of that area, saw her, he took her and raped her. ³ His heart was drawn to Dinah daughter of Jacob; he loved the young woman and spoke tenderly to her. ⁴ And Shechem said to his father Hamor, “Get me this girl as my wife.”

⁵ When Jacob heard that his daughter Dinah had been defiled, his sons were in the fields with his livestock; so he did nothing about it until they came home.

⁶ Then Shechem’s father Hamor went out to talk with Jacob. ⁷ Meanwhile, Jacob’s sons had come in from the fields as soon as they heard what had happened. They were shocked and furious, because Shechem had done an outrageous thing in^[a] Israel by sleeping with Jacob’s daughter—a thing that should not be done.

⁸ But Hamor said to them, “My son Shechem has his heart set on your daughter. Please give her to him as his wife. ⁹ Intermarry with us; give us your daughters and take our daughters for yourselves. ¹⁰ You can settle among us; the land is open to you. Live in it, trade^[b] in it, and acquire property in it.”

…

¹³ Because their sister Dinah had been defiled, Jacob’s sons replied deceitfully as they spoke to Shechem and his father Hamor. ¹⁴ They said to them, “We can’t do such a thing; we can’t give our sister to a man who is not circumcised. That would be a disgrace to us. ¹⁵ We will enter into an agreement with you on one condition only: that you become like us by circumcising all your males. ¹⁶ Then we will give you our daughters and take your daughters for ourselves. We’ll settle among you and become one people with you. ¹⁷ But if you will not agree to be circumcised, we’ll take our sister and go.”

¹⁸ Their proposal seemed good to Hamor and his son Shechem. ¹⁹ The young man, who was the most honored of all his father’s family, lost no time in doing what they said, because he was delighted with Jacob’s daughter.

…

²⁴ All the men who went out of the city gate agreed with Hamor and his son Shechem, and every male in the city was circumcised.

²⁵ Three days later, while all of them were still in pain, two of Jacob’s sons, Simeon and Levi, Dinah’s brothers, took their swords and attacked the unsuspecting city, killing every male. ²⁶ They put Hamor and his son Shechem to the sword and took Dinah from Shechem’s house and left. ²⁷ The sons of Jacob came upon the dead bodies and looted the city where^[c] their sister had been defiled. ²⁸ They seized their flocks and herds and donkeys and everything else of theirs in the city and out in the fields. ²⁹ They carried off all their wealth and all their women and children, taking as plunder everything in the houses.

Civilization has gotten to a point where there is an efficient and calculated response to injustice. When someone rapes your sister, you don’t get into an endless war with his town and destroy his flocks after tricking his town into getting castrated. This is a historically unprecedented norm of great value. And yet people want to risk dispensing with this norm—replacing it with the norm of unmitigated vengeance—all so they can get their rocks off by sticking a finger into the eye of a poor, non-influential Home Depot worker, for expressing a view that’s common among Democrats behind-closed-doors. All so that they can get someone fired who is entirely unexceptional among people on the political left—differentiated only by her willingness to say what many people are thinking and her having been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Now, it may feel cathartic for an innocent bystander on the other team to get what those on the right feel they’ve been getting for a while. But it’s cathartic in the way that revenge is always cathartic—in the way that killing everyone in the town of Shechem, son of Hamor the Hivite, is. To avoid descending into endless bloodshed, we must resist the urge to deliver cathartic justice, and respect general norms that reduce wrongdoing when followed by everyone. Making exceptions to the norms so you can make the other side feel what you felt is a recipe for a total breakdown of norms.

You know something has gone wrong when you find yourself saying “no I know that a rule like this is indispensable for a flourishing civilization, but if we just break it this once because the other guys have, everything will be fine.” Quoting Scott once more:

The right-wingers admit that they have suffered terribly at the hands of cancellation mobs. Okay, check. They admit it’s made them so mad that they want a bloodbath of cancelling liberals harder than anyone has ever been cancelled before. Okay, check.

And now they say . . . that lefties must suffer terribly at the hands of cancellation mobs, because it will teach them that cancellation is wrong?

If being on the receiving end could teach people cancellation was bad, it would have taught you that. It obviously hasn’t, so try a different strategy.

Vengeance has an intoxicating allure. But civilization is fundamentally predicated on not following its recommendations, on being more civilized than that. Tearing down the shelling fences that protect against abuses so you can get in one last shot at your enemy is the most foolish and self-destructive thing one can do.