At first glance, Garth Ennis’ writing on Preacher appears to be edgy and heterodox, at least for a Direct Market comic from DC. And not just in the superficial stuff that makes for a ‘Mature Readers’ label –swearing, ultraviolence, loyal canine sidekicks. No, it appears to be edgy – at least for its cultural context and intended readership – at a deeper level of content and theme. The Catholic Church is portrayed as venal and corrupt. There’s a savagely funny send-up of the idea of a messianic bloodline, as made famous in The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (and even more famous in The Da Vinci Code).
Oh, and God is a narcissistic, selfish prick.
So, yeah, Preacher seems to be pretty ‘far out’. But a closer look reveals that Ennis’ morals are, in fact, deeply conventional. At its heart, the book is a sort of love story, and an effectively sweet one at that. And Ennis endorses in Preacher the same old-fashioned kind of masculinity that he valorises throughout most of his work, represented here with only a moderate dose of irony by John Wayne. A man, Ennis as much as out and tells us, should be strong, self-sufficient and upstanding. He should treat his lady right, do good by his friends, keep his word, and look after them critters what can’t look after themselves.
Excuse me while I ride off into the sunset.
There’s nothing wrong per se with this kind of conventionality, I think. Stated thus baldly, the book’s morality is prima facie unobjectionable.* And the book itself is easily my own favourite among the long-running series published by Vertigo.
(Suck it, Sandman and The Invisibles! And seriously don’t even bother, Y and Fables)
What is worrying, however, about Preacher — and it’s another theme that runs throughout Ennis’ work — is its conventional, even reactionary, sexual morality. Time and again, Ennis reveals that he is fundamentally uncomfortable about any sexual activity outside a very limited range. Time and again, he attributes to his villains sexual proclivities outside this range. Time and again, he uses sexual perversion as a shorthand for moral perversion.
Consider: the book’s secondary villain Herr Starr, who wants to give Margaret Thatcher a golden shower, and can eventually only reach sexual satisfaction through liberal application of a strap-on.
Or: Jesus DeSade, whose unbridled hedonism leads to pedophilia.
Or: T.C., whose unconstrained libido matches his moral and intellectual savagery.
Or: Miss Oatlash, the dominatrix and Nazi apologist. ZOMG! The uptight professional woman is secretly into BDSM – smile, you’ve just been Shyamalanned!
Or: Odin Quincannon, the evil businessman who…well, no, I won’t spoil that gag for those who haven’t read the book.
Or:
[CASSIDY SPOILER!!}
That the depths of Cassidy’s decline are marked when he’s coerced into giving his drug dealer a blowjob.
[END CASSIDY SPOILER!]
By contrast, there are only three occasions when the main good guys – viz. protagonist Jesse Custer and girlfriend Tulip ’Hare – engage in anything remotely kinky. First (chronologically at least — it occurs in a flashback), Jesse idly considers asking Tulip and her best friend Amy to join him in a threesome. He decides against it, not wanting to jeopardise his relationship with either of them—incidentally, this could well be the smartest thing Jesse does in the whole series.
Second, Tulip handcuffs Jesse to a bed, leading the poor sap to think that they’re going to get their kink on. But no such luck; it’s just revenge for one of Jesse’s misdeeds. Tulip just leaves him there while she goes out drinking with Amy.
Finally there is some suggestion, later in the series, that Jesse and Tulip do eventually use the handcuffs in the manner intended, viz. very mildly kinky sexual practices. So even when the good guys do get down and dirty, it’s about as vanilla as you could imagine.
Now, to be fair, Ennis rarely presents any of the villains’ sexual deviancies as evil in themselves (with the obvious exception of DeSade’s pedophilia). Their perversions are funny, not wicked. We’re supposed to laugh, not boo. And Ennis is under no obligation to proselytize for sexual adventurism.
But Preacher does deliberately set out to undermine some central parts of Christian morality — in particular the value of faith, and the doctrine that God deserves our worship. So it’s a bit of a let-down to find that Ennis’ views on sexuality are barely more liberal than that famous neologism, Rick ‘man-on-dog’ Santorum. And it’s even worse that Ennis perpetuates the myth that only bad guys like to get kinky.
Preacher may be a good comic but, when it comes to sexuality, it brings to mind what Homer Simpson once said about the bible: talk about a preachy book!
* but maybe not, uh, seconda facie. A while back, someone called ‘moose n squirrel’ accused Ennis of fascism, in a comment thread at Tim O’Neill’s whenwillthehurtingstop.blogspot.com. (Because I, evidently, suck and am stupid, I can’t find the post or comment now) Among the evidence was the fact that Ennis almost always presents weakness as contemptible, meriting either scorn or ridicule or both, while the good guys are almost always adept at chewing bubblegum and kicking ass. But it’s for good, of course, not for evil, so that’s A-OK. I find this a persuasive reading of Ennis, in Preacher as much as anywhere else. Those who favour a more charitable interpretation carry a heavy burden of proof, or so it seems to me at any rate.
Not that fascism would necessarily invalidate Ennis’ work, even if it is there. I like all kinds of comics with dubious ideological contents: e.g. Dave Sim, Harold Gray, Raymond ‘boo hoo nuclear holocaust somebody call a waaambulance’ Briggs etc.
I’ve not read Preacher but this seems to fit with pretty much everything of his I have read. Ennis basically writes with the outlook of a rather old-fashioned 10 year old boy – from his sniggering approach to sex to his seemingly never-ending (and mostly entirely non-ironic) attempts to single-handedly re-popularise the traditional, stiff upper lipped British war comic of yesteryear.
“I like all kinds of comics with dubious ideological contents: e.g. […] Raymond ‘boo hoo nuclear holocaust somebody call a waaambulance’ Briggs”
Eh? What do you have against Raymond Briggs?
I’d basically agree with this, but then I’d suspect Ennis might agree as well; not that I’d blame anybody for giving up on The Boys — it’s a rather old-fashioned superhero soap opera of niggling extended build accompanied by uneven, sometimes bad art — but part of series’ ostensible hero’s character is his struggle with his very conventional, thoughtless sexual desires… not a huge part, but a part, and evidence that Ennis is pretty much aware of this tendency in his work, and interested in acknowledging it at least…
Ian: in the words of Foghorn Leghorn, that was a joke, son. How could anyone object to When the Wind Blows? I like Briggs a lot — Fungus the Bogeyman was on my top ten list for the HU poll! He deserves to be better known outside the UK; it doesn’t help that his highest-profile release in the Direct Market was a reissue of the uncharacteristically mopey Gentlemen Jim.
Jog: in the words of Cathy, ack. I tried hard with The Boys, I really did, but…I finally cracked it with that X-Men story where SPOILER Prof. X is a pedo. What next, Batman and Robin are gay? Aquaman is lame? The whole series reads like the comics equivalent of white people drive like this, black people drive like this. Ack.
JOOTJB wrote: “But a closer look reveals that Ennis’ morals are, in fact, deeply conventional.”
So?
So it contrasts with the surface of his work, which seems anti-conventional. That’s all.
Oh, and also he should be shipped off to the gulag for failing to kowtow to the morally bankrupt leftist idols of permissiveness political correctness.
Or something.
permissiveness *and* political correctness
and by ‘his work’, I really meant Preacher specifically
Jones –
“Ian: in the words of Foghorn Leghorn, that was a joke, son. How could anyone object to When the Wind Blows?”
Ah. Now I feel foolish.
Briggs is great. I used to live a few miles from him when I was a young child – every time we drove past his house (which he used as the model for Father Christmas’ house in his books) my dad would tell me to look out of the window to see if I could spot any reindeer in the garden. Don’t remember ever actually catching sight of any but I like to think that’s just because they were all hiding round the back…
Isn’t the whole point of Preacher that American Christianity, as seen by Ennis, doesn’t measure up to American rugged individualism?
When it comes to the sex stuff, the main thing is that Ennis knows that he and Custer are both chauvinists. Custer wrestles with it throughout and that’s okay — I think it’s Ennis’s acknowledgment of his own outlook.
(I liked Preacher. I didn’t agree with everything it had to say but I had a blast reading it and that counts for a lot.)
Yeah, normally edgy work like “Preacher” isn’t my cup of tea, but I really like Ennis’ writing.
In person, he also seems friendly, funny, self-effacing, easy to talk to, and very low maintenance.
Ennis certainly ridicules some institutions; though he’s far from nihilistic, and has great respect for individual courage and honor.
For instance, in one issue of Preacher, Starr through various political connections is placed over one American military officer, who is told to to order his men to launch a mechanized assault upon Jesse and his group. The officer is not only skeptical; he tells Starr in no uncertain terms that if this dubious venture gets any of his men killed, he’ll personally make sure Starr pays for it. All stated in that splendidly pungent, punchy Ennis dialogue. Starr, taken aback, says nothing…
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Jones, one of the Jones boys says:
Now, to be fair, Ennis rarely presents any of the villains’ sexual deviancies as evil in themselves (with the obvious exception of DeSade’s pedophilia). Their perversions are funny, not wicked. We’re supposed to laugh, not boo…
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True, true!
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…it’s a bit of a let-down to find that Ennis’ views on sexuality are barely more liberal than that famous neologism, Rick ‘man-on-dog’ Santorum. And it’s even worse that Ennis perpetuates the myth that only bad guys like to get kinky.
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Yes, he’s pretty conventional in his attitudes. Though isn’t it “less bad” to have the attitude that kinkiness is ridiculous and laughable, rather than immoral and vile?
Incidentally, in The Boys (a series I’ve enjoyed a great deal) Ennis shows some “non-kinky” behavior as indeed vile. As reported in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boys_%28comics%29 , “Annie January, a.k.a Starlight, is recruited from the Young Americans to join the Seven, whom she soon discovers to be a lot less clean-cut than the press make out.”
The “initiation” of the naive, idealistic Annie — who will become the love of the gentle everyman Wee Hughie — involving her having to sexually service the macho louts of the Seven. Her being semi-forced (do it or get kicked back down to the superhero minor leagues) to this Ennis shows as degrading and morally depraved, unlike the laughable kinkiness common among the bad guys in Preacher.
Speaking of fascism, there’s actually a strong theme against all that in The Boys. The series begins with an obvious political analogy; in Scotland, the girlfriend of Wee Hughie is hideously killed in the fight between an arrogant American superhero (totally unconcerned about the “collateral damage”) and the supervillain he was battling with.
That comic also shows how the ultra-male Billy Butcher, leader of the Boys (a group dedicated to keeping these corporate-sponsored superheroes in line by, among other things, blackmailing them by videotaping their kinky sex) may make homophobic jokes and remarks, yet is actually friendly with a gay male character who’s (as I recall) a bartender.
In other gay-friendly touches, the Wikipedia entry tells how one story arc ended with… “While the crime is solved…Hughie is depressed that there is no real justice for the dead man. He is, however, able to bring a gay couple back together.”
Ennis isn’t a fascist. I think he’s a kind of thwarted romantic reactionary. In his war comics, the hero is normally a rebel not because he opposes the war effort but because the top brass are incompetent or treacherous. He’s a bit like the (brilliant) thriller writer Len Deighton in that respect. But I don’t deny he’s got that nasty vicarious sadism in the way he portrays the violent tough guy. I think you can relate all that to his difficulties with sexuality.
What I would really love to see him deal with properly is Northern Ireland. According to Wikipedia his first comic was about the Troubles, but he doesn’t seem to have returned to the subject since (although the relationship between the Preacher and Cassidy is clearly something to do with it). Correct me if I’m wrong; I’ve only read some of his stuff.
Actually he did, in a (non-supernatural) one-off spin-off of Hellblazer with art by Dillon. A major point was how Northern Irish are not to be defined solely in terms of the Troubles.
Thanks, I will try to get hold of that. Now I think about it, it is of course extremely offensive to expect a Northern Irish writer to have to “cover” the Troubles, but in my defence it seems a slightly less crass point if you’re discussing someone whose work’s main theme has been violence. Or is it?
So thoroughly non-supernatural is that spin-off (titled “Heartland”) that until right now I didn’t even realize it was a Hellblazer spin-off. I always thought it was just a random straight-fiction one-shot that Ennis and Dillon somehow managed to get published back in the Wild West days of Vertigo.
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Paul Francis says:
…Now I think about it, it is of course extremely offensive to expect a Northern Irish writer to have to “cover” the Troubles…
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Now now, you weren’t demanding he do so; all you said was, “What I would really love to see him deal with properly is Northern Ireland.”
And anyway, isn’t his full name Garth “Extremely Offensive” Ennis?
BTW, I’d always made sure to pick up every Punisher issue Ennis wrote; if the art was by Steve Dillon — to Ennis what Quitely is to Morrison — all the better…
One of those story arcs reminding how Ennis has a soft spot for misfits and freaky types, ‘long as they aren’t assholes. There’s Arseface, the facially multi-pierced guy in one Punisher storyline (who suffers through getting them ripped out with pliers rather than betray Castle) , Wee Hughie’s bizarro childhood friends in Scotland, that birth-defect one-eyed, hallucination-seeing woman in Preacher…
He is in fact a sensitive little flower. Wouldn’t want to hurt his feelings.
Regarding Preacher, I never could square Ennis’s chivalry (a man, like Cassidey, who hurts a woman isn’t a man at all) with his attitude that the Saint of Killers, who killed men, women, and children, was a badass. Cassidey had to temporarily destroy himself to obtain redemption, but the Saint of Killers apparently got a free pass.
Bear in mind that neither Cassidy nor the Saint are presented as morally admirable — but I take your point that the Saint is a badass. Here’s one attempt to resolve the incongruence: Cassidy’s violence against women is an expression of his psychological weakness. He does it as a bully. The Saint, by contrast, is driven to it by extreme circumstances and is possibly even less culpable insofar as it’s part of God’s great plan.
Cassidy’s great sin is that, although physically strong, he’s psychologically weak. Which is pretty much the same for God, right? God is a bad guy because he (a) craves the approval of those weaker than him (weaker in a literal physical sense) and (b) fails to fulfil his noblesse oblige towards them as his creation.
For Ennis, both wanting to be loved by the weak, and bullying them, are sides of the same coin: they express a fundamental and corrupt psychological weakness. For Nietzsche, the ubermensch neither cares what the weak think of him, nor does he subjugate them (although he easily could) — not out of compassion, which is a contemptible, Jewish motive — but because doing so would be infra dig. I think that’s pretty close to Ennis’ view (minus the anti-Semitism), although no doubt he would vehemently deny it.
That is an interesting interpretation, but it doesn’t make me feel much better about Ennis. I would also say that the Saint’s actions are the product of psychological weakness as well. When he was resurrected he became indestructible and all-powerful, but at the top of his to-do list was wipe out every living person in Ratwater, because the thugs who ran the town killed him and his family. Talk about bullying–revenge is arguably the fantasy of the powerless. (And Preacher is chock full of revenge fantasies, where villains meet their just desserts in various gruesome ways.)
I think this just reaffirms your original point, that Ennis peddles a conventional masculinity that a better writer would interrogate.
“revenge is arguably the fantasy of the powerless.”
That’s a great line. I need to remember that.
Two wrongs don’t make a right.
Revenge fantasies often feel the wrong way round, i.e. you suspect the fantasist has started with the righteous brutality and has then had to invent a suitably heinous original sin to justify it. Which is actually double the fun because you get to have two lots of violence, one bad, one good. Sin City springs to mind.
“revenge is arguably the fantasy of the powerless.”
To that effect:
“In any case, one can state that much of the so-called Nietzchean ‘superhumanity’ has as its origin and doctrinal model not Zarathustra but the Count of Monte-Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas.”
— Antonio Gramsci, Letteratura e vita nazionale, III, ‘Letteratura popolare”.
on which Umberto Eco commented:
I found Gramsci’s idea seductive. That the cult of the superman with nationalist and Fascist roots be born, among other things, of a petty bourgeois frustration complex is well-known. Gramsci has shown clearly how this ideal of the superman could be born, in the nineteenth century, within a literature that saw itself as popular and democratic:
“The serial replaces (and at the same time favorises) the imagination of the man of the people, it is a veritable waking dream (…) long reveries on the idea of vengeance, of punishing the guilty for the ills they have inflicted (…) ”
Thus, it was legitimate to wonder about the cult of the right-wing superman but also about the equivocal aspects of the nineteenth century’s humanitarian socialism. [tr:AB]
(from Eco’s introduction to the French translation of his 1978 book of essays, Il superuomo di massa.)
And in researching pop adventure literature from the 18th century on, I was astonished to find out how central revenge fantasies for the impotent were in them; I’d say up to and including Superman, at least in his early years.
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Josh says:
…revenge is arguably the fantasy of the powerless. (And Preacher is chock full of revenge fantasies, where villains meet their just desserts in various gruesome ways.)
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Well, the Saint of Killers certainly was a loose cannon; but if he’d, say, confined his murderous retribution to “the thugs who ran the town [and] killed him and his family,” what would be the problem with that?
As with “villains meet[ing] their just desserts in various gruesome ways,” isn’t there a significant overlap between revenge and justice?
A guy murders a bunch of people; society captures, tries, and either executes or imprisons him. Isn’t that both justice and taking vengeance upon him for his actions?
Where revenge can diverge from justice is when, for instance, someone kills another for mocking him, or cheating with their spouse. A disproportionate punishment, rather than a morally appropriate one.
And, aren’t there plenty of rich and powerful people who still have revenge fantasies? Against critics, “those pesky government regulators,” anyone who dares interfere with them in any way?
The powerless have plenty of non-revenge fantasies too: sex, romance, travel to exotic lands, fame, wealth…
“And, aren’t there plenty of rich and powerful people who still have revenge fantasies? ”
Being rich and powerful doesn’t necessarily make you actually powerful. Everyone — rich, poor, strong, weak — is ultimately at the mercy of many, many factors beyond their control, whether it be the affections of others, the random working of disease and natural disaster, or death.
Revenge fantasies are fantasies of control; they provide the illusion that individuals can manipulate the world through their own abilities in order to obtain justice, or satisfaction, or what have you. They’re a way of denying the basic powerlessness of human beings. As such, those who are used to control (the rich, the politically connected — or, say, men) may be even more subject to them than those with less power, who tend to be forced to accept their lack of agency early and often.
As to your comments about justice — I’d say justice is often (always?) a fantasy too, not unrelated to revenge fantasies. Our current criminal justice system certainly is a huge weight of evidence for that viewpoint.
@Noah, it doesn’t come from me. I think Jonathan Rosenbaum said something along those lines, but I can’t find where. I think psychologists say the same thing…
@AB – that’s a cool quote from Gramsci, thanks for sharing.
There is no such thing as revenge, says George Orwell, in this essay (which betrays the ingrained anti-Semitism that he never quite managed to rid himself of):
http://www.george-orwell.org/Revenge_is_Sour/0.html
Noah wrote: “Revenge fantasies are fantasies of control; they provide the illusion that individuals can manipulate the world through their own abilities in order to obtain justice, or satisfaction, or what have you.”
Why do you say “provide the illusion”?
You almost sound like Mongo in “Blazing Saddles”: “Mongo only pawn… in game of life”
I say “illusion” because people die. No one’s life is entirely under their control.
This is a conservative argument. Modesty about individual control is at the heart of conservative rejection of radical social change, and at the core of its critique of modernity in general (see Edmund Burke.) I don’t think it’s the last word to say on the subject or anything, but it’s a pretty powerful and worthwhile perspective. The fact that conservatives have more or less entirely abandoned it is one of the reasons our political discourse is such a travesty.
Noah — While it is true that we do not have total control of our lives, and no one is guaranteed a tomorrow, we do have many, many opportunities in life to make decisions that will impact our lives and the lives of others.
As someone who has spent much of his life exploring the various sciences, and as someone who also spent about a dozen years troubleshooting hundreds of mechanical/electronic aircraft avionics problems, I know that cause/effect or if/then is an irrevocable law in the universe.
When confronted with a problem, the trick is to narrow down the variables to the point where one can make an educated and reliable decision. This doesn’t always work, of course. For example, some problems have so many variables it may impossible to make a “good” or “accurate” decision. Or perhaps there are available solutions but they are all deemed “unacceptable.”
But the phenomenon of cause/effect (if/then), at its core, works extremely well. It is the principle behind Boolean logic, which in turn is at the core of all computer digital logic and computer programming.
I think what happens is that most people don’t realize they have the power to cause and effect things in their life — but they absolutely do. Not everything, of course, but quite a bit of stuff nonetheless.
I think revenge might be one area where Noah’s conservative pessimism really is the wisest response though. The laws of cause and effect leave you powerless to undo an evil that has already been done to you. By all means embark on that killing spree, but you are likely to feel a sense of anti-climax.
Cause and effect works well for computers. Less well for human interactions or politics, where the variables become infinitely multiplied.
People need to take responsibility for their actions. One way you do that, though, is by admitting that you aren’t a God who can determine what is just and unjust, or who can perceive and devise a fitting revenge for every injustice.
Noah: if “people die” is an argument against the pursuit of justice, then it’s equally an argument against getting out of bed in the morning. But maybe we actually shouldn’t get out of bed? I don’t know, getting out of bed does seem like a politically corrosive product of modernity or something.
Russ: I don’t think Boolean logic has anything whatsoever to do with “cause and effect”…unless I seriously misunderstand the words “Boolean logic” and “cause and effect”…and probably “has”, “anything”, “to”, “do”, and “with”, while we’re at it. The “if…then” operator of classical logic — the “material conditional” — and its equivalent in Boolean logic, is *notoriously* unlike “if…then” statements in everyday life, either in or out of causal contexts.
Everyone: it’s been a while since I was really familiar with this literature, but IIRC the standard explanation of anger and revenge in game theory and evolutionary psychology is that it’s strategic irrationality. It’s a way of signalling to other people that you will disproportionately respond to slights, insults and ill-treatment, so that they won’t do it in the future. Suppose you know that, if I find out you’ve stolen ten dollars from me, I will spend hundreds of dollars to track you down and fuck you up; then you might think twice about stealing from me. In other words, a thirst for revenge is a way of saying “don’t fuck with me”.
What’s the evolutionary psychology explanation of why evolutionary psychology explanations are so darn popular? And how exactly does watching revenge narratives improve your mating chances? Someone else says “don’t fuck with me” and that means everyone’s more likely to sleep with you? That doesn’t seem especially convincing.
Re, people dying. I think you maybe didn’t follow me? I wasn’t saying, “People die, therefore, why bother pursuing justice.” I was saying, “The pursuit of justice often seems to be more about asserting control than about actually righting wrongs. Even people who seem to have control over their lives actually do not in important ways, such as determining the moment of their death. As a result, everyone has control fantasies.”
Control fantasies, the belief that technology and progress will allow us to change the world for the better, seems to me to be definitionally progressive — and as such it is very much a hallmark of modernist ideologies, like communism or fascism or capitalism. Questioning that is a conservative move — which has its own problems, certainly. You’re welcome to critique those problems if you’d like. I don’t think you managed to do it in that response, though.
Sorry; just thinking about this more. Jones, do evolutionary psychologists feel this is an effective strategy? Or, somewhat more broadly, is there anyway to critique revenge (or I guess anything?) from inside evolutionary psychology?
“the evolutionary psychology explanation of why evolutionary psychology explanations are so darn popular”
At a guess, I’d say: we naturally reason teleologically (there’s some developmental evidence for this, and cross-cultural evidence too, I think). I don’t know what the explanation for *that* is; several possibilities come to mind but I’d really just be making them up.
More than usual.
Anyway, because of that, just-so stories are extraordinarily cognitively catchy. On the one hand, they’re counter-intuitive or surprising enough that they grab our attention (depression is good for you! women prefer different kinds of men depending on their menstrual cycle! men are from mars, women are from venus!). And, on the other, they conform enough to natural patterns of thought — specifically teleological explanation — that they’re comprehensible and “make sense”. They’re what Sperberians call “minimally counter-intuitive”.
On revenge narratives: well, I wasn’t trying to explain why people are interested in them — who knows why? I was just giving the standard explanation of why people in the real world pursue vengeance even when it’s self-defeating and counter-productive.
Besides, there’s much more to evolutionary success than making people more likely to have sex with you. I know I brought that caricature on myself! But no, an implausible caricature is not plausible…
The idea in this case wasn’t that a thirst for vengeance signals to potential mates that you’re an attractive choice; rather, it’s that it signals to people who could potentially mess with you (e.g. by physically harming you or hampering your access to material resources) that they had better not. And the avenger need not himself (sic) reap the benefits of vengeance; those benefits might accrue instead to his kin or group. (Yes, I believe in group selection; everyone believes in kin selection).
As to the possibility of critique within ev. psych., there’s plenty of room for it. The bog-standard point is that the evolutionary concept of “adaptation” is a historical one. “Adaptations” are, roughly, those traits which evolved, at least in part, by being selected for. But “x is an adaptation” does not mean “x is currently adaptive”, nor that “x now does what it was selected for”, much less “x does what we would actually want, evolutionary success aside”, much much much less “x is morally acceptable” or “hooray for x”.
Look, my bullshit-detector goes off the scale when when I hear most ev. psych, too. 98% of what gets reported as ev. psych is b.s. (I think I read a study once with that estimate…) 99% of that is irresponsible speculation. But 98% of theology, Theory and something-else-starting-with-“th” are b.s. too, so there’s plenty to go around. At least the strategic irrationality explanation was one of the fairly well established claims of ev. psych. and (more particularly) game theory, I thought…but I could easily be wrong about that.
Ultimately, I agree 300% with the statement that “the pursuit of justice often seems to be more about asserting control than about actually righting wrongs”, at least if we substitute “revenge” for “justice”. When Stringer Bell goes after Omar in The Wire, I don’t think he’s particularly concerned with restoring justice sub specie aeternitatis. And I agree probably around 200% with the statement without the substitution.
You know, I believe that there was significant biological evolution of human behavioural traits. But I also believe that there was significant cultural evolution of same. In lots and lots of cases, culture’s been much more important. Kidding aside, why can’t we all just get along?
The problem with separating justice and revenge is that it often seems like the first is just cover for the second, or for the imposition of power. That’s Foucault’s argument…which is maybe somewhat undercut by the eager idiocy with which he embraced the Iranian revolution.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
“And, aren’t there plenty of rich and powerful people who still have revenge fantasies?”
Being rich and powerful doesn’t necessarily make you actually powerful. Everyone — rich, poor, strong, weak — is ultimately at the mercy of many, many factors beyond their control, whether it be the affections of others, the random working of disease and natural disaster, or death…
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Sheesh. No, being “rich and powerful” doesn’t make you invulnerable, omnipotent. (Which is not what I said, but why let that get in the way of dismissing someone’s argument?)
But, being powerful does make one have plenty of power, in many ways…
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As to your comments about justice — I’d say justice is often (always?) a fantasy too, not unrelated to revenge fantasies. Our current criminal justice system certainly is a huge weight of evidence for that viewpoint.
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So, let’s toss out the entire legal system; let no crime be punished…
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People need to take responsibility for their actions. One way you do that, though, is by admitting that you aren’t a God who can determine what is just and unjust…
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Does that then mean we must not criticize the Comedian for sundry unsavory actions in Watchmen? We’re not gods, after all…
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…or who can perceive and devise a fitting revenge for every injustice.
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So because we can’t do an exactly perfectly fitting to every punishment, we should chuck the whole system out? For sure, “the perfect is the enemy of the good…”
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R. Maheras says:
Noah — While it is true that we do not have total control of our lives, and no one is guaranteed a tomorrow, we do have many, many opportunities in life to make decisions that will impact our lives and the lives of others.
…I think what happens is that most people don’t realize they have the power to cause and effect things in their life — but they absolutely do. Not everything, of course, but quite a bit of stuff nonetheless.
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Indeed! And, a sad effect of oppressive/abusive upbringings or circumstances, is that people take on the attitude of “learned helplessness” ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness ); believing that “because I was never able to do anything about this suffering I went through in the past, therefore I will never be able to make things better for myself in the future.”
An attitude ironically reinforced by some well-meaning types: “You’re not responsible for anything you do, or crimes you commit! You’re just the victim of prejudice! We won’t criticize you for robbing, raping or murdering, that would be blaming the victim! You don’t have to anything, it’s up to society to change and make up for all the wrongs done to people like you…”
…Which just reinforces an attitude of helplessness; that says it’s not up to them to do anything to better themselves, resist their weaknesses. (And no, I’m not saying it’s totally up to victims of poverty/prejudice to improve their lot, either.)
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Noah Berlatsky says:
Control fantasies, the belief that technology and progress will allow us to change the world for the better, seems to me to be definitionally progressive — and as such it is very much a hallmark of modernist ideologies, like communism or fascism or capitalism. Questioning that is a conservative move — which has its own problems, certainly…
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So, “the belief that technology and progress will allow us to change the world for the better” are fantasies?
It would definitely be a fantasy (as fanatic proponents of technology, progress, modernist ideologies would hold) that those factors will make for a perfect world, a Utopia. (A fantasy embodied in that “One World” poster and “Millennium” ad in the penultimate page of Watchmen.) Human nature, pesky unforeseen natural factors — a new disease, tsunami, mega-meteor strike — will get in the way.
But it’s equally absurd to have the reactionary attitude that because, say, “the poor will always be with us,” therefore nothing should be done to improve conditions; strive toward a somewhat better world, more just society.
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…do evolutionary psychologists feel this is an effective strategy? Or, somewhat more broadly, is there anyway to critique revenge (or I guess anything?) from inside evolutionary psychology?
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Dunno about what evolutionary psychologists specifically think about this, but justice/fairness/revenge certainly have important parts among the more evolved social animals.
There’s “it signals to people who could potentially mess with you (e.g. by physically harming you or hampering your access to material resources) that they had better not,” as one of the Joneses put it.
There’s observed behaviors among chimpanzees that a brutal, bullying leader, who’s especially greedy with the bananas, will find himself resented, obeyed only grudgingly, and on his own if he’s attacked by a lion.
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Though human morality may end in notions of rights and justice and fine ethical distinctions, it begins, Dr. de Waal says, in concern for others and the understanding of social rules as to how they should be treated. At this lower level, primatologists have shown, there is what they consider to be a sizable overlap between the behavior of people and other social primates.
Social living requires empathy, which is especially evident in chimpanzees, as well as ways of bringing internal hostilities to an end. Every species of ape and monkey has its own protocol for reconciliation after fights, Dr. de Waal has found. If two males fail to make up, female chimpanzees will often bring the rivals together, as if sensing that discord makes their community worse off and more vulnerable to attack by neighbors. Or they will head off a fight by taking stones out of the males’ hands…
Young rhesus monkeys learn quickly how to behave, and occasionally get a finger or toe bitten off as punishment. Other primates also have a sense of reciprocity and fairness. They remember who did them favors and who did them wrong. Chimps are more likely to share food with those who have groomed them. Capuchin monkeys show their displeasure if given a smaller reward than a partner receives for performing the same task, like a piece of cucumber instead of a grape…
As Dr. de Waal sees it, human morality may be severely limited by having evolved as a way of banding together against adversaries, with moral restraints being observed only toward the in group, not toward outsiders. “The profound irony is that our noblest achievement — morality — has evolutionary ties to our basest behavior — warfare,” he writes. “The sense of community required by the former was provided by the latter.”…
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http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/20/science/20moral.html?pagewanted=all
An excerpt from Wild Justice – The Moral Lives of Animals:
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Some animals seem to have a sense of fairness in that they understand and behave according to implicit rules about who deserves what and when. Individuals who breach rules of fairness are often punished either through physical retaliation or social ostracism. For example, research on play behavior in social carnivores suggests that when animals play, they are fair to one another and only rarely breach the agreed-upon rules of engagement—if I ask you to play, I mean it, and I don’t intend to dominate you, mate with you, or eat you. Highly aggressive coyote pups, to give just one example, will bend over backwards to maintain the play mood with their fellows, and when they don’t do this they’re ignored and ostracized.
Fairness also seems to be a part of primate social life. Researchers Sarah Brosnan, Frans de Waal, and Hillary Schiff discovered what they call “inequity aversion” in capuchin monkeys, a highly social and cooperative species in which food sharing is common. These monkeys, especially females, carefully monitor equity and fair treatment among peers. Individuals who are shortchanged during a bartering transaction by being offered a less preferred treat refuse to cooperate with researchers. In a nutshell, the capuchins expect to be treated fairly…
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Much more at http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/041612.html
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Noah Berlatsky says:
The problem with separating justice and revenge is that it often seems like the first is just cover for the second, or for the imposition of power.
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Certainly; and people start wars because they say they’re for peace, or pretend to love when they just want sex. What else is new? Do we dismiss those arguing for peace and love, or justice, because liars and hypocrites use those to mask their base motivations?
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That’s Foucault’s argument…which is maybe somewhat undercut by the eager idiocy with which he embraced the Iranian revolution.
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That’s where ideology and simplistic thinking leads you. If American imperialism maintained by a puppet tyrant, the Shah, is bad, therefore anyone opposing all that should be “good”…
Isn’t the revenge fantasy typically that the revenge was a matter of justice? Inglourious Basterds is such a revenge fantasy, since the revenge is just. I Saw the Devil is about revenge, but the revenge isn’t portrayed as just. I pretty strongly disagree that most revenge fantasies are about power (a demented view of morality — of course, a believer would eventually support a totalitarian), they’re mostly about evil people getting their just deserts. The fantasy is that evil people get their just deserts.
“The fantasy is that evil people get their just deserts.”
That’s a fantasy about control and power, though. The fantasy is that it’s possible to punish evildoers and right wrongs. It’s much the same as superhero stories in that regard…which again are empowerment fantasies.
Well, yeah, but it’s the power to see justice done, not merely to exercise power.
Right…but that’s just saying that there’s a particular thrill to having the power of the lawgiver/father. And for that matter, most revenge narratives are excited by the power of the evildoer *and* the revenger. In slashers you identify first with the killer and then with the victim who enacts revenge; same with rape revenge films. I think it’s naive to assume that the *only* excitement in these narratives is the restoration of justice. They’re so popular in part because they’re double-sided power fantasies, catering to dreams of transgression and dreams of the law.
If the only point was to see justice done, you’d think the genre would have a lot of instances of bad guys brought low by bolts of lightning or other natural disasters. But it’s important that it be human agents who enact vengeance, because the fantasy is of human power, not just of abstract justice, where the guilty are punished any old how.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
…The fantasy is that it’s possible to punish evildoers and right wrongs…
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Uh, but that’s not a fantasy; that happens all the time!
Which is not saying that it’s possible to punish every single evildoer in the proportionately exact fashion, nor utterly undo every single wrong, or force exactly satisfying restitution, which would be a fantasy.
So are you dismissing the very idea of “justice” by holding up to impossibly perfect standards, which even God miserably fails to uphold?
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…In slashers you identify first with the killer and then with the victim who enacts revenge; same with rape revenge films…
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Well, maybe some people do; I don’t “get” them that way at all…
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If the only point was to see justice done, you’d think the genre would have a lot of instances of bad guys brought low by bolts of lightning or other natural disasters. But it’s important that it be human agents who enact vengeance, because the fantasy is of human power, not just of abstract justice, where the guilty are punished any old how.
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Wouldn’t it be “important that it be human agents who enact vengeance” because those are characters in the story, whose travails and situation we’ve become involved with?
And if this is just a matter of catering to fantasies of “human agents” having the power to “enact vengeance,” then it should be just as satisfying if Sherlock Holmes is hot on the trail, then some police detective comes in from left field and solves the case, right?
Unless — because of the structures of narrative conventions — we’re involved in the main protagonist’s attempt to catch/punish the evildoer, and would feel cheated if some minor character came in and did the deed instead.
(For instance, it had to be Clarice Starling who tracked down and killed “Buffalo Bill” in Silence of the Lambs, not some patrolman or SWAT-team member.)
When it comes to “bad guys brought low by bolts of lightning or other natural disasters,” that’s the realm of religion; with God blasting those nasty Sodomites and such…
I first ran across these lines from The Mikado in a Will Eisner Spirit story. The Lord High Executioner sings:
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My object all sublime
I shall achieve in time —
To let the punishment fit the crime —
The punishment fit the crime…
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More, at http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Mikado/A_more_humane_Mikado
Justice is occasionally done in real life. It’s almost invariably achieved in pulp. And when it’s done in real life, it’s often a slow, painful process, filled with accidents, and rarely the work of a single agent. As you point out, we much prefer stories in which a single agent achieves justice…which, I would argue, is part of the fantasy of control, not a contradiction of it.
“In slashers you identify first with the killer and then with the victim who enacts revenge; same with rape revenge films.”
I wouldn’t lump slashers in with rape revenge films. Quite often the slasher is a threat to the protagonist without having actually done anything to her. And I don’t identify with the slasher or the rapist, nor do I believe you’re supposed to. That’s only a particular sub-genre, such as Psycho, which is explicitly about the mental state of the killer.
“I think it’s naive to assume that the *only* excitement in these narratives is the restoration of justice.”
I agree with that, and said nothing to the contrary.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
Justice is occasionally done in real life. It’s almost invariably achieved in pulp. And when it’s done in real life, it’s often a slow, painful process, filled with accidents, and rarely the work of a single agent. As you point out, we much prefer stories in which a single agent achieves justice…which, I would argue, is part of the fantasy of control, not a contradiction of it.
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A reasonable argument! Indeed, real-world justice is as imperfect, unsure and meandering as…well, most anything “real-world.”
So…random death wishes from anonymous posters add little to the conversation. I’ve deleted them.