The war against the coronavirus has not been won. Consequently, what the Homo sapiens — an ingenious species wired to survive — seem to be concentrating on is winning the smaller battles. Given the gargantuan size of the human ego, these triumphs have been christened with a singular title: ‘revenge phenomenon’. So contemporary society, ravaged by Covid, is now replete with various kinds of righteous acts of vengeance against the virus. Affluent families lucky enough to have survived in comfortable cocoons go out, whenever there is a dip in the positivity rate, on what is now known as ‘revenge tourism’. There is the ‘revenge dinner’, too, for the patrons tired of the mundane daal-bhaat-torkari food regime, brightening up the mood of restaurateurs. The lovelorn are at it too: ‘revenge dating’ scorched the summer of 2021, says a prominent dating website.
Yet, humanity’s relationship with retaliation has been markedly tempestuous. The avenger need not be an angel. Indeed, Francis Bacon, the English philosopher, described revenge as a kind of ‘wild justice’, acts that lie outside the realm of refined, redistributive justice. It is possible that Bacon’s condemnation was directed at the primitive disposition of this kind of justice. History bears evidence of its primeval nature. The pre-industrial, feuding society embraced honour as the core of community life and its members would not hesitate to protect honour by spilling blood. The evolution of modern jurisprudence can be traced to the moral — also philosophical and theological — condemnation of these transgressions. Yet, it cannot be denied that the fascination with revenge could not be snuffed out entirely. Postmodern societies often bloody their hands by dispensing extrajudicial justice. The Indian examples would include khap panchayats that are known for their role in killing men and women, usually inter-caste couples, in the name of honour. The Arts, too, are rich with the evidence of the triumph of recrimination. From Shakespeare’s Hamlet to Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo to Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, each work offers glimpses of the human proclivity for reprisal. Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Slaying Holofernes is a testament to visual arts’ enquiry into problematic versions of justice; even Mozart, that magisterial composer of light and melody, infused some of his operas with the dark shadow of revenge.
The march of civilization mirrors a curious contradiction. Humanity moves forward but the journey is made possible because of received wisdom from the past. The glorification of revenge — it has added a degree of thrill to benign leisure activities — cannot simply be brushed aside as a quibble with semantics. In a world battling a deadly pandemic, the honour — ethics — bestowed upon vengeance is representative of a beguiling intersection of the primitive and the postmodern. But this convergence begets questions. Is mankind evolving or regressing? Is it moving forward or back?
