Payback: Why We Retaliate, Redirect Aggression, and Take Revenge

222 Pages·2011·0.94 MB·English

by  David P. Barash

Payback
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Payback
Why We Retaliate, Redirect
Aggression, and Take Revenge
DAVID P. BARASH, Ph.D.
and
JUDITH EVE LIPTON, M.D.
1
1

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L ibrary of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Barash, David P.
Payback : why we retaliate, redirect aggression, and
take revenge / David P. Barash, Judith Eve Lipton.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-19-539514-3 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Pain. 2. Revenge. 3. Aggressiveness. I. Lipton, Judith Eve. II. Title.
BF515.B36 2011
155.9'2—dc22 2010040162
________________________________________
978-0-19-539514-3
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Typeset in Chaparral Pro
Printed on acid-free paper
Printed in the United States of America
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To our children. We celebrate Eva, her husband, Jeremy, and their son, Isaac; Ilona
and Yoav; and Nanelle and Lizzy. We also dedicate this to our friends and colleagues
who have struggled with these issues along with us, and who are committed to
personal as well as global healing. We thank our patients and students, who have
taught us while allowing us the privilege of teaching them. Finally, we note those
remarkable individuals who are living examples of peace and equanimity, whose very
presence is like a glass of cold water on a hot day. Such people bring peace and in
their gracefulness, they help others relax, and explore alternatives to retaliation,
revenge and redirected aggression.
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PREFACE: 1984 TO NOW
Th e winter of 1984 was a perfect storm in the Barash/Lipton household. George
Orwell himself would have been impressed with the misery. Politically, two “Big
Brothers”—Ronald Reagan and Leonid Brezhnev—were at each other’s throats,
fl aunting enough nuclear weapons to poison life on earth if war broke out.
Whether the end was to be by fi re (global incineration) or by ice (nuclear winter),
it looked like everything we knew and loved, including the entire process of bio-
logical evolution, was threatened by two competing empires with more interest
in dominance than in preserving life on our shared planet. Th e authors, Barash
and Lipton—the former an evolutionary biologist specializing in animal behav-
ior, and the latter a biologically oriented psychiatrist—were totally immersed in
the peace movement, trying to stop nuclear war. Th is meant that the house was
littered with picture books about Hiroshima and posters saying things like “Life
itself will end if there is a nuclear war.” In addition to our own professional
writings, we had already written a book called S top Nuclear War, a Handbook
(Grove Press, 1982), which included a detailed description of the medical eff ects
of thermonuclear war, along with the history and politics of the Cold War.
Another book—Th e Cave Man and the Bomb: Human Nature, Evolution, and Nuclear
War —was underway, eventually published in 1985 by McGraw-Hill.
O ne of us, David, although a biologist by training and inclination, was a
tenured professor of psychology at the University of Washington, in Seattle, and
the other, Judith, was a highly respected physician. For all our professional
success and recognition, however, our house had become a toxic environment,
especially for our children by previous marriages. Trying our best to save the
world, we absorbed a lot of pain in the process and were unintentionally passing
some of it to our children. We recall with some shuddering pain a sardonic ditty
by “Weird Al” Yankovic,” whose song Happy Birthday coincided with our 13-year-
old’s birthday, helpfully advising that thanks to nuclear weapons, we would all
be “crispy critters” after the next war. Our pain had become theirs; happy
birthday indeed.
vii
viii Preface
In addition to fi ghting to prevent World War III, we also fought about trivia:
the correct tempo for Für Elise, whether to have white sugar in the house,
whether to require the kids to clean their own rooms and do laundry. We fought
about bedtimes, playtimes, and sports. We fought so much about food that
Judy eventually resigned from cooking altogether. And we fought about our
stepchildren.
Eva left fi rst, in 1980, deciding to live with her biological mother. And on
August 1, 1983, Jenny—age 13—died when her bicycle was hit by a pickup
truck. Our stepfamily had been vaporized, as surely as if it had been hit by a
bomb. We were left with “our own” child, Ilona, then age fi ve, a quiet little girl
who knew how to make herself invisible. Our relationship was strained, almost
to breaking. It was unclear which of us was the worst off ender when it came to
making our home such a diffi cult place for children. Obviously, we were both
responsible.
I n January 1984, on a bleak and especially miserable day in the Pacifi c
Northwest, in the cold, empty house where children used to play and now there
was only one, Judith struggled with anger, fear, and depression. Th en something
changed, and very quickly. She happened to read an essay by the Buddhist monk
Th ich Nhat Hanh, which later became his wonderful book Being Peace (Parallax
Press, 1987). In it, Hanh describes how suff ering begets suff ering, entreating his
readers to look deeply into the origins of things, especially bad things. He
explains that all actions are born from others—a non-theological perspective on
karma —and how it is that many betrayals, assaults, critiques, and defections are
brought about by previous experiences of loss and pain. In the end, Hanh enjoins
us all to stop the cycle of suff ering . . . simply by recognizing the problem and,
despite recognizing that some degree of suff ering is inevitable, making it our
private mission to minimize the world’s burden of pain. How to do this? By
taking personal charge of our actions—specifi cally, deciding that “the pain stops
here,” and therefore no longer passing it along like a hot potato. It is asking a lot,
but it also off ers a lot.
J udith thinks that until that day she did not have a clear “moral compass,”
although she had always tried to be a reasonably good person. She was good or
bad, depending on circumstances and emotions, fi ghting to prevent nuclear war
(good) but also fi ghting with stepchildren (bad). Good and bad were automatic,
not calculated. It was good to save a kitten and bad to run over a dog in the road.
Good to give money to charities, bad to give money to panhandlers. Good to be
a physician, bad to be sloppy about collecting payments. It was good to play the
piano, bad to play F ür Elise too fast. It was good to read fi ction, bad to watch TV.
And for David’s family, who had run a small fl ower shop in the subway of
New York City, it was good (albeit regrettable) to pay off the thugs for protec-
tion, good to sell old fl owers in artful bouquets, bad to buy retail, and even worse
to vote Republican.
Preface ix
Most people, we submit, have a similar inner algebraic system for calculating
moral dilemmas, although the metric and substance of that system is not con-
scious. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” is an excellent and
nearly universal rule, but in practice, terribly diffi cult. Th e Ten Commandments
and Islamic Shar’ia law have algorithms for making moral decisions, but these,
too, are not easily internalized and are often stretched. In this sense, we were
not alone in our moral quandaries during that snowy winter of 1984. It was good
to fi ght and work for peace, to study animals and evolution, and to minister to
the psychiatric needs of suff ering patients, but bad to deal incessantly with
nuclear war, to the point that dinner table conversation with 10-year-olds was
mostly about politics and the possible end of the world. Judith called her revela-
tion of January 1984 the Principle of Minimizing Pain, and we off er it, unblush-
ingly, as the 11 th Commandment (see Chapter 8). It yields a clear—albeit
diffi cult—ethical guideline, a way to calculate actions that includes recognition
of feelings, both in oneself and others, but one that is not based on feelings or
intuition alone. It is a slow process, because actions have consequences, and it is
diffi cult to think through the ever-growing circles of cause and eff ect that any
given action may provoke. Sometimes the eff ects are obvious. For example, after
Jenny died, we took the books, posters, and movies about nuclear war out of the
kitchen, dining room, and living rooms, confi ning them to the study where they
did not poison the children with fear and foreboding. (We did not stop our
anti-nuclear activism, however.)
It also became clear that it was better to accept a stepchild’s foibles than try
to make him or her into a diff erent person. Better just to grieve our losses
—rather than sling blame back and forth. We were far better as a team than as
competitors or opponents. Better to off er and receive love, within a family, than
to rail against imperfections. If the children wanted to live on pizza or macaroni
and cheese instead of specialty vegetarian dishes, what did it matter? No one
was going to die of malnutrition, but clearly we were suff ering over trying too
hard to eat just the “right” things.
David was smitten, as well, with the concept of “pain-passing,” not only for its
interpersonal insights, but because it helped make sense of some of the most
troublesome things that people (and animals) do, while uniting facts and theo-
ries from physiology and evolution to the behavior of nations, connecting ethol-
ogy, history, anthropology, philosophy, and psychology. Even literature, law, and
theology. As we now hope to show, it is a paradigm that off ers not only a power-
ful dose of practical day-to-day wisdom, but also a means of tying together an
impressive array of seemingly disparate fi ndings—loose ends no longer, they
emerge as parts of a coherent whole.
I n Judith’s work as a physician, it became clear that in order for the Principle
of Minimizing Pain to work, it had to include provisions for reconciliation and
forgiveness, which, in turn, morphed into another algorithm, a Forgiveness