To understand what is going on in America, you must understand this.
One of the most powerful forces in the human condition is vengeance. The terrible history of tribal war, predating civilization, is nothing more than the one group exacting vengeance on another.
Justice is difficult. Justice requires wisdom and temperament. Vengence is easy. The first codes of justice were little more than prescriptions for vengeance, such as an eye for an eye from Hammurabi’s Code.
Vengeance is one of our most visceral feelings. Consider how many movie franchises capitalize on the genre of revenge porn.
Justice is the hallmark of civilization. Vengeance is the hallmark of anarchy.
Justice requires temperance. Vengeance exploits ugly passions.
What is happening in society today is not a pursuit of justice, it is the pursuit of vengeance.
The mob may be calling for justice but what it wants is vengeance.
It’s not about repairing communities, it’s about hurting all those on the outside who are blamed for the communities’ problems.
If we let the mob win, we let vengeance win. Civilization will lose. Those are the stakes if we do not reign this in.
The problem with vengeance is that in the eyes of the person seeking revenge, no amount of pain and suffering on the part of their oppressor is ever enough.
Vengeance for what? All their wounds are self-inflicted.
It’s the Kristallnacht for Whites. Except it’s a toy, because no Whites were killed and no Whites were arrested and sent to concentration camps. Even liberal city Whites won’t actually submit to that.
Here’s a squeeze argument. We see that city Whites permit their retirement plans and to be destroyed and healthcare to be made the most expensive in the world. We see that city Whites permit a small percentage of their shopping areas to be smashed and burnt. We see from Connecticut, California, New Jersey, etc. that Whites won’t permit gun registration more accurate than 4473 forms for commercial sales. But what we haven’t seen is how much more smashing and burning city Whites will permit before they stop it. Any predictions?
Justice is difficult. Justice requires wisdom and temperament. Vengence is easy. The first codes of justice were little more than prescriptions for vengeance, such as an eye for an eye from Hammurabi’s Code.
This understanding of Hammurabi’s Code does a great disservice to Hammurabi and to the understanding of the evolution of legal theory in Western civilization… and unfortunately it’s a very widely held understanding.
Roughly 1754 BCE, King Hammurabi had the laws of his kingdom carved into massive stone stele that were erected in major cities throughout his kingdom. This laid the groundwork for two fundamental concepts of Jewish and later Christian Anglo-Saxon (and ultimately America’s Juedo-Christian Anglophone) legal systems. First, the idea that the law is not a secret or something only taught to the few, it’s public and everyone has access to it. Second, the idea that the law is fixed and reliable – literally this is the origins of the “carved in stone” idiom – so that the people can rely on it. The law is the law, it isn’t subject to the whim or pique of the judge.
On the subject of justice, the “eye for an eye” portion of the Code is actually a major stepping stone in humanity’s movement away from tribal vengeance feuds and towards civilized restorative equity. The “eye for an eye” principle is that a person who has injured another is to be penalized to a similar degree and no more. Adam kills Bob’s goat, Bob must give him a goat in exchange… Adam doesn’t kill Bob’s cow. Charlie knocks out Dave’s tooth, Charlie gets one of his own teeth knocked out, Dave doesn’t kill Charlie.
Lastly, whilst the Code of Hammurabi did reinforce a stratified social system of castes, classes, slavery, and all those other -ism and -ist things, the Code was also a fundamental step in moving Western civilization toward the idea of “Rule of Law” and not “Rule of Man.” Although it was the post-Norman Conquest mixture of Anglo-Saxon, Frankish, and Nordic culture that really developed the idea that the Law absolutely and totally trumps the Crown, one can see the beginnings of this in the Code of Hammurabi which, although exempting the king from a lot of it, doesn’t exempt him from all of it… and because it is (literally) carved in stone, means that the Crown cannot easily alter the Law.
I don’t disagree that publication of the law that applied to all and was knowable was a tectonic shift forward in jurisprudence. However there was still an aspect of vengeance to it.
Hammurabi’s code prescribed that if a workman built a house and the roof collapsed and killed the resident’s son, the workman’s son would be put to death. This doesn’t create restitution, it’s vengeance. Its codified so the resident doesn’t kill the entire workman’s family or that the workman doesn’t kill the resident’s other son in return.
It wasn’t until the laws of Moses the said the sins of the father shall not be visited on the son did the leap from vengeance to restitution take place.
That’s why I said it was an important step forward and not that it was the end of the journey. The Noahide laws were the next major step forward, but they owe there existence to the older Babylonian code.