Revenge can be so very seductive

THE illicit thrill conferred by skillfully made pornography comes in large part from its elevation of a natural impulse -- say, desire or anger -- into a consuming passion that crowds out every other consideration or claim of conscience.

Think lust or rage.

Our cinematic culture has created a rather crowded subcategory of this genre with the revenge flick. In those films the deeply wronged protagonist wreaks vengeful destruction on his tormentors, heedless of any moral or humane restraint.

Occasionally watching or reading pornography can be cathartic. Part of the guilty charge comes from knowing that actually living out what’s vicariously fantasized would be perversion.

That’s the edge along which William Ian Miller dances rather cleverly in his intermittently engaging new book, “Eye for an Eye.”

Miller occupies an endowed chair at the University of Michigan Law School and in previous volumes has explored disgust, courage and “faking it.” This one is a meditation on lex talionis, the ancient and -- in Miller’s view -- now harmfully neglected “law of retaliation.” We know it best from Genesis 9:6: “Whoever sheds a man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed.”

“Talion” is the term for any law that dictates a punishment equal to the offense. Miller gives the Hebrew scriptures an interesting going-over looking for examples, then ranges back to their juridical origins in the legal codes of Babylon and Sumer. He’s at his most passionate on the literature of Icelandic sagas, which is one of his great academic specialties.

Miller finds these societies’ notions of human worth -- ones based on individual honor rather than a concept of universal human dignity -- superior to our own.

Our legal system, he argues, has failed in a sort of amorphous way by severing equity from revenge. Let people respond more brutally more often, he contends, and we’ll all be better off for it -- in some amorphous way. No need to enumerate all the philosophical, Talmudic, theological and legal sources that pretty convincingly argue just the contrary. This is essentially unserious argument, and Miller is at his best when he digresses most completely into literary and film criticism. His chapters on Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice” and Clint Eastwood’s “Unforgiven” are about as good as you can get.

Miller is a formidable reader, and that’s clearly where his heart is even when it’s supposed to be somewhere else, which makes him a rather unsteady theorist of justice. Miller is too scrupulous a scholar not to acknowledge that contemporary honor societies -- notably those in the Islamic Mideast, where the law of vendetta prevails -- are unlovely places. He’s also at pains to note, though glancingly, that he wouldn’t want to live in their historical antecedents, including his beloved Iceland of the sagas. It’s their ideals, particularly their notions of human worth, that Miller finds engaging -- not the actual facts of their existence.

Fair enough. I know Tolkien readers who like to pretend from time to time that they live in Middle-earth. But if there’s one place where ideals and the consequences of actually living them out really do need to be reconciled, we might broadly agree that it’s in the law.

In describing his distaste for the “economic evangelizing that goes on in [university] economics departments and law schools,” Miller observes that “one suspects that their position is equally an aesthetic one, to the extent one can distinguish the moral and the aesthetic.” In fact, it is precisely the insistence that morals -- or justice -- cannot be distinguished from aesthetics that makes “Eye for an Eye,” like pornography, seductive but unsatisfying.

“The classic formulation of the talion embodies a narrative in as succinct a form as it is possible to condense a story,” Miller writes in a chapter on Deuteronomy. “It has a beginning, a middle and an end. Beginning: you took my eye; middle: threat and bargain; end: I restore my honor and dignity by taking yours from you and now we are even. The notion of getting even is inseparable from the aesthetics of justice.”

He goes on to argue that “perfection of fit is coupled with another principle of poetic justice: its irony, so that the wrongdoer can be understood to be the author of his own punishment.” Miller concedes that in talionic and honor societies “sometimes the irony is pushed to its limits by making what we find to be particularly chilling uses of vicarious liability,” as in this prescription from the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi:

“If a builder constructs a house for a man but does not make his work sound, and the house that he constructs collapses and causes the death ... of a son of the householder, they shall kill a son of that builder.”

Now anybody who has been through a major remodeling project perfectly understands the impulse at work here. Still, call me culturally narrow, but I “find” the notion of killing a child for something his parent did chilling because it is chilling. Similarly, although irony is a fine thing on the page, stage or screen, I would find it a wholly unwelcome element in any legal proceeding to which I was party.

“There is one smaller point on which I have no ambivalence whatsoever,” Miller concludes at his book’s end. “Though we have progressed in certain domains of knowledge -- science and technology, for instance -- it is not obvious to me that we are better psychologists and social psychologists than humans were in centuries past. Indeed it is obvious to me that we are not.... And with no irony I can attest to my belief that when it comes to understanding human motivation -- no less than to understanding justice and what it means to get even -- we are not as smart now as we were when people worried more about their honor than about their pleasure.”

Maybe, but the author’s charm and erudition notwithstanding, measuring the all-too-obvious vices of this society -- such as pathological hedonism -- against the most idealized (and sanitized) expressions of other eras’ better natures makes this reader think that the smartest thing going on here is the stacking of the deck.

To borrow his own methodology by making recourse to a classic text, both the accuracy of Miller’s observations on the contemporary situation and the insufficiency of his book’s prescription for amending it were jauntily foreshadowed in lines Yeats wrote nearly 70 years ago:

Because this age and the next age

Engender in the ditch,

No man can know a happy man

From any passing wretch;

If Folly link with Elegance

No man knows which is

which ....

*

Eye for an Eye

William Ian Miller

Cambridge University Press: 304 pp., $28