Aw yeah, vigilante justice, says Barr
Interesting. William Barr thinks two old movies that glorify vigilante “justice” aka revenge are emblematic of the human desire for justice.
“I believe a sense of justice is hardwired into human beings,” Barr recalled during an interview with Crime Story podcast host Kary Antholis. “Don’t ask me why, but it is there and it’s satisfying to see justice done.”
Why not ask him why? You’d expect lawyers to be interested, and it’s not a particularly arcane subject. There’s been research into a sense of fairness in chimpanzees, for instance, and I’m sure that’s just one item of many.
But hey, why read up on such things when there are crappy old movies to watch.
Barr elaborated on his theory of justice, recalling the Charles Bronson movie Death Wish and Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry, icons of vigilantism in ’70s filmmaking that spawned movie franchises.
The original 1974 exploitation classic Death Wish tells the story of how a do-gooder Manhattan liberal sees the light after his wife is murdered and his daughter is raped. He becomes a one-man vigilante squad, roaming New York City and executing petty thieves.
Yes, that’s justice all right, killing petty thieves because one woman was murdered and another was raped. We amateurs must be wrong to think it’s a little closer to justice to go after the actual perpetrators as opposed to random people doing more trivial crimes.
“Death Wish, yeah,” Barr said. “That gives people a sense of satisfaction when they see it.”
I haven’t seen it, but I’m not getting what’s satisfying about that. It’s unnerving that the US Attorney General is.
I haven’t seen Death Wish, but I grew up on that line of thought. That’s exactly the sort of thing my family believes, and they cheered on all those vigilante justice movies and TV shows. Yuck.
But I don’t think that’s hard-wired. I do think we tend to have a desire for revenge, but I think we can manage to work through it, and not go out and kill people for our revenge. We can do healthy things, like working for an anti-rape group to make the world better or setting up a survivor’s fund.
The thing is, most people who have bad things happen (which is most people) don’t go off on killing sprees. They grieve. They adjust. They move on. Many of them set up memorials or work to make sure it doesn’t happen to someone else. Most people can deal with tragedy without creating more tragedies for more people.
We have a revenge based “justice” system anyways, so I can see where he’s coming from… What else is capital punishment but revenge?
Trump would probably say all that touchy feely stuff is for “losers.” Winners like him excersize their “sense of justice” by demanding the execution of innocent people, who just happen to be black He would probably have been happy to do it himself, just like that Mr. Kim he so greatly admires. So yes, of course he’s going to hire an AG who gets a stiffy while watching stuff where men with guns cut through the red tape to “get things done.”
Has anyone actually seen Death Wish? I haven’t, either.
Of course if one believes human beings have justice hard wired into them then it is so much easier to imagine that criminals are not really human beings at all. Then all sorts of bad treatment can be excused, if not justified.
One would expect someone in the position that Mr Barr is in to be able to distinguish between revenge and justice and have some understanding of the issues that revenge raises – they have after all been a staple of Western literature, from Aeschylus to ‘Njal’s Saga’, ‘Hamlet’, and Bacon’s great essay, in which he writes that ‘Revenge is a kind of wild justice; which the more man’s nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out. For as for the first wrong, it doth but offend the law; but the revenge of that wrong putteth the law out of office…’
But, no, it is the Duertes and Bolsonaros of the world whom Barr admires.
I think it’s possible and perhaps likely that we have a fairly complicated set of built-in responses to injustice. As Ophelia said we see these in other chimps and it wouldn’t be entirely unexpected if we saw them in ourselves too. Without straying into evo-psych, it’s a reasonable hypothesis for a social species.
The two instincts I’m thinking about (if they are actually distinct, I’m not sure) are ‘fairness’ and ‘justice’, for want of better words.
Human children certainly have a strong sense of what’s fair and what isn’t. The biggest tantrums I’ve seen have been reactions to perceived unfairness and the frustration of not being able to do anything about it. I can relate.
We see virtually identical tantrums performed by alleged adults on the internet every day. I’m looking at you, MRAs, incels etc.
And we have a sense of ‘justice’ in the sense that many of us seem to instinctively want people to be punished for what we perceive as unfair behaviour(*).
I think one of the problems we have might be that these instincts tend to misfire. A lot. For example, the unfairness instinct seems to be triggered for many people when they feel their already unfair privilege is being eroded, even when it is not. And vast numbers of people seem to have a miscalibrated sense of justice, the obvious examples being capital punishment, genocide and the familiar racist trope of blaming (and harming) all members of a group for the real or imagined sins of some members.
So – according to me – perhaps Barr has perfectly ordinary senses of unfairness and justice but that they are so massively and dangerously skewed that he – a lawyer – interchanges justice and revenge in such a horrifying way. Or perhaps it’s just because he’s a gigantic arsehole, although the two are not incompatible.
(*) This instinct seems to be missing in me, I don’t know why. I just don’t seem to have any desire to see anyone punished, even if they’ve done bad things to me. Do our best to make sure they can’t harm anyone else, certainly, but I’m not going to complain if prisoners have Playstations in their cells. I’m not suggesting this makes me especially good or moral or anything of the sort, but it seems to make me weird because I’m definitely in the minority. I’ve been asked countless times if I’d feel the same if [crime x] were committed against me or one of my loved ones. Yeah, I’m as certain as it is possible to be that I would. I mention this only because it seems to incite a whole lot of people to want to punish the weirdo and who doesn’t like irony?
Re the distinction between fairness and justice: a few years back I saw a keynote address by an Australian researcher at a language testing conference in which he compared the citizenship tests administered in Australia and the US (the following is pulled from memory, so some of the details may not be entirely accurate, but the gist is). The Australian test is a rigorous, highly reliable measure of English language and Australian customs and culture; it meets the industry-wide standards for high-stakes testing, and does a good job of serving its intended purpose of ensuring that new citizens meet the requirements for citizenship established by the law. The US test, on the other hand, consists of ten questions drawn from a published pool of 100; the questions haven’t gone through much if any qualitative or quantitative review, the test is administered and scored by a not very well trained citizenship officer, and no statistics are available on the reliability of the test. And nearly everyone who takes it passes.
His point was that you could argue that the Australian test is fair but not just, while the US test is unfair but just.
Well, I am the only one in my family who hasn’t seen it, so the answer has to be yes. In fact, when I was in high school, it was highly discussed and recommended by many. It sounded awful to me.
I did see Dirty Harry, but not because I wanted to.
latsot, I think it’s not unreasonable that we have a built in sense of justice/fairness, even revenge. But I think it is also not unreasonable to note that our society on one hand tries to train that out of us by teaching us social skills and other societal norms, while on the other hand feeds us a constant diet of it. For some of us, the societal norms becoming the driving motivation of our actions (I would say, for most of us) but that doesn’t mean we never have those senses of outrage and desire for someone to be punished. I’ve felt that about twice in my life, though I must admit I have a perverse desire to see Trump relegated to some eternal hell (but since I don’t believe in that, it’s more fantasy than curse). I think there may be people genetically predisposed to be unable to deal with societal norms; that’s basically a sociopath.
I think most of these Trump-inspired killings could be that, but I suspect it is more that they have fed on a steady diet of Fox News, action movies, and angry parents that is overriding any training in social norms that might have been part of their upbringing.
I saw Death Wish. My take-away was that Bronson couldn’t act for shit. I barely remember the actual story.