[Nat]

My dog pees on the floor a few times a week around dinner time. My mom swears it's because she's mad she didn't get soft food. I think it's because she's old and senile (and deaf and blind - so possibly disoriented to boot). But who knows what's going through her head when it happens?

My cat is pretty spiteful toward other cats, but I don't think it's vengeful. I think he pretty much lives in the moment.

I don't believe in the death penalty, but if you look at human history, it seems to me like there has been a long-lived thirst for blood. I kinda think the death penalty might keep it in check.

There was a really interesting podcast a while back - here's the transcript.

Tidbits:

Today, "Getting Revenge and Forgiveness." Michael McCullough is a professor of psychology at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida, where he directs the Laboratory for Social and Clinical Psychology and also teaches in the Department of Religious Studies. I spoke with him in 2008, after the publication of his book Beyond Revenge. For that work, he analyzed extensive data from social scientific studies on humans and animals as well as biology and brain chemistry. We'll spend most of this hour talking about what Michael McCullough is learning about forgiveness. But he stresses that to reimagine the human capacity for forgiveness, we must first challenge our ideas about the human inclination to seek revenge.

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Mr. McCullough: Japanese macaques are very status-conscious individuals. They're very intimidated by power; let's just put it that way...So if you're a high-ranking Japanese macaque and you harm a low-ranking Japanese macaque, that low-ranking individual is not going to harm you back, right? It's just too intimidating. It's too anxiety provoking. But what they do instead, and this still astonishes me, is they will find a relative of that high-ranking individual and go seek that low-ranking cousin out or nephew and harm him in retaliation.

Tippett: Really?

Mr. McCullough: Yeah. So it's as if they're saying, 'You know, I'm not powerful enough to get you back, but what I'm going to do is I'm going to go harm your nephew.'

Tippett: Now that does sound like human behavior, doesn't it?

Mr. McCullough: Right. And here's the kicker, is when they're harming this nephew, most of the time they're doing it while the high-ranking individual is watching. They want the high-ranking individual to know that, you know, you can harm me. I know you can harm me. I know you're more powerful than I am. But rest assured, I know how to get at what you care about and what you value.

Tippett: You know, I had this realization a few years ago when we did a program on the death penalty. It might seem simple but it seems so stunning to me to realize that the criminal justice system, and even, and especially, the death penalty in history, was progress because before there was any kind of criminal justice system, human societies regulated themselves by precisely that kind of revenge you're describing.

Mr. McCullough: Throughout most of human history we have not lived in complex societies with governments and states and law enforcement and prisons and contracts that we could enforce in a court to get people to do what they agreed to do. So the mechanism that individuals relied upon to protect themselves and to protect their loved ones and to protect their property was fear of retaliation. And if they could broadcast that fear of retaliation to the individuals they lived with, to their neighbors, to the people on the other side of the hill, and you could cultivate a reputation as a hothead so people knew not to mess with you, that was like an insurance policy. And you're absolutely right that in a lot of the world this is still going on.

Tippett: Right.

Mr. McCullough: And any time you disrupt that system, that system of government, that system of policing, that system of law enforcement, so people can't trust that their interests are going to be protected, that desire for revenge comes back. And people will take revenge back into their own hands to protect themselves.

Tippett: And I think you're also saying in your research that — and also in terms of what we know about the brain — that the emotions, the reactions, that arise in response to grievance are also — we are hard-wired to have those reactions, that they serve a purpose. I mean, I remember Sister Helen Prejean saying to me when we did that work on the death penalty, you know, she's a great opponent of the death penalty — she said, "Anger is a moral response," you know?

Mr. McCullough: That's right. It certainly is. Anger in response to injustice is as reliable a human emotional response as happiness is to winning the lottery, or grief is to losing a loved one. And if you look at the brain of somebody who has just been harmed by someone — they've been ridiculed or harassed or insulted — we can put those people into technology that allows us to see what their brains are doing, right? So we can look at sort of what your brain looks like on revenge. It looks exactly like the brain of somebody who is thirsty and is just about to get a sweet drink to drink or somebody who's hungry who's about to get a piece of chocolate to eat.

Tippett: It's like the satisfaction of a craving?

Mr. McCullough: It is exactly like that. It is literally a craving. What you see is high activation in the brain's reward system. So, again, this is one of the messages it's important for me to try to get across. The desire for revenge does not come from some sick dark part of how our minds operate. It is a craving to solve a problem and accomplish a goal.