No Revenging Angel
Yet another Seton is being published, though few of you are likely going to be reading the piece. My father's article — On the Importance of Getting Even/ A Study of the Origins and Intention of Revenge — is coming out in the next issue of the Smith College School for Social Work Studies. My Pa was the major domo in counseling at Smith for a quarter-century and instructed graduate students in the field.
His essay, which I actually read, is not incomprehensible to people outside the field, though I will not be passing it along. It's kinda dry, to say the least, and beyond insisting that revenge is biological, at least to the extent that all thinking is, I don't know that it advances understanding of revenge much for us common folk. Mebbe them book-learn'd folks 'll likely get more out of it. For instance, from his premise that revenge is an intrinsically human balancing mechanism, he says that an individual who is wronged and feels a need for revenge "reverts to a less instructed stage of integration." Which is a clinical way of saying "going postal."
In a discussion of his paper, I found myself wondering how much of his ability to manage anger — especially his intellectualizing of most everything resembling emotions — was at the root of whatever induces me to stumble in this area. What with personality and character pretty much set by the time we are five, and all but etched in the proverbial granite by the time we've spent a year in school, it gives one pause to even contemplate — let alone deal with — the framework of the mind that dictates who we are today.
Is it possible to disassemble who we are to the extent that we might unravel some knots? Or is our mental structure so tightly wrapped that we could never find our way deep enough? Is our organization of thought tied up so far back in our development that it is inaccessible? From my experience, the answer is possibly. From the looking I've done, I'd say we can get closer to the trigger mechanisms of our learned-or-not "instinctive" responses.
Much of our behavior is programmed. It probably has to be. We'd go nuts if we had to figure out a fresh response to every element stimulus every time it occurred. For instance, we don't have to touch a hot stove more 'n a coupla times to not do that anymore. More complicated for me, at least, is learning not to behave out of habit when I'm confronted with a challenge, or even just a question. Sure, I know that whoever is asking is deliberately threatening my basic psychic structure and I will explode — or implode — if I don't rise to a crushing defense.
Lately, sometimes, all other things being in relative balance, I am catching myself sooner, even before I pull the pin on the grenade. Because after pulling a small mountain of self-inflicted shrapnel from my anxiously ravaged soul, I've found that a little patience can resolve big problems. Whether they be otherwise wonderful people whose driving skills might need just a little touch up, or Pentagonal dinosaurs who with all good intentions but miraculously small brains threaten to annihilate my nieces' and nephews' future, the fact is that becoming distraught — in thought or deed — doesn't serve my purpose.
Indeed, father, I will reprise for you a line I opined many years ago, that education is the best punishment. Usually when we take the time to think about it, revenge is not a useful response, natural or not. And we human beings have within us the intellectual capability to discern that fact, and to opt for what will make our lives better than worse.
And that's SetonnoteS...I'm Tony Seton.
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