sunday times
Is it right to take revenge?
The general wisdom is that the more mature reaction lies in letting things go: you’ve lost a battle, but by not fighting back you win the moral war; it undermines your enemy’s victory and makes you look that much bigger. To cement your superiority you might even turn the other cheek, transforming potential humiliation into something divine.
For all its serenity, however, electing not to take revenge comes with problems. First, if dropping the issue is the mature option, it implies that exacting vengeance employs the baser instincts, which suggests that taking revenge is more authentic. Second, to let your attacker off the hook is to warp the frame of justice. While revenge evens things up, letting things drop never brings closure. That’s because it fails to respect a basic law: you hurt me, so I hurt you back, now we’re quits. Besides, revenge is sweet. Why? The sweetness comes from dealing a blow to an enemy when they thought they’d got away with it. But you need to choose your moment. Sweet as it is, revenge left too long turns sour.
But between revenge and inaction lies a cunning middle ground. It’s summed up by Nietzsche who said: "The best revenge is to live well." You transfer the curse of envy onto your enemy, and make your own life as brilliant as you can.
Should I confront a two-timing friend?
She didn’t notice me, but I once saw a friend kissing a man who wasn’t her husband. It was a Tuesday afternoon on Brick Lane, east London, a random time and place that you’d think would guarantee anonymity. But no: by utter chance, I observed the unfaithful act. For people having affairs there’s a lesson: always be on the lookout. But what about for the witness? I never confronted my friend, but should I have?
She and her husband had been at a party of mine weeks before, and I had the feeling she didn’t love him, so seeing her in another man’s arms wasn’t a surprise.
I used this fact to justify my silence: she doesn’t love her husband, she loves someone else — so I should shut up and let it unfold to its natural conclusion. Intervention on my part would only catalyse that conclusion, or force me to choose between husband and wife. At the time, I elected to act as if nothing had happened, but now I would call her on it. Why? The secret I held about her put a barrier between us.
Then there’s the view, which goes back to Saint Augustine, that we can carry on denying the truth for only so long. When we don’t name the facts, we live out distorted narratives that serve nobody.
My silence was a collusion with her, making the husband doubly sinned against. Whether she was right or wrong to be kissing another man isn’t the point: I should have told her without judgment what I saw on that Tuesday afternoon and left the rest to her.
Is life too short to live in the moment?
A reader has emailed to ask whether it’s possible to live completely “in the moment”. The phrase has two interpretations. The first is throwing yourself into things with reckless joy, a carpe diem attitude that says you must live for the day. And when tomorrow comes, you do the same thing again. It can also mean nearly the opposite. In my twenties, I tried being a Buddhist, and that meant a lot of meditation, not to mention knee-ache from sitting in the lotus position. To meditate is to clear your mind of hopes, fears and images, so all that is left is your own breathing. The present becomes everything; past and future evaporate.
So, clearly it’s possible to live in the present, but is it desirable? I gave up on Buddhism precisely because I felt I was losing my past and future. I enjoyed fantasising about what might happen to me; even the regrets I had made me feel alive. The Buddha preaches detachment, and that’s exactly what was happening. Ironically, the more you immerse yourself in the present, the less attached you become to anything else.
Now I believe it’s more human to move between throwing yourself into things and stepping right back to muse on past and future. Otherwise we scorn the gift of being able to wander through time and space in our minds. We’re blessed with both memory and imagination, and can activate these only when we’re not completely saturated in the here and now.
Is it lying to withhold information?
Here’s an interesting question a reader asked: is withholding information the same as lying? It’s the difference between active and passive deception. Withholding information is the suppression of truth rather than the expression of untruth that characterises a lie.
Both are designed to deceive, but withholding information makes a secret of the truth — it doesn’t distort it. Lying depends on spoiling the truth, and so undermines the very basis of justice. Not that withholding information can claim any moral high ground: it still shares with the lie the intent to deceive.
But this assumes all deception is bad. A friend told me that when she and her husband go out for the evening, they wait until their three-year-old is asleep and the babysitter has arrived. They don’t say they’re going out because they don’t want her to worry. In this case, the “withholding of information” is the equivalent of the white lie, ie, the intent to deceive is there, but that intent is benign.
Besides, we withhold information all the time. When we meet up with friends, we’re selective in what we report. At work, we censor information that isn’t relevant. This background of “withheld information” is what allows the foreground to come forward; we can’t deal with all the information all the time. Consequently, what we do reveal does duty for what we don’t, and people make broader inferences from the smallest things we disclose. So you shouldn’t lie, but perhaps you should watch what you say.
“To be or not to be” is Robert’s weekly column in The Sunday Times. Here’s a selection.
All website content and design is copyright of Robert Rowland Smith Ltd. Site designed and maintained by Robert Rowland Smith. Made on a Mac.
