Justice:

Fellow lawprof Joe Olson passes along this quote, from John O’Sullivan:

This high-minded timidity [of treaties and conventions enforced only against those who agree in advance to be bound by them] permeates modern culture at high and low levels. For instance, a recent thriller about hostage-taking, “Man on Fire,” directed by Tony Scott and based on a novel by A.J. Quinnell, received harsh critical reviews precisely because it seemed to approve of revenge and vigilantism.

Creasy, played by Denzel Washington, is a burnt-out former mercenary who becomes a bodyguard to a young girl in Mexico City. She gradually draws him back from his suicidal despair by her frank affection. When she is kidnapped and apparently murdered, he methodically sets out to find and kill the men responsible — in very brutal ways. As in the 1970s Charles Bronson movie, “Death Wish,” the viewer essentially sympathizes with Creasy. The critics thought this a crudely vicious message on both occasions.

But as Bacon pointed out: “Revenge is a kind of wild justice.” It will inevitably — and arguably rightly — become the resort of decent people when law and government fail to deliver justice. Post-modern governments fail in just that way. Humanitarian bodies such as Amnesty International are even worse: They practice a sort of unilateral civil libertarianism that holds governments to account for the smallest infraction of civil liberty but treats terrorism as a natural disaster. Transnational bodies like the U.N. and the EU are worse — they seek to take the weapons of war and capital punishment from us in our struggles against terrorism, slavery, piracy and hostage-taking and to force us to rely instead on their own paper resolutions and elevated principles.

All these responses — from the critical reactions to “Man on Fire” to the E.U.’s prohibition of capital punishment — are overcivilized. That sounds almost like a compliment, as if it meant more civilized. In fact, to be overcivilized is to be less civilized because genuine civilization includes a robust willingness to enforce its order and truths on anarchy, violence, murder and superstition.

As long as we remain overcivilized, anarchy, violence, murder and superstition will continue their sinister recovery — until one day you may think you hear your own mother’s voice [pleading for your life] on the network news.

There are obvious reasons not to take this argument to its logical conclusion, which might push us from the overcivilized to the undercivilized; the point it makes is one of those points that is valid, but has to be kept in mind alongside some equally valid points on the other side. But it is indeed a point that needs to be remembered.