An article in the Times today about online vigilantes: ordinary folks sitting at home in front of their computers trying to launch counterattacks against all the grifters and pedophiles and such on the net. Comparisons are made to the mythical wild west and frontier justice, and Charles Bronson is mentioned at least once. What strikes me is how strongly we romanticize the image of the vigilante in American culture. It starts early doesn't it? After all, what are superheros but vigilantes? Even the most mild, say Captain American or Superman, operate outside the bounds of the law. And of course it isn't just for kids; Mystic River is the most recent example I can recall of a piece of popular entertainment that treats this issue in a very sophisticated way. And as that film makes clear, the vigilante is morally ambiguous in very troubling ways, even when he have some sympathy with the vigilante's intentions. But our identification with the vigilante ethos implies that we believe we, as individuals, have some sort of inherent, intuitive ability to discern what is right, and what would constitute real justice in a particular situation. At the risk of being cynical, I am extremely skeptical of any such notion. Granted there are, unfortunately, plenty of instances in our world of unambiguous wrongdoing and injustice that go unremedied, but the world is a much more complex place than the vigilante would have us believe. History demonstrates that even our best and brightest, applying deliberative effort, have gotten some pretty essential stuff wrong, so the chances that you or I might set things right with a trip to the gun shop are awfully slim. And even if trying to clean up the web seems mild by comparison, well, the slope is quite slippery. It's easy to endorse such means when we happen to approve of the intended end, but somewhere there's a surfing vigilante who disapproves of you and is certain I am the devil. I grew up on Shane and Dirty Harry and the Punisher, and loved them, but I am repulsed by honor killings in "other" cultures. And if the underlying impulse is not exactly the same in all these cases, it's not entirely different either.
p.s. For a great literary example of the horror of a vigilante mob check out Kevin Baker's Paradise Alley, an amazing novel set during the civil war draft riots in NYC in 1863.
