Grace & vengeance

In primitive, honor societies violence is a surrogate for compromise. 

Feuds are part of the political process by which the truth and the will of God (these two are often indistinguishable from each other) is both revealed and established. If feuds result in the loss of life and limb, that is of little consequence to the concerns of the tribe or clan. Feuds also serve as the basis for the system of justice. 

With a deficit of judicial authority among the ordinary folk of village societies, the basis of adjudication is membership in a militia that can protect and exact revenge for slights and insults. This is the world of the mafioso crime families and their godfathers, the juvenile delinquent gangs or just the code of the school-yard, the drug lords, the prison gangs or the sectarian, ethnic militias that rule wherever the apparatus of state rule does not reach. 

The honor code, the maintenance of one's public face with respect and dignity, the ability to stand up for what is one's own and to meet the challenge with style and grace and with the swift exercise of power – these are all manifestations of the processes of juridical fairness in situations where the apparatus of justice is absent. 

This is what happens when grace prevails over institutions and only God's truth, and not man's institutions, operates in the affairs of men and women. Grace and vengeance are close hand-maidens, and the beatitude that comes with the sublime condition of a general enlightenment brings with it the cruelty of vengeance and the constant struggle to establish on one's own the zone of dignity that the general public sphere otherwise might or might not afford one, especially to the stranger: and at the same time the state of grace hazards the dangers and the violence of the apocalypse. 

When leadership fails, the two alternatives are grace (on the left) and vengeance (on the right), and we have both working hand in hand today in the Islamo-terrorist/Euro-leftist alliance.