We live in unforgiving times. Public self-righteousness is on the rise and the taste for revenge has never been greater.

It’s an that is in our . The Romans called it Lex talionis, the bloodthirsty need for retribution, proportionate payback for perceived misdeeds. Revenge helped our species evolve by punishing cheaters, promoting fairness, and preventing the mob from taking justice into their own hands.

In polarized times, especially, we revel in moralistic damnation. We slop around in schadenfreude like orgiasts at a bloodletting.

It’s a primitive business, this matter of revenge, a gut reaction like fighting or fleeing. You feel your blood rise in your neck. How do they look at themselves in the mirror? Don’t they have a moral center? Your jaw clenches, you tighten your fists, and turn into an animal. Moral offense causes visceral changes.

You see how unenlightened you really are. If you think you are Buddha in the making, just turn on Fox News, or MSNBC, and try not to get apoplectic. I'm physically unable to watch Glenn Beck without wanting to club him and be done with it. It’s interesting to learn in Lance Morrow’s book, Evil: An Investigation, that men are more predisposed to revenge than women. Women gravitate toward care and connection while men, apparently, resort to violence. That’s not to say women don’t lust for revenge, but not as aggressively or as often.

What we share is a need for some form of justice. We balance the moral scales of the universe with the rocks of and contrition. The problem is that justice is a local concept that has more to do with religion, geography, , homophobia, and economic imbalance than it does with actual right or wrong.

My people's approach to “necessary evil” may seem like an abomination to you. Among the Inuits, infanticide is considered an act of compassion when food supplies run low in the tribe. It’s considered an honor to murder girls and women for reasons to do with sexual impurity — or having the misfortune of surviving your husband: Some 2,500 brides and widows are burned to death each year for refusing to pay a larger dowry, or out of respect for their late husbands.

Revenge is a scourge in our species, a vestigial moral device that has outlasted its usefulness. Revenge, like , is only constructive when measured out with . Wisdom's first rule is knowing that your point of view is your point of view, forever subjective, biased, skewed, and suspect. No system of right and wrong is absolute. Universal justice does not exist. Justice, like , is always local, open to provincial interpretations.

On a personal level, the taste for revenge is equally noxious. Nothing infects a relationship worse than the tit-for-tat of endless revenge. Couples never regain a sense of trust and safety after the howitzers have begun to blast. Knowing how brutal and selfish we can be, we need to approach revenge with skepticism.

Here are five questions I ask myself when my blood starts to boil:

What is the actual source of your rage? Lots of times we are outraged for reasons we're not aware of. The moral organ is visceral; we react to experience non-rationally. When I'm outraged, I try to sit still and suss out what is going on. It's never what I think it is.

What good will come of revenge? Like , revenge makes promises it frequently cannot satisfy. It tells you that the other person's pain will become your pleasure, it assures you that right will be done, and that not doing this is simply wrong. This is a caveman-era lie.

Have you ever committed a comparable offense? There’s almost nothing a person has never done, in some form or other in their lifetime. We throw stones from our own glass houses and cry for one another's heads.

Could your version be wrong? You know it can. Undoubtedly. How often do we get things completely right? We misattribute others' motives and imagine devils that aren't there. We're stuck in our stories like flies in glue.

If you were wise instead of angry, what would you do? Humility deflates the need to punish, and wise people are always humble. You can't be humble and scornful at the same time; they cancel one another out.

The Roman philosopher Terence said, “Nothing human is foreign to me." The only one thing that will end the violence is remembering that we’re human, too.