The American Furies

Lawlessness in the Social Media Age

The Law is Too Slow, George Bellows, 1923

The courts have ruled, but the Trump administration has thus far refused to comply in good faith. Instead, they’ve played word games while seemingly setting the stage to openly defy the Supreme Court. Right-wing influences have cheered them on—while calling for the administration to go further and rule by fiat. The rule of law in the United States is in a crisis we haven’t experienced since the desegregation of the South.

The law and courts are an imperfect tool for their intended goal—ensuring justice, security, and proper ordering of relations in a State (amongst other things). The courts are a tool that we collectively use to ensure that when we seek to redress wrongs, we do so in as neutral a manner as possible so that we can prevent unjust harms coming to those who are innocent.

The law is slow and can often feel as though it is less satisfying on an emotional level than retributive violence delivered immediately. From lynchings to cyclical revenge killings—people have often chaffed at notions like juries or due process as being dry and insufficiently dramatic, and therefore unable to fulfill a sort of psychological need to see justice done with immediacy.

Justice, in its proper form, is slow and impersonal. That slowness is its strength—and its political fragility. The mob wants justice now. And when the law’s pace and processes fail to satisfy, the temptation is to abandon it altogether.

When the courts do their job and constrain the government, people begin to demand that the Executive step outside the law and act unilaterally. The fever-pitch of the White House constatly repeating the refrain that the United States is being invaded by an army of murderers and rapists only turns the dial up more.

Flooded by this endless social media content—and the immediate emotional impact of engaging with that content in real time—zealots of the right demand further violence done against those they deem as being unworthy of legal protections.

In their telling, Trump simply has to act in an atmosphere, even if the courts don’t let him, as one must just look to see the overwhelming crisis that we’re in.

It is the sort of mobbish exultation to engage in lawless brutality that carries the very real risk of someone in the White House choosing to do something extremely stupid. Extralegal violence—once unleashed—is not something that can just be undone.

The cycle of violence and demands being made now is not exactly new and reflects a common problem in political life, going as far back to Aeschylus writing about the point of laws and courts in the Oresteia.

Following Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia for fair winds to sail to Troy, his wife Clytemnestra conspires with her lover Aegisthus to murder him upon his return home.

While deeply sympathetic—Agamemnon did murder her daughter—Clytemnestra’s pursuit of justice outside of the law invites Orestes to murder her and Aegisthus in turn to avenge his father.

The Furies personify vengeance itself—merciless, unceasing, and impervious to reason.

Seeing as how Orestes also murders his mother and her lover extralegally, he is subsequently hunted across Greece by the Furies¹. The Furies mythologically personify vengeance—unceasing unreasonable monsters that seek only to violently redress previous wrong—who unceasingly follow Orestes until Athena intercedes to conduct a trial in Athens.

After the trial and acquittal of Orestes, by a jury that includes Athena, the Furies symbolically take up residence beneath the court and are renamed to the Eumenides—meaning the Gracious Ones. Their role becomes one of ensuring that fair justice comes to those who are found guilty of crimes.

The taming of the Furies—and Aeschylus’ whole point with the Oresteia was about the importance of the courts and the law in taming passions and preventing violence from spiraling across a community. One extralegal act—no matter how justified in Clytemnestra’s case—would inevitably beget further retribution.

Courts ensure that, for all of us, we enjoy the same considerations as any other citizen in a State. They ensure that we are not subject to arbitrary killings that arise out of ill-considered mob-like intensity.

Even if the President was right—even if the threat were real and immediate—it would not matter.

The moment he steps outside the bounds of the law, he invites a breakdown in the closest thing we have to a neutral arbiter of civil conflicts. It does not matter what kind of mandate he has. Like Clytemnestra—even if the President was right—retributive violence outside of the law is a risk to the basic functioning of the legal system.

Never sleeping or resting, the choir of voices in our social media feeds have become an endless source of anger fueled by dopamine and algorithms. Like the Furies that once stalked Orestes across Greece—our modern media ecosystem provides an endless source of screaming demands for immediate retribution.

The most shrill voices appear to want to shake the cages of the Eumenides and demand that the Furies be loosed back out into the world—a society wherein power exercises itself entirely arbitrarily against anyone not properly classified as deserving of the protections of our Constitution so they can be dispensed with however the Executive sees fit.

Once you designate one group as being outside the bounds of the law, however, there’s no reason the boundaries would not expand to include more and more people who are no longer entitled to the protection of the law.

The Furies, however,—despite what their contemporary cheerleaders might like to think—did not discriminate by partisanship or citizenship when they were allowed to freely roam Greece.

You can live in a world with the Furies or you can live in a world with the Eumenides. You can’t have both.

1. Yeah, I know they’re actually the Erinyes in Greek, but the Latinized version sounds better. I don’t care that that conflicts with me going on to call them the Eumenides.