Last year at about this time there was some discussion of vigilantism prompted by thoughts about 9/11. This seems to be a yearly event now. He Needed Killin' explored some of the ideas.

One of the striking changes in American society after 9/11/2001 was the number of solid citizens who remembered their roots - or at least the Hollywood version - and voiced interest in some vigilantism.

The conflict is that the acts of vigilantes are criminal - outside the law - but are viewed by some as necessary, at least in the early days of a society. The mythology of the American west abounds with examples, though this isn't formal argument or proof of the proposition. The example that was used in the comments following that post comes from the film The Searchers.

Ward Bond has to arrest John Wayne and take him to trial even though the creep needed killin'. The president who tortures to save the city has to be prosecuted for that crime, even though it saves the nation. And both Wayne and the president have to agree that this is right and proper, must feel guilt.

James Bowman, the author of Honor: A History, makes a related argument.

[T]he California conference I attended had devoted one of its sessions to a discussion of John Ford’s film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Released in 1962, this classic Western tells the story of a frontier town called Shinbone that is terrorized by a murderer, thief, and gun-for-hire who bears the significant name of Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin). A lawyer called Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart) comes to town with the idea of setting up a practice there. But before he even arrives his stagecoach is waylaid by Liberty and his gang, and he is robbed and beaten. Symbolically, Liberty tears the pages out of one of Stoddard’s law books. On his arrival in Shinbone, the lawyer is nonplussed to find that there is no law enforcement there willing or able to bring Valance to justice. Tom Doniphan (John Wayne), the only man in town capable of standing up to him, is disposed to mind his own business. On the frontier, the law is otiose because (as Tom explains to the newcomer) there, “men take care of their own problems.”

The point being made by Ford and his screenwriters, James Bellah and Willis Goldbeck, is that what’s needed for the establishment of civilization is, in the first instance anyway, not law but heroism. Someone has to risk his life to put an end to the threat of violence and disorder to the whole community. The problem, as in the parable of the mice, is that there is no incentive for any particular individual to be the one to bell the cat. And even if there were, there could be no question of due process about the exercise. The man who took on Liberty Valance would have to be as much outside the law as Liberty is—at least so long as his ability to intimidate witnesses makes the law powerless against him. But the filmmakers also seek to show us how this has become an unpalatable truth and one that people seek to disguise from themselves. Doniphon is induced to shoot Valance in what he himself describes as an act of “murder, pure and simple”—but in such a way that it looks like an act of self-defense by Stoddard, who is the representative of culture (he teaches the illiterates of the town to read), as well as law and civilization.

My emphasis. Bowman's argument wasn't only that vigilantism is foundational, but that we are conflicted about that to the point that we suppress the memories.

The suggestion is that the power of “the specter of law and order”—in its own right, that is, and independent of the willingness of brave and powerful men to express their will to dominance by killing or threatening to kill each other—is a form of mythology which is foundational to their, and our, civilization. And so it is too, but only to the extent that that civilization’s principles are utopian in nature, as ours increasingly are.

We are queasy about the blunt reality - “murder, pure and simple” - and so construct a myth about its justifiability - calling it self defence - rather than baldly admitting that it is a will to dominance by one carnivorous tribe over another. But that isn't the point Bowman wants to make. His argument is against the discredited but still influential idea that society can be made so lawful and civilized that individual goodness is irrelevant.

We may have lost confidence in the ability of those [social] engineers to design a perfect system, or even to live up to their own high expectations of humanity, but it is easier to go on clinging to their fantasies as if we believed them to be real than to submit to the despair of admitting to ourselves that life is still for us what it was to our great-grandfathers who believed—or at least pretended to believe—that there was nothing in it more important than being good.

Bowman's point is partially valid as I see it. We are still hobbled by the sentimentalism of intellectuals who admit that social engineering has failed but who still get misty eyed about the dream, and so are unable to produce useful scholarship or provide intellectual energy for more realistic social views. But Bowman assumes that the conflict is between good and bad, and that being good is useful. It's more complicated than that. It's not just Tom Doniphan against Liberty Valance, it's also dueling Tom Doniphans from different tribes. Both are good guys from the perspective of their respective tribes.

We need to be careful not to generalize from simple examples to general principles. We can indulge in suitably conflicted admiration for our Tom Doniphans when they exterminate our Liberty Valances, but that doesn't scale up to large and diverse societies, much less the whole world. The straight shooting heroes need to keep their guns in their pants for the most part, and the Ransom Stoddards among us need to mature a great deal before their provincial conceptions of law and civilization can be given serious consideration.