The spectre of the Unabomber must have weighed heavy on William Vollmann as he crafted the fourth chapter of his magnum opus. Thought to be the Unabomber at one point, it’s almost like this chapter was written as a response to the FBI’s unwarranted suspicion. He’s trying to convince us not only of where our rights begin, but also that he as a moral being is compatible with society. Where Kaczynski advocated a return to the state of nature, Vollmann spends this chapter defending the merits of living within the social contract. His signature libertarian overtones which must have smelled suspicious to the authorities are still present, but during this chapter, Vollmann’s writing provides us with a stark rebuttal of any philosopher who advocates a quick exit from a structured society. In outlining where the individual’s rights begin, Vollmann weighs the pros and cons of life in a society. It’s a very subtle refutation of Kaczynski’s argument. He doesn’t even mention Kaczynski until the end.
We’re reading Rising Up and Rising Down, so Vollmann’s examination of the social contract is not carried out with musings on property rights or the proper structure of a legislature. In this chapter, we are concerned with the right of the individual to perpetrate violence. The chapter is structured around the four rights which Gaius Marius, hunted by his enemies: Self-Defense, Other-Defense, Self-Destruction and Euthanasia (I p. 231). In discussing these circumstances, Vollmann gives us an honor centric view of the rights of violence of the individual, conscious of both an individual’s safety and security, and appropriately, the individual’s reputation.
He begins with an evisceration of the concept of ostracism from society. He frames this first part of the discussion by describing the Roman civil war which brought Julius Caesar to power. He lingers on those throughout history who were excluded from mainstream society because of their views, quoting from antiquity: ‘virtually all of the most accomplished men were ostracized: Aristeides, Kimon, Themistokles, Thoukydides, Alkibiades.’ (I p. 230) After a long and scathing description of the period, he decries the law of the jungle, stating that the “social contract is not just when it can be unilaterally abrogated by the more powerful party” (I p 233). Thus he refutes both authoritarianism and a return to a Hobbesian state of nature in one stroke. At the end of his introduction, Vollmann writes almost like he’s apologizing. “The prospect of being blotted out of the social contract is terrifying, whether the government be good or bad” (I p. 234). Maybe I’m making a leap, but it seems vaguely autobiographical.
Vollmann then takes the thematically appropriate choice, and starts discussing suicide after he finishes his fearful ode to ostracization from society. “The virtue of suicide,” Vollmann says, “is control.” It is, as he explains over the course of the next section, the last means of the individual to exercise autonomy when circumstances have taken everything away from them. During this section, Vollmann pays much attention to concepts adjacent to reputation. He invokes the samurai of Feudal Japan, taking their own lives as a means of retaining or restoring their own honor, and political prisoners, taking their own lives as a final means of protest to an unjust regime. During this latter discussion, he also acknowledges suicide’s viability as a mechanism for escape, referencing the suicide of Geobbels. Vollmann is not a cold cold realist like me. Though he frames his discussion in terms of the “utility” of suicide, the purposes he seems sensitive to are often intangible, carried out for the individual’s feelings. Moral calculus he comes to at the end of his discourse is that “suicide is permissible whenever uncoerced” (I p. 243). So almost always.
Then Vollmann moves into euthanasia, dipping his feet into the waters of carrying out violence against others. To begin this short section, he uses Goebbels as a bridge between suicide and euthanasia. After all, Geobbels didn’t go alone. He dragged his family with him. Again, Vollmann is sensitive to the sufferings of individuals, ending with the moral maxim: “Families or comrades may legitimately coerce the deaths of dependants to spare them from lonliness, death by torture or dishonor sufficient co compel future suicide. The question this maxim begs is who gets to decide when a situation meets those parameters. Vollmann references an unsavory circumstance, a husband who killed his children to spare them from life in a separated household. And Vollmann roundly condemns the hypothetical husband, stating that his action is not Euthanasia, but a thinly veiled revenge killing (I p. 244). It’s somewhat of a blurry distinction, and it’s one that would be difficult to apply to the real world. But I think it holds.
Then, we get to the full loaf in Vollmann’s discussion of homicide. Now that actions wholly violate the harm principle, the discussion of the social contract returns. You won’t find any justification of murder or war in this section. Here, we are strictly concerned with self defense, the place where the authority we have entered into the contract with can no longer be counted onto carry out its end of the bargain, and thus must allow the individual to defend themself. Fitting then, that this section centers around the actions of Bernard Goetz, who killed a boy on the subway after he and four accomplices accosted Goetz on the subway. The situation was ambiguous, and there is still debate about whether violence was their agenda that day. Vollmann takes the leap and says: yes violence was their intention, siding most of the way with Goetz as he pulls his revolver and opens fire. He’s with him for four shots, enough to wound three of the boys and get them all running away. It’s on the fifth that Vollmann breaks with Goetz, when he took aim at the last boy and finished him off at point blank range. That shot was not in self defense or in defense of others. What we can infer from his defence of Goetz is that Vollmann’s stance is startlingly similar to the Stand Your Ground laws in this country. Lethal force is okay if you feel threatened. Not, as in Geotz’s coup de grace, when you are demonstrably safe.
The last section Vollmann covers is an examination of violence during revolution. Here, Vollmann focuses on the idea of when the social contract functions and when it does not. The functioning social contract is, in Vollmann’s words, “where the people ought to be able to feel themselves, if not its executors, at least its originators or beneficiaries.” If this is not the case, then all bets are off, and the individual has the right to “justly throttle your corresponding right – and you -” (I p. 262). Vollmann closes with a reference to the man who he was thought to be. He says that the act of violence, a temporary return to the state of nature, must always be temporary. Life in society is preferable, under the ethical maxims that Vollmann has laid out. The last justification he offers in this chapter is a ringing endorsement of mainstream society with the rallying cry: “the Unabomber was wrong” (I p 262).
–M.H.