Chapter Eight ends with an exploration of people’s varying conceptions of honor, which honor Vollmann divides into five categories. The first category places honor above self—as something paramount. The second category says that honor may be placed above other ends, but that it is not consistently supreme. The third category says that honor is a custom, justification, or neutral characteristic. The fourth category reduces honor to a means which can be used trivially, and the final and fifth category condemns honor to irrelevance or odiousness. He explores these categories through quotes without commentary.
A defense of monuments section uses pictures of monuments and pictures of people as living monuments to explore how people are and respond to visual claims regarding honor. The images include piles of Iranian helmets cemented to a larger monument, each with a bullet hole, and smiling people standing before a portrait of Saddam Hussein.
Chapter Nine is titled ‘Defense of Class.’ Class, according to Vollmann, has four component parts: function, status, property, and rank. Class is not inviolable; it generalizes the roles that people play and how they are perceived, both in terms of reputation but also regarding the distribution of resources, and class is present in nature. Vollmann looks to ants and wasps to highlight the functional origins of class. Ants have clear casts whose origins are biological and completely determinate of their behavior. Queens dominate reproduction, while others ensure her survival and reproductive success. Among these others, young ants tend to the larvae while older ants sacrifice themselves on dangerous foraging missions. Similarly, humans also have divisions in class based on biology; in nomadic societies, the value of men related to their ability to provide food for their social groups and the value of women related principally to their ability to reproduce. Those who could not contribute may have been expected to find ways to reduce their burden on others, sometimes through their deaths.
Ants, however, are purely biologically driven according to Vollmann, and their behaviors can be manipulated through pheromones. Worker respond to the scent of their queen just as they would to their actual queen, and unproductive queens may be killed by their own workers—their children. Humans have status, and it generally relates to function. Status is often dictated by class, although there is status within each class. Class is defensible when it is related to function, but when class ceases to be related to function (when it ceases to be potentially necessary), then it becomes indefensible.
Vollmann believes that property is highly consequential. He cites Clarence Darrow and the FBI in asserting that 90% of crimes are property-motivated and he equates relative poverty with misery. Defense of property is allowed, but not against the genuine need of another (for example, you can’t defend your apple against a starving child) and you cannot shoot a burglar in the back. The right of others to life exceeds one’s right to property. Class, which includes property, is only defensible when it is necessary. Further, class is ultimately derived from function, so property (when it is defensible) must also be derived from function.
Rank exists purely within the minds of those who participate in it, and it is aided by props whose effectiveness is measured less directly by their utility of their use than the conveyance of certain relations. Mundanely, a wedding ring indicates marriage and sexual unavailability. The sacrifice of a slave indicates power and dominance, and according to Vollmann thoroughly demonstrates the non-economic nature of rank and slavery.
-T.C.