Vollmann opens “The Days of the Niblungs” by critiquing various optimistic views of the nature and future of humanity. The chapter deals heavily with major political thinkers of the 19th and 20th centuries, including Arendt, Kropotkin, and Bakunin among others, who, while having often disparate political ideologies, demonstrate a sort of hope regarding human development towards peace. Vollmann doesn’t give up on believing that the world ought to be better, but is hesitant to believe that violence itself can somehow be erased from human culture. However, he describes his agreement with Bakunin’s belief that the apparent universality of some form of violence is not necessarily an indication of its being natural, and thus accepts the premise that progress is possible. Despite the possibility for progress, Vollmann writes, “we need not delude ourselves that ‘history’ has accomplished much in the way of human improvement” (I, p.31). While the forms of violence may change, violence as a component of human nature and thus human culture does not.
In the section titled “Is Violence Displaceable, Eliminable, Sublimatible, or Stimulable,” Vollmann begins to outline the nature of violence itself. One way that violence manifests is from the urge to destroy others, or otherness in the pursuit of homogeneity. Perhaps we satisfy this urge through invasion and pogroms. Another option might be controlled outlets of violence in the way of Roman gladiator fights. Would uncontrolled violence sink if “future mass murderers were given the chance to kill one another on television,” Vollmann asks (I-p.35). This notion presupposes that the urge to act violently is finite and can be siphoned into different channels in a predictably proportionate way. However, Vollmann points out that in the case of the Roman gladiator fights, the effect was not a reduction in violence but in fact an increase in it. In fact, this was precisely the point. By watching gladiator fights citizens were meant to be hardened for war, not appalled by it.
He then considers to the absurdity of every day violence, so to speak, that one might read about in the local newspaper or see described in national crime statistics. Often times the victims of violent crimes, say a woman raped on an elevator by a stranger or an infant beaten to death by her mother, are “mere placeholders” as “violence rises up and takes the sacrifice it finds” (I-p.36). The absurdity of violence is further shown in crime statistics in Japan and the United States where the most common motivations listed on reports are “unknown” and “other.” Because of this, Vollmann is skeptical that policies that attempt to remove the apparent reasons for violence will be completely effective and, in some cases, completely miss the point.
If it is impossible to remove violence what then can be said about the role of developing a moral calculus or writing a book like Rising Up and Rising Down at all? Vollmann’s purpose with this book is to move toward a moral calculus that might arise from the in-depth examination of violence that he offers. He makes no illusions about his ability to radically alter the course of human action with this book, nor does he claim to have “seen enough, suffered enough, or thought enough about violence” (I-38). He makes clear that violence and suffering awes and shames him, but does not invite his own emulation of it.
To begin an examination of violence, or any research topic for that matter, one must be keenly aware of their own ignorance and potential failures in the pursuit of the truth. The truth of any situation is not immediately given up in a succinct and discrete way. Rather, the researcher goes about both collecting and interpreting data in an effort to piece together something that gets at the substantiated truth. This means that even when something seems so clearly true, or might as well be true given the circumstances one, must still seek to corroborate and substantiate the truth of that specific situation. There are many traps one can fall into if they let their own intuition and experience overcrowd their judgement. While Vollmann does not deny that experience is critical, he warns that over time as one gathers more and more bits of knowledge and develops a conceptual understanding of the world, one is more susceptible to miss things that don’t fit their theory.
Vollmann continues his qualification of pursuing empirical truth by pointing out the often-deceiving nature of “settled data.” For instance, the statistics of the death count under the Khmer Rouge varied widely over time with some early estimates putting the total at 300,000 and later estimates putting the total at more than three million. Vollman makes reference to this not to say that contemporary data cannot be trusted but that it is not necessarily infallible simply because it is recent.
Beyond the fallibility of statistics describing violence, there is of course the qualifying question “what is violence and how do we know it occurred?” To describe where this question might be asked, Vollmann gives a rather controversial example of qualifying crimes like attempted rape based on cultural context. Here he tells a story told to him by a victim of sexual assault where the victim was held in a corner against her will and groped before she was able to escape the situation. The perpetrator had a “rough upbringing,” and as such, according to Vollmann, was not able to understand how his actions could be described as attempted rape. Rather, he merely saw them as normal, if not inappropriate courtship. The point being that crimes should be understood in the specific context of perpetrator and victim and normative ethics fails to grasp this nuance.
He continues this argument by critiquing Hannah Arendt in the context of her famous and controversial work Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. This brief section some scrutiny as it over-essentializes Arendt’s defense of a common humanity and blatantly misinterprets Kant’s ethical framework. Vollman uncritically accepts Eichmann’s claim in the trial that he was following Kant’s categorical imperative by simply following orders and fulfilling his duty. Vollmann writes, “I wish that Kant had been there, for vis-à-vis the ‘I just followed orders’ defense the philosopher expresses agreement” (I-p.47). As Arendt famously points out in Eichmann, this reading of Kant by Eichmann is not only untrue but indicative of his inability to think, the critical piece of Arendt’s argument in the text. To quote Arendt herself in response to Eichmann’s invocation of Kant: “This was outrageous, on the face of it, and also incomprehensible, since Kant’s moral philosophy is so closely bound up with man’s faculty of judgment, which rules out blind obedience.” Vollman uses Eichmann has an example among several, so it is not worth going further in describing Arendt’s or Kant’s position.
Vollmann next considers ways to approach justice. He contrasts it with respect and evaluates whether it is passionate or objective. He asks, in regards to the question of respect, “Do I betray and humiliate those who have trusted me, or do I soften my conclusions?” (I-p.50). Vollman’s guiding principle is that we must respect the human in everyone including those that do evil.
The final parts of this section summarize the motivations and justifications for the book itself. The first half of the book is to be a theoretical account of violence based on the already decided scholarly research on the various topics it draws from. He has provided a complete volume of the moral calculuses he employs throughout the text. Ultimately, he seeks to give as near complete an account of violence and ethics as he can given his decades of research on the topic.
–RW