Vollmann is a reformist, not a revolutionary, a fervent individualist who is especially suspicious of justifications of violence based on broader ideology, on creed or class, for example, rather than those based on threats to the sovereign self, or "the lonely atom" as that self is sometimes characterized here.
He prefers the efficacy of small acts which are less prone to the vertigo of risings up and down: "People have improved conditions in sweatshops, temporarily, and in finite localities, but no one has ever reorganized the means of production with happy results, because it is difficult to know when to declare victory". This reverence for the small act or reform is deconstructed by some of the events recounted in the Studies in Consequences volumes, however, where the small act is often figured as noble but inadequate, quixotic: Vollmann's delivery of medicine to Iraq, under sanctions between Gulf Wars, is described as dropping a sugar cube into the ocean; his rescue of the young Thai prostitute from bondage is, again, a brief tilt against a system of exploitation that remains intact. Prostitution is one of the most controversial motifs in Vollmann's oeuvre. He is well known to be a journalist who does not make his excuses and leave. Curiously, in these pieces it is often the prostitutes, with their awareness of the metred nature of modern life, of the ubiquity of transaction, who demonstrate the systemic understanding of things that Vollmann tends to disavow, or to personalize by asking them for stories or kisses (the girls, all business, refuse). There is a heroic bathos about Vollmann's reformism which finds its formal echo in the voice he brings to his journalism, the very opposite of gonzo cool, not just in its gauche altruism but in its willingness to admit weakness and unworthiness, as when he confesses to feeling childishly hurt that Mica is suspicious and insufficiently grateful for his brave efforts to help her.
These books reveal a Vollmann who is in many ways a typical Second Amendment American, albeit one equally able to cite Guns & Ammo and the Poetic Edda ("From his weapons away no one should ever stir one step on the field; for no one knows when need might have on a sudden a man of his sword"). One of the more dubious moral actors here is the subway vigilante Bernhard Goetz, whom Vollmann defends on the grounds of imminent self-defence, while questioning Goetz's excessive zeal when dealing with his screwdriver-wielding assailants.
"I'd judge him thus: first four shots justifiable, fifth shot unjustifiable."
Vollmann is a dirty-hands moralist, eschewing politically correct camouflage for utter candour. "I myself want to look into the evildoer's eyes, and I want to compel him to gaze into his own eyes, to see his image and to judge it; he owes his victims that." This call for empathy and self-scrutiny is vital for Vollmann, hence he dismisses the idea of confronting violence via social engineering as "the invisible hand (which)most graciously regulates them down the corridors of their rat-maze". Pressured moral calculation in a quickened world is preferred to passive indifference in a becalmed one. At one point, Vollmann refers to the simulation course many American police undergo in which, faced with fleetingly appearing and disappearing benign or dangerous targets, they are confronted with the choice of shooting or not shooting. This is a high velocity version of Vollmann's moral calculus, as example after example springs out at us. To do violence or not to do violence? You decide. These questions are not merely rhetorical: in the Studies in Consequences volumes Vollmann asks everyone, from drug barons to warlords to gangland enforcers, to justify their ethical positions -and on a surprising number of occasions he elicits revealing responses.
Images of staring into an antagonist's eyes recur throughout the project. This gaze is at the root of both Vollmann's ethics and poetics; in its purest state he describes how a child's pupils widen while it is "straining to identify with what it sees, to bind itself to the world with perception". What Vollmann cannot bear is the idea that reconciliation between self and other might be impossible. He reserves special ignominy in the Justifications volumes for "Defense of Inevitability", and recoils from Bakunin's conclusion that there are circumstances where two worlds can never meet: the workers want equality and the bourgeoisie wants to maintain inequality, therefore violence is inevitable. At the more anecdotal level, there is a painful account of Vollmann chewing qat as the honoured guest in a room full of Muslims in the Yemen exactly a year after 9/11; the gathering united in politeness and ritual, but hopelessly divided by world view.
In another highly charged category, "Defense of Class", Vollmann provides a Tolstoyan vignette, "The Countess and the Clay-Eater". In pre-Revolutionary Russia a wealthy countess sees a wretched child by a roadside reduced to eating clay and gives him two kopeks. Their eyes meet. We are then given detailed, layered accounts of their subsequent lives up to and beyond the Revolution, the boy rising up the Revolutionary ranks, the countess and her family falling on hard times.
Here, rather than in the Moral Calculus itself, we get a sense of the thorniness of ethical questions, sometimes even their apparent intractability:
"She wasn't obligated to help. That selfsame fact from the standpoint of the boy who had to eat blue clay, justifies revolution". At the climax of this episode, the grown boy -at the vanguard of shock-workers -and the countess's husband clash and a now familiar trope re-emerges: "Two pair of eyes gaze upon each other, shining with hatred and resolution . . . . Does the clay-eater feel pity? Do the two kopeks which the countess once put in his hand soften him a little, or inflame him? Who is to blame? There can be but one definition for this confrontation: Tragedy".
