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Reviewed by Steven Moore
RISING UP AND RISING DOWN By William T. Vollmann. McSweeney's. 7 vols., 3,299 pp. $120 A little over a hundred years ago, Sir James G. Frazer set out to explain a minor point in Classical scholarship: the rule that regulated the succession to the priesthood at a shrine in Italy devoted to the goddess Diana. But over the next 15 years, as he realized that every aspect of the rule had a history to be explicated, and as he found parallels in other cultures, his project ballooned into the 12-volume Golden Bough, a monumental study of the evolution of magic and superstition into religion, an influential work cited by writers as diverse as T. S. Eliot, Carl Jung, William Gaddis and Jim Morrison. Twenty years ago, novelist William T. Vollmann set out to answer a similar deceptively simple question: When is violence justified? Most people have a stock response. Never, says the pacifist. Only in self-defense or wartime, many would say. Whenever anyone looks at me funny, a bully would say. Whenever I'm doing God's work, a religious fanatic would say. The new century threatens to be even more violent than the last, so it is a question that deserves a more considered response, a challenge Vollmann has met with a massive work that provides an encyclopedic survey of violence and a general field theory for its justifiability. The work is divided into two parts: The first four volumes are what Vollmann calls the "theoretical" part of the study -- drawn mostly from historical accounts of violence -- while volumes five and six deal with contemporary zones of violence, based on Vollmann's far-flung travels. A concluding volume contains a digest of his "moral calculus" (more on this below), appendices, supplementary materials and a 44-page bibliography where Herodotus is followed by a book on bear attacks, and where a translation of the medieval Two Lives of Charlemagne, by Einhard and Notker the Stammerer, precedes John Ellis's Social History of the Machine Gun. "Eclectic" doesn't even begin to describe it. To organize his unruly subject, Vollmann divides acts of violence into their various possible defenses: self-defense (the only clearly justified use of violence, according to Vollmann), defense of homeland, of honor, authority, race, creed, gender and more recent concerns such as defense of Earth against polluters and defense of animals. For his examples, he draws on nearly all eras of recorded history -- in volume two he tosses off "A Survey-History of Property from Nomadic Times to the Russian Revolution" -- and treats nearly every culture on Earth, from the hapless Afghans to the Zulus. The scope is immense, and his reading wide. Though not an academic, Vollmann scrupulously documents everything in hundreds of source notes (his philanthropic publisher hired a team of fact-checkers to help) and goes out of his way to be as fair and respectful toward his material as possible. He is so open-minded that he can identify and praise Trotsky's few virtues while admitting, "To Trotsky I'd be scum." There's no agenda, no preordained thesis, no political bias: He simply wants to understand violence and share his findings. Nor is he prescriptive; though sickened by violence, he's concerned here with how to judge it, not how to eradicate it. We know how to eradicate it: As Vollmann counsels, just observe the Golden Rule, perhaps fleshed out with the U.N.'s 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but that's easier said than done. Like Frazer's, Vollmann's method is comparative: Though a principal "moral actor" stars in each section -- Trotsky in "Defense of Authority," Cortez in "Defense of Ground" -- other actors from other eras of history make their appearances. "For much the same reason that one opera frequently recalls another," he notes, "the student of history will find that many an atrocity will be recapitulated somewhere down the centuries." In his chapter on "Defense of Honor," he finds common ground among the Charge of the Light Brigade ("remembered for its 'gallantry' -- in other words, for its tactical idiocy", Joan of Arc, Napoleon, King Olaf's forced conversions in medieval Norway, Sun-tzu and Mao Zedong's personal physician. Referring to young inmates of a juvenile hall in the 1950s, one of whom became the murderer Jack Abbott, Vollmann writes: "And now Blinky has disturbed his prestige again, like the Roman Prince Maxentius throwing down the statues of the Roman Emperor Constantine. Abbot had better show some 'heart.' ('When a brave man faces death,' says Socrates, 'he does so for fear of something worse.')" A discussion of Plato's totalitarian ideals includes an aside on "his half-brother Adolf Hitler" and an anecdote about a 4-year-old girl whose parents allowed her to starve to death. A single paragraph will join a Revolutionary War Minuteman, an 1870s pioneer woman and the 6th-century Byzantine historian Procopius. Vollmann will defend his right to carry a gun with a citation from the Old Norse Poetic Edda. Throughout, the emphasis is on individual responsibility for acts of violence. Vollmann contemptuously dismisses the claims of "social forces" and "historical goals" that so many revolutionaries and tyrants hide behind, identifies the monstrous arrogance of terrorists who would impose their beliefs on others, and condemns the spinelessness of those who defend their participation in atrocities by claiming to be "following orders." (As the personified Technology in Thomas Pynchon's World War II novel Gravity's Rainbow says at one point, " 'Do you think we'd've had the Rocket if someone, some specific somebody with a name and a penis hadn't wanted to chuck a ton of Amatol 300 miles and blow up a block full of civilians?' ") Vollmann indicts not only the obvious mass-murderers of history -- Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein -- but also those who encouraged widespread violence (Robespierre, Trotsky) or made questionable decisions that led to it, like Abraham Lincoln. (Vollmann reminds us that Lincoln started the Civil War not to free slaves but to assert the superiority of federal rights over states' rights, a dubious justification for the four years of bloodshed that resulted.) As Vollmann proceeds through the various defenses of violence, he codifies his findings as part of a "moral calculus," an attempt to establish a checklist by which any act of violence can be judged as justifiable or not. Not surprisingly, he finds most acts of violence unjustified, excepting only self-defense and violence committed during a justified war, and even that must be tightly restricted. (According to Vollmann's calculus, the Bush administration's recent invasion of Iraq is totally unjustified because it fails the test of imminence, among other reasons.) His moral calculus is presented in digest form on pp. 33-119 of the final volume, and I wish this section could be printed as a pamphlet and distributed worldwide. Every politician, soldier, activist and budding revolutionary deserves to read it, if no more of Rising Up and Rising Down. (And about that odd title: A "rising up" is a justified act of violence, a "rising down" an unjustified one.) Unlike Frazer, who never left his library, Vollmann supplements his immense reading with fieldwork done in some of the most dangerous places on Earth. Volumes 5 and 6 record his trips to Cambodia, Thailand, Burma, Japan, the former Yugoslavia, Madagascar, the Congo, Somalia, Malaysia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Colombia, Jamaica and various parts of the United States. Some of these essays were published in the 1990s in such magazines as Spin, Gear, Esquire and the New Yorker, always in severely edited form, and for many readers these will be the most enjoyable volumes of Rising Up and Rising Down -- though "enjoyable" is hardly the word for this parade of misery. In almost every case Vollmann shows the effects of violence on those least able to avoid it: the poor. Some of these make for rather thrilling reading -- like his account of his rescue of a 12-year-old sex slave from a Thai brothel -- while others are the bleakest things you'll ever read. A few are "Apocalypse Now"-type quests for mysterious figures -- Vollmann was one of the few to interview Khun Sa, the "Opium King" of Burma, and Hadji Amin, the "Old Man" of the PULO separatist movement in Thailand -- but most consist of interviews with the wretched of the Earth as they suffer from the effects of weak or illegitimate governments. I lost count of the number of times Vollmann was almost killed during these adventures. Here in the States he hangs with Cambodian immigrant gang-bangers, with suicidal Apache teenagers on an Arizona reservation, with mourners after the Columbine massacre, with superstitious blacks down South (who resort to magic, voodoo, Christianity, Santerķa and other primitive beliefs to ward off violence) and with paranoid whites in the Pacific Northwest, whose very real concern with governmental abrogation of their rights gets mixed up with anti-Semitism, racism, conspiracy theories and Bible-fueled apocalyptic fears. Rising Up and Rising Down is a monumental achievement on several levels: as a hair-rising survey of mankind's propensity for violence, as a one-man attempt to construct a system of ethics, as a successful exercise in objective analysis (almost nonexistent in today's partisan, ideological, politicized, spin-doctored, theory-muddled public discourse) and as a demonstration of the importance of empathy, whether in writing a book like this or simply dealing with fellow human beings. It can be an exhausting, depressing read, but with the ever-growing role of violence in our lives, it is an essential one. And the amazing fact that during the 20 years he spent writing Rising Up and Rising Down Vollmann also published a dozen extraordinary books of fiction -- many in the 700-page range and packed with historical research as deep as that on display here -- elevates this achievement beyond the realm of mere mortals. Steven Moore's collected reviews of Vollmann's work will be published next year in "Expelled from Eden: A William T. Vollmann Reader." - - - -
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