The noble, the ignoble and the indeterminacy of consequentialism: The Hammer, by K.J. Parker

 With every piece I read by K.J. Parker (Tom Holt), the more fascinated I get.  This gentleman is becoming one of my favorite writers, although he seems to be very polarizing.  I can understand why.  His main characters are difficult protagonists to like, not necessarily villainous, but often horrifying, and Parker's writing style can be slick and cold, even when he writes moral parables.  Yet even with some flaws in The Hammer, this one comes with highest recommendations.  The protagonist, Gignomai met'Oc, can be read as a cold-blooded villain, an avenging angel, a heroic leader and founding father to a new nation, all, or none, set in Parker's continuing parallel world, this time with a story meant to be a reference to the colonization of North America and the eventual American revolution, complete with the industrial and scientific innovations taking place in the 18th Century.  Brilliant.

Here's the deal.  One of the old world empires (known only as Home) runs a colony under a mercantilist economic system.  That means they have "The Company" collect taxes and goods, which includes most of the agricultural products that the colony can produce, forcing the colony to buy finished products from Home, through The Company.  The colony is forbidden from manufacturing on its own, or from trading with anyone else.  Hence, mercantilism.  An exiled, noble family from Home, the met'Ocs, have set up shop on a plateau ("Tabletop") looming over the colony, and they occasionally raid for cattle and supplies, but despite their ostensible nobility, they're dirt poor, and the colony has more.  The met'Ocs are psycho.  Long ago, there was a daughter.  She was caught fooling around with one of the thugs the met'Ocs hired as security/colony-raider.  Luso met'Oc (the middle son, in charge of security 'n such) killed the dumbass who was messing around with the boss's daughter, but then Papa met'Oc tortured his own daughter to death.  Gignomai liked her, and was traumatized both that it happened, and that as a kid at the time, he couldn't bring himself to step in and stop it.

When Gignomai grows up a bit, he escapes to the colony, never telling anyone about his dead sister.  Instead, he has a plan.  He brought some books from Papa met'Oc's library, with some information that he can use to build forges and other manufacturing equipment.  He's going to build a factory.

The story he tells the colony is that, yes, it's illegal, but as the colony needs fewer finished goods from Home, they can keep more of their cattle.  So, Home starts sending less, thinking they're punishing the colony, and eventually they write off the colony, thinking they're leaving it for dead.  Actually, this is just the first story.  Gignomai needed a story to tell the colonists as he got things up and running to the point that he could start to manufacture flintlocks.  The met'Ocs had a couple, but that's it.  Flintlocks are a rarity, but if Gignomai can start manufacturing them in numbers, then he can arm the colony, and they can declare independence.

See?  Revolution!  Fighting colonialism and mercantilism and all that!  Through science and industry!

But what really matters to Gignomai is vengeance.  He wants to start a war between the colonists and the met'Ocs, but just as he escaped, they started making peace, making it even harder for him to start that war.

Before revealing to anyone that he has flintlocks, he sends a couple of his people to start shooting up some colonists' houses.  Their only conclusion could be that it was Luso met'Oc.

That's still not enough.  And here's the real mistake of the book, I think.  I think that should have been enough, but Parker wrote in the "savages," who are obviously the Native Americans, and he did a weirdo, over-the-top noble savage storyline, where the savages (they have no other name) are so peaceful that they cannot even conceive of violence.

Yeahno.

In the novel, they basically think the colonists aren't real.  They are either dead people from the past, or future apparitions, or something like that, but either way, not real.  Hence, the savages won't interact with the colonists.  Except one, who had been kidnapped decades earlier, and educated back "Home," to speak their language, and hence knows that they're real.

Anyway, to prove his point, Gig goes to a savage encampment and gets their goat.

Literally.  He shoots a goat in the head.  It is hard to maintain that Gig isn't real after he does that.  It also shows that he is a potential threat, but he told the old man to tell them that if they want flintlocks, he'll give them flintlocks.

That way, he can blame the met'Ocs for giving flintlocks to the savages, scare the fuck out of the colonists, and use that as motivation to lead a raid on Tabletop when Luso met'Oc gets married to a newly arrived exile-noble.  Gig and crew lock the met'Ocs in the building, set it on fire, they all die, no fighting necessary.  Then, he can start cranking out the flintlocks so that when The Company shows up, they can decide that the colony should just be left alone, thank you very much.

Freedom and independence, thanks to Gignomai met'Oc, industrialist/revolutionary leader for freedom.

Unless he is just a vengeance-obsessed, sociopathic manipulator.

And so we consider the moral philosophy of consequentialism.  From the perspective of the colony, there may be problems down the line as a result of arming the savages, but that is indeterminate.  The met'Ocs?  Their deaths, as moral questions, deserve contemplation, particularly in the brutality.  Suppose, though, that one accepts the morality of capital punishment.  If so, then while the met'Ocs were denied a trial, knowing what we know about Gig's sister, then their demise could be interpreted as justice, if at the hands of the wrong people on false pretenses.

Hence, consequentialism.

Similarly, Gignomai used lies to arm the colony, and in the process, fought that great evil, "colonialism," and its twin that no leftist even knows, mercantilism.  (Leftists tend to think that colonialism and capitalism are the same things, having no education in history or economics.)  Gig did it with industry and armaments.  And lies.  Let's not forget the lies, and hence we come back to consequentialism.  Can we judge Gignomai or his actions by the result?

Gig does not judge himself that way.  We ultimately learn that his father, the shitbag who tortured his own daughter to death, thereafter secretly wore a hairshirt, spirited away by Gignomai to wear as his own secret act of self-punishment.  Did Gignomai believe that he was a great leader, a righteous man, or anything of the sort?  Not privately, nor even really publicly.  Yet as readers, we are invited to weigh his deeds against the consequences.  The met'Ocs were shit, yet if you have a code, you should recoil, not only from the brutality of the death to which Gignomai puts them, but from the lies he uses to manipulate the colonists, and his vengefulness.

Yet to recognize does not mean we cannot, as readers, see the colony, post-met'Oc, armed to defend itself from Home and its mercantilist empire, and say that this is better in consequentialist terms.  This is what a novel like The Hammer can do that you cannot.  You cannot lie, cheat or steal, much less commit the atrocities that Gignomai met'Oc does motivated in reality by vengeance and hide that motive beneath more shiny, happy consequences in order to justify that which Kantian morality never would.  You cannot, but a novel can demonstrate for you what you sacrifice to play by those rules.

And make no mistake, an action that violates deontological morality can, through consequentialist bankshot, produce something better.  Perhaps the odds are higher in a well-plotted novel than in the messy place called reality, but consider that which is at the core of The Hammer.  Vigilantism.

Vigilantism is morally wrong, and I'm not going to bother with an extended argument on that.  That doesn't mean that an act of vigilantism can't make the world a better place if by killing, say, a child molester, you prevent the molestation of children.  Better if you can get the child molester sent to prison, but is the world better without the pederast in it?  I'm anti-child molestation, and I don't care who knows it.

You can construct any number of similar vigilantism arguments.  In the case of The Hammer, there was no functioning legal system.  Gignomai manipulated the colonists into killing the met'Ocs.

The question is generally how we think of vigilantism in the case of a flawed legal system.

As though there ever has been or ever will be a legal system without flaws.  Every choice, then, is a kind of compromise, or put another way, we are all compromised.  To adhere strictly to Kantian morality is to accept... wait... lemme think of a word... consequences.  Consequences that may be worse in utilitarian terms.  Yet purely consequentialist or utilitarian arguments invariably lead to violations of Kantian principles.  All points in between are compromises between.

Gignomai met'Oc shows a particular consequence on a particular extreme.  His means are as corrupt as possible, and his motive is "icky," if perhaps a warped, pseudo-justice, yet knowing his own corruption and rejecting his own corruption, he seeks a consequentialist veil, and perhaps even a consequentialist defense of his own actions.  We can reject the defense while acknowledging that the colony really is better for his horrific actions.

I refer to Marcus Aurelius a lot.  One of his more famous aphorisms is as follows.  Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be.  Be one.

He makes it sound easy.  In simple situations, it is.  The hard situations are the ones that matter.  Most people fail the easy tests, or perhaps I should say, most people fail the easy questions when the pressure is high.  The Gignomai met'Oc question is something else.

Then again, he'd say I'm overthinking it.  Gig's a shit, end of story.  He's probably right.

Every professional bluegrass guitarist can play "Nine Pound Hammer."  It was only a question of whom I chose for this morning.  I'm going with this live performance by Jim Hurst.