If, for example, it would somehow serve our interests to throw sulphuric acid in a child's face – are you prepared to do that?
Le Carre, following Orwell and Greene, records his characters making a 'second vow' by which their initial willing self-weaponisation is turned against the idea they have of their own involvement. The second vow is invoked to overcome the inevitable scruples which subsequently emerge before the dirty work that is integral to the imperative of what must be done. The first vow is simply made, a clearly stated a priori patriotic and technical commitment to 'whatever it takes' in securing an idealised representation of the cause. The first vow is formulated in that spirit of faustian naiveté where the actuality of complication is readily acknowledged but cannot be imagined. Is the first vow made or taken? Is the second vow taken or made? The first vow is enough to set in motion the process of involvement: youthful energy is bound through campaign experience into the veteran's trapped and hooded ambivalence. And it is to bind the veteran to his standpoint that the second vow becomes necessary.
For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do. Now if I do that I would not, it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me.
The second vow appears on the horizon of critical inextricability where the agent is faced with an escalating spiral of commitment set against his own unassuaged weariness. The world is tired of the forces changing it, and the agent sees its weariness as his own - he continues even as he knows it is better not to continue but also knowing he cannot stop. The second vow is made exigently, and with the agent up to his neck in the struggle. The second vow appears at the threshold where the mission is about to swallow the cause. If the first vow is made in a hurry of naiveté, the second is indicative of a critical shift in the terrain. Where before there was always the possibility of an appeal to the objective necessity of the measures taken, suddenly there is only a gathering momentum. Not only can the agent find no discernible logic in the sequence of commands that he is to obey, and thus no reason to go on, but the actions required of him also directly contravene the values he has sworn to uphold. Inevitably, he discovers there is no cause but the mission, and his only function is to preserve it. The crisis is not that there seems to be no justification for what is demanded of him but that he has reached the point where all justification has become redundant. He has become inseparable from the process of realisation as it struggles against inertia.The second vow occurs at the crossroads of post-commitment, the agent is now so involved that he cannot free himself from the forces that sweep him along. He has passed into a state of post-agency. His actions have become the involuntary spasmodic responses elicited by an environment that both expels and swallows him. A final cause has set him in motion through a sequence of events of which he is instrument and product. The second vow is a ritual of the inescapable emerging from within hitherto freely chosen commitment - its content acknowledges with clear eyes the fatal but unexpected consequence of the first vow but without relinquishing it. With the second vow, the agent cleaves once again to the cause that he has killed through his commitment - and he asks himself if there ever was a first vow, or had it been the second vow all along? Had he really known a time before this, his second vow?
