Substantive: The Concept of the Political

In this post, I want to continue the application of Schmitt to Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game. Last post I covered what I saw as the application of Schmitt's political philosophy to the politics being played out on Earth as Ender was attending battle school in the asteroid belt. Principle to the politics of of post-Bugger Earth were the internet (I use internet in the context of what we would understand the concept to be, not necessarily what Card 100% envisioned) personalities of Locke and Demosthenes. As we understand from some of the interspersed chapters and the final chapter of Ender's Game, the current political entities of Earth are united under the banner of defeating the Buggers, but on the brink of collapsing into infighting once again. In deft political maneuvering, Peter Wiggin utilizes his created personas to elevate himself to the position of Hegemon of Earth, essentially keeping Earth united. As opposed to the union of Earth during the Bugger wars, which very much so mimics Schmitt's friend-enemy political dynamic, Peter defies Schmitt's logic, and keeps humanity together via colonization practices, and steeling itself against future enemies, but not necessarily one present.

In this blog post I want to continue the application of Schmitt's friend-enemy political theory, but this time to the concept of the International Fleet, and how it represents humanity as a whole (and, indeed, how Ender plays into the concept of the IF), and the Buggers themselves. In general, when analyzing the IF and the Buggers under Schmitt's political philosophy, I'm going to ignore the League War at the conclusion of the novel and its effects on the IF, as I believe I've covered that sufficiently in the last post.

The IF fleet represents the best of humanities military steeled against a common enemy. However, the Bugger threat is a very unique one to humanity. As Chris pointed out in his latest post, the Buggers fail to attack innocent human settlements, and in general human bystanders. While I think this has an easy internal explanation in the story's universe (the Buggers were innocent of the fact they were killing individuals, but knew not to attack worlds, which they may have seen as containing a queen), it has interesting applications to Schmitt's theories in that the public never really had any reason to fear the Buggers. In essence, the public never had anything personal against the Buggers - they were simply a threat to the whole. From The Concept of the Political; "The enemy is not merely any competitor or just any partner of a conflict in general. An enemy exists only when, at least potentially, one fighting collectivity of people confronts a similar collectivity. The enemy is solely the public enemy... The enemy is hostis, not inimucus in the broader sense," Schmitt relays that an opposing collective of fighting people may not necessarily have to commit crimes against people in order to be considered the enemy. Only "because everything that has a relationship to such a collectivity of men, particularly to a whole nation, becomes public by virtue of such a relationship," says Schmitt. In Schmitt's sense, we can say the IF (representing humanity) and the Buggers are enemies not by virtue of the crimes the Buggers have committed against humanity, by but virtue of there existing an opposing fighting force which could jeopardize the existence of humanity.

Related to this, I have to say I entirely agree with Morgan's post on the alien nature of the Buggers and the quote from Schmitt she uses. This quote follows up logically from what I have just presented: Schmitt says that the enemy need not be the enemy which has committed certain crimes against specific people, and need only be a public threat. But, of course, we need to ask why that enemy would be a threat. Schmitt here makes it clear that simply the concept of being different is enough to cause conflict; "The political enemy need not be morally evil or aesthetically ugly; he need not appear as an economic competitor, and it may even be advantageous to engage with him in business transactions. But he is, nevertheless, the other, the stranger; and it is sufficient for his nature that he is, in a specially intense way, existentially something different and alien, so that in the extreme case conflicts with him are possible.”

Consider, for a moment, that humanity was capable of actually communicating with the Buggers. We know that Mazer Rackham tells Ender on the way to Eros that humanity did in fact attempt to communicate with the Buggers, but all the attempts failed. At this point, we have no idea if this account is even true, considering the extent of the lies all the adults were telling Ender. So then, would humanity still wage war against the Buggers even if we were capable of communicating? And, to another extreme, would humanity still wage war if we met a race of, say, sentient cute bunnies? Schmitt says, "Emotionally, the enemy is easily treated as being evil and ugly, because every distinction, most of all the political... draws upon other distinctions for support... [T]he morally evil, aesthetically ugly or economically damaging need not necessarily be the enemy; the morally good, aesthetically beautiful or economically profitable need not necessarily become the friend..." Therefore, the friend-enemy distinction Schmitt puts forth isn't even based on other contributing factors, it is the simple alienness of the two political entities that drive them to war.