Reflection on Class Discussion and Ender's game

There was one line in Ender’s Game that I think should have been discussed in class and seems inconsistent with the novel. Before Ender engages in the final battle he asks Rackham if he could attack a planet with a MDD device. In response Rackham states that the Formics, or Buggers, never attacked a civilian population during either invasion. It does not seem to make sense that the humans would fear their own xenocide if the Formics only launched attacks against military targets. It is reasonable to have feared enslavement or submission, but total annihilation does not seem to be the logical conclusion based on the Formics’ actions. Could the humans not have used the MDD on the mass of thousands of MDD ships to hamstring the Formics rather than bring a sentient species to extinction? This one line seems very out of place in the novel as there is so much fear and paranoia about the Formics and discussion about the survival of the human species. In many ways I feel this reflects contemporary issues with terrorism where we have demonized terrorists to the point that negotiations with any extremists group is almost unthinkable. Whether or not discussion with these groups is a beneficial or moral course of action is another question, but the real issue is that by being close-minded the option of diplomacy is overshadowed by military action, leading to a cycle of violence. Perhaps the humans’ demonization of the Formics could be explained by the diversionary war theory, which is the concept of creating a conflict to push other issues out of the public limelight. By creating the Formics into monstrous antagonists, humanity was temporarily unified and there was relatively stability. It should be noted that just days after the Formics were destroyed this unity fell apart. Ideas like this can be seen in Schmitt’s’ Concept of the Political. This alliance based on fear directly contrasts with the Federation from Star Trek, which is interestingly enough more successful than any alliance mentioned in Ender’s Game. I personally believe that any unification based on the principals of cooperation and self improvement will outlast one based on domination and self preservation. Perhaps that is why organizations such as the European Union have had such great success whereas alliances such as the Non-Aggression Pact between the USSR have ended in ruin and destruction.

Reflection: Ender's Game

I admit, this entire post will be colored by the fact that I just finished Carl Schmitt's The Concept of the Political. After finishing Schmitt's work, I find it entirely impossible avoid applying its concepts directly to the human-Bugger conflict found in Ender's Game. Ah, where to begin...

I think one of the larger subjects not covered in class on Thursday was the political environment on Earth during Ender's time at the Battle School. Although the political maneuvering of Peter and Valentine as Locke and Demosthenes was no doubt a subplot to Orson Scott Card, the reactions on Earth to the Bugger wars are largely predictable by Schmitt's writings. Although Card presents a scenario which Schmitt largely believed was impossible, a force opposing all of humanity that is distinctly non-human, the logical extensions of arguments presenting in The Concept of the Political are present within Card's universe. Let's take a look at the political subplot, and compare it with the conclusions Schmitt makes when the political environment is defined by friend and enemy.

Card's descriptions of the Earth geographic and political environments are written with varying degrees of detail. From what we're told, the geopolitical environment post first invasion has resulted in the founding of the International Fleet, a worldwide space-operating military organization. From the descriptions Card gives, the organization draws its forces from a number of "super-states", essentially large territories that have resulted from the integration of states in regions of the world. These territories are united under the three leaders of "the League", the Hegemon, Strategos, and Polemarch (interestingly, George Schwab, translator, utilized the word polemic often within Schmitt's passages).

The Cold War influences on Card's political universe are pretty obvious (read more on Card and Cold War influences with Morgan's recent post). Of the states in the tenuous League, the "Second Warsaw Pact" are the most noticeably belligerent. Clearly by the time Ender's Game is taking place, the IF's warnings of an impending third Bugger invasion has taken a backseat to inter-league conflicts, specifically between the Second Warsaw Pact and the American territory. This, of course, plays at Schmitt's declaration that, "Humanity as such cannot wage war because it has no enemy, at least not on this planet. The concept of humanity excludes the concept of the enemy, because the enemy does not cease to be a human being..." The essence of Schmitt's critique lies in his hypothesis that it would take an extraterrestrial threat in order to unite humanity under the same banner. This has clearly occurred within the context of the League and the IF, but as the threat of the Buggers seems to pass, there is no longer an enemy in which humanity may unite against. Peter and Valentine Wiggin, posing as Locke and Demosthenes, utilize this tumultuous political landscape to begin their rise in Earth's political ring.

On one hand, Peter knew Russia and the Second Warsaw Pact were preparing for the post-Bugger war conditions: "Valentine, things are coming to a head. I've been tracking troop movements in Russia... In the last six months, they've stepped up, they're getting ready for war. Land war." And Peter definitely predicted the collapse of the League post Bugger wars: "When the Bugger wars are over, all that power will vanish, because it's all built on fear of the Buggers. And suddenly we'll look around and discover that all the old alliances are gone, dead and gone, except one, the Warsaw Pact." Peter's intentions were predicted from the first establishment of the two pseudonyms, and confirmed when Valentine revealed to Ender that Peter had utilized Demosthenes mob-appealing belligerence and Locke's "influence with the intelligentsia" to prevent the League War (which ensued after Ender's annihilation of the Buggers). In essence, Peter recognized the same political philosophy put forth by Schmitt and utilized it to his advantage. Knowing that a structure of government already existed that allowed for world hegemony allowed Peter to step in, but holding together Earth in the post-Bugger era required a deviation from Schmitt's political thinking. While Schmitt would predict that states would return upon the absence of a common enemy for humanity, Peter manages to keep the world united under a very different banner. Here, Peter defies the political philosophy of Schmitt - instead of uniting humanity under the threat of a common enemy, Peter manages to define his state not by external forces, but by an internal push towards the stars and colonization. And while Peter is implicitly implying that humanity needs to defend against any more external threats that could hurt it like the Buggers, there is no longer a single explicit enemy for humanity to unite against. Peter brought humanity past the political as defined by friend and enemy.

Reflection: Ender's Game

I wanted to take the time in my reflection to touch on a few things that we glossed over or didn't discuss in class. Not all of these have to do with alien-human interactions but, as I've begun rereading Xenocide (it's not really a sequel to Speaker for the Dead, it's just this kind of abysmal continuation of a few very bad ideas brought up in Speaker), it colors my whole thought process looking at Ender's Game. In Speaker Ender's in his thirties (I don't think that's a spoiler?) and it makes you so keenly aware of his childhood in Ender's Game that it makes everything else slightly superfluous. And yet, I came to the conclusion during our discussion that Ender has to be a child in this book, or he would not do the things he does. It's a very child-like action to do something outrageous in the hopes that unpleasant things will stop, and that's exactly what Ender does when he attacks the buggers' homeworld. Now, we know that the reason Ender is able to do this is because (in part through the Fantasy Game) he understands these creatures, he loves them, they get inside his head and his dreams. It makes his decision all the more radical because, even though he doesn't know it's real, even though he's being manipulated and deliberately pushed to the breaking point by his superiors, even if it's just a game, it's such a heinous act from his standpoint that he MUST be past his breaking point to do it. I myself can't even play Renegade on Mass Effect.

Ronald Reagan, in a speech to the United Nations General Assembly in 1987, said:

"In our obsession with antagonisms of the moment, we often forget how much unites all the members of humanity. Perhaps we need some outside, universal threat to make us recognize this common bond. I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world. And yet, I ask you, is not an alien force already among us? What could be more alien to the universal aspirations of our peoples than war and the threat of war?"

I did not think about this when reading Ender's Game, in part because I did not, until recently, know that this quote exists. And my immediate reaction to it is that, while it is a nice idea, it is pretty fundamentally that: an idea. The reason I chose this quote to reflect on is because, given the time that this was said, and the time during which Ender's Game was written, the influences of the Cold War are unmistakable. It is one of very few things about the novel that is particularly dated, because reading about Russian imperialism and the Warsaw pact is an immediate source of confusion for those of us born at the tail end of the Cold War. And yet what we have between the Buggers and the Humans is a kind of Cold War in itself, a state of destruction perpetrated by an inability to understand the other's ideology. I was trying to pinpoint, in my earlier post, the kind of patriotism I could see in the childhood games of Val, Peter, and Ender, and I at first likened it to World War II but I really think, in retrospect, that it's slightly later, and it's fascinating to think of Card (biographical fallacy, I know) growing up in this Cold War environment and letting it influence his work.

The last thing I wanted to mention is why Ender has to leave Earth behind. It's interesting but, reading the book, you don't get much of a sense of his attachment to Earth, despite the fact that he is essentially being trained to defend it. Before he goes off to Command School, he learns to develop a connection with the physical world, but there's still no sense of its people. And yet, after he's made a hero, he goes off to settle colony worlds. Why? The answer is simple, according to Val. Because he would be far too much of a tool for Peter, and that in itself is disturbing to me. There's this comment in one of the later books that talks about how Val and Ender simply handle people. Far be it from me to speculate what would have happened had Ender stayed on Earth, but I feel as though, for him, it would have been utterly pointless, because the only person he deeply cared about went with him when he left. As for Peter turning him into a puppet, I'm not sure how well that would have worked. The Buggers tried to get at him, and they, who could literally reach into his mind, found him too strong a persona to use. And while Peter was a figure of terror in Ender's childhood, Ender was later manipulated by other people in some significantly more distressing ways. Ender was selected by Battle School over Peter because he is not merely ruthless, but compassionate, and lacks the element of ambition that made Peter dangerous. In that case, I suspect he would have been more of a threat to Peter than anything else.

Substantive: Ender's Game

Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game is one of the few science fiction works which seems to have universally been accepted as a teenage right of passage. The book itself has all the makings of a story which strikes at the heart of young people: crazed familial relationships, a lonely protagonist, and memorable characters. I have to admit, I'm probably one of the most biased fans of the book, considering that for years my online handle was Ender. It was easy for me to relate, consider that Ender and I share the same name, same position in the family (thirds are clearly the best), same siblings (unfortunately for me though, my eldest brother isn't out to conquer the world), and the same sense of intelligence. I only wish I could invoke the same feelings I had when I first read the book! But this, being my third time reading through Ender's journey, was different. It was different because the book is clearly more than a tragic tale of a young boy who is swept up in a world of controlling adults. This time, it was a tragedy for the human race.

Ender's True Game - The Prisoner's Dilemma

But wait, Ender's "game" (without giving away too many spoilers) is just literally that, right? The book throws us through countless games that Ender plays, like Buggers and astronauts, to the more advanced battle room, and finally to the simulator in command school. But, when we say that these were Ender's games, we wrap a bubble of understanding around them. Of course it's okay for Peter to bully Ender, it's just a game. Of course it's okay to shoot your fellow students, it's just a game. Of course it's okay to blow up simulated starships, it's just a game.But if we take the side of Ender, and question the adults in the book for their true intentions, perhaps we can also question what Orson Scott Card means when he says Ender is playing games.

The prisoner's dilemma is one of the most widely applied "games" from a field of mathematics called game theory. The game has been applied to countless fields, from economics, to international relations, and even to evolutionary biology (with the two later subjects implicitly important when considering Ender's Game). In the thought experiment, it involves two potential prisoners. They're being interrogated by the police for a crime they're suspected of committing together (in the game, it doesn't really matter if they've actually committed the crime). If both prisoners deny that they committed the crime, both walk out scot-free. If one denies that they've committed the crime, and the other implicates the first suspect, than the first suspect goes to jail, and the turn-coat gets a reward for putting a criminal behind bars. The same is true if the first suspect is the turn-coat, and the second suspect denies involvement. The final option, of course, results in both suspects implicating each other, resulting in long prison sentences for the both of them. The most important aspect of this game is the prisoner's inability to speak to one another. Here, there isn't any collusion between the two; there can't be any deal making to ensure that both deny the charges and get off. Of course there are theoretical iterations of the game that allow for that collusion to take place, but it's this lack of communication built into the original prisoner's dilemma that makes it such a fascinating case into behavioral logic. It's also the lack communication that's built into the heart of Ender's universe.

Just how much do we know about the Buggers from a reader's perspective? Really, we know about as much about this threat to humanity as Ender does. There have been two attacks against humanity - the first and second invasions. Later in the book we find out that the first invasion was more of a bugger scouting mission, and not really a full out invasion per say. The second invasion, on the other hand, WAS a true invasion, and as we learn, included a queen Bugger. Let's try and put this into our prisoner's dilemma framework. Since we don't know many details about the first invasion, it might be similar to our last option, where both suspects implicate one another. In this case, each species attacking each other leads to a bloody war. The second invasion is probably more indicative of our middle cases of the prisoner's dilemma, where one suspect implicates the other while the other denies it. Here, the Buggers attacked the humans, and the humans did NOT attack with an equal and opposite force. As we know, the humans barely won that battle. So what does that leave the humans to do in Ender's game? The answer lies in Anatol Rapoport's strategy for the prisoner's dilemma: tit for tat.

In 1984, Robert Axelrod designed a tournament for the prisoner's dilemma. The goal of the tournament was to determine the best strategy for winning the prisoner's dilemma. Each outcome was given a certain point value, with cooperation having a high value, deceiving your opponent and succeeding having the highest value, being deceived having the lowest value, and simultaneous deception having a low (but not the lowest) value. From this setup, the strategy that consistently had the highest score was probably the most simplistic - do whatever your enemy does. Anatol Rapoport named his strategy tit for tat, where if your opponent cooperates, you automatically cooperate in return. But, if your opponent deceives you, your continual return deception guarantees you'll never suffer the greatest loss.

From this, it's pretty clear that Card at least on some level agrees with the tit for tat strategy, and employs the human race in Ender's Game as the player ready to respond just as his opponent had in the last round. So then, why is this more than just a tragedy for Ender, but a tragedy for the human race? It all comes back to the lack of communication. We learn that it's built into Bugger biology that they've never had any need for what we understand as communication. Because all the workers are psychically linked with the queen, they're more like hands than individuals. That completely undermines a need for language, writing, or even speaking. So it's easy to see how the Buggers could be incapable of understanding humans. Therefore, neither of the species can collude and prevent war. The tragedy is that under these conditions, war isn't only more likely, it's BETTER for both species to destroy each other than to take the chance of attempting to collude. Ender's xenocide was inevitable.

Substantive: Ender's Game

I promised myself that when we got to Ender's Game I would do my best to look at it objectively and (more importantly) be very, VERY careful not to talk about the rest of the series. That being said, this book shows a child in what is probably the most remarkable and disturbing bildungsroman ever. This group of children at the Battle School are essentially trained to forgo the positive parts of their humanity (kindness, caring for others, etc.) and to suppress these instincts in favor of something significantly more primal. I will not argue that this is uncommon--the nature of the individual is not particularly heralded in contemporary military organizations--but I think it touches on an interesting taboo. They are doing this to children. Literally alienating Ender--the word choice is purposeful--so that when the time comes he is capable of doing something that is almost inhuman in its proportions: committing xenocide. I have always, always looked at this book as showing, in many ways, how humanity can often be more alien than the aliens, for it is humanity who, fully knowing what they are doing, decides on the wholesale destruction of an entire race, and enlists a young boy to help them do it.

That being said, I think the parallels here between the world in which the Wiggin children live and the circumstances of the 1940s are too clear to ignore. It reminded me, in many ways, of a comment I heard during a class on the Vietnam War--that a lot of children grew up wanting to be Audie Murphy, firing at Nazis from the top of a burning tank. The Buggers seem to be roughly akin to the Japanese--the children play astronauts and buggers in the hallway, and there is this kind of unquestioning patriotism on the part of humanity in every word that Graff says. Ender is born because the government dictates it to be so, he goes to Battle School when they tell him to, and there, everyone believes that the terrible, crushing hardship they are suffering, subduing ego and kindness, is for the good of humanity, in the immediate peril of the Buggers' return. Until we discover that they are not returning, that in fact humanity is taking the war to them, and Ender commits the wholesale destruction of an alien race because he wants the game to end.

The last thing I wanted to mention, which is perhaps the most important, is how much Ender grew to love the enemy he was fighting. He studied them constantly, they got into his head (quite literally), and to a little boy to whom humanity had been nothing but cruel and alienating, this strange, unearthly presence must have been like a beacon in the darkness. And how different the Buggers' attitude towards humanity was than humanity's unequivocal attitude towards them! A hive mind considers its workers expendable; the hive queen did not realize that every single human life is individual, precious, unique, etc. The regret that the Buggers had, coupled with the near-extinction of their species, is so different from the victory in which humanity revels, except for one thing: Ender mourns. And then writes the Hive Queen and the Hegemon, in which the two enemies of his childhood--the Buggers and his brother--are explained, loved, and understood. How that impacts the rest of humanity, and the rest of Ender's life, is a topic we'll have to address when we read Speaker for the Dead.

Substantive on Ender's Game

In my opinion Ender’s Game is not only an impressive work of science fiction, but poses a number of intriguing questions about human nature, the future and interaction with aliens. On the topic of human nature, it seems to be a common theme in many science fiction works that the problems that plague the world today are still prevalent in the future. This brings us back to the question I raised in class. How far has humanity truly progressed? Ender’s world continues to be racked by authoritarianism, racism, religious persecution, violence and international rivalry, just as it is today and just as it has been for thousands of years. Will the human condition prevent us from advancing to a certain point, or will humanity be able to overcome some of its’ more base attributes? The reason the buggers were able to advance was because they operated with a “hive mind” under the control of one sentient being and there appears to be no indication of infighting within the species. On the other hand, by putting “all your eggs into one basket” and relying on one sentient being the buggers were easily wiped out. There seems to be a similar phenomenon in District 9. The aliens in the film were essentially mindless except for a few intelligent beings that had the capacity to lead. On the other hand there are humans, who as a whole are sentient, but also self interested and divided. Perhaps then a more successful alien species would be characterized not only by sentience but also an empathetic and symbiotic mentality.

Another question that Ender’s Game raises is what human-alien interactions would entail. Because two species may have entirely different mindsets and thinking patterns, it is not unrealistic to believe that misunderstandings and conflicts could occur, such as the ones between the buggers and the humans. To one species life may seem precious, to another expendable. Hopefully, though, if a civilization has advanced to the point of intergalactic travel it has socially evolved into a benevolent society as well. This would be in accordance with the Fermi paradox. On the other hand, the alien species could simply be proficient at wiping out other civilizations and not its’ own. In terms of contemporary times, I believe that if aliens were to visit Earth today that humanity’s response would be extremely diverse. Many people might launch an armed attack or flee in fear that the aliens had come to wipe us out. Others might be empathetic, diplomatic and rational by making genuine attempts to communicate with the aliens. Some might even try to manipulate the aliens for profits. Besides this I feel that religious fanatics might view other sentient beings as demonic and be uncompromisingly violent as they would view human’s as the only species created in God’s image. Personally I feel that aliens haven’t contacted us yet because they view us as a “developing planet” that is not yet mature enough to engage in intergalactic politics.

Another question that Ender’s Game made me ponder was that of intergalactic travel. Even at light speed a trip to another galaxy would take years and by the time a vessel returned everyone that you knew would be dead. Thus, I believe that intergalactic travel would entail an artificial wormhole or portal that would be much more efficient as it would bring a vessel from one point to another. Such a device would open up not only new galaxies to exploration, but dimensions as well.