One of the key passages from Ender's Game that we talked about on Thursday was Ender's discussion with Valentine on page 238. He describes the way he kills: "in that very moment when I love them... I destroy them. I make it impossible for them to ever hurt me again." This comes after Ender reveals to his sister that he hates himself. So, when Ender destroys an enemy, he loves that enemy but hates himself.
The book revolves around the idea that Ender's empathy makes him well-suited to wipe out the buggers. While this might be true in Ender's case, Ender's is certainly not the typical case. Destroying the buggers required very special talents that only Ender possesses. Usually, genocide and colonization involve overwhelming the "other" with force, not tactically outmatching and destroying it. Ender assimilates the buggers' strategy into his own to defeat them, but he later finds out that he never fully understood or "loved" them. This made me wonder whether Ender was correct in saying that he "loves" his enemy right before he kills them, or if he was trying to describe a different feeling that he did not have words for.
Another topic that we covered extensively in class was humanity; whether it applies to Ender, to the children at battle-school, to the buggers. A few people argued that the buggers were more "human" than the humans who wiped them out. However I think that we incorrectly identify humanity with empathy. The buggers were a naturally empathic species, so we say that they were more "human" than Ender, Graff, and Mazer. Human history would argue against that theory of what is "human." The third invasion follows the pattern that terrestrial human expansion has followed for thousands of years. Wells's narrator in War of the Worlds claims that mankind's supremacy over Earth was won "by the toll of a billion deaths." Humanity as it exists now owes survival to killing off evolutionary competitors, killing countless animal species, and subjugating large portions of its own species. The most realistic conclusion Card could have given Ender's Game is the image of humankind traveling through space to claim the ruins of a civilization it has destroyed. Card weaves the themes of empathy and humanity into a contradiction that makes them inseperable from violence and genocide.
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I agree to some degree with your point about humanity. Unfortunately human nature has not historically been characterized by empathy. It has only been around half a centruy since the Holocaust, and today we live in a world racked with just as many problems as it has had for centuries, perhaps more. However humanity also has the capacity for empathy and good. Although we may read about horrible events in the news all the time, everyday firemen and firewomen risk their lives to rescue people from burning buildings. Everyday people donate to charities, give money to a random homeless, or listen to a friend's woes. History itself is filled with humanity's attempts to find peace or improve itself. Thus, perhaps human nature cannot be exemplified by a particular emotion, but by the fact that humans are flawed and have the free will and intellectual capacity to choose moral or immoral paths. This makes us a species that cannot be generalized or predictable. This makes us unique, but also brings with it the capacity for animalistic actions.
ReplyDeleteI see your point about human beings showing empathy in specific situations. And I agree that it is wrong to make "humanity" a synonym of imperialism and militarism. Human action is extremely various and therefore difficult to precisely characterize. However the cases you mention describe human beings deciding to "do good" in specific situations. In fact, someone might argue that the wealth a person donates to charity was probably obtained (indirectly) through the labors of an exploited race or class. Maybe individual humanity is more characteristically empathic than collective humanity. Genocide and crimes of war are certainly not the only "human", but history has shown that human beings looking to expand are extremely capable of and willing to commit atrocities.
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