The context provided by the sequel, which Card has said he wanted to write first, shows that Ender should and does feel guilt over his actions, and was intentionally self-deceiving in order to protect himself (the sequel is a fairly crude colonial meditation that lacks a lot of the contradictorily beautiful imagery in the first book, I wouldn’t recommend it but it further complicates the image of Card the messed-up person).
1 Like
it says he feels guilt but it also completely absolves him of that guilt numerous times. If anything, it’s even worse about this.
1 Like
Hmm, I read it as, penance is a lifelong act, not a burden that can be washed clean. No one is available to forgive him, nor would forgiveness save him. Ender must do this duty for the rest of his existence.
just quoting the part of the linked essay that’s especially poignant
1 Like
There’s a lot of argument in Speaker that empathy can only truly be empathy if it’s extended towards everything – and in this case, that extends to Ender. I don’t think that’s unreasonable and I think Speaker flipping the mirror back is interesting and persuasive.
It’s very much driven by a religious perspective – it’s an argument that we should strive for a universalist empathy as God might have, in a way that can reconcile the evils of the world. I don’t think it’s an unserious view, though it’s not especially practicable at a human scale.
It is not at all curious to me that OSC would extend empathy to the perpetrators of hate crimes first before he would extend it to ‘buggers’ or ‘queens’
To OSC, as the text states: the only thing that matters is intent and not the act itself. Good people are good because they intend to do good, even if they massacre an entire civilization, whereas bad people are bad because they’re sadists or queer and deserve to die
It’s a false empathy, the christian right-wing attitude of “forgive and forget anything your abuser does”
3 Likes
I don’t think the text of Speaker supports that read at all. It’s very clear that empathy and forgiveness are separate actions, that one does not necessitate the other, and neither can obviate guilt. I certainly wouldn’t call it false empathy. I certainly don’t want to defend Card the person, but I think creators have the same unrecognized dissonance that all people do and can produce works they can’t act by.
One of the interesting setups in the book is that Ender’s exile is self-imposed; he has knowledge of what he’s done but Earth reacts to him like it’s Starship Troopers. He’s not externally punished and part of his duty is to do this penance himself.
the text not only supports that read, it states it outright, I’m not capable of contorting my reading to ignore what the words actually say and where they are deployed the way they are
“Speakers for the Dead held as their only doctrine that good or evil exist entirely in human motive, and not at all in the act”
by the very tenet of his colonialist religion, he absolves himself of genocide, because he only intended to ‘neutralize their capacity for war’, not to kill them all. The narrative extends limitless bounties of sympathy for the poor perpetrator of mass violence because it follows a bizarre sort of quasi-deontological morality employed by far right christians rather than even a simplistic consequentialist model, let alone an actually useful model of ethics.
1 Like
Which is why he wrestles with it next to the guilt he rightly holds for the entire book. The book is adapting a religious perspective that argues it’s not a person’s place to judge good or evil – and from there, it’s asking, what responsibilities do we have to each other? Because they clearly exist and that tenet (as the book expresses), isn’t actionable.
okay, so can we agree that it’s utterly fatuous to say it’s not a person’s place to judge whether genocide is good or bad?
Because it’s fatuous to say that.
Personally, I wouldn’t adopt those ethics. But it’s something that has thousands of years backstopping it and providing it with a rich enough heritage that there’s real meat in it.
Because it argues towards a radical empathy, it’s easier for me to understand than chivalric values, which I always find offputting and much harder to read in pre-modern literature and history.
do you have any evidence of this? Because it’s just simplistic pseudo-ethical apologetics for hate crimes to me. There’s no ‘radical empathy’ that prefers the abuser over the abused (which speaker of the dead explicitly does in the quotes I provided)
No, I don’t have specific theological cites; my theological understanding comes from reading the historical works in which it seeps through. “Judgment is God’s alone” is certainly a throughline as people, especially the military elite producing culture, have tried to reconcile their actions with their scriptures and people have tried to work through the randomness of fortune and the lack of punishment for evil.
I don’t think either book prefers the abuser over the abused, and I don’t think the quotes prove that. For example:
Ender’s Game is a metaphor about waking up to evil acts and reflecting back on what brought you there. I think this is a pretty common situation – that a lot of us have had revelations in which we realize that we’ve participated in or benefited from an evil system, that we’ve ignored signs, that we need to change. It doesn’t have to be about strictly genocide.
It doesn’t mean that we need to immediately self-annihilate. It means that we need to undergo a process of self-examination, of penance, and change.
2 Likes
Okay, yes, there’s a long history of people who commit grave transgressions trying to exculpate their responsibility by saying “only God can judge my actions” but that’s not an ethical system, it’s the opposite, a system of un-ethics. Real world ethical systems tend to combine intent and action to determine the morality of an act. There is, outside of Rich America, no legal standard by which intent is the only thing that matters as it is explicitly stated to be the case for Speakers of the Dead. It is a system that explicitly makes good and evil a personal quality rather than a phenomenon that emerges from social interaction, hence the quasi-deontological nature: Ender is a good person not because he committed genocide but because he felt bad about committing genocide.
When someone in the book tries to extend the same empathy for the dead buggers that the text extends towards Ender, they are shot down and regarded as another breed of xenophobic Calvinist (lol) secretly motivated by the hatred of the other in one of the most DARVO-y parts of the book. Empathy for buggers is presented as an aberration where empathy for space hitler is to be applauded.
The only evil acts are those that are committed with an intent to do evil, in the moral universe of Ender’s Game and Speaker of the Dead. The very phrase, ‘evil act’ is not possible in the OSCian landscape, there are only Evil Intents.
It’s only natural to try to reconcile a text with such a deranged philosophy to be something less pernicious, especially if you felt some sort of resonance with it, but that doesn’t change what the text actually says.
4 Likes
I’ll reiterate that I don’t think the book is exculpating characters due to their moral intent, but removing a human role in it. In recognition of human limits, it’s an appeal and satisfaction in a higher judgment.
Of course, a legal judgment is a poor substitution for a judgment of right and wrong, and generates exactly the secular injustices a cosmic appeal can appeal to – but I know you don’t believe it should be.
I think the book uses the Speaker code to create a stark position that we and our protagonist react against. If he believed in it, if it were true, why would Ender be in conflict? What would the (overlong, mushy) book even be about? He would be satisfied that he had done no wrong and retired. I think it’s asking, to what extent does intent count against outcome and proscription? It’s wishy-washy about the answer because the metaphor created in the first book is a bit too extreme and the cultural portrayals too naive to explore it in a very deep way.
I fell down a little reading about Ender’s Game’s development rabbithole and I found a very good reminder why exactly I can’t stand the book and the author when he explained why he expunged a certain n-word from Ender’s dialogue in later editions, and he capped off his reasoning for removing that word with this sentence:
Which is not to say I’ll never use n* – or any other word – when I find it necessary and appropriate.
This is the Orson Scott Card guarantee. I imagine he found it necessary and appropriate during the obama administration
1 Like
I just realized that we’ve been using guilt in two different senses, which may explain one of the places our views diverged. I was using guilt only in the sense of “responsibility” rather than “feeling of remorse”
Ender self-pitied as often as he abused and murdered his victims. The narrative itself absolves him of his guilt because it is constantly about how ender is right about everything and not actually at fault. He’s the protagonist and this isn’t russian literature, it’s juvenile sf. He feels doubt and guilt and blames himself because he’s very Smart and Sensitive and Responsible and he is a Good Person who doesn’t like violence, but he still uses it constantly because the narrative is set up so that all of his violence is necessary and justified, and used against acceptable targets like inferiors, “bugger-lovers”, and “buggers”
He’s not marginalized, he’s an aggrieved white male power fantasy. He is exactly what every school shooter sees themselves as.
5 Likes
I find it hard to empathize with Ender (nearly every other kid is just cooler) but I took the plotting not as a construction to absolve him but rather how and why the military would use children. They want their vicious egocentrism to begin with — if “winning” means xenocide can they mold a perfect instrument that won’t hesitate? It’s not far removed from militaries justifying drone warfare as less dangerous and psychologically taxing for the operator. Why even make the operator aware of what they’re doing if they can still be made to do it?
Besides the final twist, Graff with the body bag on the same flight as taking Ender to Command School sticks out in my memory. Ender murdered another child with his bare hands but he can’t know because they have a job for him to do. From this point the reader has enough information to step out of Ender’s POV and be horrified by him.
1 Like
The thing that sticks out in my mind is the simulation game thingy he’s in where he climbs a beanstalk and meets a giant and all that. And the game always ends with a choice of two drinks and no matter what he chooses he gets brutally poisoned
And eventually he decides to just murder the giant brutally instead which is implied to be unintended by the creators. And after that the game never resets, the giant’s body decomposes and becomes a beautiful hillside with a village and pastoral shit etc
And i always read that as (1) Ender is once again backed into a corner so his violence is justified and (2) the ends justify the means.
Anyway Ender is just my dad’s entire philosophy turned into a child so i can’t be impartial send tweet
9 Likes
finished Speaker for the Dead… it’s interesting, Card is clearly grappling with some abuse he experienced in his childhood, but the limitations of his analysis are more clearly apparent here - partly because he’s writing as the adult character. his philosophy of “it’s nobody’s fault because everyone tried their best” is one way of coping with what happened to him, but it’s clearly flawed, and the parts of the novel where he takes this approach really fall flat. Ender’s omnipotence and ability with people is also jacked up to cartoonish levels. the hive queen plays a bit part at best. on the other hand I always appreciate a good first contact scenario, and he does a good job sketching out the piggies and the fears of the other that come from that contact. That’s probably the most compelling aspect of the book for me, including the negotiations. he also brings through the pathos of domestic scenes effectively enough, particularly the scene where Marcão’s domestic abuse is fully revealed. that being said Ender’s romance is unconvincing, ender is a really wooden character.
it feels like Card’s understanding of what happened to him in his childhood is frozen sometime in the distant past and he refuses to peel back the veil to go further and allow full space for his emotions about the abuse. this interview where he explodes in homophobia is really instructive on this account. he continually goes up to a point and then stops.
I came away feeling like more than any character in the book, Card identifies with little Grego, to whom his abuser is just Papa, the loved one who will not love back. which, interesting, but ultimately unsatisfying, because he does not have the emotional skill to go further.
4 Likes