Some last thoughts on the class
Wow, this is really hard. I'm just sitting here, staring at the screen, wondering how to summarize all my thoughts about our class. I guess I'll blog a little about my final project, because, to me, that is a culmination of the entire class...
I'm writing about the role of identity, particularly minority identity in people's lives. Part of the project is looking at the role these groups play in social science and science fiction. However, I'm also doing some interviews to try to find out a bit about how people from minority groups feel about how their identity affects their role in society.
I am not done with my project yet, but I've conducted a few interviews. What I've found amazing so far is the degree of difference between how different people feel, and what they think that the future of minority roles in the United States. I've found a general concensus that knowing your heritage helps to build your sense of identity. However, visions of the future are quite different. On the one hand, some believe that the creation of a more unified society will make the heritage of individual groups less important, while on the other, there is a sentiment that society will become more unified when people understand the heritage of other groups better.
How does this have to do with science fiction? Take The Moon is a Harsh Mistress for example: The people on Earth, who still see racial difference, disapprove of mixing races, perhaps even of understanding them. The priority is on separation and purity. Simultaneously, the moon has created a society in which racial differences and ethnic heritage do not create barriers between people. Instead, people come together across divisions to make one society.
Time Jumps
The only thing that bothered me about Ian Banks' spectacular book was his tendency to thrust you into situations with absolutely no explanation or description. The ironic thing was that he had spectacular descriptions, but the generally didn't appear until after you had already drawn much of the same conclusion for yourself. I understand that he was trying to create an authentic experience of the events in the novel by revealing things only as they occurred to the characters. Unfortunately, the characters had the advantage of living in the world and already having seen/learned about what was going on. I am not opposed to Banks' technique on principle. I think that it can be very effective. In particular, the slow revelation of Quilan's mission as he himself remembers it is very good. However, I think Banks overuses the technique. As soon as the reader thinks they have a grasp of what is going on, they are thrust unexpectedly into a new situation where they are confused again. It is extremely difficult to get a hold of the timeline until about halfway through.
The other....
"Kill the Buggers! Kill the Bugs! Kill the Arachnids! Kill the Aliens! Kill the Piggies! Kill the Indians! Kill, kill, kill, kill..."
Doesn't anyone ever get tired of all this killing? Over and over in science fiction, there is a repeated emphasis on wiping out the different ones. I know we've talked about it over and over, but still....
Oh, and what about our moral hypocryse (and lack of spelling ability) regarding geno/xeno cide. When it was Ender wiping out the Buggers, we were all saying "Yeah, let's go get the fuckers!" but when we were reading Todorov, everyone was saying "Well, there is no question it was morally reprehensible..." Mightn't we be in a bit of a Speaker for the Dead situation? In retrospect, "shit, that was a bad idea". Shouldn't we try to understand what was going on at the time? I know that the Native Americans were not the threat that the Buggers appeared to be, but they might have been as much of a threat as the Buggers genuinely were. After all, the Buggers weren't coming back to get Earth and the Native Americans weren't coming back to get the Europeans.
dimensions of personality
In the midst of reading The Conquest of America, a few sentences brought to mind the real similarities between social science and science fiction, reality and fantasy...
Communication is "the interaction of individual with individual, the interaction that occurs between the person and his social group, the person and the natural world, the person and the religious universe," Todorov postulates (69). This definition seemed quite accurate to me, because the concept of communicating with the world is obviously distinct from the concept of communicating with a specific person, and, as a result, takes on different characteristics when put into practice.
However, this passage also reminded me of an explanation Card makes in the introduction to Speaker for the Dead: "Our whole demeanor changes, our mannerisms, our figures of speech, when we move from one context to another." As a result, it is difficult to write a book with many important characters because, in order for them to be fully developed, the writer has to explore their relationship with each other character, and different combinations of multiple characters.
It seems to me that the concepts of these two passages are quite similar, although one addresses issues of communication in a real historical situation, and the other characterization of fictional persons thousands of years in the future. Nevertheless, the underlying concept is that people change substantially depending on their surroundings and what they hope to accomplish in terms of communication and interaction. I think the two ideas could be applied to each situation. Communication differs not only when it is addressed to the world rather than an individual, but also depending on which individual it is addressed to. Likewise, people change depending on whether they are concentrating on their relationships with another individual, a group of individuals, or the world.
Humane Treatment
I was fascinated by the discussion of vegetarianism and vegetarian principles that we had during class Tuesday. I personally don't eat red meat, but I do eat fish and chickens, and it has nothing to do with my sense of sympathy for the animals. Instead, I disapprove of the environmentally detrimental practices used to raise many meat animals and the fact that, by raising more grain and less meat we might feed the world's entire population. Furthermore, I think that, in the question of eggs, we blew too quickly by the point that Pooja shouted out: U.S. eggs are not fertilized. By eating eggs, American vegetarians are not destroying some potential chicken life, they're destroying some potential garbage...
I also wanted to make a point about the idea of "humane" treatment of animals. Someone said that they thought all animals should be treated according to their "humane" standards, even though they might be varelse and not ramen. Ironically, that is what the piggies think they're doing when they murder Pipo and Libo. They believe that they are bestowing honor on their friends and allowing them to move on to the next stage of life, while the humans see their actions as cruel. Not, of course, that I think we should try planting pigs, but we might want to consider that what we believe is "cruel" does not necessarily translate into the animal kingdom...
The Question of Relativity
OK, so I read Speaker for the Dead, and I enjoyed it, mostly, but I couldn't help but get weirded out by the idea of a romantic relationship between Ender and Ivanova. He is 3,000 years older than her!!!!!! I know that he looks and feels like he is 35, but we all know the truth. He was born on Earth thousands of years before the Starways Confederation was even a dot on some treaty. He grew up with the reality of the Bugger War and he was the Ender who perpetrated the despicable "Xenocide". And, of course, the original Speaker for the Dead.
I can't really believe that he is the true equivalent of 35. I believe that at some atomic or subatomic level, he must experience all of the time that passes while he is in space travel. Afterall, the Hive Queen experiences every second of their travel because of her greater telepathic abilities. Since the atoms in the Hive Queen are the same as the ones in Ender, and throughout the universe, those atoms must have experienced every second that has passed in the real world.
There is also the element of experience. Although he may not have lived through everything conciously, Ender has experienced firsthand all of the transformations of public opinion and society that have occurred during that time. He has experienced first-hand both the hatred and love of the Buggers and every degree of feeling in between. He has seen the fall of the IF and the formation of the SC. He has spoken first-hand with people dead for thousands of years. And, most disturbing, he was a man of great experience when Ivanova was still a child. He fell in love with her even before she began her twenty year affair with Libo.
Yes, Ivanova has experienced more pain in her forty years than most people have. Yes, starship travel has kept Ender young outwardly. But, nevertheless, Ender's experiences and the literal age of his atoms mean that he is 3,000 years older than her.
Blogging with the Enemy
I was at a complete loss about what to write, so I started thinking about the concept of a war between Red Sox and Yankees fans, then about the concept of blogging, then about the application of Schmidt's theories to the Blogesphere...
I'm not entirely sure whether I agree with Scmidt's definition of the political. I do think that there is some merit in saying that situations where the option of complete physical annihilation of the opponent is kept on the table are fundamentally different from other situations, such as the Red Sox-Yankees rivalry, or the systematic economic destruction of small stores by vast chains. I understand the desire to try classifying these, at least the later, under Schmidt's friend-enemy distinction, but, since sports rivalries and cut-throat economic competition existed when Schmidt was writing his tract, I don't think there is any excuse for altering Schmidt's concepts.
The area where I think there might be an excuse is in the realm of technology, in particular, the internet. There was no such thing as the internet in 1932. The idea of an electronic network that would allow people to keep in touch virtually instantaneously around the world was so far beyond the technology of the time as to be completely ridiculous, the subject of only the most bizarre science fiction.
Now it is a reality. And with that reality comes a new aspect of human interaction. It is quite possible for two people to develop a relationship across the internet without ever meeting or even knowing one true fact about the other. Don't we often read about criminals, particularly child molesters, who are caught when they talk to 13-year-old girls who happend to be undercover cops? So, if it is possible to develop relationships across the internet, than it is possible to develop enemies. Of course, with current technology, those might primarily be personal enemies, exempt from Schmidt's definition. But what if we colonized other worlds, as in Ender's Game? What if there started to be an interworld-internet? What would that do to our friends, and to our enemies?
World War II
I was really interested in the ideas the Schmitt proposed, especially when considered in the light of his later Nazi collaboration. He suggested that the only way to justify one man killing another is in a war against an enemy. He also said that in war, the enemy need not be evil or immoral, that it is sufficient to be simply "the other". States, in his view, have the ability to justify the use of war against an enemy because they are political.
Is it therefore fair to postulate that Schmitt may not even have believed that the Nazi's war was justified? Could he have thought that the war was morally wrong and still gone along with it because the real question, for him, is one of political emnity, not moral disapproval. Furthermore, how would he justify the extermination of the Jews (homosexuals, Gypsys, etc.) within the German state? In one way, that is a civil war, to which he seems to give less credence, and in another it is not a war at all because the victims are unable to fight back. If it is not a war, how can such violence be justified?
Finally, I think it is interesting to note that in pre-World War II Germany we see all the categories that Schmitt discusses becoming political. The economic is political, because Hitler came to power by promising bread to the people. The moral is political because he was able to blame the Jews and make them out to be evil people. The religious is political because he could call for the extermination of another race, etc. And all of this political power was turned to the perpetrating one of the most horrific genocides and wars that the world has ever seen.
