Encounters with the other

(Sorry this is late, guys – my internet wasn't really working, so I actually wrote this last night....)

In Ender’s Game, there’s a huge gap of understanding between the humans and the buggers. Both species fail to understand the intentions of the other, not just because they don’t try, but because their intentions are (literally) alien to each other.

In class, a comparison was made between the human/bugger encounter and the European/Native American encounter. I think this was a particularly apt metaphor, for a number of reasons.

For one thing, there’s communication. When the first explorers (and conquistadors) set foot in the New World and met the indigenous people, not only were they unable to communicate with the natives, but sometimes did not even recognize their speech as language. The same problem occurs between the buggers and the humans – not only can they not communicate, but they can’t even recognize each other’s communication as existing.

Another similarity is that Native Americans and European explorers couldn’t understand each others’ motivations. Native Americans could not understand the idea of personal property and ownership of land; Europeans could not understand Native American tribal organization and group possession of land. Similarly, whereas the buggers could not understand that each human was an independent being, humans didn’t understand the biological connection shared by buggers.

Contact with aliens is something we’ve only been able to speculate about, but I do think it's likely that the contact would result in conflict, just as most human contact with an "other" has throughout history.