Along those same lines

I agree with all that you guys have said about education, especially Thursday's class. And Russ, it WAS awesome. I think that was the most fun I've had in a class in a very long time.

Re: the American education system...
I think that one of its weaknesses is that it pigeon holes people. I want to make a couple of points:
1) that in few disciplines are people who graduate with a degree in it (undergrad)actually "experts".
2) That concentrating in one area should not have to come att he expense of taking other classes. Of course, the challenge here is to find another fesiable system...
3) that in the US, the fact that you have a degree is valued more than what it was in (they just like that you have it because it means you can think and it gives you certain stature). I just think that my experience in the working world and at AU has taught me that the piece of paper matters more than the fact that you decided to take SIS-460 instead of SIS-470. I mean, it depends on what you want to do with your life--if you are the scholarly type, then good for you. But I'm much happier working (more a "doer" than a thinker), and so I think for someone like me, the ability to jump around from discipline to discipline would have been much more useful.

But then again, in Latin America, most people have to specialize when they enter college, as most people study only one discipline for the duration.

And then there's the Mark Twain argument: "The only time my education was interrupted was when I was in school." (or something along those lines). Do we really need some sort of organized structure in order to learn things. Yes, probably, to a point. But I also think I have learned the most about myself and about the world by traveling and meeting people from all over. Do we always need a theory for everything? Maybe if we will become chief actors in a certain area that values stuff like that, but otherwise I would argue that practical experience is almost more valuable than academic experience. Feel free to argue with me (I'm a senior...I'm ready to get out and I'm a bit jaded....)

Along those same lines

I agree with all that you guys have said about education, especially Thursday's class. And Russ, it WAS awesome. I think that was the most fun I've had in a class in a very long time.

Re: the American education system...
I think that one of its weaknesses is

On education, and the grief I feel missing last class

So, I missed the last discussion session of the semester, for reasons of.. well - for reasons of it being the end of the semester and having to choose between missing a class session or perhaps failing another class for not having a project finished. Not an excuse, but a reason -- and not a decision I relished making, either.

Well, today I ran into PTJ in TDR, and was informed that the class I missed was the MOST INCREDIBLE CLASS IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD. I was really jealous -- it sounded right up my alley - intensely abstract intellectual discussion, an entire class striving together in the search of higher meaning. Not to mention, I loved the book. Well, we accept the consequences of our decisions.

Anyway, I'd like to springboard off of Anne's discussion of "interdisciplinary studies" -- I'm guessing this was delved deeply into during class, and I regret missing the discussion. At the risk of making a point that has already been debated and cast aside as silly:

It's really interesting to consider the proposed pedagogical system in contrast with our own. Especially taking into account the important role that mandatory education plays in our progressive (which I mean in the progress towards more advanced and efficient civilization, not a socially just one, etc) capitalist society, which is such a clear descendant of the Protestant Work Ethic dynamic which played such an important part in our discussion of Manifest Destiny. Imagine, for a second, that there was no societal coercion for getting an education. Jobs didn't require diplomas, nobody was judging you based on your formalized acquisition of skills and knowledge. Think of what percentage of your peers might never have set foot inside a classroom (and yes, obviously that's kind of Anne's point -- who needs classrooms?)

But also think what percentage of people who are currently working as chemists might never have discovered the field at all. I personally love chemistry, but would never have gotten beyond the most rudimentary understanding of it if I hadn't been coerced to by college admissions standards. I didn't ultimately choose chemistry as my professional paths, but I can imagine many who might have discovered the subject in much the same way and ended up pursuing it.

All this aside, my ultimate point is that I think mandatory education plays an enormous part in our system of social progression, and it's very interesting to consider what an alternative might do -- would it be more efficient because people are connecting one-on-one with their passions? Or would it just promote sloth and anti-intellectualism because the human race naturally tends towards these things, and we need institutionalized imposition of knowledge to overcome it?

Interdisciplinary Studies

I don't know if you all remember this, but way, way back when we were discussing The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, I argued that anarchy was not an effective discipline for a university, and students with no rules would choose to learn less than their counterparts with innumerable tests and guidelines.

I want to go ahead and strongly disagree with myself. After our theological, political, sociological, linguistic, and mathematical debate on Thursday, I think that a wide-open anarchical learning system would have incredibly good results. Students would have to be provided with a lot of support, but it's amazing to imagine what would happen if everyone were permitted to pursue their own interests from very early on. People would have their first specialization by the age of 15, and keep picking up things for the rest of their lives. There'd be no stigma against math or economics or science as being "too hard": those who chose to study such areas would relish the challenge or find it easy. Likewise, all knowledge could be valued for itself, so there'd be no looking down on such "useless" subjects as English or philosophy (or science fiction): minds fine-tuned to learn and guide themselves would soon search out a job suited to their unique talents, or teach themselves the rules of any job they liked.

Sure some people would miss out on what our culture considers "basic skills." Some people would have below-average reading skills. Others would be lacking in math abilities. But I think that if we had a culture where anyone could learn whatever they wanted, everything would eventually work out. If math is considered a basic requirement to society, a math-less person who encountered trouble in daily life would find someone to teach them math to overcome that problem. People would learn about not only what interested them, but what related to their daily lives: a diabetic might be an expert on chemical engineering, but also on diabetes; a champion swimmer could quote you Shakespeare and explain the physics of a body moving through water.

And in this utopian anarchist learning-oriented society, people would do a lot of sitting around and talking. The popular novels of the day would be enjoyed not just for their stories, but for the quality of their writing, how they relate to world politics, and what they say about human nature. Groups of students from this society would hold regular discussion groups, their topics moving from religion to politics to trigonometry to the nature of reality as the mood struck them.

And this class has already had a taste of just how cool that would be.

And after class...

Following our discussion on class, I was wondering why we had such a problem defining religion. Its somewhat like the conversations I have had with people on the subject of love. No one knows how to define it of what are the special qualities that make it specifically so, but they know how to identify it. Religion is the same. We knows which things are religion, but it is hard to tell what would become a religion if we wanted to make one. How is it that the Culture does not exude qualities of religion? Perhaps they do. But they live not by a constant practice. There is still an individuality for each person that the Culture does not control which makes it less religious. I think religion is a control factor, to monotor populations. Generally they provide a set of moral standers for an individual but that is not required. Instead they provide a social frame work in which a person can live and die by. In this case I think the Culture is not a religion specfically because it avoids death. Religion is meants to explain what happens to us when we die so we do not have to constantly live our lives in fear. In this way I agree with Nishida is his explanations of easter and western philosophies combine. He explains that religious is not about creating moral obligations but instead to figure out the existenciel crisis. With this I must be in agreement.

A world of alternet reality

OMG I just realized I did not post before class. I am very sorry! Here were my thoughts going into the class discussion...

This option of storing the soul seems like cheating to me. How is it that people capture souls and then go on about their lives without them ever ending. Not to say that they are exactly souls. but if they are doesnt that create alot of problems for religion. Another book I read about a year ago (I cant remember the name but I will post it when i get home) was about this man who created a machien that detected when the soul entered and exited the body. When he found out this solved the problem of ethical abortions because one could see when the soul had entered the fetus. Now in the case of souls that never get to leave a body, what is the ethical way of dealing with people who cannot authentically be toward their own deaths?
(Sorry, here comes Heidegger). If a Da-sein cannot be toward its own death then it does not truely look toward its future. It is inauthentically being in the past and the present, as if the present will never end. Since there is no angst toward death, peoople do not really have care for themsevles. In this case people are more like objectively present things than beings who are in essence in wonder about their being. For me this is problematic. In order to truely exist in all spaces and times one must worry about a perminant death. Ethics does not work in this framework unless everyone dies.

On The Hub and Godness

I thought what Anne said about the Hub was interesting, especially her discussion on whether or not he's a God, and I'd like to expand a little more on that idea.

Semantically speaking, I don't see what there is to separate Hub from God-like status. His direct involvement in the lives of billions of people, his ability to control the fortunes of an entire planet.. he is in fact much more active, visible and identifiable than any God we've come in contact with. One could, perhaps, say that this very feature separates him from God -- that God is too much of an abstraction, and the fact that Hub can be quantified and explained keeps him from being a God, despite his omniscience and omnipotence.

There is, then, the matter of how one defines 'God'. If you adhere to a strictly classical notion of God, as being universally good, universally omnipotent, then Hub doesn't fit into the God category. His governing of the universe is more limited to human affairs; he can't bend and change the laws of physics, as we might perhaps expect God to be able to do. According to this definition, he is merely a highly-advanced technological construct.

But if you take a more humanistic outlook on the matter, and conceive of a God as any entity, either veridically existent or projected, that is believed in, trusted, or relied on by humanity (... or by Culture), then it becomes very easy to classify Hub this way.

It's kind of a small and nit-picking point, but one that interests me nonetheless.

The Hub

I really enjoyed Look to Windward. Banks created a nuanced, intricate plot that I'm definitely going to be reading again. There are so many things to talk about, too, Thursday's going to be fun.

But what I really want to talk about is the Hub. The Hub fascinates me - not just because he's an interesting character, but because he's a character at all. The Hub is basically a hyper-advanced super computer (Culture : humans :: the Hub : Mike), yet besides controlling the weather and Orbital-wide life support systems and transport systems and advising Masaq' citizens on everything ever ("His name is Bob" "Here's how to get to Sesame Street" "No, you can't eat that"), he has a personality. He chats to people at parties through his avatar, but he's not just a social lubricant who's really good at setting people up; he's a friendly face for everyone, someone familiar and enjoyable to talk to.

It's easy to see how a world with a Hub could be such a relaxed, happy place. No one is ever alone with the Hub around; no one ever has to look stupid with the Hub whispering in their ear; no one has to worry, because the Hub takes care of everything. But the Hub's not just a maintenance system, he's a friend - I wonder how many people in our society who go endure turbulent friendships and flawed relationships and end up feeling hopelessly and utterly alone would secede from the world if given a Hub-like figure: someone with infinite patience and time to listen and discuss.

So the Hub is very much a kind of person - definitely not a human, but a person, a Mind. But is he a God? He mentions once that Minds are "close to gods, and on the far side". And, indeed, the Hub's intimate involvement with and protection of each one of the billions of inhabitants of Masaq' is godlike; at any given moment he's likely to have a trillion processes running at once, but he also has emotions - he feels love and duty towards the Masaq'ians.

But I don't think the Hub is a god. Perhaps he's right, and he is something beyond godliness, but he displays a typical human characteristic: the recognition of one's needs as the most important thing in one's world, and which may be pushed aside or dealt with in favor of assisting others, but which in the end control you. In the end, the Hub has protected and nurtured the inhabitants of the Masaq' Orbital for eight hundred years, but he recognizes that his grief for his twin will never dissipate. He is close enough to human to empathize with Quilan's loss of his mate, close enough to commit a suicide that will benefit only himself. It's in that moment that I find the Hub to be the most likable and even perfect.

Is Jon human?

So Russ' post has got me thinking about Jon. He's an interesting character - Moore does a great job in portraying a sentient, yet objective point of view, which is something that our planet has never known.

However, Jon wasn't always the superpowered-superweapon that he is during the period illustrated in Watchmen. He was once a totally normal human being, who - like many traditional superheroes - got his powers through a freak accident. Unlike most superheroes, however, he seems to have lost his humanity in gaining is powers - and not in the way supervillains, do either.

All of the passion and emotion of humanity seems to have leeched out of Jon. I guess that once you can see the universe on a subatomic level and manipulate everything you see, stuff like emotion and morals must seem.... silly. At the end of the book, when he leaves for another universe, Jon seems to be a completely alien being.

But I don't think that it was just his transformation that changed his emotions; I think it was the time spent with a completely different, non-human point of view. Russ, this is how I'd answer your question as to why Jon continued to respect the authority of the President: he remembers and acts on the emotions and morals of his previous human self, and hasn't yet begun to change as a result of his deeply technical worldview. Perhaps as he stays longer and longer as his new self, particles and atoms and physics become more and more understandable and familiar, but passion and morality become more foreign and strange.

Another factor, on the other hand, could be love. Jon seemed to be losing contact with his human emotions as soon as he became a superbeing; however, he just seemed cold, a bit too logical - not completely inhuman. For example, when he vanishes the crew and audience of the film set to the street and moves himself to the moon, he's displaying rather human emotions - fear, anger, grief, frustration, pouting.

It is really when Laurie tells Jon that she's sleeping with Dan that Jon seems to truly leave emotion behind. Not too long ago, he gave a huge emotional response to the news that a number of people who associated closely with him might have cancer. Now, he seems unconcerned that the whole human race might bomb itself into oblivion. Was it love that kept Jon just a little bit human? Or was his progress to a frank objectivity inevitable in a being who can see and manipulate the very material of existence?

Watchmen and Geopolitics

This is the theme that most stood out at me throughout the work. Most likely because the book was such a great relic of the Cold War era -- there's so much terror about the pending nuclear holocaust, and it doesn't seem as though this feeling is entirely dramatized for the characters. By which I mean you can tell that Moore was reflecting the popular attitude of the time. All of this seems altogether foreign to our generation -- we've heard plenty of tell of the Cold Ward; we understand its implication and the extent of the terror it caused, but having grown up after it had ended, we have no real understanding of how powerful that fear must have been. I feel it permeates Watchmen.

There are enough obvious reasons: this standoff, and an effort on the part of Ozymandias to thwart it, are the driving points of the plot. What I thought was really interesting, though, was the way Moore tied these superheroes into the geopolitical structure. Especially the vigilantism of the Comedian -- and the seemingly more official business of Jon -- in the Vietnam War. Also, more importantly, the fact that Jon was essentially used as the ultimate weapon, or perhaps the ultimate deterent, against the Russians. One gets the sense that Moore's invention of Jon maybe stemmed from a Western desire to see the Russians thwarted in their expansionistic (slash dominational) efforts. Although that might be reading too much into Moore and his writing.

Regardless, Jon's character, and the way he is able to affect world affairs, just by his very existence, are very interesting. What I found particularly curious, though, was the fact that Jon was recognized and treated like any valuable and high-ranking agent of the government. He is summoned, and he is ordered to do things by the president. However we learn that Jon's view toward the universe has become entirely materialistic - he has learned to see things at the atomic level. Why, I wondered, does he continue to accept the president of the USA, and his molecules, as a source of authority? Why would he value Nixon's judgment (especially if he could see into the future, wink wink) above anyone else's? Perhaps a better question still: why were they stupid enough to let Jon into the same ROOM as the president? Nixon and all his secret service men would have presented Jon as much challenge as the billions of tons of Martian crystals he created. Which is none whatsoever.

Geopolitically, I found myself constantly wondering why Jon had such allegiance to the US government? His new powers as well as perspective, one would think, would have revealed to him the many errors of his government's ways, relative to what had been going on in the rest of the world. Why did he hold so true to his country and work on its behalf, when there could surely have never been any true incentive for him (How do you pay a man who can materialize cash?) It seems like, when Jon came into existence, the arms race would have turned into a Jon race -- a mad dash to win his favor and protection at any cost.

Masked Morals

I watied to post a few days after class because I have been wondering about morals and masks. If we can define morals as an individuals standards of right and wrong then those should not change for that person at any time. If someone puts on a mask, that does not change their personhood, it mearly is an alternative face that hides the real you from being seen in public. Being seen or not does not change your morals. Or at least it should not. Thinking that you become another person when you put on a mask is problematic. Let us pretend that everyone has his or her own secret identity. Then, in the time when we encounter strangers or people we think are wrong there is no problem with breaking their fingers or questioning them about whatever we want. Granted, one would have to be strong enough to enforce that kind of abuse on others but it is not unrealitic for that to take place for the majority of people. That means when you take off the mask you are vulnerable to the attacks of anyone else in masks. This would create a society that would be entirely unproductive other than creating an amazing personal defense system to ward off your crazy neighbors.

In the real world we do not wear masks, but we enjoy the idea of being someone else. What is it in this someone else with a different face that allows our violent urges to emerge? I do not think it is correct to suppose that we can change our morals based on our appearance. It is the same being within, and therefore the watchmen (specifically in the choice to blow up new york) are morally out of line. In the case of Rarshach the man has a duel personality disorder because he cannot handle the real him. His morals are founded on the mask. In his case, he did choose one way of being and stuck with it, but for personal reasons found himself more comfortable with a mask. This does not make his actions acceptible, but at least he had one moral code for himself, not two.

Shades of moral grey

I love how Moore plays with the morality of the superheroes in Watchmen. First, we've got the superheroes themselves - in the American psyche, superheroes are supposed to be the embodiment of all that is good. But the Watchmen (and their successors) have questionable motives and methods. They enter the superhero business not only from a sense of civic duty and a desire to fight for justice, but also for their own satisfaction and profit - except for Jon, these men and women don't even have superpowers.

Then, of course, there are the individual characters. The Comedian is violent, misogynist, power-hungry, and a rapist. Yet he is one of the few Watchmen to remain on the side of the US government, one of the few who is not cast out of society as a danger.

Roschach is wanted on several counts of murder, uses questionable rationalization for his actions, and is generally a wretched, ungrateful, unhelpful human being. Yet he sticks firmly to his morals (questionable though they may be), and Dan trusts him to help save the world.

And then there is, of course Ozymandias - Adrian Veidt. He's "the smartest man in the world," handsome, successful, helpful, everything you think a superhero is supposed to be. Yet - he chooses to kill half of New York, a cruise ship full of artists and thinkers and builders, and half of the Watchmen. He does it to save the world... but is he justified? Even putting aside the question of whether it would really work (Watchmen suggests it does), is it justifiable to make decisions for an entire species?

Not to mention Sally Jupiter's self-serving sexuality, or Dan's dependence and hero-worship, or any of the other all-too-human flaws of these superheroes. Moore paints a grey picture of morality: it's impossible to say who, of these heroes, is good, and who is evil, and what constitutes which.

The Ending of Watchmen

First of all I would like to say that reading a graphic novel is not as easy as it first appears. I thought it would be a simple task to skim through the text and get it done in an hour or so; I was wrong. Looking at the pictures along with reading the text makes for very slow going, not to mention those terrible scenes in which the boy on the street corner was reading the pirate comic. When I first encountered one of those scenes I stopped attempting to skim.

Meanwhile, What was with the ending of the novel? The whole time there is a huge build up of something terrible about to happen. When it does finally take place only one person objects and then allows himself to be killed very easily. Then quickly, following the destruction and murder of most of New York suddenly everyone bans together and stops the feeling of impending doom everywhere because something terrible has already happened so nothing worse could come after that, right? I'm not so sure. Even though the theme of this week is exceptions, how much is being accepted here? These masked men are just people like the rest of us but training to fight crime in a way that the police cant / wont / don't. That one of them suddenly finds a way to stop social degradation is implausible at best for me. We can see that terrible events do not stop other terrible events from taking place. Somalia and Cambodia are excellent examples that no one apparently learned anything from. I do not think that a creature invented in someones mind would have a greater effect upon the world. Instead I think that encountering the other might make human kind more divisive, and less inclined to change their nature simply because something entirely new appears on the scene. Perhaps the character John is the best example of people not changing because of encountering the other... or perhaps he is not other enough to use here. Just some thoughts...

Watchmen

I am more than halfway through Watchmen, and I have to say that so far, I love it. This is my first graphic novel, but I'm learning that I really like graphic novels as a medium. I never realized how they allow a number of different stories to occur simultaneously in a way that other mediums do not allow. Point in case--the overlapping and interplay of the guy reading The Black Freighter and the newspaper guy talking. It's awesome.

I can see why this falls into the "Exceptions" category on the syllabus because it takes place on our planet, but history as we know it is altered. I find Jon interesting because of the aspect of a super-soldier who, in the book, is an integral part of the US's national security strategy. I really like how Moore and Gibbons tell the story of his "becoming" and overlap all the different time sequences within that. What I find interesting is how it all relied on a series of coincidences--ie, forgetting the watch, the fat man stepping on it. The prominence of watches in how they interplay into fate in the story of Jon's becoming is a bit reminiscient of a discussion of Deist philosophy that I had in high school in which my teacher told us their views that God created the world as a perfect machine, like a clock, and stood back and did not interefere. But that's a stretch...
Still, I think the presence of clocks=watch(men)= time ticking toward the end of the world throughout the story so far is interesting and really want to see where it goes. Also, we have the aspect of the meaninglessness of time in Jon's case.

Another theme that has emerged so far that I find interesting is what I guess I would phrase "The Golden Rule and limits thereof"--namely, for criminals, what is just punishment for their crime? Should crime fighting be left to "official" channels (police, government) if it is ineffective? The distinction in Watchmen seems to be that only violence/force sanctioned by the state is justifiable (and therefore the superhero crimfighters are not), which kind of goes with Weber/Schmitt's ideas (although I'm not arguing they do so wholly).

I can't wait to see where the story goes because I'm really into it so far...

Not a test of faith

Honestly I don't think that the trials that Emilio encounters can honestly be described as those of testing his faith in God. I think instead, based on our discussion and a few re readings of sections of the book that Emilio is really have a test of his humanity. What is it that makes us distinctly human and what is it the other that we fear. When we watch Emilio be raped by the poets we do not think of the man who sent him to this fate as someone who misunderstands what Emilio wants in the first novel. When we re-encounter the character we learn of the mishap based on the culture and the language of the two societies. The misunderstanding is not so much a punishment of God but an area of language that Emilio failed to understand. This a a problem of cross cultural communication, not a sin for which Emilio is now paying. I think that the two books as a whole work to tell the story of a man who puts himself in the service of God but finds that the big questions in life are not about what might exist out there in the universe, but instead the need to explore the significance of what is at home either here on earth or in the physical realm in general.

On deaths, Emilio and suffering

I definitely agree about how dreary and depressing both of these books have been with the massive amount of deaths, especially of innocents -- or worse, the deaths of innocents contrasted directly with the thriving of the guilty.

I think you can certainly pick out a "story of Job" like theme with regards to Emilio and the trials he endures in the name of his own faith. Emilio is (arguably, of course) one of the most pious and sinless characters in the series, up until all of the rage and humiliation of being raped repeatedly and constantly leads him to murder an innocent. We can imagine God, watching Emilio, his most steadfast servant, testing his faith and his ability to persevere, torturing him and punishing him at every turn, either for God's own sick satisfaction, to settle a bet with the devil about the nature of piousness, or to prove a point about the greater good.

I don't know, I guess this is a grandiose idea, almost bigger than the themes of the book itself, but it's what kept occuring to me.. I kept putting Emilio's story (or his backstory) into this Jobian framework, and it kept fitting.

A Few More Deaths Please...

May I just note here, that I do not think enough people were needlessly killed or maimed in this novel. I think we needed a few more depressed people in need of a world of help. I think in this book, may of the themes regarding God and our relationship to others were drown in the constant misery and destruction that took place over and over and over again. Not only was there too much destruction, Emilio was always given chances to recover and then fell apart soon thereafter. It was too predictable, even more so than the first book. Even though we were not told the ending to the story in the beginning of the novel as we did in The Sparrow, it was almost impossible to miss the implications of what would come in the second book. If Emilio did not return to Ratchet, Chidlren of God wouldnt have been written. As soon as Gina was introduced it was obvious that they would fall in love, make love, and then he would disappear off to outerspace. Beyond the basic simlicity of the plot line, it was still a compelling story to read, it simply wore me out the farther I delved into the novel.

Perhaps that is the point of the book, to take the reader on a path of emotional upheavle in an attempt to convey how difficult it is to question one's own faith in God and relationship to other beings created by that God. By knowing ahead of time "Gods" plan, perhaps then the reader should understand from a Gods perspective that while we want the best for Emilio and his friends, creation has been created, we know what will happen, but now we must simply wait it out and watch. I for one, am glad I do not normally have a godlike perspective, I would be a very depressed God.

On God's Will

After the end of The Sparrow, Emilio Sandoz seems broken and abandoned by God. We might hold out a hope that God works in mysterious ways... but mostly, it seems like he is a cruel comedian, making every well-intentioned action into a horrible joke.

Children of God starts out with much the same message. Emilio backs away from God and religion. He immerses himself in his linguistic work, leaves the Jesuit order, and abandons celibacy for love. We see Emilio becoming happier and more whole as he secularizes his life.

But then Giuliani and Carlo interfere - or is it really God interfering? Giuliani wants to send Emilio back to Rakhat for the good of Catholicism as a whole, to heal the breach between the Pope and the Jesuit organization, but also because he still believes it is the best thing to do for Emilio himself. The involvement of both Giuliani as Father General and the Pope, as God's representatives, seem to imply God wills Emilio go go back to Rakhat. As for Carlo? Well, God uses all as tools and works in mysterious ways...

And Emilio does seem to have a purpose in Rakhat. Sofia is still alive and, with Supaari, has been a driving force behind the Runa rebellion (ironic, isn't it, that two non-Runa should play such pivotal roles...) But Emilio's role seems to be to heal the breach that's formed - between Jana'ata and Runa, and between mother and child. He is the bridge that allows the reform Jana'ata and the triumphant Runa to open negotiations; it is to Emilio that Isaac gives his music of God, the harmonies of Jana'ata and Runa and human DNA. As Isaac says to Emilio, "It's God's music. you came here so I would find it" (page 427).

So perhaps all of Emilio's sufferings and trials were all a part of God's plan for revealing to his children their unity.

Language and Metaphores

Thinking back to our conversation in class, I was wondering about the function of language and metaphores that were laced purposefully throughout The Sparrow and in general the role that language played in The Conquest Of America. When The Jesuits arrive on their allien plannet they are prepared and in fact anticipating finding new languages. I think it is interesting to note that they spend most of the book looking to understand how language works as a window into what the plannet and the native inhabitants have to offer. On the other side of this was Columbus who went searching for something he knew to exist, found something entirely different, and yet imposed what little knowledge he had about those people and their culture to take advantage of them for personal gains (even if he said it were in the name of god and for gods glory, some of that glory goes to himself for being gods intrument...). He assumes that they do not even have a langage, that they are so primative that they cannot even communicate with the Spanish explorers.

Not only does Columus assume that they have no language, but if they are able to communicate that their societal structure is exactly the same as it would be in Europe. Everything is similar in some fashion or another, and he draws connections between words that sound familiar. For the Jesuits, they impliment biblical metaphors without even attempting to use them to understand the Runa. For example (and the most overused one in the book) was the garden. The downfall and slaughter of the Runa comes from the garden which foreigners introduce. Though this isnt exactly the use of language that the Jesuits use to encounter the Runa, they still draw connections to God and his interplay with all of his children.

Overal, I simply think it is interesting to think about how one being could encounter another that looks so similar to the self and has all the same manerisms and assume that it has no language. The Jesuits went looking for language, knew that it would be there. Language is what enticed them to travel so far away. For Columbus there was no drive for language, only the drive for money. Speculating on the money issue, perhaps that is the reason Sandoz will go back in the second book. I have not read it yet, but there would be no second book if he didnt go back..

How to define the other

We define the other in opposition to ourselves: the other is what is not me. That is, everything that is not self is other. Since there are degrees of not-self - ranging from your very close friends on one end of the spectrum, to foreigners with wildly different customs or aliens on the other end - there must also be a range of other.

Sometimes, we're willing to give those towards the far end of the spectrum - let's call them the extreme other - a break when it comes to moral relativity. We say they're different, so we can't hold them to our standards.

But where does that line of permissible difference stop? For some people, even the slightest not-other (i.e., anyone who's not you) can't be held to the same standards as oneself. For example, Emilio (before and after he leaves the priesthood) holds no one to the same celibacy standards he holds himself to.

But for others, anyone who's a close other should be held to their own standards. For example, Voelker has a pretty strict idea about what all Jesuits should do.

I guess I'm not entirely sure where I'm going with this, except that the whole idea of "other" is a pretty relative concept.

Otherness distinctions and divergent societies

I feel like a really effective way to tie the debate about the bestowal or denial of humanness to other cultures (particularly to the native American cultures by the Spaniard conquistadores) is to go back and look at the enormous differences between the societies themselves. We can nitpick all we want about degrees of otherness, and to whom should or should not otherness be assigned, but in analyzing this particular case, it really is EXCEPTIONALLY easy to understand why the native American societies were grouped into that category by the Europeans and were thus denied an egalitarian conception of being "Human".

Todorov mentions it repeatedly. The very modes of thinking were inherently different between these two societies. Ways of conceptualizing, not only one's surroundings, but time itself were worlds apart. The cyclical understanding of time, omens and signs held by the Aztecs presented an enormous disconnect for the Europeans, one which would be almost completely insurmountable even by our own much more tolerant and "culturally relativistic" standards. Imagine trying to communicate something as simple as going to work and having to deal with a bunch of different problems -- that you didn't have to deal with the day before -- to someone for whom every single action is both a repetition of the past and an omen for the future... for indeed the terms "past" and "future" have no meaning. There is only "now", "now then" and "now later". Even after the Europeans were able to devise a way of communicating with the native Americans, they were presented with such a huge cultural impasse, likely like none ever before encountered, that truly and honestly coceiving as this race of people as "the same" seems immediately challenging. Even we, modern liberals, might be able to conceive intellectually of a certain sameness still existing between ourselves and such a culture, but I feel that in practice the barriers presented would almost necessarily give way to an "Other" assignment.

So this social divergence worked to the double disadvantage of the native Americans -- it both cemented their inferiority in the eyes of the conquistadores (for difference is, of course, tantamount to inferiority) and thus the justification for their slaughter; and the cyclical time conceptualization made the improvisation that would have been necessary for effective warfare against the Europeans impossible.

I guess what it all comes down to is that, simply by being fundamentally different in an unfortunate way (imagine if the Indians had had both technology and worldview which were strategically SUPERIOR to those of the Europeans... the world would be quite a different place), the native Americans were kind of screwed from the beginning. Upsetting at times.

I agree that the order in which we read The Sparrow and The Conquest of America lends itself very well to a comparison between the two. I think one issue is very interesting in terms of a difference between the two works. The conquest of America was indeed one of conquest, of the side that entered new lands winning out over the other because the invadees did not conceptually understand the rules of the game, so to speak. However, in The Sparrow, paradoxically, the "invaders" ultimately fails to understand what will be done to them at a very basic, linguistic level. Because Emilio never understands the contract and gives his consent to have his hand stretched (which also kills Marc) and is ultimately sent back in shambles. Thus, it is also interesting that in The Sparrow, the side which most resembles the Spanish in that they are characterized throughout the novel as "the one" in relation to "the other", the Jesuit party, meets with drastically different results although they both claim to be on God's side.

I think in many ways, the cultural relativism employed in the way that Emilio's party interacted with "the other" is demonstrative of the new wave of thinking is demonstrative of the shifting societal viewpoint Todorov discusses on 249. He states that nowadays, there is more of an awareness that the predominant ideology that Westernism was superior has diminished in favor of an atempt to find a synthesis between equality and difference. "We want equality without its compelling us to accept identity; but also difference without its degenerating into superiority/inferiority" (249). I feel that this is tightly bound to the ideologies of postmodernism and post-colonialism.

Postmodernism, which forces us to disect and subsequently question the way in which society, knowledge, and basically reality is constructed also leads us to question whether anything can exist absolutely and objectively. Post colonialism, similarly, leads one to question whether one people is absolutely superior to another. The combination of these two ideologies necessarily leads to increased relativism.

I think that The Sparrow’s approach to the interaction between known humanity and unknown humanity is very indicative of a very post-modern, post-colonial mindset whereby objective superiority simply does not exist and things like morality become highly relative in the way they are perceived. The very knowledge that nothing can really be objectively superior was not present in the works of Colombus. As presented by Todorov, the explorers could not even contextualize the other as having an equal human identity (76) because to acknowledge that “the other” could be equal was not in their frame of reference—the one is always superior to the other in the mind of the one. Only in our modern day do we acknowledge that the other’s beliefs he is “the one” have just as much merit as our belief that he is the other.

The Other Aliens

Jumping off from Vanessa's post, I love that we're reading Conquest of the Americas right after The Sparrow. The parallels and contrasts between the Spaniards/Native Americans and the Jesuits/aliens are fascinating!

In The Sparrow, the Jesuit expedition went to Rakhat with a total respect for whatever alien culture they might find. When they arrived, they asked questions, learned the language, and tried to integrate themselves as best they could into the society they found. In short, the expedition treated the Rana and Jana'ata as, if not humans, at least as people.

As a contrast, the American "discoverers" - especially Columbus (who was HILARIOUS, in that I can't believe he actually acted like that kinda way) - went to the Americas ignorant and uncaring of the culture, motivations and desires of the Native Americans. Though Columbus took cultural notes, he imposed his own desires upon his interpretation of the indigenous people. When he didn't understand the natives he met (or, when he admitted he didn't understand them) or when they acted contrary to his expectations, he interpreted them as animals, as non-human - in short, as aliens.

Why would the (fictional) Jesuits treat aliens as people, and Columbus and the Spaniards treat humans as alien? Moral relativism! (What, is there a theme in this week's blogging or something?) Emilio and the other members of the expedition to Rakhat are meeting the aliens with the intent of meeting and understanding people radically different from themselves. They recognize that their ways will be different and are ready to accept the difference. Columbus and the other explorers, however, don't really have a concept of an other that is also moral. Thus, when they encounter the Native Americans, they see the difference as not just immoral, but unhuman.

Relativism dragged into America

In the Conquest of America, if we look at the details of what happened in the history of Spanish conquests there, there is a total lack of relativism. Since we are comparing the two books, this weeks and The Sparrow, I think it is interesting how ideas about allowing others religious and social freedoms have changed. When the Spanish were exploring / plundering the Americas, they could bearly even concieve of the local populance having a different social structure or language base. Columbus and the subsiquent leaders depicted in the book think it is their right and duty to give these people "culture". However, in The Sparrow the Jesuit mission was very careful not to try and impose anything on the societies they met and have as little impact on their way of life as possible. They didnt want to kill or take anything from them. Perhaps then we should look at the difference in the nature of the missions between the Jesuits and the Spanish.

The Jesuits went to a new planet knowing that there would be differences, perhaps ones that would be fatal to themselves or perhaps the locals. On the other hand the Spanish went to American is search of wealth and an area to populate and use for its on social and economic goals. In light of the face that these two cases were very different in their inherant nature and purpose, does it show anything consistant within the practices of caring for cultural relativism or does it instead show that cultural relativism did not always exist? When the Spanish went to the Americas they did not have any regard for the practices of the people. They took advantage of them and used them till many of them died or became disfunctional. They attempted to convert many of the cultures to Catholicism and did not believe any of the local practices could be justifid simply because they were different from what the Spanish had known. Personally, I dont think cultural relativism came into play in the international community in dealing with forein nations until colonization and the movement for independant nation states was completed after WWI. After that time, we started attempting to explain the practices of other people, not attempting to change them, because they were inherantly different and therefore had to be judged under their own moral codes. But now, looking toward the future, who are we going to allow to be the judge for alien species? How can we say what is a greater good for a group on another planet when we cannot even decide this as a unified who on our own home planet? It seems to me that cultural relativism might have saved the indigenous peoples of America from the Spanish torment, but that was during a time when people were greedy for resources and could justify eliminating another race. Now that the international community poo poos genocide, does that mean that relativism has only come onto the scene recently? If one were to say that we all belong under the same moral jurisdiction, then it would be easy enough for a race to claim supriority over another. Just some musings... what do yall think?

Yet more cultural relativism

To jump back on the bandwagon which I kinda started myself...

My point of view is that there exist basically two choices in dealing with the moral relativism question: either accept M.R. absolutely, or reject it absolutely. That is to say, you can't make an exception for one act, which you judge in your value/moral system to be unacceptable, as being acceptable for another society because "it's relative", and then proceed to condemn a social practice because it doesn't fit into your own conceptualization of morality. The idea of relativism is an either-or scenario. Either you can accept the idea that it's all a matter of perspective, or you can reject it. You can't just say "well, these cases are a matter of perspective, but these cases aren't. They're only a matter of MY perspective." The supposition in the latter statement being that "MY perspective" is irrefutably dervied from a univeral moral code. The problem of course is that, if you grant a deviation from the Universal Moral Code that you're in touch with in a certain instance, it's not longer universal. If it doesn't hold in at least once case, the idea that it's concrete, fundamental and holds in all cases falls apart.

So we just have to make a choice between accepting MR or rejecting it. Accepting it means refusing to judge other cultures based on our own values (almost everyone finds it at the very least very, very difficult to do this), or buy that our values are THE values and those who do not adhere to them are inherently immoral / not in touch with the grand design of good vs. evil (and this, naturally seems just the slightest bit ethnocentric).

It's a sticky situation. And I have no easy answers.

Jumpoing on the relativism boat

The problem with imposing one set of morals on a set of people with another set of morals is, of course, that morality is relevant. Even on planet Earth, between a single species, we can barely agree on a single instance of good and evil. We agree killing is evil... but disagree about killing in wars, or blood feuds, or if he stole my cow. We agree rape is bad... but disagree about whether you can be raped if you're married, or if rape is a punishment. We agree love is good... but disagree about whether children can love romantically, or whether it's okay for two members of the same sex to love each other, or if two people from different religions can love each other.

Can there be a universal standard of morality? Clearly we can't crusade on specifics - for example, the U.S. culture finds burkas barbaric, but some Muslim women choose to wear them in order to free themselves from male scrutiny. However, the majority of people would agree that the choice to wear a burka should be just that - a choice.

So can we agree that something is moral if it is a choice? If everyone who follows that moral code agrees with it, and makes the choice to follow that code of their own free will - is it moral?

Even if we put aside the problems of identifying choice vs. coercion (do the Runa choose to live as they do, or do the Jana'ata coerce them?) and assume that children must be coerced by their parents before they attain an age or maturity to make their won decisions, this system of judging morality wouldn't work. Most participants in the U.S. culture agree that murder is bad and rape is bad, but we still must have laws and a police force to legislate against and punish those who choose not to follow this moral code. Thus, many are coerced into following the "no murder no rape" morality.

But that's a good thing, right? Rape and murder both hurt other people. So what if we judge all moral systems based on how much they protect its participants?

Unfortunately, this is also problematic. Besides the fact that in some circumstances, rape ("she deserved it") or murder (the death penalty, anyone?) can be justified as protecting others, almost ANYTHING can be justified as being "for someone's own good." Radical Islamic men who force women to wear burkas, leave the house only in the company of male relatives, and leave their professional lives claim they are protecting the women from dangerous males and the scary outside world. The Jana'ata would claim that their breeding program (and stringent hierarchical system) prevents poverty, crime, genetic diseases, overpopulation, and overuse of the planet's resources. Columbus claimed his work went to cilivilize, tame, and "save" (convert) the Native Americans.

Logic fails to find a common ground for judging morality. Thus, the only way to judge morals is from a moral standpoint, which basically means that there must be agreement among those following the same moral code, and either noninvolvement or conflict between those with different moral cades.

Relitivism idea cont...

Sorry this post is late... I was working on something else and then i looked at the time and it had passed midnight... not that it is a good excuse but here is the post...

I personally do not think we should leave room for cultural relativisim. It is an easy way out, a way not to think about what other people are doing simply beacuse it is eaier to say that we cannot judge their morals because we do not understand their societies. When discussing scentient beings and attempting to discern which ones are or are not, should not change our moral code. Regardless of which being has a greater capacity for thinking, it is also a living breathing being. Those beings on the alien world presented in The Sparow are obviously scentient, obviously within a moral code of some sort. That between the two races one dominates the other is not ok under what humans have defined as morally just. Instead of attempting to qwell murders while they are happening, what Sophia should have done was gathered together and organized the Runa to work against their agressors. Granted, they were not expecting a slaughter and she felt compelled to step forward and speak out against the killings, but that did not help her on moral grounds. If you are attampting to eliminate a source of moral injustice, then the best rout is to shed light on the matter from one intelligent being to another.

Im not quite sure what one should do if the other does not comply. Are we morally justified in forcing someone to comply with what we concider to be moral behavior? If human brought guns, and threatened the Jana'ata with death or pain in order to save the Runa, would that really be the moral way to stop the killings of the Runa people? Is it better to have population control or homelessness and hunger? Is there no way to find an equilibrium or does there need to be an imposition of one cultures morals upon another? And then, why is it that we do not all conclude the same moral strucutre? The very existance of cultural relativism suggests that different beings suppose different ways of being to be the correct way of conduct. The way to eliminate relativism would then be to collectively bring people to believe in one standard... but if people are from a galixy far far away, how is that possible?

Cultural relativism and predation

I didn't finish reading the entirety of the novel before class (It was sold out at the campus bookstore and I couldn't find it at Borders this weekend), which is why I didn't post until now. Sorry.

I feel like we hit upon a really interesting topic when we were talking about the morality of the stystem of predation on the alien planet. That being the importance of moral relativism; to what degree are we committing a cultural mistake in judging the alien culture by our own norms of predation (namely, that it's morally wrong/sinful to eat something that is sentient). I find a few flaws with this point of view. First of all, there's a certain disanalogy between the terran food structure and that on Rakhat. Namely: THE ONLY THING "SENTIENT" ON EARTH IS US! In saying that we oppose eating anything that can talk back to us, we're really just saying we oppose cannibalism, which holds true in any species. So extending our point of view to an alien society in which this sort of predation is the norm seems somewhat inappropriate.

Second, as we talked about, is the question of moral relativism. My first argument aside, what right should a group of human travellers have to impose their own system of values upon an alien world, which has developed culturally within its own closed system and has developed a cultural/social code which seems to function efficiently and to the (general) well-being of all. Cultural relativism is, of course, often a messy subject because there seem to exist some things which one culture (western culture, for example) cannot accept as a matter of differing opinion/worldview. Murder being one. And we define murder by the killing of another sentient being (that's homicide, in humanspeak, meaning killing of the same type of being, meaning killing of another human). However, clearly in this alien society, the label "homicide" wouldn't hold as accurate. So I feel like, on Rakhat, the distinction of "sentience" is a much more trivial one than it is for us. Another species is another species. Eating is eating.

Overall, I enjoyed the novel and thought the development of chracters throughout the novel superb.

I found the scene (starting 195) where Anne performs Alan's autopsy to be particularly interesting, as it illustrates the crossroads betwen faith and science. First off, let me say that I found it to be a little cliched that the one consistently focused on throughouot the book as "the non-beliver", Anne, also happens to be a doctor. I think this is cliched because society is constantly debating the contradiction between science and religion, especially in the creationism/evolution debate. I guess I was just disappointed that the most prominent "non-believer" was involved in science. I realize that Sofia Mendes was not a Jesuit, but I don't feel that her faith was focused on with as much inensity as that of Anne's.

When DW insists that there "has got to be a reason" that Alan died, and Anne shouts, "You want a reason? God wanted him dead" (197). She continues, "Why is that so hard to accept? Why is it that God ets all the credit for the good stuff, but it's the doctor's fault when shit happens? When the patient comes through, it's always,"Thank God," and when the patient dies, it's alwas blame the doctor. Just once in my life, just for the sheer novelty of it, it would be nice if somebody blamed God when the patient dies, instead of me" (198).

This was a very pivotal scene in the book for me, as it illustrates the constant examination throughout the novel of God's nature. Anne's comment underlines the fact that many followers of religion admit to not having known God but to believing in His existence. Even Emillio admits that he has spent his life doubting and wants God to cure him of this doubt. I think one of the major points of the novel is that since "God's ways are not our own" (I am paraphrasing here, as I couldn't find the quote), God's power is not necessarily as just and fair as many believe. This is partially why Emillio insists on carrying the burden of what happened on Rakhat. He has SEEN the power of God and His power to wage both delight and suffering. It is the difference between just believing something--making assumptions and accepting dogma about in which form something exists--and actually knowing something exists.

Theme Swaps for the Jesuits

I would first like to say, Anne, I agree with you about the abrupt ending. The author did such a good job with the build up of the story line only to apperantly get bored with telling the story and just kill everyone off really quickly and have everything simply happen by conicidence. That being said...

There was something that I did not like about sending Jesuits into space. This could be because I personally have issues with the control by religion of new discovery, but it definately makes sence in the context of exploration of new beings. However, the Jesuits fail to provide their normal function in space. Though they send dedicated and intelligent men abroad, they do not attempt to push ideas of God onto the native people in any way shape or form. Anne (ThePinkDoom) mentioned that they do not try to convert Sophia, which makes sence since she has already found God, even if through another religion. There are no attempts to give religion to the Runa, but isnt that the whole reason for being sent into space, to find other children of God?

Not only that, but our protagonist who loses God tells his superiors that they cannot understand how he lost God, that they dont have any way of connecting him back to God even if he tells them what happened while he was there. When he finally tells the story, we see that he begins to heal, that he is getting stronger having been home and taking care of himself for some time. I think this is too hopeful. There should be no redemption for this man. He should remain torn, stuck in his past. He has found that God does not step in to help, he was naked before God and was then raped. Though he was a spritual man for some time, that is torn from him. Going back to God makes sence in a healing process, but in this story healing doesnt seem to fit. Healing only happens with help, and all his friends who can help him are gone. This means he has to help himself, but there is nothing individual about the themes within this book. The Runa are a collective as are the Jesuits, the exploration group, the questioners of the expaditions activities. Being alone is as if the author is giving into another theme that makes the story easy to end.

I think this story reflects on what happens when one gives themselves over to much to what they feel destined to be. There are times when you have to take responcibility for things that happen to you for no real reason. Even if you get swept up in events, one has to take responcibility. This book seems to be a failing of responcibilities. Jesuits fail to convert, Emilio fails to leave the Jesuits for Mendes, Rune fail to stand against their agressors, and the theme of togetherness fails to be maintained in the book. I wonder if the author did this on purpouse, to show that we all fail sometimes. It would be interesting if she had.

The Jesuit ideal

First off, let me say that I was severely let down by the ending of the book. Russell spends almost 400 pages building up to The Huge Reveal!!! but it turns out to be a huge letdown. Not only was the actual plot kind of weak (the reason Emilio kills Askama is... random coincidence!), but Russell's presentation is a serious anticlimax to a well-written, intense buildup - not to belittle rape, but it's pretty obvious, given his character, that Emilio's "prostitution" is involuntary, and while the circumstances are interesting, Russell portrays them in a clinical way that contrasts strongly with her earlier intensity - to the scene's detriment.

But this isn't a blog for a literary class!

I was very interested in Russell's portrayal of the Jesuit Society. She gives the impression of an ancient organization with timeless motivations - to the Jesuits, the mission to Rakhat is just another in a long history of missions to new worlds. Her Jesuit characters are selflessly motivated - Emilio just wants to make the world (worlds?) a better place, the Father General just wants to help Emilio, and even Voelker is trying to do the best thing for all of humanity.

Her priests aren't even particularly dogmatic. No one on the mission even attempts to convert Sofia - or even discuss theology with her in any depth. At various times, the Jesuits in The Sparrow refer to celibacy, the priesthood, and even belief in God as a fluid, subjective thing that works for some people at certain times. Jesus isn't much of a focus. Their attitudes are liberal, accepting, and passive.

Now, I'm not familiar with any branch of Catholicism, but Russell's priests seem to follow the Unitarian Universalist principle of encouraging and supporting each individual to find their personal spirituality (whatever that might be), rather than the usual Christian dogma that there is only one right way. Emilio and the others tend to find their faith in everyday labors, rather than prayer or supplication.

It's all very John Paul II, and differs greatly from the attitudes of Jesuit priests in Shogun, a favorite fiction of mine that follows a shipwrecked sailor through Japan around the year 1600. In this novel, the Jesuits are ambiguous characters, making morally questionable decisions in order to obtain political power in Japan. They are very different from Russell's scientific, data-first-religion-later priests.

I am skeptical not of the presence of Russell's open-minded, accepting priests that embody everything that true Christians (or true whatevers) are supposed to be. Certainly these people exist, even if they are generally overshadowed in the public consiousness by pushy, prejudiced Christians (an issue explored nicely in the latest arc of the comic Something Positive, the storyline starting here). No one criticizes the Jesuit mission for bringing back no information about faith on Rakhat, and for explaining no element of Catholicism to either the Runa or the Jana'ata. Perhaps it's merely a characteristic of the Jesuit Society, or at least Russell's fictional Society, to be more interested in academic study of new peoples than in religious conversion. But I find it improbable.

What does everyone think about the portrayal of a religious society where priests focus less on theology and more on faith, morals, and academia?

Clear distinctions

We've had a pretty hard time making Schmitt's clear distinction between "friend" and "enemy". He argues that every entity has to be one or the other; but we've wondered, does an enemy have to have a clear intent to hurt to be considered an enemy? Can global warming or a virus be an enemy? If we follow Schmitt's statement that an enemy is a similar force, than these examples are not enemies. But are they friends?

Schmitt tries to make friend/enemy an absolute, basic distinction like good/evil, beautiful/ugly - basically, black/white. He leaves little room for shades of gray. Enemies, though it is possible for a political entity to have good relations with them, are in some essential way different, and this difference makes war possible. Yet, Schmitt also states that enemies can change and become friends. Does Schmitt think that the essential nature of political enemies changes, so war is no longer possible? I think he's just covering a hole in his logic: that is, the friend/enemy distinction, just like the good/evil and beautiful/ugly distinctions, is subjective and subject to change.

If two states had been friends, and then gone to war, would Schmitt argue that they had actually been enemies on friendly terms? Or that the very nature of one country had changed so that the two were essentially different, thus making war possible? Are all foreign countries actually just enemies, with the possibility of war latent? How does one discern the nature of another nation, and how can you tell from that nature if war with a certain other country is possible or not?

I have to say, Schmitt befuddles me.

The friend vs. enemy distinction & its application

There's clearly a certain truth to Schmitt's friend vs. enemy distinction and the importance he assigns to it. This distinction is all over social science (and literature, etc.) in the form of the "other". Basically, what Schmitt seems to be describing is an advanced manifestation of the "other" conceptualization with a political application (Look at all those big words!). Schmitt limits the friend vs. enemy distinction entirely to "the political", saying that other manifestations of the other dynamic should be labeled differently in non-political situations.

So my criticism of this point-of-view is severalfold. First, Schmitt seems to have invented his own semantic system with regards to this distinction which doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me (maybe it has something to do with the translation, but I'm doubtful). As far as I'm concerned -- and Schmitt was unsuccessful in convincing me of the contrary -- one can conceive of anybody with similar interests as a "friend" and opposing ones as a "foe/enemy". These can be economic interests (somebody who wants to balance the budget a certain way could easily conceive of someone with a different take as an "enemy"), social ones, etc. I think Schmitt's point was that only in political circumstances does the enmity get advanced enough to describe the relationship between the two actors as a "friend vs. foe" one. But, I'm unconvinced of that. Again, it's a question of semantics, but I always have a hard time when an author makes up his own semantic system and expects me just to go along with it.

Additionally, I disagree with Schmitt's limitation of "the political" as extending only to situations in which the threat of war underlies all negotiations. Certainly this is true in the case of interaction between countries internationally, but Schmitt's definition requires us to disregard practically all intranational negotiations (except circumstances in which Civil War seems to be a potentiality). And these are the types of interactions that we generally conceive of as "politics" or "political" more than anything else. Even if you still hold that the representatives that we're referring to here represent states and populations with the means and, conceivably, the desire to go to war with one another if sufficiently agitated, I feel that you still have to take what we generally conceive of as "inter- and intra-organizational politics" into account. Having been a member of non-profit organizations and having watched how "politics" (or what I've always conceived of as politics) take root in daily interactions, I have a hard time discounting this side of the political altogether. But Schmitt requires that I do, because nowhere does the threat of physical violence and retaliation come into play.

So, my point is, Schmitt's definition is unnecessarily specific and limiting to an understanding of what really is "political"

The Objective Enemy

Our discussion in class of Schmitt's ideas of the enemy left me wondering about what an enemy might be. Of course according to Schmitt global warming is not what he would consider an enemy, and neither is terrorism. So what is it that we fight these days? We do not fight for ideals and visions for the future, unless that includes economic gains and military might. We does not include individual goals or desires, it is that of the state. What makes me wonder is that apparently the people are supposed to be a part of that state. How is it that our collective points of view get distilled into something like the war on terrorism? Does human behavior constantly strive to find an enemy? Are we out of enemies? I do not think we are done being against each other's ideals, but governments in a global society have to take more difficult routs to get the population to do what it wants.

Many still do follow the government blindly, otherwise our global community would fall to pieces and require a new beginning. I think that most people did not really care enough about the political enemy unless it might injure them directly. In order to get people on the side of the government in terms of obtaining power and funding, there has to be an enemy. Terrorists are better than global warming, so it is best to target them. At least they exist! Who has created the problem of global warming and AIDS other than many years of drivers and sex addicts? The enemy has to be invoked because otherwise the only people left to blame for any problems we encounter are ourselves.

I think a better way to discuss the political is to say that governments and political parties gives up someone to complain about. If we are out of complaints and have come to terms with the previous aggressor, then a political party needs to supply a new motivating factor to drive on society. Before the more modern ages, it was enough to fight to stay alive against the elements of nature. Since we think we have dealt with nature (excepting of course our recent Katrina case) we must move onto the things that might "really kill us". Because global warming isn't killing us yet, there will be no move to stop it. Since AIDS isn't killing all of us yet, or at least political leaders or rich people as a whole, there will be no move to stop it. This list may include cancer, traffic congestion, steroids in baseball (yes this is important), children who want education who can not afford it, children who need to eat, children who waste their education on alcohol, rape, murder...etc. I think the position of the leaders consists of "its not killing me or my family, so why should I care?". As soon as some scandal is uncovered, when enough people are killed, then we step up to the plate.

The enemy is simply someone who managed to take enough of us out that we need to react because we fear for our own lives. This we is the political leadership. As soon as they are scared enough, or enthused enough by an opportunity, they take action. Nature isn't enough any more to scare us, now it is oil availability and people who blow themselves up at parties. Can anyone think of a time in recent history that politics acted for something other than economic gain or military might? I cant, please... help me think.

I don't "buy" it..(of course, no pun about economic liberalism intended in the slightest)

In section 8, Schmitt discusses the threat that economic liberalism poses to the concept of the political. “For the purpose of protecting individual freedom and private property, liberalism provides a series of methods for hindering and controlling the state’s and government’s power. It makes of the state a compromise and of its institutions a ventilating system and, moreover, balances monarchy against democracy and vice versa” (70). Furthermore, he states that “no consistent individualism can entrust to someone other than to the individual himself the right to dispose of the physical life of the individual” (71).

I realize that Schmitt grew up in a period and in a country where harsh state control was the norm and that the repression was seen as necessary for the greater good, but I question his assumption that the perpetuation of “the political” is better when given the choice between that and a liberal world. At least in the liberal world, one has free choice and is not expected to offer his life to the “higher purpose” of the state. What is wrong with decrying repression and lack of freedom? According to Schmitt, this leads to a “system of demilitarized and depoliticized concepts” (71) which he implies is negative. My question is this: perhaps I’m not understanding the point he’s trying to make, and if so, please comment, but, aside from making the concept of the political (and therefore a whole treatise on its meaning) completely irrelevant, what is wrong with such a demilitarized, depoliticized world? Perhaps it’s that we would then not be able to differentiate friends and enemies? Why does someone have to fit into one or the other—why can’t someone be part friend and part enemy? That seems to fit more closely with what I’ve learned of human nature—people are rarely ever completely for you or completely against you and are more interested in how their feelings about you will affect them. Please comment if you have thoughts because I think perhaps I’m not understanding Schmitt (I’m on migraine medicine and a bit tripped out, admittedly).

Schmitt mentions that “instead of a clear distinction between the two different states, that of war and that of peace, there appears the dynamic of perpetual competition and perpetual discussion. The state turns into society…the self-understood will to repel the enemy in a given battle situation turns into a rationally constructed social ideal or program. … At the intellectual pole, government and power turns into propaganda and mass manipulation, and at the economic pole, control” (72). Given what has come out as of late about the Bush administration’s lies concerning Iraq on the one hand and the northern hegemony in organizations such as the WTO, IMF, etc., this certainly seems to be the case in our society today. Perhaps it comes down to whether ambiguity about who actually is the enemy is necessarily a bad thing. I would say that since WWII, a clear cut, easily identifiable enemy (“Communism”, our biggest enemy for a long time, was not even a physical being) has been increasingly absent from our world. Since it’s the world we’re living in, I guess I fail to see why the world which Schmitt advocates is an improvement.

The enemy other

I confess I'm not all the way through Schmitt yet, but so far I'm finding him pretty interesting. When he is first introducing his theory of an "ultimate distinction" between friend and emeny, he writes:

The political enemy need not be morally evil or aesthetically ugly; he need not appear as an economic competitor, and it may even be advantageous to engage with him in business transactions. But he is, nevertheless, the other, the stranger; and it is sufficient for his nature that he is, in a specially intense way, existentially something different and alien, so that in the extreme case conflicts with him are possible. (p27)

I think it's interesting that Schmitt doesn't say that the enemy should be portrayed as the "other" but rather, it is in his nature that he is the enemy. I'm sure he didn't write with science fiction in mind, but it relates strongly to books like Ender's Game or movies like Starship Troopers where the very nature of aliens make them the enemy.

However, even in Ender's game, the line between friend and enemy isn't so easy. Even though the aliens are about as different as you can get, Ender and the queen find a commonality, and become not enemies, but friends. Even though Schmitt states that enemies are not necessarily at war, but rather that conflicts are possible, in my opinion the very nature of the relationship between humans and the buggers changes with the Speaker for the Dead's story of the bugger queen.

Additionally, Schmitt's idea that all relationships of states with other entities can be simplified to "friend" or "enemy" is overly simplistic. Conflict with any nation is possible, no matter how unlikely it may seem; then, is every nation an enemy?

The political in Ender's game

The clarity and simplicity of Schmitt's antithesis of "friend" and "enemy" being the basis of politics was really striking. Although his logic took a lot of twists and turns and, on this point at least, I never felt like it completely and fully established its own truth, it is still obviously a very useful way to conceive of political struggles. The division between the self and the other is clearly present in practically every part of the political spectrum.

I also found it very interesting to consider the struggles in Ender's Game in light of this conceptualization. Ender does assume a very political role for much of the book, particularly during the latter half or so of his training at Battle School. He acts in order to inspire respect, to garner allegiance, to fulfill everyone's expectations of him as the "chosen child", the "destined savior" of the human race or whatever it is. It's easy to see in Ender's relationship with other characters the division between friend and enemy (though the role of enemy is often imposed upon him by others, whereas Ender would have been content to remain politically "neutral"). Nonetheless, when the role of enemy is cast on you, you must assume it and reverse its definition back upon its imposer, who then becomes enemy from your perspective -- because, as Schmitt mentions, not to accept this antithesis and play by its rules is to ignore the underlying root of political dispute -- the threat of war.

And Ender uses this threat of war; he understands its significance and its political usefulness (and necessity). (I'm talking about on an inter-personal level, of course, not about the war he [inadvertently] wages on the buggers). Ender's calculating nature when it comes to combat, his ability to make preemptive strikes in order to prevent further problems in the future, is a very political asset. So is the more pacifistic way he creates allegiances among the members of his army, manipulates and uses their abilities and resources, etc.

There are also obvious themes of the political which tie into Schmitt's ideas in the subplot of Demosthenes and Locke, buttt.... they're not quite as interesting so I won't get into them here.

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.

Schmitt: Friends and Foe

It is an interesting idea that Carl Schmitt presents in determining how political groups have both friends and enemies. The state, as a political entity, is separate from humanity. Schmitt argues that "humanity as such cannot wage war because it has no enemy, at least not on this planet" (54). Instead he argues that wars waged for the sake of humanity are not really for humanity but instead for political powers. Though he doesn't really touch too much more on this throughout the rest of his book, I find it interesting that no human can be the enemy of another human. I had always assumed that human beings were primarily enemies of other human beings, and animals or even alien species that we have not yet discovered could not really be our enemies. They would instead be a threat, or a dangerous animal that we need to take precautions against. Instead here Schmitt argues that an enemy must be made inhuman in order to fight against them. This idea makes sense for large scale battles and wars, but in the case of the individual, I'm not sure that humanity cannot wage war upon itself.

Looking back at Ender's game in the battle school, the children fought against each other knowing full well that they were all a part of humanity. Even Peter Wiggen was a member of the human race even though his ideas and actions were twisted. Ender found it perfectly possible to fight against members of the children's army, granted it was not a real war. His relationship with the other members of the battle school was constant strife. The fights that took place between any of the human characters in the book was a struggle of human against human. When he kills the buggers, Ender thinks he is playing a game to beat out his teachers and Graff. Even in Dune Paul fights against the emperor as his enemy who is also a human. I would say that it is definitely possible for humanity to wage a war against itself, and that self can be an enemy. You do not need a foreign species to make up an enemy.

When are children no longer children?

I would like to continue this theme that Anne and Russ were discussing earlier and expand upon that. When we talk about children, we think of age or a lack of mental or social development. For the children who went to battle school, they were young, very young in fact, but their minds were beyond the normal thinking level for someone their age. We assume, in modern society, that children should have time to be innocent and to enjoy their childhoods. However, in many areas around the world there are peoples and places that have no time for children. Children have to become adults quickly. I started thinking about this last night when I went to see the new film of Marie Antoinette. She was given away in marriage at age 14 and expected to produce an heir to the thrown of France within the following year. Granted, 14 is older than any of the children we experience in Ender's Game, but it proves the fact that the concept that children should remain innocent is a recent idea. While it is nice to think that we might have created a world in which our children and future generations might thrive, where they would not have to worry about working toward sustaining their families till a little later, this is not always the case.

I also do not think that war is the reason children have to grow up quickly. I think war makes growing up a sudden process, where a person becomes an adult or perishes from a lack of ability to survive. But for Ender and his friends, they become adults quickly without experiencing the harsh realities of war. While there is a general threat of attack from the Buggers, Ender grows up because he has a mind that is capable of understanding his situation in perspective to others. In the opening chapters, when Ender is surrounded by a group of bullies, Ender knows instinctively how to stop his opponents. This is a survival tactic, not someone who has lived through the devastation of war and been torn apart by it.

Children are only children because they are shielded away from how adults view their present situations. Responsibilities, even something as simple as chores, force children to grow up. This is why child geniuses exist amongst us. Because of their aptitude they are taught as an adult would be instructed and therefor learn extraordinarily quickly. If all children were forced into rigorous instruction at very young ages they too would likely come to have brilliant minds, if not quite as amazing as the prodigies. Age is not what defines children, it is responsibility and survivability that determine maturation into an adult.

...more groupthink

When I was on looking at comments, I saw that my post from before somehow got messed up and did not post about half of what I wrote. My fault for not looking to make sure earlier.

Anyway, I will recreate what I remember saying..
THe theme of groupthink versus individual flexibility to adapt to the situation is a salient theme in both works. Since this was written during the Cold War, the obvious parallel is that Communism will falter because the individual's abilities reign supreme over the collective group abilities. The communal nature of the enemies is similiar (although not identical) to the Borg, where knowledge was all collective and centralized. The ability to think independently and reason is part of what differentiates us from animals (although I realize that computers challenge the reasoning aspect of this).

However, my mom actually had an interesting interpretation of this. She interpreted it as a lesson about micro-management, and how an organization will run much more efficiently if individual employees are allowed the flexibility to make decisions themselves without having it approved by a chain of command. This relates to much of what Thomas Friedman says in "The World Is Flat". The old heirarchical structures of corporations are breaking down because in part, they are not as efficient or productive as a more streamlined, level organizational structure. I work for Homeland Security, and the heirarchy is just ridiculous--it is so hard to get anything done, especially if you're young. For Card to have seen the falability in something like this well ahead of his time is very acute.

Re: Ender, childhood, believability

Like THEPINKDOOM this is the theme that most stuck out to me throughout the book. I'm not sure how much Card just wanted us to suspend disbelief and accept the maturity with which these (very, very young) children are acting, accepting it at face value. I had trouble buying into it, and I'll tell you why.

It's not just that the kids are smart. Child geniuses and prodigies are not at all unheard-of. The problem is that these kids are acting with an awareness of concepts and ideas that can only be understood through experience. They don't arise out of hyperintellect or superior intuition. Peter's ability to track Russian troop movements through abnormal levels of activity on trains, for example. Ender's understanding of the intricacies of war strategy (yes, some of this is intuitive, but a lot of Ender's understanding seems to be of the sort that we would attribute to especially talented West Point graduates). These are debatable subjects, granted, but I feel like Card's portraying children who are 6 or 7 years of age in such a mature light, giving them an incredible understanding of language, and of completely adult themes, is sort of unbelievable.

I guess the biggest problem I have is that innocence goes right out of the window. The very phenomenon of childhood itself is disregarded. Almost all of the kids start out adults at the beginning, even though they've barely been toilet trained.

That said, I loved this book.

Childhood

One of the things that has always fascinated me about Ender's Game is its portrayal of childhood. My copy of the book starts with an introduction by Orson Scott Card in which he contrasts the reaction of a gifted teacher ("Gifted children just don't talk like that. They just don't think like that.") to the reaction of a group of gifted students ("We are the Enders of today.")

I am inclined to agree with the students. Card depicts children for who they are, not for who adults think they are. Though it may seem unrealistic for 6 and 7-year-olds to be deadly serious about games in the Battleroom, the Battleroom is the only fictional creation. Think of any kid you've seen arguing about the rules of the game (say, hide-and-seek) and whether or not someone cheated. It seems childish to an adult, but that child is taking hide-and-seek as seriously as we would take our midterms.

Card also has some poignant things to say on the nature of childhood. A few times throughout the book, Ender takes some time to wonder what a "real" childhood would be like. He reads through old books and realizes his childhood isn't normal. On page 224, the narration says of Ender, "He was a soldier, and if anyone had asked him waht he wanted to be when he grew up, he wouldn't have known what they meant." After the war is over, and everyone is standing around wondering what they'll do next, the following exchange occurs (page 304):

"'We're kids,' said Petra. 'They'll probably make us go to school. It's a law. You have to go to school till you're seventeen.'

They all laughed at that. Laughed until tears streamed down their faces."

For me, these are some of the most poignant moments of the book. They show how war and stress and work can ruin the innocence of childhood and how fast children can grow into adults. It's not just an element to a work of fiction, either: in 2006 the UN estimates that more than 250,000 children are actively involved in armed conflict, some as young as nine (source). And though fighting in an army or militia is certainly the most dramatic way of forcing children to become adults, it's doubtful that the estimated 246 million children engaged in child labour, some as young as five (source), have retained that innocence of childhood that we so value.

Ender, along with Petra, Bean, Alai, Shen, and all the other children of the Battle School, can't really be considered children. And I think Card presents a completely accurate picture of how they play to beat the system - be the best and no one can ignore you, try to make the right friends in the right way and work to keep your enemies from hurting you. The way it's played out reflects a fictional setting and hyperintelligent characters; yet, I can relate to their struggles, and I'm sure most people in this honors class feel the same way.

Is it possible to have sci-fi without a superhero?P

I've realized, after the five or so books that we've read so far, that all of the books in a certain way focus on a super-human character. It's as if structurally they'd fall apart if they didn't have this element -- something that supercedes human limits, and perhaps provides human legitimacy for the fantastic heights that the novels' plots and themes always reach.

Paul, the Messiah and greatest human ever to live. Yod, the greatest cyborg ever built. Ender, the brightest boy, chosen from birth to lead his people to victory in a galactic war (wow, sounds sorta like another book we've read...). So on and so forth.

So why is this treatment necessary? It does sort of seem to be integral to science fiction, at least to the science fiction we've read. There's just something about the narrative structure.. I guess, as I said, it helps us to buy into all the scientifically fictitious stuff we read about, seeing it from the point of view of someone who as far exceeds our own limitations as the futuristic technology exceeds that of the present. Paul's probably the best example of this, the one that's made me think most about it (along with Ender). Paul is as epic as the story that weaves itself around him. We want to believe that a being such as Paul is possible, and this desire colors our willingness to buy into the world of Dune and Herbert's themes.

That's how it seems to me, at least.

Creation and Ownership

One of the topics Piercy deals with is the connection between creation and ownership: women have the power to "create" children, but as Malkah points out, they have to let those children go; men, on the other hand, create machines, which they believe they have full control over no matter how long the machine exists or how much like a man he becomes.

However, despite the statement that mothers must relinquish control of their children when the children grow up, Shira's relationship with Josh and Ari seems to say that while children are still young, mothers have complete ownership. Shira's motives for the majority of the book revolve around her getting Ari back. It doesn't matter to Shira what Josh wants, or if Ari gets to spend any time with him, or even if Josh is killed: Ari belongs to Shira, and she MUST have him in her control. Nothing in Piercy's narrative condemns this attitude: when Josh is killed, Shira expresses some regret, but never does she stop to question if maybe Ari would be better off in someone else's control.

There is also a contrast between mothers' and fathers' rights visible in the relationship between Shira and Malkah and that of Gadi and Avram. In their adult lives, neither Shira nor Gadi want to come home - yet here the similiarities end. Malkah wants Shira back, but Avram is apprehensive of Gadi's return. Malkah and Shira have a positive relationship, while Avram and Gadi are constantly sparring. Finally, Shira chooses to stay in Tikva, while Gadi runs back to his former life as soon as the chance is offered.

Yet - Malkah isn't really Shira's mother, but her grandmother. Shira's mother Riva gave up the control that comes with ownership, choosing to leave her daughter in the control of her own mother, who she had resisted throughout her childhood (Malkah remembers Riva as a little girl, standing in the courtyard screaming "NO!" at the top of her lungs). What is Piercy saying here about the relationship between creation and ownership? As a mother, Riva created yet relinquished ownership to another.

Compared to humans, the relationships of Yod and Joseph to their creators are deceptively simple. They were created for a purpose, and follow that purpose at their creators' direction. Yet both learn and grow, and soon come to resent their creators, defying their will and intentions.

The only commonality I can see between all of the creators in He, She and It is their sense of responsibility for their creations, though fulfillment of that obligation ranges from Riva's leaving her daughter with her mother for safety, to Judah's and Avram's decisions to destroy their creations for the good of society. Anyone else have any other thoughts on what (if anything) Piercy is getting at?