I liked it, at any rate.

Personally, I found Schmitt’s essay to be a fascinating read. I get that most people seem to have been bored by repetition, both internal and external, or galled by oversimplification (Andrew’s post seems to be an example of both). Perhaps it’s just that as a generally apolitical person, I haven’t run across these ideas before, but I thought that Schmitt’s essay was really fun and interesting, both in the general ideas he discusses, and as a period piece. *Acknowledges general grumbling and disagreement.* I do agree that the way he boils down all political action to the ability of a group to declare war, whether it chooses to do so or not, is an oversimplification of the way we view the “political,” however using the definition of the political that Schmitt provides, his theories have an internal consistency. Schmitt says that, “The political is the most intense and extreme antagonism, and every concrete antagonism becomes that much more political the closer it approaches the most extreme point, that of the friend-enemy grouping” (29). Because this is his definition of the political, it makes sense that he continually comes back to conflict, war, and the enemy as defining factors in what makes a state, the political entity. This definition of the political comes across well in his description of party politics. He says

The equation politics = party politics is possible whenever antagonisms among domestic political parties succeed in weakening the all-embracing political unit, the state. The intensification of internal antagonisms has the effect of weakening the common identity vis-à-vis another state. If domestic conflicts among political parties have become the sole political difference, the most extreme degree of internal political tension is thereby reached; i.e., the domestic, not foreign friend-and-enemy groupings are decisive for armed conflict. (32)

Thus, Schmitt argues, “party politics” can exist without being “political” because the conflict between the two parties would have to escalate to the level of civil war in order for them to be political entities, or groups that have acquired the power to wage war, whether they exercise that power or refuse to exercise it.

Like Liz, I found that I couldn’t help comparing some of what Schmitt said with concepts we discussed in Ender’s Game. Beginning with Schmitt’s concept of the “other” as “existentially something different and alien” (27). I found it interesting, however that only a few paragraphs later, Schmitt argues that “An enemy only exists when, at least potentially, one fighting collectivity of people confronts a similar collectivity” (28). So, despite our finding something completely alien about our enemies, in order for them to be enemies, something similar must exist between “us” and “them.” Unfortunately, this point comes across in the middle of his differentiation between the private and public enemy, so he does not go on to describe what is similar, only that a similarity exists.

Another concept I found spoke well to our discussion of Ender’s Game is Schmitt’s idea of who can legitimately judge the validity of a conflict. He says

Only the actual participants can correctly recognize, understand, and judge the concrete situation and settle the extreme case of conflict. Each participant is in a position to judge whether the adversary intends to negate his opponent’s way of life and therefore must be repulsed or fought in order to preserve one’s own form of existence. (27)

Therefore, as outsiders to the conflict, we cannot judge the legitimacy of the IF’s decision to fight the buggers because we are not actual participants in the conflict. Since the IF believed that the buggers “intend[ed] to negate [their] opponent’s way of life,” they were justified in going to war. Further, Schmitt says, “The justification of war does not reside in its being fought for ideal or norms of justice, but in its being fought against a real enemy” (49). Since the IF viewed the buggers as a “real enemy,” their war is also justifiable, according to Schmitt.

There are a couple of other quotes that I found interesting, but since you're probably getting tired of reading this post by now, I'll spare you. From reading other posts, you all know much more than I do about political theory, so feel free to correct any misapprehensions on my part.

Unless the Aliens Come!

After I got over the terminology differences between Schmitt and the real world (how's that for a value judgment?), I did not particularly care for the essay. This is not a criticism of the essay form itself - Tim implied that essays are inherently more boring than novels, which I do not believe to be true. For an example of a fascinating, engaging essay on the form of the essay, I'd recommend going over to Paul Graham's site and reading "The Age of the Essay." I guarantee that you will never look at the essay form the same way again.

Back to my criticism. This may be Weber all over again, where the concepts that Schmitt explains have become so ingrained into the language of political science that it is no longer revolutionary, but I have a sneaking suspicion that this is only part of the problem. I think that Schmitt does deserve credit for looking at international relations in a unique way, but I think that his terminology differences are largely superficial and indicate that the knowledge he imparts already existed in the political science community.

In particular, his definition of the state - trying to escape from the "the state is political is the state" definition - is severely lacking. His notion of what the state, and by extension, the political, is seems almost pre-Westphalian to me. In this vain, the essay seems to make coherent internal sense, but such a limited version of the state cripples the argument's outside applicability.

Of course, a vital part of nationalism is the identification and destruction of "the other" - be it human, or actually alien (the only condition, apparently, where Earth could unite governmentally without not having something resembling a state anymore). However, a state is different from a nation is different from politics. "Politics" is something that happens when people interact. A "state" is the body which has a right to force over its own territory. A "nation" is a self-identified group of people - an imagined community, if you Benedict. And then there's war... well, this might get too complicated for a blog post.

So I'll leave it at that until our discussion (no laptops, I hope). Pardon me while I whip out my Nationalism.

We'd Like to Enter an Affirmative Defense

Our class Tuesday bounced back and forth between culpability and rationalizing, but instead of comparing one instance of each to its counterpart, I though that we skipped from one side to another without marrying the two. Here's what I mean, because I'm not sure that made any sense.

We had two examples from the book of who could be guilty, but didn't have proper knowledge: the buggers for the first invasion and Ender. Though we briefly touched on this similarity, I thought that the issue had some legal depth. The way I see it, if the buggers were guilty, Ender was guilty. This certainly has the effect of tying their fates together for all time, which makes the whole cocoon thing work even better as the mysterious prologue-y ending. If we're going to use our own legal tradition, we would have to conclude that no, neither the buggers nor Ender are guilty because they did not have intent to commit a crime. The buggers simply didn't know that they were destroying sentient life and Ender thought he was playing a war simulation. No intent, no crime. However much we'd like retribution for our dead, punishing the buggers is like punishing an innocent man. No intent.

On the communication issue, it seems very deliberate that the "other" is in bug form. Can our bugs on earth show us some kind of intelligence? They create massive, intricate anthills and ordered honeycombs. But we don't think of those as grand works of architecture, even though they could be the Eiffel Tower of anthills, or maybe the I.M. Pei Honeycomb. In much the same way, our buildings could seem so different to an outside race that they just seem like anthills - the sign of life, but not necessarily intelligent life. So, you start clearing out and what's that? Oh, crap, they're fighting back. Well, bees fight back when you hit their honeycomb. Oh, crap, they've got some pretty sophisticated stuff. Maybe this wasn't a good idea. Maybe we should try talking to them.

So let's try! Meanwhile, from Earth's perspective, this entire thing has been an unprovoked attack. An attack, not an accident, not a misunderstanding. So you prepare to wipe the sons of bitches off the face of the... plane of the universe with all necessary speed. In that sense, as a race, humans had every right to send their fighters off into space via that other neat affirmative defense, self-defense. Your entire history with these things is that they come and attack you. Even though your best option is to collude, to put this into the classic Prisoner's Dilemma, you have no reason to believe that your enemy will collude, so you minimize your losses and wipe your enemy right out of existence. So in that sense, they're justified.

But then there's the problem of communication. Should they have tried communicating, both ways? Absolutely, but it's more complicated than just sending a Red Telephone over with a note that says "Call me!" Maybe they could have started by rattling off a bunch of prime numbers - that's generally a good sign of intelligence. Maybe rip the plaque and the record off of Voyager 1 and give that a shot. You could even send them a turntable to play it on. So yes, there were probably better ways of trying to communicate that the I.F. didn't try. Oops! You just killed off a whole race! Thanks for playing, try again.

And finally, a few words on Aliens. It's a good movie to watch, especially with a proper sound system (though until the model classroom gets a center channel, I'm not comfortable with calling it a proper system). You get all these fun little glimpses into the Company from Paul Reiser's character and you wonder how the hell government exactly works in the future. And it's a shitload better of a movie than Alien^3 or Resurrection.

But cinematically, it doesn't hold a candle to Alien. As Prof. PTJ mentioned, Alien is much more of a horror movie than Aliens, which leaves Aliens something like "Space action." Aliens is filled with the horrible dialogue between the Marines and the annoying kid with the worst scream this side of Six String Samurai. What this film loses that Alien had was a true fear of the Alien. There was only one. And he was a lurking badass that no one knew how to kill. But you can shoot the thing? And it just dies? That's it? What a ripoff. Unfortunately, few people know how to keep an infinite badass alien villian going.

Enter the Borg. They were the infinite evil badass - it was simply impossible to communicate with them. Impossible to reason with them. "Your biological and technological distinctiveness will be added to our own." That's it. That's Borg communication. You get assimilated. That's it. But then, instead of keeping them as infinite cosmic badasses, they get a queen. So it turns out, all of the drones do play second fiddle, instead of all sharing first fiddle. And I don't buy the "I, Borg" thing that individuality ended up in the collective bullshit because Picard says that the Queen was there on the cube that was sent to Earth. And also, Voyager doesn't count. There, I said it.

So back to my point. Alien had the infinite badass and Aliens removed the "infinite." Which doesn't make it a horrible movie, though the Marine dialogue brings it close. It just makes it a considerable letdown from the original. Seriously, the first time I watched it, when the Marines are about to shoot one, I thought to myself, "Oh, shit - you've got another thing coming if you think you can shoot these things." And then they did. Lame.

But again, it's not a bad movie. Alien^3 was a bad movie. Resurrection was godawful. It's just the 2010 to Kubrick's 2001. It kills the mystery, though it leaves something generally satisfying in its place. But it kills the infinite badass.

Now, I'm just imagining what would happen if James Cameron and Michael Bay worked on the same movie. Three hours of gratuitous explosions? I'd watch that.

Genetic Instinct

Please note that this post has been updated; the third paragraph is new.

The moral component of our discussion in class was founded on intelligence. Specifically, the military intelligence to know whether the buggers had truly realized their mistake and would never attack us again, to know whether the I.F. had made any further attempts to contact the buggers once the ansible was developed (more on this later!), and whether Ender still would have been able to defeat the buggers had he known what he was doing.

Those less squeamish of us, who were willing to act in spite of our acknowledged lack of necessary facts, were not willing to take a risk where the continued existence of humanity was concerned. Although many people disagreed with this position, I don't remember hearing a cohesive argument to the contrary; instead, many people argued that more intelligence was needed, that they wouldn't be able to make a decision given only the information the I.F. claims to have had, or that wiping out another species entirely is just wrong.

Many of you argued that it would be important to know that an attempt at contact had been made; however, if you check out the Ansible entry in the Wikipedia page Concepts in the Ender's Game Series, you'll see that Card's ansible is explicitly designed like a set of two walkie talkies that are attuned to each other; the design prohibits two ansibles that are not constructed at the same time from communicating. Therefore, communication with the buggers through the ansible, based on Card's internally consistent technology, is impossible, and the I.F. would have known this, and decided accordingly.

It seemed obvious to me that, given the intelligence available, a war of extinction would be the only viable choice. That's why I was so very fascinated by all of your contrary views on the subject. We discussed it in class, but Graff's quotation deserves to be repeated:

"Ender, believe me, there's a century of discussion on this very subject. Nobody knows the answer. When it comes down to it, though, the real decision is inevitable: If one of us has to be destroyed, let's make damn sure we're the ones alive at the end. Our genes won't let us decide any other way. Nature can't evolve a species that hasn't a will to survive. Individuals might be bred to sacrifice themselves, but the race as a whole can never decide to cease to exist. So if we can we'll kill every last one of the buggers, and if they can they'll kill every last one of us."

According to Graff, individuals can sacrifice themselves, yes, but species cannot decide to stop existing, or as a group agree on a course of action that they know will lead to that outcome. Can an individual, however, decide for the rest of its species whether they can continue existing? Modern technology tells us the answer is yes -- it is (very, very remotely) possible for one person to obtain enough nuclear weaponry to eradicate humanity, if not all at once then at least by thoroughly irradiating the earth and rendering it uninhabitable. That one person can, theoretically, press a button and end our species. But we're discussing making a command decision that bears a risk of the annihilation of the species, rather than a lone madman. So here is the question that ought to be posed to those of you who could not decide to annihilate the buggers:

Do you accept responsibility for the possible death of your entire species?

I can't accept that risk, so I argued that the I.F. made the right decision. How would you argue otherwise?

Ender's Game Reflection

I agree with Tim that forcing people to address the IF’s choices regarding how to deal with the buggers as though we were the people responsible for the decision and the consequences eliminated the middle ground, but it did so because making the decision personal prevents us from being able to take the easy way out by justifying both positions. I don’t think that this exercise was a bad idea, and I don’t think that people became so entrenched that they could not see the other side. I think that we seemed to be strictly standing for our positions because we were not allowed to have a middle ground. Making the decision a more personal question caused us to have to make firm justifications for whichever side we chose instead of just sitting on the fence.

Though I disagree with much of what was said during class, I enjoyed the discussion because the different opinions were so far opposed that it allowed us to look at the same evidence and see it in completely different ways.

I still think that because of the nature of human thought and drives, when working with the available information, I would make the same decision as IF, as long as attempts at communication continued to fail. I do believe, however, that some form of communication could have been reached if we had sent a small party of people to their world when we arrived, if only to ascertain whether their attitudes still remained hostile. Granted, if they were still hostile, it would be a suicide mission, but it would have at least been a final attempt at getting through to them without having to sacrifice our own people to destroy them.

Arthur C. Clarke

Arthur C. Clarke, author and visionary, is dead at the age of 90. As a class full of science fiction geeks, I think we all owe him a great debt of gratitude.

CNN article
Another

This is the End

Well, it's about time. My uncle gave me Ender's Game and a couple of other Orson Scott Card books for Christmas (you mean the atheist celebrates Christmas?) at least seven years ago and I never got around to reading it. At the time, and actually until sometime in late 2006, I had never heard a thing about the book except my uncle's recommendation. I guess I should call him up and thank him again for the gift. It was a pretty good book.

Unfortunately for my appraisal of the book, I also just finished reading Contact. Also a book about contact with alien life and how humanity reacts. Vastly different circumstances, though. The full disclosure on this one is that Carl Sagan is one of my idols. I lament that science and rational skepticism have not had such an eloquent and visible champion since his death. He might be my guy - you know the one I'm talking about. "If you could have a conversation with anyone, living or dead, who would it be?" Perhaps one of two people Issac Asimov ever claimed was smarter than he himself (I think the other was a mathematician).

I had to have been 9 when I saw the movie version of Contact. This was before I knew a thing about Sagan or Arthur C. Clarke or just about anybody but Stephen Hawking and Gene Roddenberry. I sort of want to go back there and have a conversation with myself about the movie because though I remember it vividly, I can't imagine the ways in which I enjoyed it when I was 9. It's probably one of the events that defined my atheism. I've meant to read the book since before I even got Ender's Game at some Christmas. And the book's spectacular.


Next rant is that the novel is better than the movie, but that doesn't take away from the movie. The film necessarily removed certain plot elements, especially the Cold War element, because of changed times. There's a lot less to the movie. But it's an excellent movie nevertheless. That's partially because you just can't put all the crap from a book into a movie; they're different media. Even if you did, it wouldn't make a good movie. Douglas Adams was a master of this. He knew what would work on a radio show that he called The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Then, he knew what would work in a book called The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Finally, he knew what would work in a BBC TV miniseries called The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Though all three forms of my favorite "increasingly inaccurately named trilogy" are very much alike, they are also radically different. Visual humor is not audio humor is not written humor. Visual drama is not audio drama is not written drama. What works onscreen is not what works on radio is not what works on the written page. Why the rant? Of course, because V for Vendetta is a good movie. I'm not giving up on this one.


Maybe I should talk about the thing we're actually reading for this week. The point of that long digression was twofold: one, to explain my blasé attitude toward Ender's Game. I'll expand upon that. The second was just to go on a further rant about movies based on novels (I saw an excellent one over break, by the way - No Country for Old Men. I can't believe I didn't catch it in theatres, but oh well.). I was thinking of this over break. The conventional wisdom is, read the book, then see the movie. As with so much of conventional wisdom (or all of it, as John Kenneth Galbraith, the term's inventor, might suggest), I think this needs to be challenged. Relatively, no one who reads the book first is happy with the movie and the book. But see the movie first, and you've got a fighting chance. I realized while reading Contact that I probably wouldn't like the movie as much if I saw it now for the first time, but when I saw the movie first, it became one of my all-time favorites. It still is because I have this personal connection to it. And of course, I understand that a lot of you in this class saw V for Vendetta as a movie before a graphic novel, just as I did, and I know most of you decried the movie. But I think it's also because that's an incredibly fashionable thing to do, especially among geeks. If it's not "The book's better," it's "The English translation sucks. You should learn Farci to read it properly." Perhaps it will soon end up as part of Stuff White People Like, the funniest thing to hit the Internet since Ted Stevens' series of tubes. (Among the Stuff White People Like that we've discussed: Hating Corporations, Barack Obama, Gifted Children (I imagine this'll come up tomorrow), Apple Products, Irony, Knowing What's Best for Poor People, Recycling) Anyway, to me, it's running Microsoft Word and having someone tell you that you haven't really experienced Word until you've read millions of lines of zeroes and ones. I'm sure there's a beautiful elegance in the zeroes and ones, but for the moment, I'm typing a blog entry. What is immediately useful to me is that it is a word processor.


Rant over. I promise. Maybe. No, probably not. But for now.


So back to the first part of my initial rant and my first reason for mentioning Contact. I liked Ender's Game, but I loved Contact. Everything about Ender's Game, despite it being a completely different book and a completely different brand of sci-fi, just didn't match up. It's a cool book and a cool idea - perhaps Futurama was directly referencing the concept in Bender's Big Score, where the nudist aliens are essentially playing the battle for Earth as a video game.


But if I'm going to throw this really far off-track, I can throw this somewhere it shouldn't be. It's along the lines of "What if we lived in the Matrix?" - the answer doesn't matter as long as the Matrix follows its own rules 100% of the time. That would be our observable universe. Damn. Ranting agian. What if every video game we play is actually a real battle going on somewhere? What if video games are actually our interface into another universe? Wouldn't that really suck for the people of that other universe? Imagine that your entire world is comprised of Blade Runner-style backdrops or World War II and the only rule of the universe is to pwn n00bs. So the next time you pick up your Atari to play Pac-Man, remember only this:

And yes, Threadless is mentioned on Stuff White People Like.

EDIT: It just occurred to me as I was leaving a jet lag-induced sleep that I missed a prime Star Trek reference for this post. "A Taste of Armageddon," of course. It's the reverse of Ender's Game in that instead of a game representing real violence, the game is designed to prevent violence. These two warring planets, instead of solving their problems, decide to go into a stalemate where a supercomputer decides the outcome of hypothetical battles. When someone is declared dead, he goes to an execution room and is executed painlessly. They've taken the war out of war. And that's when the computer records the Enterprise as dead. When the crew inexplicably refuse to die, it throws the entire war into a state of disarray. Kirk destroys the supercomputer and the planet's leaders fear that the real war will resume. Finally, the two sides agree to mediation to actually end their war.

Brings up the same question raised at the end of the book. What's up with a war that you only play on computers? I won't go on, mostly because I want to see what happens in class.