Jack’s Last Battle: Some Final Thoughts on Lost and C. S. Lewis

This past week saw the series finales of two of my long-running favorite shows, Lost and 24. Without them, I will probably get more work done. So here are some final thoughts of these two (usually) brilliant and revolutionary shows.

To deal with Lost first, I have long cherished the fact that they included C. S. Lewis in the guise of Charlotte Staples Lewis among the great philosophers such as Locke, Rousseau, and Hume to be named on the show. So I was particularly intrigued by the fact that they chose to pull off an ending reminiscent of how Lewis ended the Chronicles of Narnia with the Last Battle. Lewis famously (or infamously) had almost all the major human characters from the series killed off in a train accident and taken off to Aslan's kingdom where they all live happily ever after. Keep in mind that we are dealing with a series of kid's books. Most infamously of all, Lewis has Susan left behind, because she had abandoned "belief" in Narnia for her adult cares, mainly nylon stockings. Many have argued that nylons were meant as code for sex and that Lewis was telling kids that if they have pre-marital sex they will go to hell.

Anyone familiar with Lewis' wider body of work, not just Narnia, would tell you that, for Lewis, it really is about the small things, such as nylons, to such an extent that if Lewis had written that Susan was not going to be saved because of her sex life, sex is really code for all the petty vain things, like nylons, that are really at the heart of the matter. In Lewis' theology, it is always the small sins that are important and which damn us. The big sins are merely the end result of all the small sins. For this reason, it is of little importance that, in Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Edmund betrays his siblings to the White Witch. The real issue at hand was Edmund's pride and jealousy, present from the beginning of the story. A chastened humble Edmund is a savable Edmund, regardless of the consequences of his misdeeds. On the contrary, having to live with the consequences serves all the more as a chastisement to cure the original sin. The real problem with sex is not the act itself. The real issues (at least potentially) at hand are the pride that led one to think they are above conventional morality, the desire, not so much for physical pleasure, but to be part of the inner circle of people in the "know" and the rebellion against conventional morals. As Lewis points out in his essay, the Inner Ring:

Freud would say, no doubt, that the whole thing is a subterfuge of the sexual impulse. I wonder whether the shoe is not sometimes on the other foot. I wonder whether, in ages of promiscuity, many a virginity has not been lost less in obedience to Venus than in obedience to the lure of the caucus. For of course, when promiscuity is the fashion, the chaste are outsiders. They are ignorant of something that other people know. They are uninitiated. And as for lighter matters, the number of people who first smoked or first got drunk for a similar reason is probably very large.

A person could easily come to regret a sexual action, in of itself, and repent. It is not so simple to repent from the pride that led to it. Without facing the issue of pride there can be no meaningful repentance for sex and the deed will be repeated and worse things will follow.

The major mystery with Lost in the final season was what to make of the alternative parallel universe, populated by versions of the main characters, that came into existence, seemingly after Juliet Burke set off a nuclear bomb on the Island at the end of season five. I was hoping for Desmond Hume to bring back John Locke from the alternative universe to save the Island from the smoke monster, who had taken the form of Locke. (Hats off to Terry O'Quinn for the range he showed over the series, playing the noble John Locke with his struggles with faith in the Island for four seasons, the smoke monster pretending to be Locke for one season, and the utterly satanic yet chillingly charming smoke monster this last season. Whatever qualms I may have with the quality of the writing of this show at times, I cannot stress enough how talented a cast of actors Lost had.) The alternative universe Locke would be followed by the rest of the people in the alternative universe, who sacrifice themselves and the happier existences of the alternative universe to cross back over and save the Island.

I was always far more of a John Locke fan than a Jack Shephard fan. Shephard might be important as the political leader of the survivors, establishing a community, but it was Locke, who confronted the big questions of meaning and the purpose of the Island. (I never cared about the Jack-Kate-Sawyer love triangle.) I would compare the relationship between Shephard and Locke to the relationship, I once discussed, between Peter and Ender Wiggin in the Ender series. Instead of letting this play out, the writers decided to let Jack take on what should have been Locke's role as the faith leader to save the Island.

To top it all off, in the end, the alternative universe ends up playing no role in the final conflict with the smoke monster. It is a gateway world where all the characters who died during the show along with the characters who survived but will one day die have been gathered together to fix their relationships before moving on together. The "Jew" Benjamin Linus is even given a truly moving repentance scene that Lewis would surely have approved of. Linus asks Locke for forgiveness for trying to kill him; the sin he focuses on is not murder, but the jealousy that drove him to it. That being said, this gathering together was a cop-out that dodged the major issues and failed to give six seasons of mystery the ending it deserved. Whatever else you can say about what Lewis did to Narnia in the Last Battle, and it certainly is the most difficult of the seven books, at least his narrative made sense.

My Presentation at the History and Fiction Conference at the University of West Georgia: Speaker for the Dead: a Historian’s Tale (Part II)

Post I


The three books that make up the Speaker Trilogy are about Ender's search for redemption. At the end of Ender's Game Ender secretly writes a book, called the Hivequeen and the Hegemon, to explain to humanity that the Buggers were not the monsters everyone thought they were. He writes this book under the pseudonym Speaker for the Dead. Having destroyed his own reputation, Ender disappears. The novel Speaker for the Dead opens more than three thousand years later. Ender is still alive, thanks to the laws of relativity, having spent the vast majority of these years traveling at near light speed. Over this time, Ender's book has become the holy scriptures of a major humanist religion, the Speakers for the Dead. While the Speakers do not have a deity or an afterlife, they believe in the value of all intelligent life. They try to tell the life stories of those who have departed this life in the same way that the original Speaker for the Dead spoke about the Buggers.

 Ender operates under the cover of a common speaker. With him is the last hive queen. Ender's hope is to one day find a world in which the Buggers could repopulate and where humans would no longer fear them. He takes his chance on a world called Lusitania; a world on which humanity has once again discovered an alien race, one with stone-age technology, called the Pequeninos. This new first encounter has come with its own set of misunderstandings. Already one scientist sent to study these beings has been murdered. Ender will have to stand forth as Speaker for the Dead, not only to rectify his own xenocide but to stop a new one.

A speaker tells over the life stories of those who had died not to praise or condemn the dead but simply so that those hearing could understand what the deceased stood for and how they understood themselves. The motive of the speaker is that he believes that there is an inherent value to human existence and that by honestly seeking to come to an understanding of an individual one can come to a greater understanding of humanity as a whole. I see the historian as serving a similar function for modern-day society. We are the stewards of the knowledge of societies and worlds that are dead and buried. Their values and all that they stood for are gone and there are few who would even understand them. (Just as our society will one day pass from this earth to be inherited by people who are incapable of even understanding our values and what we stood for.) The historian's task is to serve as a speaker for those who can no longer speak for themselves. Not out of any present-day agenda, but simply because he believes that human beings have intrinsic value and that by honestly coming to terms with human beings, even those no longer here, we can come to a greater understanding of present-day humanity. This is not to say that the past repeats itself, but simply that it gives a context with which to place ourselves.

The historian studies the past, but more than that he lives in the past. If the past is like a foreign country then the historian is like the intelligence officer who has spent decades living in the country he studies and has more of this country within him than that of his native land. While this intelligence officer may never become a native of the country he studies, he will never again be able to truly be a native of the country of his origin either. Not that I believe that historians are infallible oracles from whom the past radiates through. Just as a person today cannot embody anything more than just a perspective of this world so to the historian is simply an expression of one among many legitimate perspectives on the past.

Being a historian involves being both a liberal and a conservative. The historian is a liberal in that he actively seeks to challenge the status quo. He lives with an open mind and with the possibility of other ways of living one's life. On the other hand the field of history, unlike any other field of study besides for religion, is built around defending tradition, the conservative action par excellence. Not to say that the historian necessarily wants to replicate past ways of living in the present. That being said, if the historian did not believe that there was some real value to traditional ways of life he would have chosen a different field.

My goal in teaching history is to challenge students by forcing them to come to terms with the fact that there were sane, moral people who thought in ways that go against everything my students have been taught to believe. For example, most societies in history have tended to be hierarchal in their structure and in particular they have been patriarchal. I take it for granted that all of my students oppose slavery. I wish for them to understand why sane, rational, moral people made different decisions.

I, living in the year 2009, oppose slavery. It is economically inefficient and it undermines the moral fabric of society, both of the slaves and of the slaveholders. The list of objections can go on. Put me back to the United States of 1850 and none of these arguments change, but they are met with different concerns. Slavery is the foundation of the southern economy and the South is unlikely to give up their slaves without a fight that will cost thousands if not hundreds of thousands of lives. As for the black slaves themselves, it is questionable that most of them would benefit. They have not, by and large, been trained to live as free people or to take up the responsibilities of citizenship. With all of my visceral hatred of slavery, it would not take me too long until I find myself negotiating with southern slave holders. How about we agree to allow slavery if slaves are given some legal protections, maybe some limits on work hours and bans against bodily mutilation. And if slaveholders refuse to budge, we can simply cave in and give them everything. Slavery, as a backward economic system that has no place in our industrial age, will likely die eventually without anyone doing anything. I would shake hands with the Devil, knowing full well what I was doing. Now we know that those in the North who made such calculations failed. The Union did not hold, there was a civil war and over half a million Americans lost their lives. It does not mean that they were wrong.

As for the defenders of slavery themselves, it should be noted that it is possible to justify slavery without turning to racism. There is no problem as long as you operate on the assumption that society is meant to be hierarchal with some people at the top and some below. This does not even have to mean that those on top are in any way better. Even today we learn to live with the reality that we, as Americans, live on top of the economic pyramid, despite the fact that we have done nothing to deserve it, while much of the world starves. Once we enter our post-Enlightenment world where equality and not hierarchy is the presumed natural order then racism becomes the obvious tool to allow us to continue to enjoy the benefits of the hierarchal model.

I want to bring about just a glimmer of a crisis of faith; that just for a moment my students should wonder whether it is we who are wrong and Plato, Aristotle, and Jefferson Davis who were right. Not that I want my students to stop believing in equality. On the contrary, I want to make them stronger believers. I would want them to go from simply spouting dogma about equality to actively accepting it, fully aware of the price they pay in doing so. By being aware of the Devil's bargains made in the past my students may come to an awareness of the sorts of deals with the Devil made in the present. For is that not what politics is, a deal with the Devil as you compromise and accept a situation that you do not like in the hope of getting some of what you want and avoid getting nothing.

I often wonder how historians of the future will judge us. By treating our predecessors firmly, but with charity, maybe we can begin to set the ground to receive a similar judgment at our own coming trial when we can no longer speak for ourselves, but need a speaker for the dead to stand in our place.

My Presentation at the History and Fiction Conference at the University of West Georgia: Speaker for the Dead: a Historian’s Tale (Part I)

This weekend I was down in Carrollton GA for the History and Fiction Conference hosted by the University of West Georgia. I would like to thank Dr. Julia Farmer for helping to organize the conference and for her personal kindness to me in helping me deal with Sabbath issues. She also gave an excellent presentation on Ariosto and his conflicted attitude toward Charles V. I stayed at the Jameson Inn and the staff there was exceptionally courteous, particularly in terms of the Sabbath. The room was nice too so if anyone reading this finds themselves in the South I strongly recommend this franchise.

 At the conference I spoke about the work of Orson Scott Card, particularly Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead, and its influence on me as a historian. I am posting the draft I wrote for the speech. It is largely taken from various blog posts I have done here. My advisor has at times questioned my decision to spend the amount of time that I do writing this blog; time that could surely be better spent on other pursuits like finishing my degree. So now I have managed to actually accomplish something positive with my blog. I did not read from the text so my actual presentation differs slightly. In keeping with my style of teaching, I accompanied the lecture with a slide show of pictures and important concepts.



I would like to thank you the department for inviting me to speak. It is not often that I get to combine my role as a historian and my role as a reader of science fiction. History and science fiction have a lot more income than you might otherwise think. Science fiction, as those who are active consumers of it know, is much more than just space battles, babes in skimpy spacesuits and saving the universe from giant insects. Like history, science fiction, at its best is a study as to the nature of society. Traditionally history has been a study of states; in recent decades we have expanded to a wider conception of society. One could say that we historians are finally catching up to those in science fiction. Today I would like to discuss the work of one particular science fiction writer, Orson Scott Card, particularly his Ender series, and its influence on me as a historian. I was first introduced to Card when I was in high school by my younger brother, who had to read Ender's Game for class. He wanted me to read it so he would not have to. Well that was the start of a very fruitful relationship. The Ender series began with Ender's Game, published in 1985. Ender's Game went on to win both the Hugo and Nebula awards. This was followed the year after with Speaker for the Dead which also went on to win the Hugo and Nebula awards. Card went on to complete the story of Ender Wiggin with Xenocide (1991) and Children of the Mind (1996). In recent years Card has written a parallel series to Ender, the Shadow series, and this past year he has written a bridge novel, Ender in Exile, taking place between Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead.

On a general level the Ender series is a magnificent example of science-fiction as a tool to explore the nature of society. There is one of Card's trademark issues, the society building story. A group of random strangers, who have no particular reason to like each other, are thrown together by circumstances. What sort of relationships will they form? Will they prove willing to sacrifice for each other and if so why? Card confronts the issue of history in a more direct way with the figure of the speaker for the dead, whose task it is to explain to those living who the departed where and what they stood for.

Ender's Game is about a boy named Andrew "Ender" Wiggin who is drafted into a military training school. The premise of the school is to gather gifted children from around the world and train the next Napoleon or the next Alexander the Great to fight the Buggers, a race of insect-like aliens that have twice attempted to invade earth and destroy humanity. For those of you who have not read the book, this book is not, as you might think, spaceships, space battles and saving the world with a healthy side does of implied xenophobia, with the aliens standing in for some undesirable group. For one thing this book is only incidentally about battling aliens. This is a story about relationships and the building of a society as bonds of friends are born among the students at Battle School and a corps of future officers is formed to fight the coming war. I read Card as a running meditation as to the question of how one builds and maintains a society? What causes people to join together as a society? How does the individual relate to the surrounding society? What brings an individual to make sacrifices, sometimes the ultimate sacrifice, for the sake of his society? Ender's battle school is a group of competing societies. Ender Wiggin is a genius, his real talent is his ability to handle people. Ender is someone whom other people are willing to follow. People admire him and desire to learn from him and emulate him. Ender in turn is someone who honestly desires to help people. The narrative arch of the novel revolves around Ender building societies. Ender connects to various people and gets them to forge bounds with each other. These people become his subordinate commanders in the coming war against the Buggers.


It would be a mistake to confuse this society with a group of friends. While the societies that populate Orson Scott Card's novels are often quite small and might be passed off as a group of friends, it is not friendship that binds them. Card's plots tend to revolve around the issue of his characters, despite the fact that there may not be any great friendship between them, attempting to build a society together. For their societies to succeed Card's characters must confront the question of what are they willing to sacrifice for it, ultimately for people whom they owe nothing to and have no logical reason to care for. What Card's societies can be are families. Families, particularly in the world of Orson Scott Card, are groups of people thrown together, with complete disregard for compatibility or love. Despite this, family members do form bounds of loyalty with each other, even with family members that they dislike and continue to dislike.

Ender's Game climaxes with Ender and his team defeating the Buggers and saving the world. Ender destroys the Bugger home world, a la the Death Star and Alderaan, with a Molecular Disruption device. Humanity is now free to colonize the galaxy without competition and Ender goes to one of the former Bugger worlds as governor. Living happily ever after? Not exactly. The novel ends with Ender finding the last remaining Bugger hive queen and learning the truth. The Buggers, having finally realized that humans were intelligent beings even if a different kind than the Buggers, had decided to leave humanity in peace. The human fleet that Ender led had destroyed an intelligent race of beings that no longer posed any threat. He, not the Buggers, was the mass murder.

Interdisciplinary Conference on History and Fiction

I am down for my third conference presentation. I will be speaking at an “Interdisciplinary Conference on History and Fiction,” hosted by the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature at the University of West Georgia. My paper is titled “The Historian as a Speaker for the Dead: a Historian’s Perspective on the Ender Series.” It is going to be an expanded version of a piece I posted here on this blog. The conference is not until November. So between now and then I have to actually write the paper.

Orson Scott Card’s Failure to Make the Case for Traditional Marriage against Robert A. Heinlein

In a recent interview on National Review, Orson Scott Card responded to comparisons between him and Robert A. Heinlein particularly in regards to Ender’s Game and Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. Both of these novels are works of military science fiction that deal with wars set in a future world against giant insect-like creatures. According to Card, while he has read a number of Heinlein’s novels, he has never read Starship Troopers and decided never to read it when he was told of the similarity to Ender’s Game. Card goes on to point out that his and Heinlein’s politics could not be further apart; Heinlein was a libertarian while he is an ardent communitarian.

I take it as a given that Card is familiar with a certain aspect of Heinlein’s work connected to his libertarianism that, while it does not appear in Starship Troopers, permeates almost everything else he wrote. I speak of course about Heinlein’s advocacy for polyandrous relationships and group marriage. For example in the Moon is a Harsh Mistress the colonists on the Moon take to group marriage as a practical solution to their situation. They have far more men than women so instead of forcing most of the male population to be celibate (funny that the issue of homosexuality is never raised) every woman has multiple husbands. While the more puritanical citizens of Earth look askance at such behavior, the Moon colonists have embraced this alternative lifestyle and fight to maintain it. Whatever one may think of Heinlein’s ideas, there is no question that he was a brilliant man and one of the truly great visionary writers of the twentieth century. His views cannot merely be cast aside and ignored.

In Ender in Exile, Card’s recently published sequel to Ender’s Game, Card sets up a very similar situation with the soldiers now turned colonists on the former bugger world now named Shakespeare. There is a shortage of women, something that will not be rectified for decades to come when the first batch of colonists arrive. The acting governor of Shakespeare, Vitaly Kolmogorov, makes the very un-Heinlein like decision to maintain monogamy. He has all the women distributed in marriage by lottery, with a little cheating on the side to cover certain particular situations. All men who do not win out in this lottery are forced, in theory at least, into a life of celibacy. In its own way Card’s decision to defend monogamy under such extreme conditions is equally as radical as Heinlein’s willingness to abandon it.

Card puts a human face, Sel Menach, to the situation and then turns him into his mouth-piece. Sel nobly turns down his assistant, Afraima, who comes onto him. (As a side point of interest, I should mention that both of these characters happen to be Jewish.) Not only does Sel turn her down, he also asks that he either be allowed to quit or to have her fired so that she would no longer serve as a temptation. This whole bit is a remarkably lousy piece of writing that serves no purpose in furthering the book other than to foreshadow an equally lousy scene later on in the book when Ender has to keep his own teenage hormones in check.

I have no problem with Card arguing for traditional social values. Particularly in this present climate, we need every voice we can get. And Card has generally been one of the more effective voices out there. It is precisely because of the situation we are in today, though, that we need something better than: “Monogamy has been proven, over and over, to be the optimum social arrangement. It’s not about genes, it’s about children – they have to grow up into the society we want them to maintain.” (Pg. 104) What exactly is so great about monogamy and when has it been proven over and over to be the best to the extent that one would make such a sacrifice when Heinlein offers such a tempting solution?

A Blog to Take Over the World (Part I)

In the novel Ender’s Game, while Ender Wiggin is away at Battle School, his siblings back on earth, Peter and Valentine Wiggin, become, in essence, bloggers as part of Peter’s plan to become a world leader. The idea being that on the net he can assume an identity of his own choosing and not be bound by the fact that he is only twelve years old. Through the net, his ideas can reach anyone in the world. Thus he can become a person of influence, someone whom people across the world would willingly listen to. Orson Scott Card published Ender’s Game in 1985, before the rise of the internet so it truly was clairvoyant of him to appreciate how something like the internet could change how information is exchanged and how this could affect the discourse of power. The internet allows a person to reach everyone without any mediation, thus bypassing the traditional guardians of public discourse. The moment I have the internet to reach people with then I do not have to work for a major newspaper, hold public office or even hold an advanced degree and a tenured post at a prestigious university to be a major player in the public discourse. This makes me, a lone individual, powerful in ways that I could never have been before the internet.


Peter takes on the identity of Locke (a reference to the seventeenth-century English political philosopher John Locke) and Valentine take on the identity of Demosthenes (the famous fifth century BCE Athenian orator). While one might expect someone with designs on taking over the world to become a rabble-rouser, playing to the prejudices of the masses, Peter’s Locke does nothing of the sort. It is Valentine’s Demosthenes who is the rabble-rouser. She plays a populist conservative, who whips up popular hysteria, particularly against Russia. In this role, she serves as a foil for Locke, who is a voice of moderation and tolerance. In this capacity, Demosthenes is someone whom Locke can argue against, which is why Peter brought her into this project in the first place. Peter chooses not to play the role of the rabble-rouser because he recognizes that, while such a position can easily lead to widespread popular support, it will close off any chance of gaining the respect of the intellectual and political elites, which is what Peter craves. (This is Card making fun of what he sees as the elitist liberal establishment. In reality, they are just as prejudiced and open to manipulation as the populace they heap scorn upon; it just requires a different and more subtle lever to push them.)


Initially, Demosthenes is much more successful than Locke at gaining popularity. This makes perfect sense considering the nature of their styles and whom they are trying to attract. Peter understood this going in, yet it still frustrates him. He perseveres, though, and eventually succeeds. Over the course of the events narrated in the Shadow series, Peter rises to become the Hegemon and leads a united planet into a golden age of expansion into space.

Peter Wiggin is a model for me. Not that I really have any plans on taking over the world, though I do like to joke about that. I do wish to be Locke though. The internet is full of Demostheneses of both the liberal and conservative variety, spewing invective and playing to people’s passion. This goes to the very nature of the medium itself. In such a crowded marketplace the one who shouts the loudest gets heard. People like a spectacle and take a certain pleasure in beholding people saying extreme things. This is the secret to Ann Coulter’s success. I want to have a positive effect on the world. I believe that my background and my Asperger syndrome allow me to have a different perspective on things from most people and a message to give them. I do not see myself as trying to convince people to become more religious, less religious, liberal or secular. I see this blog as giving people an alternative vision of the world; one that transcends the categories that people are used to.

(To be continued ...)

The Society Building Story and its Implications for Individualism and Faith

I have written a number of posts dealing with Orson Scott Card, Stephenie Meyer and their use of society building stories in their fiction. Before leaving the issue (for now), I thought I should say a few words to wrap things up. In looking back at my posts on the topic I realized that I failed to adequately explain why I think this issue is so important. Stephenie Meyer’s decision to follow Card’s lead is not a matter of artistic copying but of a shared critique of modern individualism and a shared religious vision.

At its heart, the society building story, in which a small group of individuals, with little reason to care for one another, are thrown together and attempt to build a society with one another, possesses an ambiguous relationship with individualism. If one wanted to be simplistic one could even accuse it of being anti-individualism. The characters start off as relatively independent individuals. The plot turns on their decision to surrender their independence and tie themselves down to the needs of the group. For example, in The Host, Wanderer surrenders herself to helping her community of free humans. With Ender, however strong he might be, he needs some sort of group to give himself up to. This is a far cry from the sort of do it alone heroic individualism at the heart of so much of modern fiction and of science fiction as well. This is not the work of Robert A. Heinlein; this is most definitely not Ayn Rand.

One could even link this to the religious beliefs of Card and Meyer. Card and Meyer are both Mormons, a religious group known for its strong sense of group discipline. Card and Meyer could therefore be read as anti-moderns, whose message is that, to find fulfillment, one must reject the individualism of modern secular society and submit oneself to the demands of the group; much in the same that Mormons and followers of other religions allow themselves to be controlled by the dictates of their group.

In a sense, though, the society building story used by Card and Meyer is strongly individualistic. The characters freely choose to bind themselves to their newly built society. So this act of society building is ironically very much the act of individuals; they could not have succeeded unless they were such strong individuals. Also, this act of society building is done in defiance of some other society. Wanderer rejects the perfect society of the Souls. The Cullen family of Twilight, by their very existence, is a rejection of the Volturi and their value system. Ender’s Dragon army fights the system at the Battle School even as it plays its mock battles against other armies.

This ambiguity about individualism is also at the core of work of Robert A. Heinlein, the father of heroic individualism within science fiction, as well. In certain respects, Heinlein is a forerunner for both Card and Meyer. While Starship Troopers glorifies the individual soldier it is also a remarkable ode to duty and an indictment of modern society’s inability to install a sense of duty and responsibility within its members. Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress can be read as a society building novel itself. It is about a computer led rebellion by the residents of the Moon against the rule of Earth. The people living on Heinlein’s future Moon reject the paternal statism of the countries of Earth and strive to build their own libertarian state. The real struggle in the story is not over whether the people of the Moon can defeat the occupation forces from Earth but if such a diverse group of people can band together as one group.

Card and Meyer are hardly supporters of the sort of polyamorous marriages that Heinlein advocated. Card and Meyer belong to the mainstream Mormon Church, not to one of the polygamous sects, so they are not into alternative lifestyles. As I see it, their use of society building stories has a distinctively religious component to it. Any religious group operating in the western world today operates, to a certain extent, on a similar model as the societies found in the work of Card and Meyer. All religious groups are, in one way or another, counter-cultures. In a secular state, the government cannot be used to advance the cause of any religious group. Even more importantly, in a secular society, the very ethos of the society is contrary to the values of established religions. One can see communities of faith as collections of renegades from the general society who have been thrown together by circumstances other than their personal like for each other and must join together to form their own alternative society.

The society building story as it is used by Card and Meyer carries the distinct stamp of their Mormon faith. Mormonism is a religion organized in a highly authoritarian manner, but also one in which power is closely centered at the base. The Mormon religion does exert a tremendous amount of control over the day to day lives of its followers; members most give tithes to the Church and serve the Church in the field as missionaries. That being said the Church maintains no paid clergy; instead, leading members volunteer to serve for a fixed period of time. What is truly fascinating about how Mormons operate is their system of wards. Wards are small chapters, usually encompassing a single city or neighborhood. For Mormons, wards operate as an extension of the family; there are ward meeting and ward picnics. Mormons fall under the authority of a given ward simply by living in a given area. They do not get to choose who their fellow ward members are; if they do not get along with other members of their ward they do not have the option of breaking away and creating a new ward. (Considering all the fights and splits that go on in synagogues, I can see the advantages of such a system.) So an individual Mormon’s relationship to a ward runs in terms of a society building story. One is thrown in with a group of people that one has no particular reason to care for. In such a situation, there is no other choice but to build for oneself, out of such material, a society, and even a family.

Another Ender Post

Dragon recently posted a piece on Ender’s Game. (See here.) She analyzes the novel in terms of Erik Erikson’s theory of social development. I have no background in educational psychology so this piece was a real eye-opener for me.

The Adolescent Military Genius versus the Friendly Neighborhood Vampires: An Analysis of Orson Scott Card and his Influence on Twilight. (Part II)

(This is the continuation of a previous post. See here.) 

 

It would be a mistake to confuse a society with a group of friends. While the societies that populate Orson Scott Card’s novels are often quite small and might be passed off as a group of friends, it is not friendship that binds them. Often the societies in Orson Scott Card’s novels are built by people thrown together against their will. They do not necessarily like each and often never come to like each other. Despite this fact, there is a bond that does form between the characters. Card’s plots tend to revolve around the issue of his characters, despite the fact that there may not be any great friendship between them, attempting to build a society together. For their societies to succeed, Card’s characters must confront the question of what are they willing to sacrifice for it, ultimately for people whom they owe nothing to and have no logical reason to care for. 

The relationships that Ender builds are very different than what you find in Harry Potter. As Dumbledore points out, Harry’s strength comes from his love for his friends, Ron and Hermione. Harry, Ron, and Hermione are a group because they like and care for each other. Their bonds to each other came out of their own free will. The contrast to Harry is Lord Voldemort who, while he has followers, people who worship him as a god and are even willing to die for him, has no friends. Voldemort is completely self-sufficient, loves nothing to him and he has no need for anyone’s love. This, ultimately, is Voldemort’s undoing.

Ender has a lot in common with Lord Voldemort. He is set up from the very beginning as a loner. The people who run the Battle School, purposely isolate him, surround him with people who are hostile to him and, in one case, would go so far as to try to kill him. When Ender succeeds at forming bonds with people he is immediately taken away to another group. Because of this Ender is forced to turn completely inward. The only person he can rely on is himself; he has no friends. Ender’s victory over the Battle School system is that, despite his inability to form friendships, he does build relationships, many of which prove capable of overcoming the limitations of time and space. What Card’s societies can be are families. Families, particularly in the world of Orson Scott Card, are groups of people thrown together, with complete disregard for compatibility or love. Despite this, family members do form bonds of loyalty with each other, even with family members that they dislike and continue to dislike. This connection between societies and families is brought home by the fact that the one close emotional bond that Ender maintains over his years at the Battle School is with his sister Valentine on earth. She reunites with him after the battle with the Buggers and goes with him into exile. In the later books, Ender marries a woman named Novinha and becomes a stepfather to her children. In addition, Ender has a daughter of sorts, a computer entity named Jane. These characters, and in a more abstract way the various residents of Lusitania, become a new society for Ender to deal with. Card purposely blurs the line between society and family to the point that they become extensions of each other. 

Considering Card’s emphasis on societies/families, it is not a coincidence that Card is an outspoken fan of the television show Firefly. In Card’s review of the Firefly film, Serenity, he commented that: 

On that ship [Serenity] we had an interlocking community with a history, rather like what has been a-building with Lost and what was developed over the years with Friends. … The key to this kind of movie is that you create a community that the audience wishes they belonged to, with a leader that even audience members who don't follow anybody would willingly follow. That will be the key to Ender's Game if the movie is ever successfully made; and it is the key to Serenity. 

Firefly and Lost, for that matter, are stories about people thrown together by chance. These people do not necessarily like each other and they may even hate each other, yet they are forced to come together as a common group.

The Adolescent Military Genius versus the Friendly Neighborhood Vampires: An Analysis of Orson Scott Card and his Influence on Twilight. (Part I)

Stephenie Meyer, the bestselling author of the Twilight series, has a lot in common with the legendary science fiction author, Orson Scott Card. They are both active members of the Church of Latter Day Saints (Mormons). More importantly, while neither of them is known for religious novels per se, they both write from a background of faith and bring a strongly religious, though not particularly Mormon, vision to their work. Beyond this, I would suggest that the Twilight series contains certain Cardian elements. This should not be surprising as Stephenie Meyer has publicly stated that she is a fan of Card’s work.

I read Card as a running meditation as to the question of how one builds and maintains a society? What causes people to join together as a society? How does the individual relate to the surrounding society? What brings an individual to make sacrifices, sometimes the ultimate sacrifice, for the sake of his society? These issues underline almost all of Card’s work. For the purposes of this post I will focus on Card’s most famous work, Ender’s Game, and it various sequels.

On the surface, Ender’s Game is about a war between humans and an alien race known as the Buggers. Andrew “Ender” Wiggin attends a school for brilliant children. The purpose of this school is to create the next brilliant military commander, another Napoleon Bonaparte or Alexander the Great. The children at this school are being trained for one thing only, war. As such their primary education revolves around military strategy games, either computer games or the mock combat of the battle room.

The war against the Buggers is only an incidental part of the story. What Card is interested in is this Battle school as a group of competing societies. While the main character, Ender Wiggin, is a genius, his real talent is his ability to handle people. Ender is someone whom other people are willing to follow. People admire him and desire to learn from him and emulate him. Ender in turn is someone who honestly desires to help people. The narrative arch of the novel revolves around Ender building societies. Through the various stations that Ender finds himself, whether as a Launchie, as an unvalued member of Salamander army, as a valued member of Rat army, as a Toon leader in Phoenix army, or as the head of Dragon Army, Ender connects to various people and gets them to forge bounds with each other. Many of these people, such as Petra Arkanian and Bean, eventually become his subordinate commanders in the coming war against the Buggers.

What is interesting about Ender’s character is that, even though he is this great leader, he is a reluctant leader and does not seek power or recognition. Ender does not put himself at the center of the societies he builds. He always remains off to the side and alone.

The foil for Ender is his older brother, Peter Wiggin. Peter possesses similar gifts as Ender. The difference, though, between Peter and Ender, and the reason why the Battle school never took Peter, is that Peter lacks a firm moral base; Peter manipulates people for his own ends and is completely untrustworthy. While Ender is away from home at the Battle school playing his war games, Peter plays his own game, attempting, under the pseudo-name of Locke, to become a world leader. What is so interesting, though, about how Card deals with this character is that, while Peter may be immoral, he is not evil nor is he the villain of the story. Over the course of the novel and its sequels, Peter manages to do a tremendous amount of good even if the things that he does always seem to incidentally help him.

Ender and Peter can be seen as models of two different kinds of leaders, who come to be the center of two different kinds of societies. Peter is a political leader, who desires power over other people. He accomplishes his goals by making it in people’s interest to put him in power. He eventually becomes the Hegemon of the entire earth and leads mankind in its expansion to the stars. Ender is a spiritual leader. Even though he leads the first human colony to a foreign planet and becomes its governor, he gives up his post for a life of exile. His legacy is a book that he writes called the Hive Queen and the Hegemon. This book becomes a bible for those humans who go off to settle the galaxy and it spawns a religious movement known as the Speakers for the Dead. In the end, while Peter may have been a great political leader, nothing survives him. While Ender does not build any physical empires, he creates a society, beyond any physical boundaries, that lasts for thousands of years.

(To be continued ...)

Speaker For the Dead

In Orson Scott Card’s Ender series, the main character Andrew Wiggin serves as a Speaker for the Dead. He tells over the life stories of those who had died not to praise or condemn the dead but simply so that those hearing could understand what the deceased stood for and how they understood themselves. The motive of the speaker is that he believes that there is an inherent value to human existence and that by honestly seeking to come to an understanding of an individual one can come to a greater understanding of humanity as a whole. I see the historian as serving a similar function for modern-day society. 

We are the stewards of the knowledge of societies and worlds that are dead and buried. Their values and all that they stood for are gone and there are few who would even understand them. (Just as our society will one day pass from this earth to be inherited by people who are incapable of even understanding our values and what we stood for.) The historian’s task is to serve as a speaker for those who can no longer speak for themselves. Not out of any present-day agenda, but simply because he believes that human beings have intrinsic value and that by honestly coming to terms with human beings, even those no longer here, we can come to a greater understanding of present-day humanity. This is not to say that the past repeats itself, but simply that it gives a context with which to place ourselves. The historian studies the past, but more than that he lives in the past. If the past is like a foreign country then the historian is like the intelligence officer who has spent decades living in the country he studies and has more of this country within him than that of his native land. While this intelligence officer may never become a native of the country he studies, he will never again be able to truly be a native of the country of his origin either. Not that I believe that historians are infallible oracles from whom the past radiates through. Just as a person today cannot embody anything more than just a perspective of this world so to the historian is simply an expression of one amongst many legitimate perspectives on the past. 

My goal in teaching history is to challenge students by forcing them to come to terms with the fact that there were sane, moral people who thought in ways that go against everything my students have been taught to believe. For example, most societies in history have tended toward hierarchy in their structure and in particular they have been patriarchal. I take it for granted that all of my students believe in equality and in women’s rights in one form or another. I would want to bring about just a glimmer of a crisis of faith; that just for a moment my students should wonder whether it is we who are wrong and Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, and Maimonides who are right. Not that I want my students to stop believing in equality. On the contrary, I want to make them stronger believers. I would want them to go from simply spouting dogma about equality to actively accepting it, fully aware of the price they pay in doing so. 

Ultimately being a historian involves being both a liberal and a conservative. The historian is a liberal in that he actively seeks to challenge the status quo. He lives with an open mind and with the possibility of other ways of living one's life. On the other hand the field of history, unlike any other field of study besides for religion, is built around defending tradition, the conservative action par excellence. Not to say that the historian necessarily wants to replicate past ways of living in the present. That being said, if the historian did not believe that there was some real value to traditional ways of life he would have chosen a different field. 

 Postscript: Those who know me well would realize that my way of thinking is ultimately rooted within this contradiction.