Somebody went and filmed Ender's Game.

[patita_fea]

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As an eleven year old, I couldn't turn the pages of that book fast enough. I had to see what happened next, and I had to see how all of the twisty ethical questions resolved themselves (it didn't occur to me that they might be left unresolved).

Twelve years later, I re-read the damn thing. And MY GOD, did anyone else finish Ender's Game and think, “Wow, Orson Scott Card is the Lord King Moron of moral philosophy”?


Massive spoilers for the whole book below.

As a kid, I was impressed by the complexity of the moral questions the book raised. The protagonist is a polymath military genius, and somehow he manages to kill two people, commit genocide, and walk away fundamentally innocent.  The men who manipulate him into doing these horrible things are not sadists or monsters themselves; they are genuinely trying to defend humanity from an existential threat. That’s some heavy shit right there, Mr. Card. Is it who we are underneath, or what we do that defines us? Do we judge people by their intentions or by the results?

Is Ender Wiggin a good person forced to do bad things, or is he a Sue in a contrived plot devised by a man with his moral priorities on backwards with the tag showing?

To summarize:

A six-year-old prodigy kills a classmate in retaliation for schoolyard bullying, which buys him an invitation to Battle School, where presumably he expects courses in nonviolent conflict resolution and bunny cuddling. His creepy teachers sacrifice him on the altar of the common good, with uncanny certainty about exactly what kinds of cruelty and neglect are required. Psychology is not currently known for this level of precision, nor human behavior for its predictability, but perhaps things are different in the alien-battling future.

Ender becomes a battle-hardened leader in command of battle-hardened soldiers by playing lots of Laser Tag and video games. Despite these hardships, he remains smarter and kinder than anyone else who ever lived ever, which is how he knows the best way to stop a bully is to rupture his testicles after caving his face in. "He's clean," you see. "Right to the heart, he's good."

Eventually he agrees to continue his education in kitten rescue and traditional folk lullabies by going to Command School. He has to play way more video games than is really healthy, until finally he gets sick of this shit and attempts to intentionally lose the game. It is at this point that he discovers he has been commanding a real army this whole time, and he has just committed a real genocide.

He’s a lot like Jesus, really.

Let's leave aside, for the moment, the fact that Card has written a saintly, genius, Chosen One protagonist who only ever incurs dislike because he's so goddamn superior to everyone else. Leave aside this character's appeal to a bookish, awkward eleven-year-old who always felt out of step with her classmates.

Apparently Orson Scott Card believes there might be something moral about using a human being to serve some tenuous, uncertain greater good. Nearly everyone in the novel does things they find morally distasteful in order to ensure humanity's survival - or their own. Graff does so to mold Ender into the soldier humanity needs. Ender turns around and treats Bean with identical dickishness for identical reasons. After the war, Valentine unilaterally makes life-changing decisions for Ender's own good, justifying it with the claim that no one lives un-coerced and thus we might as well be governed by those who love us.

Card is just fascinated with the suffering and guilt these good people feel when cornered into doing bad things. And then he exonerates them. The lawyers for Graff's prosecution (and, by extension, Ender's) are portrayed as "clever" bastards with sneaky arguments, and their charges don't stick.  Valentine is forgiven and embraced with open arms. Ender, wracked with guilt, remains spiritually pure enough to found a fuzzy religion.

Card would have us believe it is admirable to lay down, not one’s life, but one’s soul for others. Apparently, "Human beings are free except when humanity needs them." Need being defined by the needy, quite naturally. It’s almost noble, when you think about it, how these men are willing to dirty their hands to keep everyone else's unsullied. It's the highest form of patriotism to treat human beings as means to ends, rather than ends in themselves.

This, to my mind, is the fucking root of all evil.

I don't consider Ender a bad person, nor do I believe he is morally responsible for genocide in the same way that, say, Pol Pot is responsible for the deaths of 1.7 million of his people. He did not knowingly annihilate a species. He is responsible, however, for agreeing to kill complete strangers on the orders of other complete strangers. Oddly, this is a decision he never questions.

For all the wailing and gnashing of teeth over his "crimes," Ender never tells us what he should have done instead, because neither he nor the author believes there were alternative courses of action. If there were no better options, then everything Ender did was necessary and proper. He didn't make any mistakes, see - his judgment and moral credentials remain impeccable - which means that his contrition is theater. It's useless. It's: "I'm so sorry that you made me hit you."

So what the fuck ever, Orson Scott Card.