Phil is (still) Phil, but is Phil human?

Any linguistic prescriptivist would tell you we've gotten lazy. We split infinitives, we end sentences with prepositions, but one thing we've gotten away with (with which we have gotten away) for far too long is our sloppy use of the word "humanity." We throw it around with little concern for the consequences. I can't even pretend that those consequences have been minor. As Carl Schmitt put it:

To confiscate the word humanity, to invoke and monopolize such a term probably has certain incalculable effects, sch as denying the enemy the quality of being human and declaring him to be an outlaw of humanity; and a war can thereby be driven to the most extreme inhumanity.

Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, p 54

I think we can all get to that. But what if there is an "other" to compare ourselves against. Were that the case, humanity would be an acceptable concept according to Carl Schmitt's framework. That by no means simplifies matters. Grass gives us the opportunity to consider the implications of "human" as an almost moral classification.

One could diagram humanity until the Singularity, but I doubt we would ever reach a satisfying conclusion. We have a hard enough time dealing with differences between homo-sapiens that for all our talk of the search for intelligent life, I don't think we are ready to have our already fragile models, philosophies, and theologies broken wide open. In the event of "contact," I think we will all find a little bit of Father Sandoval in ourselves.

While Grass got me asking questions, it didn't give me good enough answers. If God created "very small beings" similar to microorganisms, how can we know who is the virus and who is the antibody? Can we really say that the Hippae are evil based on a single word they trampled into the floor of a cave? Earth would be screwed if aliens landed in the middle of a GWAR concert. Yeah, they probably are evil, but it wouldn't have mattered if Grass had been left on its own. Without humans, the baby "good" foxen would have been able to escape to trees and survive and there would have been some balance in the ecosystem. Also, if the foxen hadn't killed ALL of that one predator, then the bad Hippae would have been kept in check to some extent. These last are just a few miscellaneous quibbles, though.

Carl Schmitt, meet the piggies

On page 23 of my book, Rooter is quoted as asking Pipo, "If you have no other city of humans, how can you go to war?" To Novinha and Libo, this question reveals either that piggies want wars, or whether they see them as unavoidable. What's really going on here, is that Rooter has demonstrated an understanding of the works of Carl Schmitt and is getting at a much bigger question. According to Schmitt, "Were a world state to embrace the entire globe and humanity, then it would be no political entity and could only be loosely called a state" (57). A single state cannot exist in isolation, without an enemy. Rooter knows that "There's no honor for you in killing Little Ones," that the pequeninos cannot be the enemy. The existence of only one human city is, in Rooter's eyes, a contradiction. He isn't concerned with war, but with alliances. He knows that there must be more than one human city, and if there aren't any more on Lusitania, then there must be other worlds with humans. By the end of Speaker for the Dead, the reader finds out that the piggies are extremely curious about spaceflight, and most of their questions came out of that curiosity.

I wonder what Schmitt would have made of Valentine's (Demosthenes') four orders of foreignness (p34). The important distinction in this work is that of ramen and varelse:

"The third is the ramen, the stranger that we recognize as human, but of another species. The fourth is the true alien, the varelse, which includes all the animals, for with them no conversation is possible."

Is there any room for these classifications in The Concept of the Political? They do increase the resolution of our analysis, but does it matter? Gobawa Ekimbo doesn't think so: "When it comes to war, human is human and alien is alien. All that ramen business goes up in smoke when we're talking about survival" (313). It's easy to imagine Schmitt agreeing, but he does admit in his writing that he doesn't know how things will change in the future, and acknowledges that his conception is meant for a specific time and place. Regarding a future all-encompassing world order, Schmitt says, "If and when this condition will appear, I do not know. At the moment, this is not the case" (54). This statement leaves the door open for different circumstances and therefor a different interpretation.

I also feel that Val's apparent oxymoron, "human, but of another species," needs to be addressed, but first I would like to know what you guys think thus far. How would Schmitt change his conception of the political in the second millenium after the adoption of the Starways Code. Would he?

First Contact: What Will We Do?

After class on Thursday, I was left wondering which of those boxes on our Schmitt chart we would actually fall under if we were to contact an alien species in real life. It's something that I don't think we settled in our discussion and I am still not sure what we would, or should, do in the event of first contact.

The first question is "what would we do"? While it is still a hard question, I think that we can answer it with a little more certainty. Looking back at human history (and even current events) we can see that the general reaction of humanity to something new and different is fear. We can also see that the usual reaction to fear is violence. Now, I cannot say for sure that we will attempt to destroy, or even harm, the first aliens we meet, and it would probably differ depending on what the lifeforms are like, but I can say that it seems to be the most probable outcome.

But now we need to discuss whether or not this reaction should occur. It might seem obvious that a reaction out of fear would be a bad thing, and it might call up memories of mistakes that mankind has made in the past, but an encounter with extraterrestrial life is not the same thing as an encounter with another human civilization. There would be no way of knowing anything about them or what they want. All people are essentially similar, but there is no guarantee that the same will hold for an alien life form. Furthermore we can't be sure that we will be the imperialists in this case. For all we know the other race will want to enslave us. It might seem cold, but it could be a species ending decision to act without caution.

On the other hand, we certainly don't want to become Ender. It would be a massive crime to destroy an entire intelligent species, especially if they meant us no harm. And even if we don't destroy them, we could end up in a pointless war when we could be learning from each-other. We might even provoke an otherwise peaceful race into destroying us. In the end it's a decision that could only be decided on a case by case basis using the best judgment available, and could only be judged in hindsight.

The Schmittian Response

I had a difficult time with the exercise we did in class on Thursday. My group, four, had to argue that earthlings would not and should not react according to Schmitt's model in the event of an alien invasion. Schmitt's model, as far as I understand it, is general enough to be difficult to escape. Acting outside of the framework would mean classifying an "other" as neither friend or enemy. That other would have to be something akin to a plague or natural disaster, a truly nonpolitical other. The way I see it, humanity would have no choice other than to make the judgment of friend or foe, and I wouldn't be surprised if we leaned more towards designating them as the enemy.

According to Schmitt, the distinction of enemy comes out of a difference between the parties:

"... 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..." (27)

A group does not become an enemy simply by being envious of another's territory, but because of the perceived differences in the groups that would enable them to fight and kill for it. By Schmitt's definition, an alien would almost certainly fall under the category of "existentially something different and alien," and would therefore become the enemy. Following Schmitt's method, it would then be nearly impossible for an extraterrestrial to be treated as anything but an enemy.

So what would it mean to act against Schmitt's logic? I see an inconsistency. In one paragraph, Schmitt claims that an enemy is someone different with whom conflict could arise, and in another, "An enemy exists only when, at least potentially, one fighting collectivity of people confronts a similar collectivity." He is saying two different things here. As brought up in class (thanks Phil!), we probably have plans for invading Britain, or Canada. There's a potential that we might fight them, therefore they are our enemies. If not even Canada counts as a friend, than I think it is safe to say that we only have enemies, and Schmitt's model stops meaning much of anything. Schmitt's framework is really only useful when you take into account the "existential differences" between groups.

The question becomes, would we, should we, treat extraterrestrials as enemies based on their differences, regardless of other factors. I still come to the conclusion that we would do so. Should we? I don't think so. We can discuss that further when we get to Speaker for the Dead which introduces another classification system into the mix.

Political Science Fiction

Kevin brought up Ender's limited list of "people he considered human," and I think this is essential in analyzing Ender through the lens of Carl Schmitt. According to Ender's paradigm, in each fight against a Stilson, he fought on the side of humanity, consciously or not. According to Schmitt:

Such a war [for humanity] is necessarily unusually intense and inhuman because, by transcending the limits of the political framework, it simultaneously degrades the enemy into moral and other categories and is forced to make of him a monster that must not only be defeated but also utterly destroyed. In other words, he is an enemy who no longer must be compelled to retreat into his borders only (36).

This jives with Ender's own strategies during his own battles. What I had interpreted as a rare comedic thought on Ender's part, "his private list of people who also qualified as human beings," becomes something scary, almost dangerous in light of his own actions.

Schmitt's theories work well within the world of Starship Troopers. While Schmitt refutes the notion that the military should be in charge, or that war is an ideal state, the civilian citizen dynamic could be backed up by Schmitt's own words. In Starship Troopers, in order to become involved with the political, one must first serve in the military. If, according to Schmitt, "the friend, enemy, and combat [i.e. political] concepts receive their real meaning precisely because they refer to the real possibility of physical killing," then it makes sense for anyone to influence that classification of friend or enemy to have had a first-hand experience with killing and the effects of that classification (33).

I think that some of Schmitt's ideas come out of the Western individualist culture. Schmitt states that "to demand seriously of human beings that they kill others and be prepared to die themselves so... that the purchasing power of grandchildren may grow is sinister and crazy" (48). I wonder what he would say about a culture in which people choose to end their own lives to salvage their family name. I would really like to know what Schmitt would have to say about a communitarian culture such as those in Asia. to demand seriously of human beings that they kill others and be prepared to die themselves so that trade or industry may flourish for the survivors... is sinister and crazy.

Schmitt vs The Bugs

The Buggers in Ender's Game and the Bugs in Starship Troopers seem to be, at least on the surface, the most extreme possible interpretation of what Carl Schmitt refers to in "The Concept of the Political" when he talks about "something different and alien." While he didn't mean this to necessarily refer an actual extra-terrestrial, both species are so different from us, so incomprehensible in both culture and form, that they could serve as the textbook definition of "alien" in the sense of otherness.

The military in both works, and along with them the civilian population, follow in Schmitt's line of thinking that the Bugs are so different from us, that their existence is a threat to our way of life. It is perceived that there can be no similarity between us and the Bugs. In Starship Troopers an analyst even goes so far as to call the idea of an intelligent Bug "offensive." And since the Bugs in both works commit aggressive acts against planet Earth, the humans, using Schmitt's logic, are justified in beleiving that the aliens pose a threat and must be "repulsed or fought in order to preserve [their] own form of existence."

The thing is, both works seem to reject this logic in the end, at least to some degree. In Ender's Game it becomes apparent that the Bugger's had never meant us harm, and had not even realized they were killing us. This entire race is wiped out needlessly because of the reasoning in "The Concept of the Political." The rejection is more subtle in Starship Troopers. While on the surface it seems to come out in favor of the destruction of the Bugs, it is important to remember that the movie is a satire of propaganda films. It is implied that a fair telling of the films events might be much more sympathetic to the Bugs. The attack on Earth was actually provoked by humans violating the Bugs territory, so it was really the humans who started the war. And at the end the brain bug is clearly terrified, and the humans rejoice in its plight. Both works show what can happen when you decide that anyone sufficiently different from yourself poses a threat to you way of life.