Gavin's Reviews > Xenocide

Ten times better than a novel with this title should be; I finally get it. It is rammed full of religion but has even more real philosophy in it. It starts slow, but by p.150 the long philosophical dialogues flourish even as Card juggles six concurrent plot lines. He does the old great arguments about the greater good, political legitimacy, consciousness, metaethics, moral patiency, communitarianism, religion, embodiment, existentialism, freedom, a sort of game theory. Card is perfectly able to write good justified atheists, which implies something about his own faith. (view spoiler)[It takes a subtle Christian to write about a religion which is an explicitly engineered conspiratorial tool of social control. (hide spoiler)] (Yes yes, he also solves its plot holes with faster-than-light metaphysical idealism, hippie oneness the long way round ("all philotic twining is willed"). But you don't need to accept a conclusion to admire an argument.)

Highly quotable:

"Human beings do metamorphose. They change their identity constantly. However, each new identity thrives on the delusion that it was always in possession of the body it has just conquered."
"Such changes are superficial. The nature of the organism remains the same. Humans are very proud of their changes, but every imagined transformation turns out to be a new set of excuses for behaving exactly as the individual has always behaved."


She had always thought that if only people could communicate mind-to-mind, eliminating the ambiguities of language, then understanding would be perfect and there'd be no more needless conflicts. Instead she had discovered that rather than magnifying differences between people, language might just as easily soften them, minimize them, smooth things over so that people could get along even though they really didn't understand each other. The illusion of comprehension allowed people to think they were more alike than they really were. Maybe language was better.

Collectively, they're a collection of dolts. But in all their scurrying around and pretending to be wise, throwing out idiotic half-understood theories about this and that, one or two of them will come up with some idea that is just a little bit closer to the truth than what was already known. And in a sort of fumbling trial and error, about half the time the truth actually rises to the top and becomes accepted by people who still don't understand it, who simply adopt it as a new prejudice to be trusted blindly until the next dolt accidentally comes up with an improvement... no one is ever individually intelligent, and groups are even stupider than individuals-- and yet by keeping so many fools engaged in pretending to be intelligent, they still come up with some of the same results that an intelligent species would come up with.

What he forgot was the way pious people had always reacted to insults against their god.

"Even the martyrs of Christianity and Islam were willing to accept rewards in heaven for their sacrifice,” said Valentine.
“Then they were all selfish pigs..."

She was a child of manual workers, and her hands, not her mind, held her future. Philosophy was as far above her as the sky was above the earth. "But the sky only seems to be far away from you," said Master Han, when she told him this. "Actually it is all around you. You breathe it in and you breathe it out, even when you labor with your hands in the mud. That is true philosophy."

I have tasted the heat of many stars, and all of them were sweet.

Its philosophical moves are classic in the good (erudite) and bad (pre-modern) sense. Authenticity, essence, metaphysics, will, creativity as stamp of divinity:

"If I can't think original thoughts, does that mean that I'm nothing but a computer program that got out of hand?"

Everyone is in severe need of a notion of expected value ("you have no idea whether finding out what you are in order to save you will help or hurt those other projects").

This passage was the first time I caught him making a howler, 360 pages in:

"Even if there is no such thing as free will, we have to treat each other as if there were free will in order to live together in society. Because otherwise, every time somebody does something terrible, you can't punish him, because he can't help it, because his genes or his environment or God made him do it, and every time somebody does something good, you can't honor him, because he was a puppet, too. If you think that everybody around you is a puppet, why bother talking to them at all? Why even try to plan anything or create anything, since everything you plan or create or desire or dream of is just acting out the script your puppeteer built into you."

This is a failure of imagination. Retribution is probably not in fact necessary to a society (while quarantine and rehabilitation are). Determinists can benefit from and suffer from all the usual evaluative stances towards their fellows and their own life; for instance I do.

But no matter: there are very few novelists who can handle philosophy this well, who can make ideas feel as important as they are, who can make the development of ideas a source of suspense as strong as a rapacious virus and a planet-killer.

Card is much concerned with maximally passionate characters with tragically differing aims, so there are lots of flatly irrational moves despite its buckets of wisdom. Novinha in particular; I don't begrudge someone overpowering emotion, but it's hard to sympathise when they lose all proportion and fairness and compassion for weeks afterward. (view spoiler)[He really doesn't do enough to establish Quim's greatness; in fact I think there's exactly one scene where he's shown turning the other cheek and dispensing hard truths before he's killed. (hide spoiler)] Qingdao is a great brilliant irrationalist: an eloquent and extended demonstration that intelligence and rationality can come apart. (She is also a wonderful portrayal of tragically partial success at overcoming classism.) And her dad is a master rationalist, who actually moves with the world.

There's a background hum of difference in it: Card's old-fashioned values / not being PC. His planet of so-called Daoists (actually fideist Legalists) may strike some as unconscionably orientalist, because unlike a lot of intentionally diverse portrayals, it portrays an actually different (inegalitarian) culture, with service and social stability taking precedence over all else.

First the gods. Second the ancestors. Third the people. Fourth the rulers. Last the self... we serve the rulers: because they serve the people, who serve the ancestors, who serve the gods... Fathers always decide everything... That's the beginning of wisdom.

(view spoiler)[But note that the text pre-empts this.

Donkeys, sedan chairs, all these trappings of ancient China--do the godspoken really think that such affectations make them somehow holier? Why don't they simply ride on fliers and hovercars like honest people do on every other world? Then Mu-pao would not have to humiliate herself, bouncing and jouncing on an animal that is suffering under her weight.

The rigid hierarchy of Path's eugenic Daoism is imposed on them by the evil empire. The orientalism is then not Card's but Congress's. (hide spoiler)] I liked his cute fabricated idea of "ancestor-of-the-heart".

He's impressed with gender differences and the simple evo theory thereof.

Our great civilizations are nothing more than social machines to create the ideal female setting, where a woman can count on stability; our legal and moral codes that try to abolish violence and promote permanence of ownership and enforce contracts -- those represent the primary female strategy, the taming of the male.

A bitter, traumatised character says "Didn't you ever think I needed somebody to jolly me out of it sometimes?" which strikes me as cool and contrarian at this point. Card's conservatism is not the obvious kind, of abortions, guns, and America first, so maybe it won't strike many this way.

In praise of abstinence:

Valentine had long ago observed that in a society that expected chastity and fidelity, like Lusitania, the adolescents who controlled and channeled their youthful passions were the ones who grew up to be both strong and civilized. Adolescents in such a community who were either too weak to control themselves or too contemptuous of society's norms to try usually ended up being either sheep or wolves - either mindless members of the herd or predators who took what they could and gave nothing.

(The key caveat, which transforms the passage IMO, is "that expected chastity".)

Sick fundamentalism on Path:

And it is certainly not up to us to decide whether it should exist--the gods have decreed that such a thing is possible and can exist."
"So Demosthenes was right. The [genocide weapon] is with the fleet."
"Yes."
"And the government files that Demosthenes published--they were genuine."
"Yes."
"But Father--you joined many others in claiming that they were forgeries."
"Just as the gods speak only to a chosen few, so the secrets of the rulers must be known only to those who will use the knowledge properly. Demosthenes was giving powerful secrets to people who were not fit to use them wisely, and so for the good of the people those secrets had to be withdrawn. The only way to retrieve a secret, once it is known, is to replace it with a lie; then the knowledge of the truth is once again your secret... he wishes to take power out of the hands of those whom the gods have ordained to rule humankind. What would happen to the people if they rejected the rulers given them by the gods?"

Valentine is portrayed as a wise "angel" and a moral philosopher but actually she seems pretty naive to me, of the old unilateral-disarmament clean-hands school.

"What matters is -- should they blow up Lusitania?"
"What kind of person are you?" asked Valentine. He could hear both awe and loathing in her voice.
"You tell me. Are we supposed to love the [contagious aliens] so much that we allow the virus they carry to destroy all of humanity?"
..."I choose to live in a universe that has some hope in it... It's wrong to even contemplate..."

But Card can write her and Miro the bullet-biting consequentialist, and sympathise where I cannot. I start to wonder if he's really a theist, seeing the many pathologies of religion clearly as he does - and what greater compliment can I give his writing?

I'm interested whether you could enjoy this without having read books 1 and 2; volunteers welcome.