Post about literature, since no one reads me anyway...
Did you read Orson Scott Card's Ender's game?
It's the first book in a saga with ups and downs, by an author who, as a public figure, is controversial. And yet it has a lot of interesting ideas.
Cover of Ender's game (Fair use)
Ender is a small child, living on Earth in the relatively near future.
He is being educated in a government program for the gifted, whose objective is to train the most intelligent individuals from their earliest childhood, to be military strategists and commanders.
Humanity is at war with an alien species, and is losing. It needs exceptional strategists who can understand how a strange mind plans a battle, and anticipate its movements. That's why they educate Ender and other children.
Poster of Ender's game (Fair use)
The educational program is tough, and Ender is bullied by older boys because he is small and weak. He avoids fights and only defends himself when he knows he can win. But then his counterattacks are definitive: every time he wins a battle, he makes sure that the same enemy will never attack him again.
That's why he is finally selected to command the war.
Ender studies the enemies insectors to know how they think and thus be able to destroy them. But once he understands them, he doesn't want to. When you put yourself completely in someone else's place, when you understand their deepest motivations, you can no longer hate him.
(CC BY-SA 2.0, by Wolf Gang)
In a way that I will not mention to avoid to spoil the reading, the war is won and the enemy is exterminated. Ender feels deeply guilty, because he understands his enemy's reasons, and spends the rest of his life repairing his crime.
He changes his name, and becomes the voice of the dead who calls upon humanity in the name of the Queen Beehive and her exterminated insector species. He casts on his own memory a cloak of ignominy, making himself remembered as Ender the xenocide. And he develops a hierarchy of exclusion to analyze the relationship of humanity with other intelligent species.
Such a hierarchy is interesting, even to be used now on Earth, and helps to understand what we consider the other.
Utlanning is the stranger, whom although we do not know, we can easily identify as human and as a member of our own group.
One of our own.
Stranger (CC0)Främling is the foreigner, of whom we see that he is like us, but he is part of a foreign culture that we do not share.
Like us, but not our own
Foreigner (CC0)Ramen is someone else's. He is clearly different from us, he is a member of another species, but we can understand him. The enemy insector that Ender destroyed was ramen.
The understandable other.
Ajeno (CC0)Varelse is the alien. It is different from us, to the point of being incomprehensible, strange, terrifying.
The incomprehensible other.
Alien (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Much of the saga focuses on the debate about rights. At what level of that hierarchy is the boundary between a being that is a person in the moral sense and something that is not? At what level is the boundary between who is worthy of rights and who isn't?
You can recognize the rights of a ramen, because he can do the same with you.
But if you give rights to a varelse, you can only lose, because there will never be reciprocity.
And the problem is complicated by the fact that this classification is not absolute. The enemy Ender exterminated was varelse. He attacked without provocation and killed thousands. But when Ender understood it, he saw it as ramen. His beehive mind did not know that he was doing harm by killing particular humans.
Beehive (CC0)
If you like good science fiction, read Ender's game. There is also a film, quite respectful of central ideas. The rest of the saga is also recommended, although the themes vary greatly, together with the tone and even the way of narrating the story.
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