I was 13 or 14 years old when I first read Ender’s Game. I stayed up nearly all night on a school night to finish it—unheard of for me at that age. I adored it. I have always been a sensitive person, very observant, with deep empathy. I was right in the middle of a personal season where I had nearly decided to shut off that entire side of me and embrace a Spock-like persona of no emotion and pure logic. It seemed much safer.

Then here came this book telling me that empathy wasn’t a weakness, it was a superpower. 

Ender Wiggin is, of course, a genius. But so was Peter, so was Valentine, and so was Bean. The reason they chose Ender was because of his emotional intelligence. In his own words:

“In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him (Ender’s Game, 238).”

Graff saw that his ability to empathize with others gave him the potential to be the greatest military commander they had ever seen. 

He could get so inside someone’s head that he could see ways to defeat them that no one else did. The problem was that his empathy could also be a drawback, hindering him from making the hard calls. That’s why they pushed him so hard out of his comfort zone in Battle School, and why they kept the truth about the simulations a secret. As long as he thought the battles were virtual, he was spared the emotional weight of his strategies and decision (at least for a while). 

And most importantly, his empathy eventually allows him to save an entire species and become the Speaker for the Dead, completely altering human history. The military used his empathy to try to save the human race. He used his own empathy to save, heal, and redeem. 

It’s rare to see a story (especially in military sci-fi) about someone with such high intelligence who also feels so deeply. But this is part of what makes Ender a great leader (the book is such an interesting case study on leadership). He not only loves his enemies, but he loves his soldiers, and they love him. They love him so much they push themselves to the edge of exhaustion and mental breakdown (Petra). 

But it’s particularly interesting to reread this book in today’s climate of rising Artificial Intelligence. Far from becoming outdated, I think the themes in this book are more relevant than ever. Ender’s Game shows us what humans have to offer that computers never could. I think if anyone had suggested to Graff that they train an A.I. to command the fleet, he would have replied with a resounding ‘no.’ They needed Ender because he was empathetic and relational. 

Philosopher Eleonore Stump has done work on what she calls “second person knowledge” (Stump, 75). This is different than knowing facts, or knowing that x is true. Second person knowledge is the knowledge that we have of other people. It is intuitive, it is emotional, it is relational, and it cannot be reduced to a set of propositions or facts. It is one sentient soul recognizing the presence of another sentient soul and just knowing.

“A pre-linguistic infant is not capable of knowledge that a particular person is her mother; but she can know her mother, and to one extent or another she can know some of her mother’s mental states (Stump, 66).”

She goes on to hash out exactly what this means in philosophical terms, but, significantly, adds:

“It is possible for one person to be aware of another as a person without seeing, smelling, touching, or tasting that other person. For example, if Paula and Jerome are engaged in an animated conversation with one another that they conduct by means of email, Paula is aware of Jerome as a person, even if she does not perceive Jerome (Stump, 76).”

We can see that this second-person knowledge and experience is so much more than just sense perception. Interesting, neh?

This is one thing (among others) that I believe A.I. will never be capable of, though it may be programmed to simulate it. It’s part of emotional intelligence, and it is one thing Ender excels at. He sees his friends and his men and they feel seen by him. We can see it in the way he instinctually handles the bullying situation in his Launch crew—he takes Bernard down a peg with his joke, but does it anonymously. We can see it in his relationships with Petra, Dink, and Bean. He relates to each one differently, instinctually, often without even knowing what he’s doing. And we see it in his second-person knowledge of the Formics, even across the galaxy.

For a long time our society has tended to praise and glorify the logical side of intelligence and tended to punish (or at least neglect) the emotional side of intelligence. Now we’re discovering that machines can do logical intelligence better than us. It’s time to re-integrate logic and emotion and recognize that they both have a role to play in intelligence and reason. More than that, both are vital in what it means to be human. 

One of the things I love about Ender’s Game is that once they do everything they can to help him reach his potential, they actually let him do what he’s good at. They don’t control him in the final simulations or try to micro-manage his decisions. I don’t think Graff is ever trying to turn Ender into someone he is not, he’s just trying to push him past the boundaries he would normally choose for himself and put him in situations that his natural personality would not land him in.

The lifestyle Ender leads after the war, I think, is good evidence of the kind of life he would have led if left on his own. Let me be clear: the manipulation, lies, and borderline child abuse is morally problematic, even in wartime and even under the threat of human extinction. As readers we rightly weep with Ender for what they did to him. And yet, so much of what they bring out in Ender is good. And the way they let him lead is good.

In his book The Death of Common Sense, lawyer Philip K. Howard argues that in some ways our overinflated legislative system is crippling us because it prevents good people from having any real influence.

“[A]n effective government [is] one that attracts the best possible people and gives them leadership responsibility. We have created the opposite system, one profoundly focused on the negative, obsessed with defensive formalisms and driving away good people who cannot…’grow the gills’ needed to breathe in this underworld of process (Howard, 109).”

As Americans, we are so afraid of power being used in the wrong ways that we hamstring people in all levels of American society, from making decisions they should be qualified to make. “Making rules as precise as possible has become almost a religious tenet (Howard, 10).”

I used to work retail and it was infuriating how many times corporate policies were so often wrong for a specific situation, yet I was expected to follow policy blindly, to the letter, when these policies were made by executives who had never visited our store in our state or interacted with our customer base. 

“We seem to have to have achieved the worst of both worlds: a system of regulation that goes too far while it also does too little. This paradox is explained by the absence of the one indispensable ingredient of any successful human endeavor: use of judgment… Human activity can’t be regulated without judgment by humans (Howard, 11 emphasis added).”

What it comes down to is that we don’t trust humans in those positions to make judgment calls, especially about when to make an exception and when not to. Granted, people are idiots, I know because I’m one of them sometimes, but taking away more and more of their power and ability to think for themselves is not the answer.

What we have done is reduced our own agency on a massive scale. No wonder A.I. is threatening jobs–we have turned our society into a bureaucratic machine ala Max Weber and reduced most jobs to a series of inputs and outputs (executing prescribed rules) with little room for human initiative, human creativity, and human emotional intelligence. 

That’s why looking back at Ender’s Game right now is so refreshing. Surprisingly, Graff and the faculty don’t try to make a machine out of Ender. Rather, they try to bring out the best of what is human in him. They allow him to use his judgment and think for himself. In fact, they risk the whole fate of humanity on his judgment because they have seen his character, his emotional intelligence, and his leadership skills. That would be unheard of today. But we need leaders like Ender, leaders with compassion and integrity, more than ever. 

The whole book is dripping with humanity and relationality. Surrounded by incredible technology, the heart of Battle School is friendship and camaraderie. The kids make each other better, learn from each other, inspire each other. Maybe the peak of human achievement, human capability, and human intelligence is more closely bound up in relationality and empathy than we have been telling ourselves. I think that is exactly the message we need to hear right now. 

References: 

Card, Orson Scott. Ender’s Game. Tor: New York, 1991.

Howard, Philip K.  The Death of Common Sense: How Law is Suffocating America. Warner Books: New York, 1995. 

Stump, Eleonore. Wandering in Darkness, Clarendon Press: Oxford, 2010.