I tried to grow a melonhead, and this was necessary. But the truth is I can’t be Ender Wiggin. Men like that are born more than they’re made. I’ve always felt more like Bean, and the book Ender’s Shadow is a more perfect representation of the Neanderthal’s experience of life. We’re born into a Hobbesian world of death and deceit, set apart from humanity for a special purpose, and it’s only later in life that we learn what it means for us to be human and feel ordinary feelings. Maybe it’s because my best friend growing up was an effortless, instinctive leader that I never wanted to be the protagonist of a story. I wanted to be the protagonist’s right-hand man, a trusted specialist and adviser in a war against…something. Maybe that Hobbesian world I’ve come to treasure as a worthy opponent, full of ruthless guile and served by legions of faceless mooks.
The relationship between Gilgamesh and Enkidu is a fraught one. I didn’t pick the banner for this blog lightly (thanks again to aiaslives for making it), it’s one of the most archetypal images I’ve ever encountered. I wanted it to stick in your craw the way it sticks in mine, the perfect representation of everything that makes us human together, two opposing forces of nature personified, mysteries of genetic chance wrestling with feelings of mutually reverential awe and mutually incomprehensible betrayal. It’s hard not to compare the relationship to the one between man and woman, only ever united by an existential enemy of proportions that exceed the bounds intuition can explore.
The mechanism through which higher human intelligence (combined with low time preference) was bred over time is straightforward. Given that man is physically weak and ill-equipped to deal with brute nature, it was advantageous for him to develop his intelligence.[10] Higher intelligence translated into economic success, and economic success in turn translated into reproductive success (producing a larger number of surviving descendants). For the existence of both relationships massive amounts of empirical evidence are available.[11]
There can be no doubt that a hunter-gatherer existence requires intelligence: the ability to classify various external objects as good or bad, the ability to recognize a multiplicity of causes and effects, to estimate distances, time, and speed, to survey and recognize landscapes, to locate various (good or bad) things and to remember their position in relation to each other, etc.; most importantly, the ability to communicate with others by means of language and thus facilitate coordination. Not every member of a band was equally capable of such skills. Some were more intelligent than others. These differences in intellectual talents would lead to some visible status differentiation within the tribe—of “excellent” hunters, gatherers, and communicators and “lousy” ones—and this status differentiation would in turn result in differences in the reproductive success of various tribe members, especially given the “loose” sexual mores prevailing among hunter-gatherers. That is, by and large “excellent” tribe members would produce a larger number of surviving offspring and thus transmit their genes more successfully into the next generation than “lousy” ones. Consequently, if and insofar as human intelligence has some genetic basis (which seems undeniable in light of the evolution of the entire species), hunter-gatherer conditions would over time produce (select for) a population of increasing average intelligence and at the same time an increasingly higher level of “exceptional” intelligence.
The competition within and between tribes, and the selection for and breeding of higher intelligence via differential rates of reproductive success, did not come to a halt once the hunter-gatherer life had been given up in favor of agriculture and animal husbandry. However, the intellectual requirements of economic success became somewhat different under sedentary conditions.
The invention of agriculture and animal husbandry was in and of itself an outstanding cognitive achievement. It required a lengthened planning horizon. It required longer provisions and deeper and farther-reaching insights into the chains of natural causes and effects. And it required more work, patience, and endurance than under hunter-gatherer conditions. In addition, it was instrumental for success as a farmer that one possessed some degree of numeracy so as to count, measure, and proportion. It required intelligence to recognize the advantages of interhousehold division of labor and to abandon self-sufficiency. It required some literacy to design contracts and establish contractual relations. And it required some skill of monetary calculation and of accountancy to economically succeed. Not every farmer was equally apt in these skills and had an equally low degree of time preference. To the contrary, under agricultural conditions, where each household was responsible for its own production of consumer goods and offspring and there was no longer any “free riding” as under hunter-gatherer conditions, the natural inequality of man, and the corresponding social differentiation of and between more or less successful members of a tribe became increasingly and strikingly visible (in particular through the size of one’s land holdings). Consequently, the translation of economic (productive) success and status into reproductive success, i.e., the breeding of a comparatively larger number of surviving offspring by the economically successful, became even more direct and pronounced.
Further, this tendency of selecting for higher intelligence would be particularly pronounced under “harsh” external conditions. If the human environment is unchangingly constant and “mild”—as in the season-less tropics, where one day is like another year in and out—high or exceptional intelligence offers a lesser advantage than in an inhospitable environment with widely fluctuating seasonal variations. The more challenging the environment, the higher the premium placed on intelligence as a requirement of economic, and consequently reproductive success. Hence, the growth of human intelligence would be most pronounced in harsher (historically, generally northern) regions of human habitation.
-Hans-Hermann Hoppe, A Short History of Man
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the stories of Gilgamesh and Enkidu are marked by an unstable partnership between the ultra-idealistic charismatic and the ultra-realistic genius: Ender and Bean, Griffith and Guts, Napoleon and Berthier. We’re like the negative poles of two superconductive electromagnets crushed together by Nature in the most hellish pressure vessels she can devise to launch electrons in a spectacular display of power. The world’s greatest scientific minds could not have designed a better weapon for the preservation of favored races in the struggle for life.
Not tonight, that’s all, thought Bean. Tonight I can rest. Tomorrow I’ll learn what I need to learn. When I’m not so tired.
He closed his eyes.
He opened them again. He opened his locker and took out his desk.
Back on the streets of Rotterdam he had been tired, worn out by hunger and malnutrition and despair. But he kept watching. Kept thinking. And therefore he was able to stay alive. In this army everyone was getting tired, which meant that there would be more and more stupid mistakes. Bean, of all of them, could least afford to become stupid. Not being stupid was the only asset he had.
[…]
For Bean, the assignment was merely to think of the unthinkable — stupid ploys that might be used against them, and ways to counter them; equally stupid innovations they might introduce in order to sow confusion among the other armies and, Bean suspected, get them sidetracked into imitating completely nonessential strategies. Since few of the other commanders understood why Dragon Army was winning, they kept imitating the nonce tactics used in a particular battle instead of seeing the underlying method Ender used in training and organizing his army. As Napoleon said, the only thing a commander ever truly controls is his own army — training, morale, trust, initiative, command and, to a lesser degree, supply, placement, movement, loyalty, and courage in battle. What the enemy will do and what chance will bring, those defy all planning. The commander must be able to change his plans abruptly when obstacles or opportunities appear. If his army isn’t ready and willing to respond to his will, his cleverness comes to nothing.
The less effective commanders didn’t understand this. Failing to recognize that Ender won because he and his army responded fluidly and instantly to change, they could only think to imitate the specific tactics they saw him use. Even if Bean’s creative gambits were irrelevant to the outcome of the battle, they would lead other commanders to waste time imitating irrelevancies. Now and then something he came up with might actually be useful. But by and large, he was a sideshow.
That was fine with Bean. If Ender wanted a sideshow, what mattered was that he had chosen Bean to create that show, and Bean would do it as well as it could be done.
But if Ender was lying awake tonight, it was not because he was concerned about Dragon Army’s battles tomorrow and the next day and the next. Ender was thinking about the Buggers and how he would fight them when he got through his training and was thrown into war, with the real lives of real men depending on his decisions, with the survival of humanity depending on the outcome.
In that scheme, what is my place? thought Bean. I’m glad enough that the burden is on Ender, not because I could not bear it — maybe I could — but because I have more confidence that Ender can bring it off than that I could. Whatever it is that makes men love the commander who decides when they will die, Ender has that, and if I have it no one has yet seen evidence of it. Besides, even without genetic alteration, Ender has abilities that the tests didn’t measure for, that run deeper than mere intellect.
But he shouldn’t have to bear all this alone. I can help him. I can forget geometry and astronomy and all the other nonsense and concentrate on the problems he faces most directly. I’ll do research into the way other animals wage war, especially swarming hive insects, since the Formics resemble ants the way we resemble primates.
And I can watch his back.
Bean thought again of Bonzo Madrid. Of the deadly rage of bullies in Rotterdam.
Why have the teachers put Ender in this position? He’s an obvious target for the hatred of the other boys. Kids in Battle School had war in their hearts. They hungered for triumph. They loathed defeat. If they lacked these attributes, they would never have been brought here. Yet from the start, Ender had been set apart from the others — younger but smarter, the leading soldier and now the commander who makes all other commanders look like babies. Some commanders responded to defeat by becoming submissive — Carn Carby, for instance, now praised Ender behind his back and studied his battles to try to learn how to win, never realizing that you had to study Ender’s training, not his battles, to understand his victories. But most of the other commanders were resentful, frightened, ashamed, angry, jealous, and it was in their character to translate such feelings into violent action … if they were sure of victory.
Just like the streets of Rotterdam. Just like the bullies, struggling for supremacy, for rank, for respect. Ender has stripped Bonzo naked. It cannot be borne. He’ll have his revenge, as surely as Achilles avenged his humiliation.
And the teachers understand this. They intend it. Ender has clearly mastered every test they set for him — whatever Battle School usually taught, he was done with. So why didn’t they move him on to the next level? Because there was a lesson they were trying to teach, or a test they were trying to get him to pass, which was not within the usual curriculum. Only this particular test could end in death. Bean had felt Bonzo’s fingers around his throat. This was a boy who, once he let himself go, would relish the absolute power that the murderer achieves at his victim’s moment of death.
They’re putting Ender into a street situation. They’re testing him to see if he can survive.
-Ender’s Shadow
I alluded before that an important aspect of the bildungsroman story is that it’s about how society expects a contradictory result from the way it treats teenagers: They want to break you, and they want you to come out of it a winner. This is insane because breaking people doesn’t make them stronger, and then all the broken people get thrown on the trash pile of history. It’s unbearably wasteful. In the story of Ender’s Game, the lesson Graff is trying to teach Ender is that he has to win every battle without failing even once, and that he’ll always be alone with the entire world against him. To do the impossible not just once, but every time he’s thrown into the forge. To live in a world of fire.
“They can’t break you.”
“You’d be surprised.” Wiggin breathed sharply, suddenly, as if there were a stab of pain, or he had to catch a sudden breath in a wind; Bean looked at him and realized that the impossible was happening. Far from baiting him, Ender Wiggin was actually confiding in him. Not much. But a little. Ender was letting Bean see that he was human. Bringing him into the inner circle. Making him … what? A counselor? A confidant?
“Maybe you’ll be surprised,” said Bean.
“There’s a limit to how many clever new ideas I can come up with every day. Somebody’s going to come up with something to throw at me that I haven’t thought of before, and I won’t be ready.”
“What’s the worst that could happen?” asked Bean. “You lose one game.”
“Yes. That’s the worst that could happen. I can’t lose any games. Because if I lose any …”
He didn’t complete the thought. Bean wondered what Ender imagined the consequences would be. Merely that the legend of Ender Wiggin, perfect soldier, would be lost? Or that his army would lose confidence in him, or in their own invincibility? Or was this about the larger war, and losing a game here in Battle School might shake the confidence of the teachers that Ender was the commander of the future, the one to lead the fleet, if he could be made ready before the Bugger invasion arrived?
Again, Bean did not know how much the teachers knew about what Bean had guessed about the progress of the wider war. Better to keep silence.
What the melonhead learns in his prison made of fire is that he can’t do it. It’s not that he learns he needs to give rein to his officers so they can take initiative and grow, he was born knowing that, it’s that he learns to believe that a peer must exist somehow. It’s a belief born of desperation and the fear of death: if the only possible way to survive is for a sort of person with a will entirely apart and capacities beyond comprehension to exist, then such a man must exist. The pressure creates the belief, which precedes the search.
The bildungsroman is about the experience of being broken and still winning. It’s about clawing your way out of the casket society buried you alive in.
They’re putting Ender into a street situation. They’re testing him to see if he can survive.
They don’t know what they’re doing, the fools. The street is not a test. The street is a lottery.
I came out a winner — I was alive. But Ender’s survival won’t depend on his ability. Luck plays too large a role. Plus the skill and resolve and power of the opponent.
Bonzo may be unable to control the emotions that weaken him, but his presence in Battle School means that he is not without skill. He was made a commander because a certain type of soldier will follow him into death and horror. Ender is in mortal danger. And the teachers, who think of us as children, have no idea how quickly death can come. Look away for only a few minutes, step away far enough that you can’t get back in time, and your precious Ender Wiggin, on whom all your hopes are pinned, will be quite, quite dead. I saw it on the streets of Rotterdam. It can happen just as easily in your nice clean rooms here in space.
So Bean set aside classwork for good that night, lying at Ender’s feet. Instead, he had two new courses of study. He would help Ender prepare for the war he cared about, with the Buggers. But he would also help him in the street fight that was being set up for him.
It wasn’t that Ender was oblivious, either. After some kind of fracas in the battleroom during one of Ender’s early freetime practices, Ender had taken a course in self-defense, and knew something about fighting man to man. But Bonzo would not come at him man to man. He was too keenly aware of having been beaten. Bonzo’s purpose would not be a rematch, it would not be vindication. It would be punishment. It would be elimination. He would bring a gang.
And the teachers would not realize the danger until it was too late. They still didn’t think of anything the children did as “real.”
So after Bean thought of clever, stupid things to do with his new squad, he also tried to think of ways to set Bonzo up so that, in the crunch, he would have to take on Ender Wiggin alone or not at all. Strip away Bonzo’s support. Destroy the morale, the reputation of any bully who might go along with him.
This is one job Ender can’t do. But it can be done.
The genius’s journey is above all a matter of faith. No one wants to hear the truth, and they especially don’t want to hear it from the smallest kid in Battle School that everybody knows has the highest scores. In real life, it looks more like being the homeless guy with no money and what appears to be a magical ability to guess things he shouldn’t have clearance to know, a voice calling out in the wilderness. So you’re stuck preparing your entire life for what feels like a singular moment that will never come, that critical point when the only thing between life and death is the final IQ test question that no one else in the room can crack.
He hasn’t frozen up, thought Bean. He hasn’t panicked. He has simply understood the situation, exactly as I understand it. There is no strategy. Only he doesn’t see that this is simply the fortunes of war, a disaster that can’t be helped. What he sees is a test set before him by his teachers, by Mazer Rackham, a test so absurdly unfair that the only reasonable course of action is to refuse to take it.
They were so clever, keeping the truth from him all this time. But now was it going to backfire on them. If Ender understood that it was not a game, that the real war had come down to this moment, then he might make some desperate effort, or with his genius he might even come up with an answer to a problem that, as far as Bean could see, had no solution. But Ender did not understand the reality, and so to him it was like that day in the battleroom, facing two armies, when Ender turned the whole thing over to Bean and, in effect, refused to play.
For a moment Bean was tempted to scream the truth. It’s not a game, it’s the real thing, this is the last battle, we’ve lost this war after all! But what would be gained by that, except to panic everyone?
Yet it was absurd to even contemplate pressing that button to take over control himself. Ender hadn’t collapsed or failed. The battle was unwinnable; it should not even be fought. The lives of the men on those ships were not to be wasted on such a hopeless Charge of the Light Brigade. I’m not General Burnside at Fredericksburg. I don’t send my men off to senseless, hopeless, meaningless death.
If I had a plan, I’d take control. I have no plan. So for good or ill, it’s Ender’s Game, not mine.
And there was another reason for not taking over.
Bean remembered standing over the supine body of a bully who was too dangerous to ever be tamed, telling Poke, Kill him now, kill him.
I was right. And now, once again, the bully must be killed. Even though I don’t know how to do it, we can’t lose this war. I don’t know how to win it, but I’m not God, I don’t see everything. And maybe Ender doesn’t see a solution either, but if anyone can find one, if anyone can make it happen, it’s Ender.
Maybe it isn’t hopeless. Maybe there’s some way to get down to the planet’s surface and wipe the Buggers out of the universe. Now is the time for miracles. For Ender, the others will do their best work. If I took over, they’d be so upset, so distracted that even if I came up with a plan that had some kind of chance, it would never work because their hearts wouldn’t be in it.
Ender has to try. If he doesn’t, we all die. Because even if they weren’t going to send another fleet against us, after this they’ll have to send one. Because we beat all their fleets in every battle till now. If we don’t win this one, with finality, destroying their capability to make war against us, then they’ll be back. And this time they’ll have figured out how to make Dr. Device themselves.
We have only the one world. We have only the one hope.
Do it, Ender.
There flashed into Bean’s mind the words Ender said in their first day of training as Dragon Army: Remember, the enemy’s gate is down. In Dragon Army’s last battle, when there was no hope, that was the strategy that Ender had used, sending Bean’s squad to press their helmets against the floor around the gate and win. Too bad there was no such cheat available now.
Deploying Dr. Device against the planet’s surface to blow the whole thing up, that might do the trick. You just couldn’t get there from here.
It was time to give up. Time to get out of the game, to tell them not to send children to do grownups’ work. It’s hopeless. We’re done.
“Remember,” Bean said ironically, “the enemy’s gate is down.”
Nothing truer has ever been said than this: the power and curse of Neanderthal is that we’re just plain too stupid to die. It’s our blessing and our curse to see the world exactly as it is and somehow, despite knowing better than anyone on earth that there’s no hope, to never give up. Our minds are always restless to find an answer, always clawing away at the mortar in the walls. Unceasing, and ultimately unstoppable. You could more easily reverse the course of entropy than keep a Neanderthal away from a solution that ought to exist.
“All your gambles paid off,” said Bean.
“I know what happened, Bean,” said Graff. “Why did you leave control with him? How did you know he’d come up with a plan?”
“I didn’t,” said Bean. “I only knew that I had no plan at all.”
“But what you said — ‘the enemy’s gate is down.’ That’s the plan Ender used.”
“It wasn’t a plan,” said Bean. “Maybe it made him think of a plan. But it was him. It was Ender. You put your money on the right kid.”
Graff looked at Bean in silence, then reached out and put a hand on Bean’s head, tousled his hair a little. “I think perhaps you pulled each other across the finish line.”
“It doesn’t matter, does it?” said Bean. “It’s finished, anyway. And so is the temporary unity of the human race.”
Sisyphus indeed.
tl;dr- I believe melonheads and Neanderthals are socially epistatic under conditions of harsh group selection.
In the northernmost regions, with long and deadly winters, provisions of food, clothing, shelter, and heating had to be made that would last through most of a year or beyond. Planning had to be in terms of years, instead of days or months. As well, in pursuit of seasonally and widely migrating animals, extensive territories had to be traversed, requiring exceptional skills of orientation and navigation. Only groups intelligent enough on average to generate exceptional leaders who possessed such superior intellectual skills and abilities were rewarded with success—survival and procreation. Those groups and leaders, on the other hand, who were not capable of these achievements, were punished with failure, i.e., extinction.
-Hoppe again
Aeoli Pera 