Monday, October 28, 2013

Darwin and the Hunger Games (The Hunger Games and Philosophy)


In a previous series of posts, I used The Walking Dead and Philosophy to look at the worldview issues in AMC’s hit series. Since the release of Catching Fire is not too far away, I am using The Hunger Games and Philosophy as a springboard to dive into some key themes in the trilogy.

The first post looked at the role of entertainment in the Capital; the second one looked at the intersection of luck and choice in understanding morality. This post will build from Abigail Mann's “Competition and Kindness: The Darwinian World of the Hunger Games” to look more closely at how this series looks when viewed through the lens of Darwinian theory.*

The Hunger Games themselves seem to epitomize Darwin’s concept of how the evolutionary process works: competition, adaptation, survivability, and a little bit of luck. The Games manage to involve three of evolution’s famous Four F’s: fighting, fleeing, feeding, and, uh reproducing. It’s pretty basic, really. Survival of the fittest as entertainment.

In the evolutionary process, all processes of selection bring the strong to the top blindly and haphazardly rather than purposefully. No situation is right or wrong or good or bad. Life just happens. As it happens, nature in essence "selects" that which is most fit in a given set of complex circumstances either through blind luck of superior adaptability. The only thing this blind process accomplishes ruthlessly is survival through reproduction. Some would say it is the 'goal' of evolution, but that's a hard claim to make in a system with no goals. As Dawkins has written,
"Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind. It has no mind and no mind's eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all." 
If survival lacks vision or foresight, it’s important that the odds swing your way. When we meet the contestants in the Hunger Games, most of them are favored with a social or physical strength which increases their odds of surviving.  Their fitness quotient, however, will vary depending on the type of environment – once again depending on chance. So we see many candidates who are favored with certain skills, but whose fitness may not be enhanced in the chosen environment of the Games.

Thursday, October 17, 2013

The Importance of Being Ender: A Closer Look at Orson Scott Card's Modern Classic


If the awards given to Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game are any indication, he has written a novel that may well become part of the canon of science fiction:
It’s been translated into thirty-three languages, ranked #59 on the reader's list of Modern Library100 Best Novels in 1999, and included on the Marine Corps Professional Reading List. Oh, and the movie (starring Harrison Ford) is opening in just a few weeks. 

If you enjoy analyzing stories such as Ender’s Game, there are a lot of excellent commentaries online.*  Rather than replicating their content, I would like to offer some thoughts on why I believe this story is so compelling. 

After the climatic battle that ends the Game, Ender discovers the Hive Queen has survived his accidental genocide. She communicates the story of her and her people to him, and in this knowledge Ender finds truth, empathy, and a path toward a form of redemption. As he records her story for all to know, he becomes the first of many Speakers of the Dead, people who speak the truth of a person’s life at their funeral.

Ender's story continues in Speaker of the Dead. He begins what will be (thanks to the quirks of space travel) centuries of searching to find the Hive Queen a new home, a new place to begin rebuilding the civilization he once destroyed. Meanwhile, he continues to "speak" the lives of those who have died as sort of a prophet in a new religion that seeks to bring truth, peace and honor to life in all its forms.

Ender's Game was the first novel in the Ender saga, but Speaker of the Dead was always meant to be the heart of the story. Card explains in the introduction to SOTD why this aspect of Ender's life is so important to him:
“I grew dissatisfied with the way that we use our funerals to revise the life of the dead, to give the dead a story so different from their actual life that, in effect, we kill them all over again. No, that is too strong. Let me just say that we erase them, we edit them, we make them into a person much easier to live with than the person who actually lived…To understand who a person really was, what his or her life really meant, the speaker for the dead would have to explain their self-story – what they meant to do, what they actually did, what they regretted, what they rejoiced in. That’s the story we never know, the story that we never can know – and yet, at the time of death, it’s the only true story worth telling.”
Speaking for the dead wasn’t always pretty, but it was always powerful. Ender becomes passionate about telling “what they meant to do, what they actually did, what they regretted, what they rejoiced in.”

Not until I read Speaker did I begin to understand what I found so compelling about Ender's Game. The heart of the story of how a deceived, brainwashed, abused child accidentally becomes the bane of the universe became clear only in light of Card’s previously cited explanation about Ender himself. The only story worth telling cannot show merely what Ender meant to do, it must show what he actually did. 

Wednesday, October 9, 2013

What If The Odds Are Against You? (The Hunger Games and Philosophy)

In a previous series of posts, I used The Walking Dead and Philosophy to look at the worldview issues in AMC’s hit series. Since the release of Catching Fire is not too far away, I am using The Hunger Games and Philosophy as a springboard to dive into some key themes in the trilogy.

The first post looked at the role of entertainment in the Capital; this one will draw from George A. Dunn's “The Odds Have Not Been Very Dependable of Late" to look more closely at the ethical implications of the influence of luck vs. the importance of intention in The Hunger Games.*
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What role does luck play in the world? More importantly, if luck is a force to be reckoned with, what does that do to the notion of choice and the possibility of meaningful moral actions?

Many of the events in Katniss’s life would never have happened were it not for luck, both good and bad. Her sister was chosen against the odds; Peeta was chosen against the odds; Katniss and Peeta got a particular team and not another against the odds. When Katniss slept in a tree with tracker jackers and wore a mockingjay pin that just so happened to feature a bird that Rue loves, the odds were very much in her favor.

So, to what degree are luck and choice intertwined? It would seem that the more our lives are shaped by luck, the less culpability we have for our actions. The less luck, the more we deserve praise or blame for the choices we make. Thomas Nagel (who seems pretty good at generating controversy) has attempted to bring some clarity to the discussion by discussing four kinds of moral luck.