Student Research Area - OSC Answers Questions
OSC Answers Questions
QUESTION:
In both Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow, were you trying to portray
Ender and Bean as how powerful and how intelligent the human race can be? And
if so, then were you and are you trying to send a message to today's youth?
-- Submitted by Kaseem Bristow
OSC REPLIES: - April 26, 2000
Human beings are, by nature, intelligent. What they often are not is
rigorous enough with their own thinking and dispassionate enough in their choices
to really bring their intelligence to bear on anything that matters. What matters
about Bean and Ender is not that they are so bright, but how they use their abilities
and how their intelligence affects their character and how their character affects
their intelligence.
Thus I was not sending a message to "today's youth," I was demonstrating
my own beliefs about how intelligence can be but rarely is used by human beings
in general, of any age, in any time. And I think I was also working out the
problem that intelligence is not, in itself, a virtue -- only the uses of intelligence
can be virtuous or the opposite.
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