fandomhigh | Practical Philosophy, Monday

Today, class was meeting... in the Danger Shop. Ender had programmed it with a simulation of a nice, cool forest clearing, though otherwise his setup was unchanged.

"I suppose this week is as good a week as any to talk about nurture," he said wryly, sitting down. "Specifically, what effect does the environment you grew up in - or exist in - have on you personally? Has it helped define you, or does it define you entirely, or are most of your traits inborn?"

He spread his arms.

"It's an issue on which scientists and philosophers have quarreled for centuries," he said. "When a child gets born to a family in the desert, are they instilled with a resistance to heat on a biological level, or is it that they grow up accustomed to it? Is a child born cheerful, or is that a mechanism they build as they explore how their interaction affects the world around them? And so forth, and so on. I don't want to really talk about other people, though. I want to talk about you."

He took a sip of water.

"So tell me about where you come from, in as much detail - or lack thereof - as you like," he said. "How much of an effect do you think it's had on who you are?"

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Peridot clammed up at that, sat in silence, debating whether to answer that question at all, for what felt like a short eternity. It was funny how time could do that, wasn't it? Make moments drag on forever, even for those who were made to exist that long?

"Because Gems who grow get ideas," she said finally, tiredly. "We weren't made to question our purpose, to question the Diamond Authority. Homeworld's lack of resources now is in no small part because of Gems who did." And then she looked up again quickly, her words taking on an almost fanatic pitch. "Which isn't to say anything bad about the Diamonds themselves! They're perfection. Of course they are!"

"If you weren't made to," Ender said, his voice still patient even as he registered that strange, sudden shift in her tone, "Then how could the Gems that came before you have done it?"

It seemed like an inherently paradoxical statement.

"I mean..." Peridot sighed. "We aren't meant to. That wasn't what we were made for. The fact that we can is irrelevant to our creation. Where humans are created to learn and grow into the people they become, we're actively discouraged from it."

Which, in its own way, was an example of 'nurture' too, wasn't it? This was starting to hurt Peridot's head.

"According to who?" Ender asked. "Your Diamonds?"

"According to everyone who was around to see the rebellion," Peridot stressed, in a way that suggested that, yes, it probably was according to the Diamonds. "I'm new, I can only go by what I've been told, but the number of Gems that Homeworld lost was innumerable. We can't afford a betrayal like that again!"

"Of course."

Ender took a sip of his water.

"But that means you learned at least part of your outlook on purpose and the importance thereof from someone else," he said. "You weren't born with it. It was given to you by the community."

Peridot stopped short, and then just sort of squinted at Ender. That... seemed about right.

Oh.

"I take it," she said, maybe just a touch dryly, "that you were expecting to come to that conclusion when this conversation began."

He seemed much more prepared for this than she was. Or maybe that was just human nature, too?

"I was not," Ender said, setting his bottle down. "I'm only confirming what you've been saying yourself."

Well, that was... damning. Peridot was looking a bit uncomfortable, now.

"If that's the case... then... I suppose we are taught not to change, and that would technically count. But allowing as much change to happen to us as you humans experience, even over the course of our much, much longer lives, is... discouraged."

Strongly.

"Which is a different answer with different implications than 'we just came out of the box this way'," Ender noted.

Not judging, really. It obviously took Peridot effort to come to these kinds of conclusions, and he wasn't trying to goaed her along. It was just becoming increasingly obvious that she had gotten a rather rigorous philosophical imprinting when she'd been born. Then again, he reflected, didn't humans, too?

"It makes an amount of sense, of course, to teach your children to think like that, if earlier forages into a different philosophy had such cataclysmic results."

He'd know.

"Children," Peridot echoed, bemused. "I suppose so. Though we don't really have a concept of children, the way you do. We're new, or we aren't."

Children just seemed so... Human. She still didn't understand them. She was simply aware that they existed.

"New Gems, then," Ender said amicably. "The unpolished."

Unpolished? That seemed apt, all things considered. Peridot would let that be.

"Would you agree it's a fair assessment, then, to say that Gems are made fully developed, but with the capacity to learn and change? That we do pick up a lot from the society around us as well, but not having that exposure from our creation isn't necessarily a hindrance, either?"

Out of the ground and straight to work.

"I can only come to conclusions based on what you've told me, of course," Ender said, "But so far, that seems fair."

From Peridot's point-of-view, but Ender had no other Gems to compare her to.

Peridot learned back a little, satisfied.

"Then that," she settled on with a nod. "That's the role nurture plays for us. For me."

So far.

Practical Philosophy, Monday

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