Well... 
we shall work out another arrangement if necessary...
Posted on 08/19/2007 6:06:46 AM PDT by tpaine
Heinlein the Libertarian
"Ayn Rand is a bloody socialist compared to me," shows yet another side to the Heinlein paradox.
As a literary influence on the emerging libertarian movement, Heinlein was second only to Rand.
Yet his statement about self-sacrifice and duty to the species seems as un-Randian as you can get. Heinlein, a human chauvinist, always believed freedom and responsibility were linked. But he would never have thought it proper to impose the duty he saw as the highest human aspiration.
Heinlein once told a visitor, "I'm so much a libertarian that I have no use for the whole libertarian movement." Although never in lockstep with every libertarian attitude, Heinlein's fictions seemed derived from libertarianism before the modern movement even fully existed. Before books like Rand's Fountainhead and F.A. Hayek's Road to Serfdom sparked the modern libertarian movement in the mid-'40s, Heinlein had published a novelette, "Coventry," about a world whose government was based on a freely entered covenant that said that "no possible act, nor mode of conduct, was forbidden to you, as long as your action did not damage another."
Heinlein's other contributions to the libertarian zeitgeist include one of the epigrams of the gun rights movement, "an armed society is a polite society" - a line first published in his 1942 serial Beyond This Horizon.
He was also a direct intellectual influence on many important libertarians. David Friedman, author of the anarcho-capitalist classic The Machinery of Freedom, considered Heinlein's 1966 novel The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress vital to his intellectual evolution. (One of Moon's heroes was a professor advocating "rational anarchy," partially based on Heinlein's one-time neighbor, Robert LeFevre, founder of the libertarian Rampart College.) David Nolan, founder of the Libertarian Party, got his start in political activism in 1960 sporting a self-made "Heinlein for President" button. Another Heinlein devotee was Robert Poole, longtime editor of Reason and founder of the Reason Foundation, one of the first institutions to try to effect libertarian change in the real world in a practical manner. Poole's efforts could be seen as a legacy of Heinlein's interest in the nuts and bolts of how his imagined societies would actually function.
Even though he adopted the Milton Friedmanite phrase "there ain't no such thing as a free lunch" as a slogan for his revolutionaries fighting colonial oppression in Moon, Heinlein was not deeply embedded in the economic strain of libertarianism, which stresses the importance of spontaneous order, the failures of central planning, and the efficiency of free markets. As the economist Robert Rogers has argued, Heinlein's fiction seemed to believe that it took Great Men or a single mind (sometimes human, sometimes computer) to make sure economies ran well. In a 1973 interview with the libertarian writer J. Neil Schulman, Heinlein was doubtful when Schulman referred to the greater efficiency of free markets. "I don't think the increase in efficiency on the part of free enterprise is that great," Heinlein said. "The justification for free enterprise is not that it's more efficient, but that it's free."
Heinlein was, then, his own kind of libertarian, one who exemplified the libertarian strains in both the Goldwater right and the bohemian left, and maintained eager fan bases in both camps. A gang of others who managed the same straddle, many of them Heinlein fans, split in 1969 from the leading conservative youth group, Young American for Freedom, in what some mark as the beginnings of a self-conscious libertarian activist movement. In a perfectly Heinleinian touch, the main sticking point between the libertarian and conservative factions was one of Heinlein's bêtes noires: resistance to the draft, which he hated as much as he loved the bravery of the volunteer who would fight for his culture's freedom or survival.
Heinlein the Iconoclast
The prominence of his juvenile novels and his galvanizing effect on so many adolescent fans have led many critics to condemn Heinlein's work as inherently unworthy of serious adult attention. As one scholar, Elizabeth Anne Hull, has written, "In an attempt to account for the extraordinary popularity and influence of the novels of Robert Heinlein, it would be all too easy to assert that the masses are asses and let it go at that. Those of us academics who read Heinlein are likely to admit it with an apology [and consider] our weakness in enjoying his work a minor character defect."
Heinlein is indeed best approached when young, because his work appeals to that eternal youthful question: How should you live as you grow into a culture you did not make?
Heinlein does this best via his defining characteristic, one that bridges the apparent divides in his work. As William Patterson, the author of a forthcoming two-volume biography of Heinlein, told me, the best way to understand Heinlein in toto is as a full-service iconoclast, the unique individual who decides that things do not have to be, and won't continue, as they are.
That iconoclastic vision is at the heart of Heinlein, science fiction, libertarianism, and America.
Heinlein imagined how everything about the human world, from our sexual mores to our religion to our automobiles to our government to our plans for cultural survival, might be flawed, even fatally so.
It isn't a quality amenable to pigeonholing, or to creating a movement around "What would Heinlein do?" As Heinlein himself said of his work, it was "an invitation to think-not to be-lieve." He created a body of writing, and helped forge a modern world, that is fascinating to live in because of, not in spite of, its wide scope and enduring contradictions.
Actually, that one was WC Fields.
Okay, I'll have that 8th and 10th and possibly 12th beer if you insist...
However, with you being a self-proclaimed ex-lawyer ailurophile, I shall accept your suggestion with some lemon juice and a grain of salt...
However, if you were a sorry, low down, sorry, no count thespian, I'll have to object mightily!
};^D)
BTW don't ever mention Ellison in the same sentence as John W. Campbell to me again! I don't want to upchuck beer I've already drank!
This is my own favorite. It's also great movie material and still quite timely.
Not worth a farthing! Between the rainy weather, worse in Texas in many a year Algore's crapola aside, and old cuz and my schedules being off kilter, we didn't catch but six danged crappie this whole summer!
And he even bought a new boat!
But gays getting married need not have any effect on your own relationships - unless you want it to.
Free markets are not just about money, but about moral codes and every other aspect of civilization. Edmund Burke himself understood that moral codes are not handed to us by God, but evolve from generations of human trial and error. If gay marriage proves to be one of those errors, the trial itself will have made humanity stronger.
Please, PLEASE Mr. Bender...you wouldn’t kill a MOTHER, wouldja?
I do hope you enjoy the books. If nothing else, they are a fun romp. “Steel Beach” may be hard to find but “The Golden Globe” should still be easily available.
Have fun.
Regards,
Groucho Marx?
Well... we shall work out another arrangement if necessary...
Ah, very nice! Good to see that Annapolis fondly remembers one of its graduates in this way.
Great find, thanks again.
Regards,
PS: I met RAH once when I was younger, not long before he died...he liked my red hair and made me blush. It was one of the highlights of my young adulthood.
Goodkind is a West point grad, and suffers from ADD.
Hell of a writer.
Bummer. Nothin’ to do on that new boat but drown worms and drink beer :-(
I was not interested in reading until my brother gave me a copy of “Red Planet” when I was around 10 - I still consider it one of my all-time favorites. I didn’t care much for Heinlein’s other juveniles, except for “Rolling Stones”. Also liked “The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress” - I still think it would make a great movie.
Heinlein bump.
Damn! Turn my back for a lousy 13hrs. and you start bad mouthing me.
He’s pretty good at both those. Can’t fish to save his life.
Of course ...it is interesting to note that last night (Saturday) - NBC televised a 1 hour show - Masters of Science Fiction - where the episode was “Jerry was a Man”, based on a Heinlein story of the same name.
The start matched reasonably close ...except in the story, Jerry was a genetically modified chimpanzee that talked, while on the show, Jerry is an artificial humanoid construct. Big difference. The “trial” and ending were also mucked up.
It is a shame that the show couldn’t keep closer to the real story. But maybe there will be an opportunity for a few more Heinlein short stories to be made into movies.
Mike
“I won’t belong to any organization that would have me as a member.”
That quote is often attributed to Grouch Marx. W C Fields would never give a sucker an even break.
Where I grew up, that sounds like the very definition of Heaven!
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...and I’ll brook no dispute as to whether I actually ever ‘grew up’
Agree. Those are very much an homage to "Moon is a Harsh Mistress". His "Red Thunder" and "Red Lightning" are also reminiscent, but more like RAH's juveniles in feel.
Ohh. You're gonna like Varley's "The Golden Globe". Elwood P. Dowd is a major character. Sort of.
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