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.
Say, you seen that guy in the ugly blue pants again?
I’m keeping my eye out for him!
No, I haven’t.
Good for you ~ someone has to protect our delicate sensibilities. >:-}
Well, where keeping an eye peeled for the guy in the ugly blue pants is concerned, it is a nasty, dirty job...
But I am happy to do it! };^b)
You’re all heart! >:-}
From the assorted usless trivia department: Marvin Zindler of EYE - Witness - News, (if you'd ever heard him you'd know what that means), in Houston, Texas passed on recently. He was the fellow who got his knickers in a twist when he found out that "Texas has a whorehouse in it!"
I Really wish some of this stuff weren't taking up what could otherwise be useful space in my brain.
Any serious Heinlien fan should check out "For Us The Living". Not because it is a great novel, because it really isn't, but because it shows how much of what later became central points to Heinlein stories were present right there at the beginning, in 1938.
Haven’t read that one, so I couldn’t help.
You're right about the alley scene. It's an all-time classic.
LOL!
The first Heinlein story I ever read was The Puppet Masters. I was 10, and spent the next 3 or 4 years devouring everything he wrote. There was probably a space of 12 months, there, where I read nothing but RAH and CS Lewis. Between the two of them, they made me the woman and wife I am today.
Books that have recently made me think of Heinlein are John Scalzi’s “Old Man’s War”, and Eric Flint’s “1632” series (alternate history). No life changing philosophies there, but durn good reading.
LOL. I prefered Speaker for the Dead
Yikes! Don’t get me started on the free online Baen books again. That dang Webscriptions has been the cause of more 10 pm runs to Barnes and Noble then I care to remember...
...I am going to want something to read...
Classic. LOL.
I lived in Houston from '70-'76, so I well recall old Marvin and that toupe of his! Gadzooks! The man was so over the top, he was sow very self-righteous that he came across campy and funny but he did gain everlasting fame for bringing "The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas" to life...
Which brings me to my favorite Aggies joke I do believe Bob Heinlein would have loved, too:
These two Aggies were hicthhiking through La Grange and hit a slow patch of highway. All the cars would head right for the Aggies, but turn off into a driveway just before them.
The cars would all go up the road to this huge house. The men in the cars would get out and ring the doorbell. A beautiful woman would come to the door, give the men a big smile. The men would pull out their wallets and give the woman a hundred dollar bill. The woman would then smile wider and invite them inside.
After a half hour or so, the men would come back out with huge smiles on their faces. They would they get back into their car and drive down the driveway and turn on the road going away from the Aggies.
"Say, Pard," the taller of the two Aggies said to the other. "That woman up there must be selling something really wonderful!"
"She sure must be," replied the short Aggie. "Wonder what it is?"
After most of an entire afternoon had passed with the Aggies watching car after car come and go, they both finally decided to got see for themselves what the woman was selling.
They walked up to the door, but the tall Aggies suddenly said, "Whoa, Pard, we need to see how much money we got!"
They pooled what funds they had between them and it came up to one dollar and sixteen cents.
The short Aggies rang the doorbell and when the woman opened the door, she was exceptionally beautiful and her smile was dazzling.
The Aggies smiled back and the tall one held out his hand with the $1.16 in his palm.
The smile vanished from the beautiful lady and she stepped back into the house. The Aggies followed her and she simply said, "George?"
She walked away as the biggest black man either of those two Aggies had ever seen came up and grabbed them both by the neck. He took them out back of the house and proceeded to beat the living crap out of each. Finished, he dragged their unconscious bodies down the driveway and dumped them on the side of the highway.
About and hour later, the Aggies started to came to. The tall one raised up on his elbow and say, "Pard, I don't think I could'a stood a hundred dollars of that!"
I think old Bob would have laughed and understood that...
One of the best belly laughs I ever had was from the look on Jimmy Stewart's face as he said, "Now that takes me by surprise, Dr. Sanderson."
And: "Wouldn't that get a little monotonous... 
just Akron, cold beer and 'poor, poor thing' for two weeks?"
For what it’s worth, I’ve listened to Ender’s Game, and I own an unread second-hand copy of Xenocide. Haven’t read Speaker of the Dead. I usually like Card’s stuff although I can’t say that I’ve gone out of my way to read anything of his.
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