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.
and a free and efficient enterprise minimizes unhappiness in society as a whole.
“Starship Trooper” Bump.
My Infantry Officer dad gave me that book as a High School Senior. It changed my life and world view. Affects me to this day...
Regards,
In my view, his latter works were long and filled with too much meaningless dialogue.
One of my favorites “Never trust a shaman’
These days, of course, no matter what you do, you will find someone to complain that it is damaging them.
48 Right Wing Assault
rbg81
Hmmm...an interesting, but deeply flawed statement.
I am surprised someone as intelligent as Heinlein did not recognize it as such.
There is short term (immediate) physical harm resulting from one's actions. But there is also long term, social and cultural harm of one's actions. The latter is tough to prove and can only be measured over generations. Gay marriage is one example. When gays started to marry in MA, the sun still rose in the morning and things were still the same as yesterday. But the effect of it 20, 50, 100 years hence is still unknown (and I suspect negative). Of course, the current generation may be so twisted, that they refuse to recognize the rot until it is too late.
There may be long term, social and cultural harm of one's actions, -- but under our Constitutions principles, - of due process under rule of law, -- our various levels of gov't cannot make or enforce prohibitive 'laws' that infringe on our individual liberties..
if your actions damage another, a jury of your peers must find you guilty of that actual damage, not some theoretical "long term, social and cultural harm".
Socialism is predicated on the theory that a moral majority can issue decrees-'laws', -- based on long term, social and cultural harm.
Such socialistic theories are a political disease.
For those of us whose formative years included Heinlein’s writing years, he was far and away the American Author of Choice!
“Goldwater’s appeal had two things in common with Heinlein’s: an individualist sense that Americans were being overmanaged and overpampered by an out-of-control federal government, and a belief that those rotten commies needed to get it, good and hard.”...not much has changed, really! The attack on the individual is now coming from both communists and islamowackos!
I grew up reading things like “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” (probably my favorite, his future history stories, and “The Martin Chronicles” starting at the age of about 11.
No wonder I ended up a strange child...
The two highest achievements of the human mind are the twin concepts of ‘-loyalty— and ‘ duty.”
Whenever these twin concepts fall into disrepute, get out of there fast!
You may possibly save yourself, but it is too late to save that society.
It is doomed.
LAZARUS LONG
I think perhaps, you’re agreeing with Heinlein’s quote...and perhaps noticing that the flaw is (with any material action) there will almost always be a ‘reaction’. The key is ‘no harm, no foul’ is perhaps his message....and as today, too many laws can appear to create a ‘foul’ where there is none!
You obviously have never been a single handed sailor, or a mountain climber, etc! While even us single-handed sailors defer every now and then to a specialist out of convenience, it may not mean we couldn’t’a done it ourselves! His message stands as written, elitism notwithstanding!
Any priest or shaman must be presumed guilty until proved innocent.
LAZARUS LONG
It's just a reworded Wiccan creed: "So far as you harm none, do what you will."
...and my favorite singer is Starship Trooper, Sarah Brightman...affects me to this day, as well!
#64...what you said!
” Freedom is better than serfdom, period.’
Well, yeah. But is that any more profound than, “Pain hurts”?
Thanks for the ping, must be Professional Engineer. ;)
Number of the Beast (read in college) was interesting, but it petered out toward the end when it introduced characters from his other works that I wasn't familiar with. (I also wasn't too comfortable with the idea that incest was okay as long as scientific precautions were taken to eliminate the hazardous results that have caused the cultural taboos.)
OTOH, "TANSTAAFL" has become shorthand on many of the old BBSes and internet web boards that I have visited over the years.
Well, yeah. But is that any more profound than, “Pain hurts”?
If freedom being better than serfdom was that self-evidently obvious (and for whom, and when), or anything less than profound, socialism would not exist. There are too many people who believe, in practice even if they will not state so explicitly, that serfdom is better than freedom...and I'm betting some of them are your neighbors.
I had friends living in Canada during the Cold War who had emigrated out of Hungary. They had friends who had voluntarily gone from Canada back to communist Hungary because freedom, as in freedom to fail, terrified them. The thought of not having a job for life along with the other ‘risks’ of capitalism worried them so much they preferred the communism that had defined their lives in Hungary. For some, evidently, serfdom was preferable to freedom.
That was in PEANUTS, BTW. As I recall it, Lucy is fearful of getting a shot, and when Charlie Brown asks her, “You aren’t afraid of a little pain are you?” she replies, “Of course I am, pain hurts.”
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