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.
That's because that big fan up front is there to keep you cool!
My favorite Peanuts bit:
Linus — You know how it is, Charlie. You win some, you lose some.
Charlie Brown — Sigh. Wouldn’t it be nice?
I imagine their idea of freedom was, as you say, freedom ‘from’ rather than ‘to.’ Is this mindset present in the freedom of/from religion dichotomy? Hmmm. As in the desire for or resistance to imposition, I’d say so.
Just weighing in (check the first line on my homepage)
Read every word as it was published and starting the grandkids on the juveniles (his best stuff, he always needed a good editor).
Huh. Funny - my flight instructor told me it was for cutting wires.
I haven't given much consideration to the from/to dichotomy as it specifically pertains to religion, so thank you for spurring something interesting for me to ponder. The first thing that popped into mind was whether creating special rules for religiously-inspired speech (the First Amendment aside) is a valid or workable approach. The old bromide of 'keep your religion out of politics" has its roots not in the right or the left, but in desire to be "free from" the imposition of someone else's beliefs...but only if those beliefs are ascribed to religion. Suppose I arrive at a position espoused by, e.g., the so-called religious right, but that position is informed by legal philosophy, or political considerations...is my attempt to implement, to impose, as it were, that position somehow socially more valid because it's not religiously motivated? Turned around, does the fact that a position might have its genesis in one's religious convictions somehow make that position invalid ab initio, because its first principles are suspect? Is this the height of egoism?
To bring this wide-ranging speculation back on topic :-) I think Heinlein would join me in being very much in the freedom to camp!
I didn’t get my early political beliefs from Heinlein, so I don’t know. However, I was strongly influenced by Anthem from Ayn Rand, which was IMO heavy on the ‘from,’ which, I suppose, implied ‘to.’
As far as I know, I’ve read all of his works and not one disappointed me. Some were better than others, but each and every one I consider a gift!
My favorite was and still is Starship Troopers and I will forever be sporting a ‘Shoot on Sight’ attitude towards Paul Verhoeven (Director), Edward Neumeier (Screenwriter) and any other of those unmentionable bums that birthed that 1997 bastard Starship Troopers flick. I cannot even bring myself to call it a film or even a movie...
The only saving grace of the whole sad effort was Brenda Strong’s Captain Deladier. That was the only character that even came close to what I saw in my mind’s eye when I read the novel. I also liked her Sgt. Dede Rake in 2004’s Starship Troopers 2: Hero of the Federation, another POS, too, but better than the original Verhoeven attempt
Okay, Okay! I like Brenda acting ability and she is also easy on the eyes... Plus her Sue Ellen Mischke was my favorite in “Seinfeld,” especially when she wore the bra over her sweater!!!
Like Kramer, I’d have run off the road too if I saw her like that while driving!
From http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0697666/
Jackie Chiles: So you’re driving in the car, you’re with your friend, minding your own business?
Cosmo Kramer: Yeah.
Jackie Chiles: Then what happened?
Cosmo Kramer: Then we saw this woman, and she was wearing a bra with no top.
Jackie Chiles: No top? She didn’t have a top on?
Cosmo Kramer: No. So I got distracted and I crashed the car.
Jackie Chiles: Well how would you describe this woman? Would you say she was an attractive woman?
Cosmo Kramer: Oh yeah!
Jackie Chiles: So we got an attractive woman, wearing a bra, no top, walkin’ around in broad daylight. She’s flouting society’s conventions!
Cosmo Kramer: She was flouting.
I second the motion, she was flouting!
Okay, back to Heinlein...
I shall go to my gave with two regrets that I will never be able to change. One, I would have cast George Peppard as Career Sergeant Zim had I been able to make the film in the 1970s when I was hot-to-trot as a wan’abe filmmaker...
The other regreat is not seeing Ed Asner play Pug Henry in Herman Wolk’s “The Winds of War” and “War and Remembrance” but that is for another thread on Liberal Actors you hate for their politics but love for their acting ability!
as to what Robert A. Heinlein wrote, here is a listing from http://www.space.com/sciencefiction/heinlein_biblio_991101.html
Over his half-century career, Grand Master of Science Fiction Robert A. Heinlein (1907-1988) produced some 40 book-length works and collections of shorter material, much of which has remained in print over the decades.
For younger readers
Rocket Ship Galileo - 1947 (juvenile)
Space Cadet - 1948 (juvenile)
Red Planet - 1949 (juvenile)
Farmer in the Sky - 1950 (juvenile)
Between Planets - 1951 (juvenile)
The Rolling Stones - 1952 (juvenile)
Starman Jones - 1953 (juvenile)
The Star Beast - 1954 (juvenile)
Tunnel in the Sky - 1955 (juvenile)
Time for the Stars - 1956 (juvenile)
Citizen of the Galaxy - 1957 (juvenile)
Have Space Suit - Will Travel - 1958 (juvenile)
Podkayne of Mars - 1963 (juvenile)
The Future History series
The Man Who Sold the Moon - 1950
The Green Hills of Earth - 1951
Revolt in 2100 - 1953
Methuselah’s Children - 1958
Orphans of the Sky - 1963
The Past Through Tomorrow - 1967 (omnibus edition)
The Adventures of Lazarus Long
Time Enough for Love - 1973
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long - 1978 (aphorisms)
The Number of the Beast - 1980
The Cat Who Walks Through Walls - 1985
To Sail Beyond the Sunset - 1985
Other novels
Beyond this Horizon - 1948
Sixth Column - 1949
Double Star - 1956 (Hugo winner)
The Door into Summer - 1957
The Menace from Earth - 1959
Starship Troopers - 1959 (Hugo winner)
Stranger in a Strange Land - 1961 (Hugo winner)
Glory Road - 1963
Farnham’s Freehold - 1964
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress - 1966 (Hugo winner)
I Will Fear No Evil - 1970
Friday - 1982
Job: A Comedy of Justice - 1984
Unrelated short fiction and marginalia
Waldo and Magic, Inc. - 1951 (short stories)
Assignment in Eternity - 1953 (short stories)
Expanded Universe - 1980 (essays and short stories)
Grumbles from the Grave - 1989 (posthumous, letters)
Tramp Royale - 1992 (posthumous, previously unpublished travel memoir)
Requiem - 1992 (posthumous, marginalia and tributes from other writers)
I must say there are only two people I think of and actually miss each and every day. They are my late Father George Bedford Lee and Robert Anson Heinlein...
And, amongst all that, he invented the waterbed.
Following specialties is part of free enterprise, is part of Western liberty. If you don’t like the payment system and the contractual and regulatory agreements, that is a separate issue.
In areas where an orthopedic surgeon does not exist, a broken bone presents as an emergency and another doctor will set the bone. In areas where there are specialists of every stripe on board, they tend to their areas. You don’t have GPs performing trauma surgery in the ER. It’s good that each choose their own path.
If the government tells you that one weekend a month you have to hop on the back of a garbage truck, are you going to be happy having to diversify your experience like that, or are you going to protest that you have better things to do with your time? If you choose to collect garbage on the side, that’s fine. And that’s all I’m talking about. People choosing to do what they want to do.
Actually, the Government (US) wound up owning the infamous Mustang Ranch (Whorehouse, subject of a movie), and some months later, it went bust.
So the tagline is a joke - congress did run a brothel, and it went broke.
Go figure.
“I will take the young pretty girl on the end..”
“So would I, but this is a union shop - Toothless edna, you are up!”
Just as obvious.
Thanks! I never realised that Brenda Strong, who also played Sue Ellen Mischke on Seinfeld, was in the abominable Starship Troopers; if ever I see it again I’ll have something else to look for beside the shower scene. ;-P
Your list of Heinlein’s works omits the novel “For Us The Living: A Comendy of Customs,” which was his first novel, written in 1938 but unpublished ‘til 2004, long after his death. It’s an interesting read — very unlike the polished writer we came to know, but rich with ideas fleshed out in later works.
Galahad:
To bring this wide-ranging speculation back on topic :-) I think Heinlein would join me in being very much in the freedom to camp!
I think Heinlein would join the Constitutional 'camp', -- which specifies we have freedom of religion, - and, -- a freedom from legislators making laws that respect specific religions.
Thus, -- there is no constitutional dichotomy.
I didn’t take gcruse’s comment to speak to a constitutional dimension...but that dichotomy certainly is an active ingredient in political and social discourse.
” Thus, — there is no constitutional dichotomy.’
I think the Constitution contains the dichotomy.
The BOR limits Congress as a freedom ‘from,’ with ‘Congress shall make no law.’ Everything else is freedom ‘to’ as far as the feds are concerned. That is, ‘to’ is not enumerated.
Unfortunately, beginning at least with FDR’s 1935 decision that a farmer growing and consuming his own food affected interstate commerce, federalism has been killed off and freedom ‘to’ dies a little more each day.
Wow ~ you were/are a Heinlein fan!!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.