[tt] Reason: Brian Doherty: Robert Heinlein at 100

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Brian Doherty: Robert Heinlein at 100
http://www.reason.com/news/show/120766.html
[Linked by Arts & Letters Daily.]

How the science fiction master created the template for our looser,
hipper, more pluralist world.

Aug./Sept. Print Edition


The science fiction writer Robert Heinlein's 100th birthday is July
7. Despite his visions of near-immortals and cryogenic sleep, he
didn't live to see it. He died in 1988, mourned by millions of
readers who saw him more as a father or a guru than merely as a
spinner of captivating tales.

Fans plan to celebrate his centennial at a conference in Kansas
City, near Heinlein's birthplace, in July. Among those who will be
paying him homage are Buzz Aldrin (the second man to walk on the
moon) and Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.), whose past includes
stints as both a hippie folksinger and a Reagan speechwriter.

That pair of devotees says something about the range of Heinlein's
influence. His influence on science fiction almost goes without
saying; when the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America
chose their field's first Grand Master, Heinlein was the easy
choice. But Heinlein was bigger than his literary genre. Following
him could lead you to seemingly contradictory places, from the
military to a free-love commune.

Heinlein venerated the armed forces, most notoriously in his 1959
novel Starship Troopers, which celebrated an elite military order.
Just two years later, he was publishing the counterculture classic
Stranger in a Strange Land, with its simultaneously beatific, sexy,
and heroic vision of Martian-inspired communal living. A rich mix of
bohemian and straight-arrow values, Heinlein's unique take on
American individualism made him the bridge between such disparate
'60s icons as Barry Goldwater and Charles Manson.

Heinlein's novels and short stories reflected the rough-hewn
anti-government but pro-defense message associated with Goldwater
and the conservative movement he sparked. At the same time, his
writings exuded the communal desire to live in blissful
togetherness, ignoring the repressive sexual and religious mores of
bourgeois America. With a libertarian vision that appealed to
individualists of both the left and the right, Heinlein not only set
the template for the American 1960s but helped create the looser,
hipper, more pluralist world of the decades since.

Whether we're looking at post-Star Wars pop culture, post-Reagan
politics, or the day-to-day tenor of our own lives in the Internet
age, it's easy to see that while more literary novelists such as
Philip Roth and Saul Bellow enjoy high-flying critical reputations,
it's Heinlein's fingerprints that mark the modern world.

Heinlein the Soldier

Heinlein was born in 1907 in Butler, Missouri, the son of a farm
equipment salesman. Family connections with the Pendergast political
machine in Kansas City won him an appointment to Annapolis. He
identified proudly with the Navy for the rest of his life, although
he was retired in 1934 because of tuberculosis, just five years into
his active service.

Heinlein sold his first S.F. story in 1939 and almost instantly
became the acknowledged king of his field, under the tutelage of
legendary Astounding editor John Campbell. In the Campbell era, with
Heinlein leading the way, the S.F. magazines moved from didactic
travelogues and amateurish intergalactic epics to intelligent
treatments of politics, religion, and sociology. Heinlein was also
the first S.F. writer to break into respectable "slick" fiction
magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post after World War II, and
he spearheaded the first sober space travel movie, Destination Moon
(1950), in which private enterprise-beating back objections from
early advocates of a sort of "precautionary principle," who feared
it was to unsafe even to try-makes it to the moon.

Most important, from 1947 to 1958 Heinlein wrote a series of S.F.
novels for boys, published by Scribner's, that seemed to make it
into every high school and elementary school library. From book to
book their scope widened, starting with plucky, capable boys making
a simple moon flight (Rocket Ship Galileo) and progressing across
the solar system, presenting young men fighting revolutions on Venus
(Between Planets), farming on Ganymede (Farmer in the Sky),
navigating interstellar starships (Starman Jones), and finally
defending the human race before an alien tribunal (Have Space Suit,
Will Travel).

These coming-of-age adventure tales imagined an anti-xenophobic
world in which aliens were lovable, inscrutable, and often wiser
than men-although, for all that, occasionally dangerous. Those books
lie close to the heart of almost everyone who went on to love or
write science fiction, or to work to make its space travel dreams
come true.

As the 1950s ended, Heinlein wrote a final boys' novel, Starship
Troopers. Scribner's rejected it, finding it inappropriate for its
intended youth market. It tells the story of a young man who finds
his place in the world by joining the Mobile Infantry, going through
the travails of training, and eventually fighting a war against
sinister, implacable alien bugs whose ant-like lack of individuality
was an unmistakable metaphor for communism.

Troopers was published in 1959, just before Barry Goldwater made his
first big national splash with his 1960 manifesto Conscience of a
Conservative. 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.

Heinlein was influenced by the same Cold War realities that inspired
Goldwater. Even in the 1930s, during his brief involvement with
Upton Sinclair's left-wing End Poverty in California movement,
Heinlein had always been a staunch individualist (and somewhat of an
elitist). His novels were peopled by super-competent men and women
struggling against repressive governments and hidebound
bureaucracies, not to mention more literal threats to their
individuality, such as brain-controlling slugs from Saturn's moon
Titan (in his 1951 Red Scare metaphor The Puppet Masters).

The struggle part was key to Heinlein's thought. In the 1950s, he
viewed Soviet communism as a threat to individualism that needed to
be combated by nearly any means necessary. (A draft, which he
regarded as slavery under any circumstances, was not one of them.)
One of his central ideas, repeated over and over again, was that man
is the most dangerous beast in the universe. Thus, he saw no
probable peaceful end to the Cold War. Preparing for a nuclear war
he saw as bordering on inevitable was, he believed, an American's
prime duty. In 1958 he bought newspaper ads calling for the
formation of "Patrick Henry Leagues" to push this idea. (Among other
things, the ads stated that "higher taxes" were a price worth paying
to beat the Soviets.)

The novel that arose from this sense of mission, Starship Troopers,
strikes many readers as overly militaristic, bordering on fascist.
The S.F. writer and Nation critic Thomas Disch wrote that the book
caused "so many of [Heinlein's] critics" to pin a "totalitarian"
label on him. (Disch kindly said that "authoritarian" is more apt.)
Troopers posited that a ruthless military was an inescapable aspect
of human civilization, and it presented approvingly a society in
which only veterans of public service could vote.

Heinlein's detractors ignored the fact that military service made up
only a small portion of that public service. The novel kept its
occasional paeans to authority and discipline strictly within the
military context, not meant to apply to all human relations. It also
explained that active military men were not permitted to hold public
office and were in fact held in low regard by the rest of the
culture.

The choice to enter the service and earn the franchise was both
voluntary and rare. The society in Troopers was, despite such a
restricted democracy, one where "personal freedom for all is
greatest in history, laws are few, taxes are low, living standards
are as high as productivity permits." Still, Heinlein's insistence
on the importance and glory of the military, and of often brutal
discipline within that context, left him, as Disch wrote, "able to
amaze and appall the liberal imagination like almost no other SF
writer."

Heinlein the Hippie

The anti-communist, pro-military message of Troopers might seem to
suggest that Heinlein stood firmly on the right wing of the larger
American individualist tradition. But Troopers appeared as Heinlein
was in the middle of writing another novel, one that painted a very
different picture.

The interrupted novel became his breakthrough both as a successful
"mainstream" writer and as a public influence. It was Stranger in a
Strange Land, about a human being raised by Martians who returns to
Earth and begins a new religion of free love.

His name is Valentine Michael Smith, and he's brought back to Earth
as a total naïf. He falls under the wings of a Heinlein stand-in, a
popular fiction writer and curmudgeon named Jubal Harshaw. After
many entertaining geopolitical machinations, lots of "everything you
know is wrong"-style lectures from Harshaw, and a stint as a carnie,
Smith starts a new religion which avers to each and every one of us
that "Thou Art God."

Smith has the superhuman ability to, among other things, make both
enemies and clothes disappear with just a thought. He teaches that
casual sex with your "water brothers" (anyone you choose to share
water with--a precious gesture on a desiccated Mars) is in Smith's
words "a goodness," not a sin.

Stranger became a slow-burning bestseller, presaging the collapse of
traditional sexual and religious mores in the 1960s. It gave the
counterculture vocabulary the Martian word grok, that very '60s term
meaning really, really understanding something, man, so that you and
it were, like, as one. The novel presaged, among other things, the
rise of charismatic non-Christian popular cults such as
Transcendental Meditation and Scientology. Through Harshaw's
lectures and Smith's attempts to teach repressed Earthlings a more
loving, open way to live, it opened up the minds of many readers to
an observation from George Bernard Shaw that Heinlein adored: that
only a barbarian "believes that the customs of his tribe are the
laws of nature."

Stranger became a prop in youthful pads across the country. Unlike
most such books that marked the owner as hip, this one actually
presented a model, long before many American kids would actually try
to put it into effect, of communal living. Many would-be "nests"
arose, including a neopagan group that explicitly named itself after
Smith's Church of All Worlds. Many of these seekers wrote Heinlein
letters addressing him as "father" and requesting spiritual
guidance. He found this disconcerting.

In 1967 David Crosby wrote a Stranger-inspired song of group love
called "Triad" that name-checks "water brothers," and Crosby still
enthusiastically considers Heinlein a personal hero. There are
echoes of Stranger in the credo of the counterculture bible the
Whole Earth Catalog, with its matter-of-fact declaration that "we
are as gods and might as well get good at it." ("We all read Robert
Heinlein's epic Stranger in a Strange Land as well as his
libertarian screed-novel, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress," catalog
founder Stewart Brand later wrote. "Hippies and nerds alike reveled
in Heinlein's contempt for centralized authority.") With the spirit
of Valentine Michael Smith ruling the anti-establishment arenas of
the '60s, it was almost inevitable that Ed Sanders, in his book The
Family, would declare that Charles Manson modeled his cult on
Smith's "nests" of communally living, free-loving, Nietzschean
saints.

Heinlein had the claim investigated and found that Manson himself
had neither interest in nor knowledge of the book. Still, one of
Manson's ladies had named her baby after Smith. A Manson girl also,
according to Heinlein's posthumous collection of letters, Grumbles
> From the Grave, wrote to the Heinleins from jail seeking help. And
though Manson was not a fan himself, his vision of antinomian
communal living-including the part about killing those you thought
needed killing, which Smith was able to do just by willing it-was
clearly one way to read Stranger.

In the novel, Smith's new religion angers hidebound humans unwilling
to grok the goodness of moving beyond traditional families and even
traditional property-an unnecessary expedient among true water
brothers, who can successfully and unjealously share. The book ends
with Smith becoming a willing martyr, dying to make men both holy
and free. That spirit of fighting to the death against a mad culture
flowed strong through the upheaval of the '60s, from the peaceful
kid sticking a flower in a rifle to the one setting a bomb in a
recruitment center.

Heinlein the Libertarian

This one-two punch of curious, powerful novels seems to indicate two
opposing strains of thought. But to Heinlein, these dueling
visions-a world of sinister alien bugs fought off by powerfully
disciplined soldiers, and a beatific Man from Mars teaching humanity
how to love freely-had the same message, as he once wrote to his
fellow S.F. writer Alfred Bester: "That a man, to be truly human,
must be unhesitatingly willing at all times to lay down his life for
his fellow man. Both [novels] are based on the twin concepts of love
and duty-and how they are related to the survival of our race."

That quote, from a man so proud of his love of freedom he once joked
that "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 that statement of 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.

Senior Editor Brian Doherty is the author of This is Burning Man
(Little, Brown) and Radicals for Capitalism (PublicAffairs). He
wrote about Heinlein in The Science Fiction Film Reader (Limelight
Editions), edited by Gregg Rickman.