In this month’s Reason, Brian Doherty looks at Robert Heinlein from all the angles.
As a soldier as epitomized in Starship Troopers:
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.)
As the hippie who wrote Stranger in a Strange Land:
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.”
As the libertarian who wrote The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress:
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.
And the iconoclast who wrote about nudism and even more taboo-breaking topics in Time Enough For Love:
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.
Read the whole thing. Heck, read everything Heinlein wrote.
