Babel Clash

Robert Heinlein’s fiction is nothing if not didactic. Willingham got me thinking about Heinlein with his recent post about the practical versus the romantic, and that got me thinking about what a know-it-all Heinlein was, and how much I love him in spite of it.

Bill Willingham loves to needle me that I’m actually a closet Republican, despite my vocal liberal views, because Starship Troopers is one of my favorite books. It’s true that despite being a fine science fiction novel, it is nonetheless a conservative apologia on the level of Atlas Shrugged. Heinlein was the guy who gave us, in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, a libertarian paradise on the moon in which the only law enforcement was consensus: if we don’t like your looks, we toss you out the airlock. He proposed in Starship Troopers that citizenship should only be offered to those who were able to prove that they deserved it, through military service. Everywhere you look in Heinlein there’s the spirit of extreme personal liberty, a chuckle at the notion of social policies, and a shrug at the less fortunate (Heinlein would probably have argued that there’s no such thing as the less fortunate, since anyone ought to be able to pull himself up by his bootstraps, and if he won’t then he doesn’t deserve liberty in the first place).

It’s a great credit to his skill as a writer that Starship Troopers is such a damn enjoyable book, given the fact that so much of it is a philosophical screed inveighing against liberalism of any kind. He goes so far as to opine that (or, at least, the novel goes so far as to opine) that the Declaration of Independence is wishy-washy because it guarantees life and liberty as universal rights. It also springs to mind that there isn’t much a plot, either, as the book mostly follows Rico’s rise through the ranks in the military, with no climax and no real arc for the protagonist except that he becomes more awesome as the novel progresses.

So why do I love Heinlein so much? First off, he is at his best a demonically compelling storyteller. (At his worst, he’s nearly unreadable; if you want to punish yourself, try making it across the finish line of The Number of the Beast.) Many of his protagonists are compelling and lovable because of the brio, tough smarts, and force of will that Heinlein gives them: Johnny Rico, Lazarus Long, etc. And when the protagonist isn’t the Heinlein ideal (or even if he is), there’s often a wise old man along for the ride to give him doses of moral certainty: Jubal Harshaw, Professor de la Paz, Col. Dubois. Who cares if the bugs are sentient beings? It doesn’t matter because it’s fun to watch Rico annihilate them with a flame-thrower, and it’s a dog-eat-dog world where we all gotta fight to survive. No namby-pamby crying for the bugs, the way Ender does in Ender’s Game. Orson Scott Card gives us an interesting moral problem to chew on, but he also takes all the fun out of having just blown up all of those evil monsters.

The thing is, that I don’t love Heinlein in spite of his personal morality; I kind of like him because of it. Even I have a tendency to get caught up in Heinlein’s philosophy–in the context of his books. When they’re throwing the guy out of the airlock in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, I find myself thinking, “My, what an efficient system! The constant threat of being lynched by one’s peers does indeed encourage civility.” Or, “It certainly seems like the right thing to do for these people who’ve just met to get married and then engage in romantic practices that would be looked upon as deviant in even the most degenerate 1960’s commune.” It’s the certainty and coherence of these philosophies that makes them so engaging.

Because here’s the deal: whether it’s genetics or the plotting of orbital paths for rockets or lunar ecology, Heinlein knows what he’s talking about. And even if he doesn’t, he presents it with such authority and panache that you’d never know the difference. Has anyone ever tried to follow the logic in Time Enough for Love in which Lazarus Long works out whether the twins who aren’t related are safe to procreate with one another? I haven’t. Didn’t you just kind of go along with it when Jubal Harshaw was explaining the subtleties of human nature to Valentine Michael Smith? I did.

In life as in fiction, a solid, compelling worldview is infectious. Moral certitude is attractive. We get drawn to stories by their ability to entertain, but we return to them for their ability to inform. And even if we don’t always agree with what we’re being told, it’s fun to experience of world in which the philosophy of the author is just the thing to make the world go ’round. Especially if there are flame throwers. (But not so much the cats. I never got the allure of the whole cat thing in Heinlein.)

And if nothing else, Heinlein gave us the term “grok,” a word for which there is no true substitute. Would that today’s youth could grok its beauty. A little bit of the Heinlein worldview might give these whippersnappers a much-needed kick in the pants!

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