Why We Must Hate Heinlein

This is not a defense of Robert A Heinlein. And it is not an indictment of him, either. To the contrary, he was a thinking, reasonable man who held opinions contrary to my own.

There are stories you read when you're very young and you understand them at one level. Decades later when you have some experience, you see things at a deeper level. Such it is with Heinlein's novella "Logic of Empire."

In this story the protagonist, Humphrey Wingate, a lawyer and his rich friend argue whether the contract labor conditions on the Venus colony constitute slavery or not.

The lawyer defends the system and its legality only to wake up in the second scene shanghaied to Venus. As you expect he experiences conditions first-hand and changes his opinion. He ends up becoming a revolutionary and he pens a manifesto.

Wingate shows an old wise ex-professor called Doc his manifesto. And Doc tells him that he has fallen into the "satan trap." The owners aren't bad people, he explains, it is a bad system.

Months later his rich buddy catches up with him and buys Wingate out of trouble, the hero goes back to Earth to publish his manifesto. It falls flat. And a helpful publisher suggests a ghost writer "sex up" the manuscript transforming it into "I Was a Slave on Venus."

This brings Wingate to say "To make yourself heard you have to be a demagogue, or a rabble-rousing political preacher..." Heinlein wrote this when the world was a lot less noisy. And his words ring truer today than when he wrote them decades ago.

Several elements strike me about this story. First, Heinlein was no ivory tower academic. He'd worked rough jobs to earn a living with his hands. Second, Heinlein knew enough business to understand the struggle make payroll. This results in a sympathetic depiction of both worker and management.

Heinlein does not go all-in with either the workers or the owners. Good agitprop must paint the owners with the blackest of brushes. That's what Heinlein's boss, Upton Sinclair, did in "The Jungle." The Jungle is good agitprop. The workers are all saints and the factories are all run by demons. But life paints in shades of gray and mixes up things that alternately support and undermine the Party Platform (no matter which party).

Heinlein wrote closer to the truth. This makes you think and for that reason he must be hated.

Droogs and Public Safety

A while back in correspondence with a person who did not want to be named publicly, I had reason to reflect upon violence and social dysfunction perpetrated by young savages.

This conversation (about an accused white supremacist who is--surprisingly--not white) came in the context of Trayvon Martin aftermath, so any mention of "savages" needs to be immediately defended against a false charge of racism. If you want to dismiss me as a blatant racist, here's your excuse. You may now retire to your cocoon now.

I don't think being black or white or yellow makes you more or less likely to be a savage. 

Yet, how do we explain all that crime without being willfully blind to the statistics? And when you get down to individual cases, I'm thinking about the Australian baseball player murdered by youths who happen to be black.

The two competing narratives on right and left are: this is a racially motivated crime vs this is just bored kids acting out. I will go with the lefty narrative because it is more interesting.

At first, I thought the violence commonly reported in the black community (particularly black-on-black violence) was a bitter legacy of slavery. Though the peculiar institution ended over a hundred years before any of the perpetrators were born, it is nevertheless conceivable that dysfunctional social patterns of criminality fitted to slavery persist to this day.

Supposing, as many would prefer, we believe (despite one perpetrator's tweets) this murder is a modern day reenactment of the Leopold and Loeb case, or the Hitchcock movie Rope that Leopold and Loeb inspired. If so, where did this savagery come from?

The disturbing image of Malcolm McDowell came to mind. Consider the savages of A Clockwork Orange. They have their every need provided by a generous and beneficent State. The droogs are all lily white and the story of their violent criminality is utterly believable. No racism here boyo.

If race does not cause savagery, then perhaps welfare causes it. 

Earned accomplishment is the source of happiness. Leopold and Loeb were trust fund kiddies, as were the privileged antagonists of Rope. When opportunities for earned accomplishment are limited, or social forces discourage or sabotage it, people act out. When every material need is provided without effort boredom becomes a problem. 

The savagery that we find so offensive may not be the legacy of slavery, but an unexpected consequence of Santa Claus. Maybe you do should dismiss this line of reasoning as mere racism. It's less threatening than an attack on Santa Claus.

The One Modern Man

I've noticed something while watching Instant Netflix a television show called Murdoch Mysteries. The story is set in the Victorian Toronto and the protagonist is a detective who employs modern forensic techniques to solve crimes. He is surrounded by barbarians who regard him as something of an oddball. We know these people are barbarians because each week some aspect of the Victorian culture we disapprove of is shoved in our face (e.g. racist, sexist, homophobic, environmentally insensitive, anti-papist or Tory).

And the One Modern Man^TM happens to disapprove, too.

He has to reflect OUR biases and preferences, or we won't identify with him. I noticed this some years back when chatting with a friend who writes murder mysteries that are solved by Pliny the Younger and his faithful sidekick Tacitus. I heartily recommend his books.

If you disagree with Victorian mores, how about a society that is built upon slavery? How about a protagonist who owns slaves? A lot of slaves!

This creates a tension between the demands of the reading public and human nature. If you grow up with anything, you'll think it to be the natural state of things.

But the protagonist has to reflect OUR biases and preferences, or we won't identify with him. The hero must be the One Modern Man^TM in the story. Ergo, Pliny manifests modern attitudes toward slavery.

This pattern should be kept in mind if your setting has a society with something, anything your reading audience finds revolting. In such a case, you need to make your protagonist the One Modern Man^TM.