I am closing in on the end of Astounding, which bills itself as a history of golden-age SF, and so far the most interesting aspect of it was the largely-uncommented-on political history of Robert Heinlein. We meet him as an enthusiast of Eugene Debs, encounter him later as among the crowds cheering FDR’s train as it passed, and say goodbye to him as an archly libertarian cold-warrior. Of course, that latter description is interesting and conflicted in and of itself: the Cold War not only expanded the state, but completely destroyed opposition to the state’s power and ambition, turning the traditional check against it (non-interventionist conservatism) into the neocon movement that gave us the GOP until the late 2000s. I began fishing about for a Heinlein biography that might shed some light on the situation. While it’s not a biography — it’s a lengthy interview bookended with Schulman’s reviews of Heinlein’s books — it made for interesting reading, given both my interest in SF and in the school of thought that Heinlein and Schulman both described to, to varying degrees. (Schulman, it should be remembered, wrote Alongside Night, in which a countereconomic anarcho-capitalist society establishes itself underground as the state economy smothers itself with inflation and diktats.)

Schulman is himself an unusual figure, as he describes three authors as those he revers above all others, who continually vie for his soul: Ayn Rand, C.S. Lewis, and Robert Heinlein. I suspect Lewis would be astonished to be sorted in such company , but that’s the marvelous complexity of the human mind for you. (And who am I to judge, with my Russell Kirk and Rand volumes on the same shelf as Howard Zinn?) As the interview develops, we get a sense that Heinlein, while sure in his convictions, nevertheless loved conflicting views: he subscribed to magazines which made various competing arguments, and while he was a staunch advocate of individual privacy and free enterprise (“The justification of free enterprise is that it’s free.”), he nevertheless appears to view something like the state as inevitable because of the “bully boys”. If I understand this view correctly, it means that, given the tribal/gang-oriented nature of H. sapiens, there will always be groups establishing a territory and imposing order on it, whether that take the form of an urban street gang or a state that defuses most resistance to it by tokens of democratic participation. Heinlein offers to Schulman that the Earth is a tough neighborhood and that humans who have survived this long only got that way being tough themselves — mean, tough, and nasty. While he doesn’t believe that excuses people being jerks in everyday society, I suspect he’d take a very dim view to cities allowing gangs of hoodlums to raid stores with impunity, or the violently mental ill to take over entire city streets.

I can’t comment on the book reviews because I’ve read so little Heinlein; The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Starship Troopers. Heinlein’s commitment to writing different stories, though, no novel like another, makes me want to dive more into his works.

Higlights:

Heinlein, through Dr. Samuel Russell in Have Space Suit—Will Travel, said, “There is no such thing as luck. There is only adequate or inadequate preparation to cope with a statistical universe.”

“We got this way—we got where we are—over the course of a long stretch of evolution, by being survivor types in a very tough jungle. And from all I’ve seen of the human race so far, they’re still that; mean, tough, and nasty. I do not mean that as a derogatory remark, either; I think that’s what it takes to survive. That doesn’t mean you have to be mean, tough, and nasty in your daily behavior. In other words I am not a pacifist, and I do not think the human animal is put together so he can be a pacifist and still survive.”

SCHULMAN: Wouldn’t you say—at least about anarchists—that this statement is irrelevant because anarchists don’t even want protection ‘from’ the state, they want protection against it?”
HEINLEIN: Now. Neil. You have in there an assumption contrary to fact. And that is that there is such a thing as anarchists which agree on any one thing. [Laughter] There are as many sorts of anarchism as there are anarchists and you sure as hell know it by now!

Incidentally, I’m delighted to have both magazines in the house as I frequently find something in each of them that disagrees with my own point of view. It does me no good to read something that agrees with my own point of view. I want to read something that disagrees with my own point of view, follow me? SCHULMAN: Okay. HEINLEIN: You can’t learn from a man who agrees with you.

SCHULMAN: This is a point Dr. [Murray] Rothbard makes frequently. He says we already have international anarchy; why not just decentralize down to the individual level? HEINLEIN: Because along comes the bully boys. And if the bully boys band together then the people who simply want to be left along have to band together.

HEINLEIN: [Isaac Asimov’s] stuff is always stimulating even when you don’t agree with it. Perhaps even most so when you disagree with it.