Re: [UUPoly-L] Stranger In A Strange Land

["Catherine Deville" <catdeville@cox.net>]

<<
The universal consensus is that these characters evoke  Heinlein's personal 
views on the subject.  I don't share those  sentiments.  Heinlein also has a

disturbing belief in eugenics and may even  have been racist (as in White 
Supremacist) in his personal thinking.   Despite these disturbing
tendencies, I 
still enjoy his writing.>>

The "universal consensus" can often be wrong. Heinlein was a brilliant
author, and as such he likes to make us think.  He includes many provocative
and intriguing ideas in his works... but he himself has often stated that
he's not prone to offer us answers, he wants to offer us *questions*, and to
make us examine our own beliefs and to force us to explore the answers.
While many of this express certain ideals consistently enough that you can
point to those ideas and say that they are likely Heinlein's... especially
when you compare them to his non-fiction work, where he was pretty clear
about his ideas, other times he plays Devil's Advocate for us, and forces us
to examine an issue from multiple angles.  Did Heinlein really believe in
Pantheistic multiple-ego solipsism, or was he just trying to make us think?
One doesn't really know, but I believe the latter.  Reading Starship
Troopers he sounds like a jack booted fascist, but if you read the body of
his works you can easily see that he's a staunch libertarian - although he
*also* recognizes the price that true anarchy, with it's failure to
recognize the necessity of the "social contract" exacts on the freedom of
the individual. His first novel, "For Us, the Living", was far left wing
communist stuff, yet Heinlein himself was vocally anti-communist, even
writing an apologia for the McCarthy hearings.  

His viewpoints, taken from his novels, range from radically left wing, to
"stridently right wing", and he sometimes sets up "utopian" societies, and
then examines them from the perspective of the outlaw individualist, and yet
in several cases that outlaw individualist is shown to be naïve and juvenile
in his understanding of how politics and society actually work. It's been
said (and it's valid, I believe), that "Often critics take one aspect of a
postulated society or commentary about some aspect of society, and ignore
the full context in which it was presented."  His most consistent threads
are libertarianism, anti-authoritarianism, free thinking (supporting the
separation of church and state and railing against the evils of theocratic
governments), anti-conscription, socialism (*and* anti-Communism... Heinlein
understood the difference), anti-racism, individualism/self-determination,
and sexual positivism and liberation.

Finally, as to his being racist or a white supremacist... I'd say that's the
same kind of misinterpretation of his work that makes him a misogynist.  One
has to examine the works of an individual from the context of the world in
which that individual derived.  And considering the date of Heinlein's birth
(1907), if you examine his work in context, you recognize that he was very
forward thinking for his generation. Several of his novels carry
metaphorical anti-racist messages at a time before the civil rights movement
had even begun. "Space Cadet" (1948) is one of the first with obvious
anti-racist statements incorporated.  In addition, several of his main
characters are either dark skinned, of African descent, or are of mixed race
("The Cat Who Walks Through Walls", "Tunnel in the Sky" and "Friday"). In
those cases it's often the publisher, whose art departments portrayed the
characters are being white on the covers, who might be considered racist.
And one of my favorites, "Farnham's Freehold", has one of the strongest
attacks against the dehumanizing influence of racism that I've ever seen at
it's center.  The Wikipedia article on Heinlein has a really good analysis
of his anti-racist content:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_A_Heinlein#Race

And as an aside... when it comes to incest, I think if you look closely
you'll see that it's not that Heinlein is advocating incest... he's asking
us to examine *why* it is taboo.  He's asking us to separate irrational
religious mores from logical reasoning.  And is he really wrong to do so? 

NT, 
Cat