Robert Heinlein and the Harsh Politics of Science Fiction (2013)
patrickmccray.com
patrickmccray.com
Next time I saw the Moon mentioned in a military context was in George Friedman's "The Next 100 Years", where he tries to predict what will happen throughout the rest of this century. The books gets very sci-fi towards the end, but it's a fun read. I wonder if Friedman has read Heinlein.
It's not confined to sci-fi.
One example is the Sector General series, which was written over several decades real time starting in the 60s. If you read them in sequence, you can see where the author started with the assumption of 1960s social standards but then actively rewrote parts of the setting piece by piece to modernize it.
But it might be interesting to consider a situation where there is no one who is obviously presented with a choice. For example, in the lifeboat example, what if there were no boat officer at all? I.e., no one with any kind of recognized authority to make choices? Might be an interesting variation to consider.
For example, I was born a long time after world war 2, so couldn't possibly affect any of the decisions. But one can still try to consider (as historians routinely do) what was the right thing to do. Should Churchill have warned Coventry about the upcoming German air raids (learned of through cracked German codes), which would likely have saved lives in Coventry, but might have cost more lives and maybe lost the war by alerting the Germans that their codes had been broken?
On a much smaller scale, doctor's frequently have to make these kind of decisions - what if you have 6 patients who will die without a ventilator, but only 3 ventilators available with no way to get more? I don't know anyone making these kind of decisions who is "enamoured" with having to make those decisions - but we recognize that they do have to get made by someone, and would quite happily offload the decision to others as long as we felt there was an ethical, moral, logical basis to the decisions they would make.
Hindsight bias is incredibly powerful, it's impossible for us to blend "obvious" signal back into the noise. Think about the discussions around whether the US should have "known" about the Pearl Harbor raid -- in hindsight, there were signals that should have alerted leadership. In reality, there was so much information that the actual signal blended into the noise. It's only much later that we know the Japanese telegrams were meaningful.
Counter-point: The US sacrificed 400.000 lives fighting the Nazis. Another 600.000 were injured. These people were sacrificed for the greater good. The US didn't have to enter the war. The US didn't have a dictatorship - afaik, it was a federal republic with a democratically elected president.
I'm not saying the US is innocent. I'm saying it isn't a black and white matter.
Contrast Heinlein's cavalier and hypothetical invocation of the necessity for making hard decisions to Admiral Nimitz's anguish over the burden of having to do so in real life, as revealed in a comment to Frank Capra, quoted in this post:
Such people weren't in the US government? You remember all the American rah-rah-rah bullshit?
>Citizenship is an attitude, a state of mind, an emotional conviction that the whole is greater than the part... and that the part should be humbly proud to sacrifice itself that the whole may live.
>[...] authority and responsibility must be equal — else a balancing takes place as surely as current flows between points of unequal potential. To permit irresponsible authority is to sow disaster; to hold a man responsible for anything he does not control is to behave with blind idiocy. The unlimited democracies were unstable because their citizens were not responsible for the fashion in which they exerted their sovereign authority... other than through the tragic logic of history.
First, anyone morally opposed to military is excluded, responsible or not. Second, being in military does not make you responsible. That claim is just a pro-military propaganda protagonist was taught in the army. Which leads me to thirds straight forward claim: the only way to gain the vote is to subject yourself to years of pro-military propaganda in environment where dissent is treated as undiscipline and where the tactic to make you adopt new values literally includes sleep deprivation and maximum exhaustion.
Lastly, military dictatorships and dictatorships in real world did not proved to lead to more responsible exertion of their sovereign authority. Turns out military has its own goals and preferences that are often incompatible with goals of anyone else. Army without war looses power and plus what is point of army that does not want to fight, so armies tend to lean toward wanting the war, responsible foreign policy or not.
As for the responsibility aspect, that's exactly addressed in the book as well:
>Sally answered, "Uh, service men are disciplined, sir."
>Major Reid was gentle with him. "Sorry. An appealing theory not backed up by facts. You and I are not permitted to vote as long as we remain in the Service, nor is it verifiable that military discipline makes a man self-disciplined once he is out; the crime rate of veterans is much like that of civilians. And you have forgotten that in peacetime most veterans come from non-combatant auxiliary services and have not been subjected to the full rigors of military discipline; they have merely been harried, overworked, and endangered — yet their votes count."
As for the military dictatorship, just as in the previous paragraph: you could not vote (or be voted for) as long as you are in Service. The Federation was a Stratocracy (of veterans), not a Military Dictatorship.
(Henlein backtracked in the face of criticism of the book and a shift in his own view and later claimed that his service was mostly non military, but this is unambiguously contradicted by the text of the original book)
You are clearly not reading the novel very carefully.
Only one person is shown being discharged from the Mobile Infantry (which, as I pointed out in another post upthread, is not where everyone who volunteers for service ends up, only a small fraction do) in the novel. That is Hedrick, who is court martialed and sentenced to 10 lashes and a bad conduct discharge. But what does he do that leads to that?
Is it that he struck a superior officer? That's the "on paper" offense, but it's made clear in the novel that if he had just kept his mouth shut in front of Captain Frenkel, he wouldn't have been court martialed.
Is it that he did not unquestioningly obey orders? No, all that got him was a swat from Sergeant Zim. If he'd left it at that, nothing more would have happened.
The actual thing that got him court martialed and discharged was his failure to think independently. He failed to comprehend what was happening when Zim brought him to see the captain, and nobody brought up the fact that he had hit Zim, and the captain made every effort to not have that stated explicitly, so that he would not have to take official notice of it. If Hedrick had been able to think independently, he would have realized that nobody wanted to discharge him, and since he also didn't want to be discharged, it was perfectly clear what he should have done: accept administrative punishment and leave it at that. But, as Captain Frenkel says to Zim when they're discussing it afterwards, Hedrick was stupid; that's what got him discharged.
And just to drive home the point further, look at what happens to Rico when he makes a serious mistake during training (which in real combat would have got teammates killed) and is brought before the regimental commander (i.e., even higher rank than Captain Frenkel). He realizes what's going on and keeps his mouth shut, and is given administrative punishment and that's the end of it.
It was obvious that everyone already knew what actually happened. What was stupid was Hedrick forcing the captain to take official notice of what actually happened. (And if he did that because he actually failed to realize that the captain already knew what actually happened and was trying to avoid having to impose the full punishment, he was even stupider.)
> the officer privately conceded fault in his own management of the situation
Of course. Nobody's perfect. We all make mistakes. But owning your mistakes and doing your best to fix things so the same mistake doesn't get made again sounds to me like a good example to be setting.
> and thought the punishment system draconian
No, he didn't. He explicitly said that, once the system is forced to take official notice of something like that, the punishment has to be what it was; there's no alternative.
But what you seem to be missing here is that, as the system is described, it expects people to use individual judgment in how to apply the rules. That's what the captain was trying to do, and what Hedrick failed to realize. The system works precisely because it's not draconian: because people are expected not to slavishly apply the letter of the law in every case. But if someone is stupid enough not to realize all that and take the second chance that's being offered to them, then, as I just noted, the punishment has to be imposed.
> such service being a good idea as a minimum franchise requirement
So teaching people that you should take responsibility for your actions and fix things that are broken and anticipate problems so you can better deal with them doesn't sound to you like a good idea?
That's a brave argument to deploy when you've spent the rest of the post explaining to me that actually, lifetime disenfranchisement for Hendrick was necessary and appropriate because trying to take responsibility for his actions (as a non-officer) was stupid...
At the end of the day I believe access to the franchise shouldn't be dependent on servitude, and that "the punishment depends on whether you and your superiors are willing and able to cover it up" isn't a standard of jurisprudence to be aspired to or an important life lesson. Judging by your willingness to deploy increasingly inconsistent arguments to argue otherwise, I'm not sure we're going to reach agreement here.
So you think the only way he could take responsibility for his actions was to insist on telling what happened even though it was obvious that everyone already knew? Thereby getting himself punished and discharged? You don't think it would count as taking responsibility for his actions for him to accept a second chance, learn from the experience, and do better next time?
> I believe access to the franchise shouldn't be dependent on servitude
Volunteering isn't "servitude".
> "the punishment depends on whether you and your superiors are willing and able to cover it up" isn't a standard of jurisprudence to be aspired to
So you think the exact letter of the law should be applied in every case? No one should ever exercise judgment in applying the law? If so, I'll agree that that's a consistent position, but I don't think it's a realistic one, and I certainly wouldn't want to live in a country where that was how the law was applied. If you would, then you're indeed correct that we won't be able to reach agreement.
> increasingly inconsistent arguments
I don't see how anything I've said is inconsistent. But I agree that what I've said comes from a very different view of the world than the one you appear to have.
He did not failed to think independently. He failed to be appropriately submissive. That submission was being framed as independent smart thinking is quite usual authoritarian move.
The genre is one of speculating about the future of the human condition. Playing with political theory is an interesting part of it and provokes interesting conversations in threads like this one. That's the best part of good science fiction or political writing.
It isn't just about future technology.
You can't take lessons from it, because author is speculating so it projects right politics and is fun rather then accurate. Just like one will not build ship based on sci-fi tech.
The part about not voting while in service does not oppose anything I said. First, you must not be strongly anti military. Second, you have to be indoctrinated and adopt military values and habits. Practically, such widespread militarization of civil life was one of factors in Germany in Hitlers reach for power. (See Richard J Evans and his Coming of Third Reich book). The military values in civil service and life played role and not for the better.
Of course military discipline does not imply responsible decision making and such stereotype is even unheard of for real world soldiers. Neither does going through something grueling. Lastly, beyond doing something grueling, military service often requires you to inflict grueling on others and you are forced to make peace with that.
This is not correct. It is explicitly stated in the novel that the government has to accept anyone who volunteers. Someone who conscientiously objects to military service will be given something else to do, but as long as they volunteer for some kind of service, they can't be denied.
> being in military does not make you responsible
Depends on your definition of "responsible". In the absence of mind-reading ability, we have to assess that indirectly. The indirect method Heinlein portrays in the novel is the willingness to sacrifice one's life for one's country. Doesn't seem like a bad indirect method to me.
> the only way to gain the vote is to subject yourself to years of pro-military propaganda in environment where dissent is treated as undiscipline and where the tactic to make you adopt new values literally includes sleep deprivation and maximum exhaustion
The only training explicitly portrayed in the novel is that of the Mobile Infantry; the training is driven by the requirements for the MI to be effective at its mission, not by "propaganda". And most people who volunteer don't end up in the MI (not stated explicitly IIRC, but certainly strongly implied by much indirect evidence). And it doesn't seem like the training that Navy pilots, for example, go through is anything like MI training (again, not stated explicitly but strongly implied by indirect evidence).
> military dictatorships and dictatorships in real world did not proved to lead to more responsible exertion of their sovereign authority.
The government of the Terran Federation is not a military dictatorship. It is specifically described as a representative democracy in which you have to volunteer for 2 years of service to your country in order to vote or hold office. What's more, you're not eligible to vote or hold office until you complete your service, which means that if you are a career military person, you don't get to vote or hold office until you end your career. So, for example, the Fleet Seargeant who gives Rico and his friends the long speech before swearing them in, and the Colonel (temporarily reduced from Fleet General) who gives Rico his pips before Rico goes out on his field training as an officer, cannot yet vote or hold office. They won't be able to until they retire.
More importantly, willing to die does not imply responsibility by no definition of responsibility ever read. Responsibility typically means being accountable, blameable or taking care to make good decisions.
It is unlikely that pilots woild have significantly less army like training.
I am not sure why it is so important for you that active service does not vote. They are still in position of disproportionally bigger power in that society politics. Again, parallels with Germany back then come to mind. The system is strongly pushing people and training to them values that have little to do with representation of those who live there and are designed to bias selection certain way.
Without committing to any position on the book itself (it's certainly an interesting Rorschach test), it is at least clearly stated that there are more than enough dangerous jobs available for non-combatant service to still involve risk of death. In the book this is presented as a mathematical balancing: power over the lives of others is granted only after demonstrating willingness to risk your life for others. You can find plenty of fault with that principle, but the book is at least pretty consistent on requiring it.
Either way, it does not suggest anything good about those making decisions.
And of course, many historical groups were willing to die and sacrifice themselves while being were bad news as leaders (ss, communists, isis, French revolution actors, ...). Hitler himself voluntered for WWI, Stalin fought as young soldier and ISIS is build on former combatants.
The franchise is pretty much the main distinction between citizens and legal non-citizen residents (immigrants or non-citizen nationals) in the US.
* Right to work, accumulate social security/pension rights, work for government entities, security clearance
* Right to own land / property
* No duty to carry an alien registration card at all times / freedom of movement within the country
* Right to marry or (if married to a citizen) keep their children with them if they ever divorce and move back home
* Right to political speech / lobbying
* Right to leave the country and return unconditionally
The question was what distinguishes a non-citizen from a citizen -- which comes before that.
Depends on the culture.
In ancient Athens, for example, being a citizen was attached to a moral imperative towards your state, not just a mere "legal status".
You were first and foremost a citizen. In fact the opposite, a person concerned with his own affairs first and foremost, was considered by the culture an inferior person, and the word use ("idiotis" -- literary "private/concerned with private affairs"), survives to english as "idiot".
That wasn't the case only in ancient Greece of course. In all kinds of cultures, citizenship and being a citizen, was considered as something bigger than "i got this legal stamp".
Over the past 20 years, several laws have been passed that erode proof of citizenship:
- id documents with an expiry date are not usable after that date (expired passports used to be accepted for domestic non-travel uses)
- the Evite database decides whether you can work at many companies
- parish records are sometimes deemed unacceptable as proof of birth, disallowing the reissue of other documents like passports
- some people have duplicate SSNs
- in the past year, a small number of people in both the USA and Canada have been told their original and valid citizenship documents were not valid by Immigration, with the burden of proof on the citizens.
Edit: also, obviously, not all citizens can vote. Children can’t, historically women couldn’t, some countries used to have racial and/or economic qualifications, and some countries still don’t allow people who’ve committed crimes to vote.
In the me-too era much of Heinlein's work is problematic, to say the least.
You might have cause and effect somewhat mixed up. SiSL came out in 1961, and he'd first started writing it in the late 1940s, if I recall correctly.
Heinlein's first attempt at a novel, in the 1930s (before he started writing seriously for money), has most of the tropes that define his later non-juvenile novels from the 1960s into the 1980s.
It seems to me, that the attitudes of "the 60s" might have been pushed somewhat by the popularity of SiSL itself.
https://gist.github.com/defunkt/759182/ad44c6135d168ae54503a...
http://www.spacesafetymagazine.com/aerospace-engineering/roc...
Edited to add: I realize post-juvenile Heinlein is not to everyone’s taste — and I’m personally convinced Double Star may be his finest single book — but if one is interested — Stranger, Glory Road, Starship Troopers, Moon is a Harsh Mistress, are all worthwhile — and different from each other.
I’m not gonna defend Farnham’s Freehold, but each of the other later Heinlein works not listed above has some merit, though mostly for real fans only.
IIRC, it happened in the martian's commune.
> you’d have a different conclusion if you read Job to the end
Thanks for the tip. Someone else posted the spoiler. While it does change things, it still is a stereotypical middle-aged guy's fantasy - she is throwing herself at him, whatever her motive.
Given that that could be used to describe quite a lot of pulp sci-fi from that era, that is not much of an indictment. Writers, then as now, knew what their audience wanted.
Now that is useful context that I didn't know. Could you provide other examples?
> Writers, then as now, knew what their audience wanted.
Wasn't their audience mostly younger guys? Wouldn't their audience want younger guys getting laid?
And SIASL isn’t about a middle aged man. It’s about a frickn Martian absolutely nothing like anyone on Earth.
Interesting phrase there. I would say his views are liberal in the classic sense, as in classical liberalism. I don’t think the term “classical libertarianism” is commonly used, but if anything it ought to refer to left libertarianism, a quite different thing.
But they could of course beat that: in 2016, they gave it to Bezos! So much for "large cash award"...