Hehehe. One could read into that an implication that Rand was not sane, if one were inclined to raise some hackles...
he probably would have barfed if you called him a philosopher to his face.
I can't find it in the Notebooks, but I'm pretty sure Heinlein wrote, "Given time and enough ink, a philosopher can prove anything."
Heinlein was also quite the sexist and believed that men had a duty to die protecting women.
I disagree that this was sexist in intent (though perhaps in application). Despite his curmudgeonly ways, Heinlein was at heart a moralist, where "defense of the species" and "liberty of the individual" were warring tenets at the core of his morality (and aligning those two tenets was the moral ideal: a moral individual freely chooses to defend the species when he must, and a moral species leaves the individual alone the rest of the time). That duty to die protecting women was all about protecting those who can birth the next generation. But he explained it better than I can:
All societies are based on rules to protect pregnant women and young children. All else is surplussage, excrescence, adornment, luxury, or folly which can -- and must -- be dumped in emergency to preserve this prime function. As racial survival is the only universal morality, no other basic is possible. Attempts to formulate a "perfect society" on any foundation other than "Women and children first!" is not only witless, it is automatically genocidal. Nevertheless, starry-eyed idealists (all of them male) have tried endlessly -- and no doubt will keep on trying.
I refuse to touch the more general debate of whether he was sexist or not. That hasn't been settled in fifty years, and it ain't gonna get settled here.
I have just read Heinlein's "Tramp Royale", a memoir of a trip he took around the world, and one of the things which struck me was the number of times he behaved very differently from how his characters would have in the same situation.
I would love some specifics, if you're so inclined, and if Dean doesn't mind the use of his bandwidth. I haven't found "Tramp Royale" yet (and I usually buy books in person, where I can drool over them before I lay my money down). Is it worth hunting down? A lot of Heinlein's posthumous works have disappointed me. As with Tolkien, there was a reason he never published these works while alive.
Check out Spider Robinson's "Rah! Rah! R.A.H.!". Spider pretty well debunks the common confusion of Heinlein with his characters. Sometimes when a Heinlein viewpoint character believes something, it's to promote that belief; but sometimes, the character acts that way so that Heinlein can shoot holes in the belief. And sometimes, the same character can fill both roles: Lazarus Long is sometimes the font of Heinleinian Wisdom, and sometimes a pompous buffoon who needs to be put in his place (and sometimes both at once). The only characters I feel comfortable equating with Heinlein's views in every case are Lt. Col. Dubois in "Starship Troopers" and Prof. Bernardo de la Paz in "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" -- and I'm not so certain about de la Paz.
I think you get much more "pure" Heinlein in the essays in "Expanded Universe" and elsewhere. I would like to see how "Tramp Royale" compares to those.
(You know, Dean, that a Heinlein post almost always leads to a spirited discussion...)
Well Dean, as you know, I'm a huge fan of Heinlein. Haven't read as much of him as you have— i.e., haven't read everything— but close. (I remember browsing through Tramp Royale in a bookstore when it first came out, and have kicked myself ever since that I didn't buy it.)
On the other hand, I must be one of the fairly few longtime denizens of Dean's World who remains almost completely untouched by Ayn Rand and Objectivism. I read Anthem way back in high school, I've read various brief pieces about Rand and/or Objectivism, but it slid right off me like teflon. According to one diddly unscientific online poll about philosophy, the overlap between Ayn Rand and myself is something like 3%. I repeat, three percent. Versus 86% overlap between myself and Thomas Aquinas. You get the idea. :)
"....Look at me and don't tell me, don't tell anyone, just tell yourself: what are you living for? Aren't you living for yourself and only for yourself? Call it your aim, your love, your cause -- isn't it still your cause? Give your life, die for your ideal -- isn't it still your ideal? Every honest man lives for himself. Every man worth calling a man lives for himself. The man who doesn't -- doesn't live at all. You cannot change it. You cannot change it because that's the way man is born, alone, complete, an end in himself. No laws, no Party, no G.P.U., will ever kill that thing in man which knows how to say 'I.'"
-Ayn Rand, We The Living
Against all enemies, I must defend to the death my values, my holy dogmas: My house and all that is in it. America -- my country. The West -- my civilization. My Gods and Goddesses (the Holy Trinity) and my Most High Goddess (the Queen of Heaven). My soul. And....
"....He that loveth his wife loveth himself."
-Ephesians 5:28
"....She that loveth her wife loveth herself...."
-Lesbians 11:38
"....the total passion for the total height...."
-Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead
When I read Rand's books in junior high I was really impressed with them. Her philosophy sounds so reasonable and rational.
It took me about two weeks to realize that all the Objectivists I knew were completely egotistical assholes. Rand herself wasn't that fun to be around, I hear. Objectivism seems to do that to people, somehow.
Martin: I don't think she was entirely sane. Her almost complete lack of a sense of humor, her dogmatic insistence that she was absolutely right in all things, and her bizarre belief that all human behavior can has a rational, cognitive basis, led her to some pretty strange places, and led to some very unhappy incidents in her life. Once again though, I do not think she was unique among philosophers in this way. Indeed, guys like Rousseau were much worse.
As for Heinlein's sexism--oh he was a sexist. He thought women superior to men. That's all there is to it so far as I can see. Arguing over whether this is sexist is mostly an exercise in verbal gymnastics.
Regarding Bernardo de la Paz, I am fairly certain Heinlein did NOT agree with the professor. Jerry Pournelle, who was friends for years with Heinlein, told me and some others back on the old Genie network that de la Paz was based specifically on a friend of Heinlein's, a man who created the idea of the "rational anarchist." He and Heinlein often argued over government and morality and, while they were friends, Heinlein thought he was wrong in many respects.
So once again we see that trying to tease out "the real Heinlein" from his fiction is a hazardous exercise. That is also an interesting Heinlein/Rand convergence/divergence, by the way.
Ayn Rand believed fiercely that her "objectivist" philosophy was so strong, so absolutely irrefutably correct on an "objective" basis, that she did not want her name associated with it. She insisted that any institutes or groups that studied it and promoted it NOT use her name. The philosophy should stand on its own outside of her. Or so she believed.
Alas, the truth is that disagreements over fine points of her philosophy inevitably leads to huge divergences. This inevitably led to competing groups of "objectivists." Eventually it led to the formation of "The Ayn Rand Institute" because one group of Randites claimed that the other Randites (er, sorry, "objectivists") had betrayed Rand's principles and erred on her philosophy. The Ayn Rand Institute is currently run by her former protege and student, in her name, in large part because of this.
In other words, objectivists come in multiple flavors, all of them dogmatically insisting that all of the others are wrong, have erred in some fundamental fashion, and are traitors to Rand's philosophy.
Heinlein never pretended to have all the answers, and you can explore the ideas he expounds upon without ever needing to satisfy for yourself which ideas represented "the real Heinlein." If he had any ultimate beliefs, they were mostly his own business. What he's left us with is a set of books that make us think and reflect and laugh or cry or be angry or sad or hopeful. A greater legacy I'd say.
Paul: I have read almost all of Heinlein's fiction, save the recently released one from the 1930s that I just haven't had time to pick up--maybe when I graduate. Tramp Royale I have not read, although I have read portions of it, and it is high on my list of books I need to read. I also have his book on taking back the American government and I must admit that I couldn't finish it. It reads mostly like a late '70s version of Ross Perot and his Reform party agenda--but it's so out of date I never could finish it.
Believe it or not Ayn Rand's philosophy has never made all that great an impression on me. I find reading about her far more interesting than I find reading her work itself.
Her fiction I find just awful. I have also had many run-ins, especially online, with "objectivists" who always dogmatically insist--just like the Marxists or the Jehovah's Witnesses--that they know the truth about me, my motives, everything I believe, and everything everyone else believes, based on their philosophy. And they are given to fly into rages when confronted with disagreement. Like Rand, they also tend to lack any sense of humor (except for the superior, haughty, "oh aren't you lesser beings so inferior" humor, anyway).
I tend to call them "Randbots" or "Randroids."
Most amusing are those who agree with perhaps 90% of Rand's work, but then will tell you EXACTLY where she erred and exactly where THEY have corrected her errors. In a sort of Darth Vaderish "now the student has become the master!" mentality I guess.
That these people never wind up having any real effect on the world around them, that they are relegated to such moldy obscure corners of the culture as the Libertarian Party and intense discussion cliques on the internet never seems to phase them.
By comparison, whether you were personally influenced by Rand or not, Rand has to be acknowledged as one of the most influential philosophers of the last few centuries, and perhaps the 20th century's most important. It is also hard not to admire the fact that at one time she was the only avowed philosophical thinker who gave a full-throated and unapologetic defense of individualism and of free markets, and of the value and morality of capitalism and individual freedom. In this she swum against a huge tide of collectivism and socialism and trendy Marxism. She was also one of the only philosophers of her day who openly spoke of the flat-out evil that was communism, too--and she was right.
One of her most endearing moments was, to me, when she told Phil Donohue that she would happily and inhesitantly say "God bless America," for even though she didn't believe in God she believed this was a truly wonderful country. And she believed that, again, at a time when it was highly unfashionable in intellectual circles to utter such sentiments.
I believe it was her upbringing in totalitarian Soviet Russia that led to much of her most dogmatic thinking: she rejected Communism so utterly and so thoroughly that she wound up creating a philosophy which was as dogmatic and absolutist as the Marxism she was raised in.
Still, she influenced a generation of important thinkers. Alan Greenspan is probably the most visible public figure--he was a longtime friend and contributed essays to some of her objectivist publications. But Ayn Rand fans are found all over the place in corporate America and in government now. Most of them are not "Randroids," but are people who read her thinking, embraced major parts of it, and put it into action in their lives and work.
Thus while I am not a huge fan of her work, I find it impossible to deny that her influence was huge. She definitely belongs in the ranks of the great philosphers of the last few centuries, if by "great" we mean "of enormous influence."
I think far less of Karl Marx and his evil philosphy than I do of Rand, but it's impossible not to acknowledge Marx's. Similarly, I find it impossible not to acknowledge hers.
Dean,
You say, “...to believe that every human action can be based on rational principles ... is the height of absurdity.”
Well, just tell us which of your actions is going to be based on irrational principles and we will be sure to mistrust you when you are so acting. Sure, objectivism is an ideal system. No one's ever going to be 100% rational, not even Miss Rand, as a cursory review of her life will clearly show. But she set the right ideal. Just think. Would you ever trust someone who said that now and then he'd allow himself to act irrationally? That at random times he would give up on reason? One can never completely achieve the objectivist ideal. But I defy you to name other that's as good.
Oh, and also, Miss Rand did say many times, as Anderson points out, that sacrificing one's life can sometimes be a rational act.
Robert: Bwaha! I do irrational things every single day, and so do you. The only difference between us is that I don't run from it. I merely check myself occasionally to see if what I'm doing is harmful or not. Still, I openly encourage you to asume that all of my actions are irrational at all times. It'll save us both time, and will be a source of much amusement to me. So we can both pat each other on the head. Won't that be fun? :-)
Reason and rationality are the higher parts of the human brain, and they are hugely important; they are what ultimately separates us from the other animals. But to consider them the most important part of the human animal is like considering the steering wheel the most important part of a car. You could make a pretty good case for that--Ayn Rand seems to have spent her entire life making that case--but fans of the wheels, the brakes, and the transmission might have some pretty good arguments on their side. ;-)
Humor isn't rational. Sex isn't rational. Instinct is a powerful and important influence on human behavior, and it is entirely separate from rationality. You can find rational reasons for why certain instincts exist, but the instincts themselves are entirely separate from reason and often override it.
Those irrational instincts often lead us astray--but our rational mind also sometimes leads us astray. Marxism is an entirely rational system of thought. It also happens to be the most erroneous and insane philosophy in human history, and to have caused more death and destruction and misery than any philosophical framework of the last 100 years. But it is indisputably rational, and entirely the product of rational thinking.
Rand thought Marxism wrong, and thought she could prove it wrong through the same types of reasoning processes Marx used to reach his own erroneous conclusion. This was her greatest error and her greatest conceit. Simply looking at the human animal in all its glory proves that BOTH OF THEM erred on a fundamental level.
“...to believe that every human action can be based on rational principles ... is the height of absurdity.”
Go through a bitter divorce or deal with friends going through one and it will very visible that this is true. There are many times humans do not act according to rational principles.
Kacie, I'm influenced all over the map by Ayn Rand and objectivism, and I can tell you for a fact that I'm not an egotistical asshole, but in fact I'm an egotistical prick.
Arnold: You should read Heinlein's Starship Troopers. I suspect you would suddenly find a thinker and writer who you agree with even more than Ayn Rand.
I was an instant convert to Objectivism when someone gave me Atlas Shrugged for my sixteenth birthday. I devoured it and was a Randroid for about a month and a half. I gather I made myself quite obnoxious for a while. Then I slowly began to recover. However, the process did innoculate me against the sillier forms of socialism and communism. The whole experience definitely had a lasting effect on me even though I wasn't a permanent convert.
About Heinlein: reading his books at a young age also probably had permanent effects on my character, although it's much less easy to pinpoint them. I was born late enough that I was reading some of his sexually exploratory work as a pretty young person, and it's sort of funny now to go back and read some of this stuff now as an adult which I absorbed so uncritically as a kid. I'd agree that he's a sexist, although I think his sexism is hard on women as well as men. He argued forcefully that women were superior, but he also had some pretty specific beliefs about what 'real women' were like that many find distasteful.
Okay Dean. I will read Heinlein's <i>Starship Troopers</i>. I like Ayn Rand, and I've read and re-read her novels and parts of her philosophy over and over again. But as I've told all of you, I don't have any saints, secular or religious, even if corresponding with SMA on Dean's World has gotten me seriously re-interested in G K Chesterton, who at least is as entertaining as he is insightful.
Besides, people have been telling me for some 30 years, "Arnold, you've just got to read Heinlein."
As for Heinlein's sexism--oh he was a sexist. He thought women superior to men. That's all there is to it so far as I can see. Arguing over whether this is sexist is mostly an exercise in verbal gymnastics.
I think you're right, on all counts. But that's not the debate I'm shying away from. Rather, I see two other, more vitriolic viewpoints that I just want to avoid:
1. "'Women are superior to men' is somehow a bad thing to believe." Some people are so wedded to "gender is a social construct" that an attitude like Heinlein's makes them furious.
2. "That's not what he really meant, just what he said. He really wanted women barefoot and consigned to the kitchen or the bedroom." People who argue this are reading different books than I, apparently; but they're convinced beyond all argument.
These viewpoints -- not supported by his works at all, as far as I can see -- are unassailable for some. As you say, people aren't always rational.
Regarding Bernardo de la Paz, I am fairly certain Heinlein did NOT agree with the professor.
This is why I qualified that assertion. I'm very sure that the vegetarianism-of-convenience and the rational anarchism weren't Heinlein at all. Yet at the core, de la Paz was a strong proponent of TANSTAAFL, liberty, and duty; and he did his darndest to sneak into place a limited government, all the while knowing he would fail. In those respects, I think he came closer to pure Heinlein (as he expressed himself in his essays) than many other major characters. I think Lazarus Long, Jubal Harshaw, and the Old Man (three characters I often hear cited as "Heinlein talking to the reader") in a lot of ways diverged far more from Heinlein's views than the Prof did.
Lazarus, frankly, was a scoundrel and a cad. He was just too selfish too often to really be trusted; and though many stories showed him gaining some maturity and responsibility, I never really believed it. He was a lovable lout, and a good man to have at your back in a fight. But in a lot of ways, he remained the whiny brat who just wanted Mama Maureen's attention (in some wholely unhealthy ways).
The Old Man (from "The Puppet Masters") is one of my favorite Heinlein characters: smart, decisive, and patriotic. He also had an ego the size of a small midwestern state, and it practically cost him the planet.
Jubal Harshaw seemed a lot like the Heinlein of the essays; but sadly, he was a Heinlein who had given up. He was just so sad and tired of battling the world that he decided to turn his back on it and take care of his own. That may have happened with Heinlein at some point; but if so, he never wrote about it. Heck, "Expanded Universe" was largely a one-man world saving effort.
The problem with all of these parallels (as Spider pointed out) was that (after his first novel) Heinlein wrote characters, not polemics. He was too good to write one-sided Omniscient Lecturers who Know What's Good for the Reader. They're flawed and human, with aspects drawn not just from Heinlein himself but from his acquaintances and his experiences. That's why I think Lt. Col. Dubois comes closest to pure Heinlein: he doesn't get enough screen time to really develop as a character, other than as a font of irritation-cum-wisdom; and "Starship Troopers" was intentionally written with more of a polemical slant.
I also have his book on taking back the American government and I must admit that I couldn't finish it. It reads mostly like a late '70s version of Ross Perot and his Reform party agenda--but it's so out of date I never could finish it.
Is that "Expanded Universe"? If so, did we ever come away with different impressions! Of course, I read it right when it came out. Maybe it is dated, and I'm just not remembering those parts.
That these people never wind up having any real effect on the world around them, that they are relegated to such moldy obscure corners of the culture as the Libertarian Party and intense discussion cliques on the internet never seems to phase them.
Recall the Shatner song, "Has Been", where he sings about those armchair critics, Never Done Jack, Don't Say Dick, and Two Thumbs Don.
To answer Martin's question, on the assumption that it will interest others, it was Virginia Heinlein, affectionately called Ticky thruout "Tramp Royale", who who was inclined to attack, evade or ignore the various obstructionists they encountered thruout the journey. Robert's inclination was not to make waves and not to violate rules.
South Africa allowed a limited number of cigarettes to be brought in duty free for personal consumption. It turned out that this number applied to them as a couple. He groused about the 100% duty; she hid cigarettes about her person. By the time they reached Indonesia she was so fed up with Customs inspectors that she declared two pounds of heroin. He was very angry with her, pointing out that they were "strangers in a strange land" and should behave circumspectly, but later one of his characters (Podkayne's brother) pulled the same stunt.
Paul Burgess mentions having read "Anthem" while in high school. Fortunately, so did I. I'm afraid any of Rand's less atrociously written works might, at that stage of my life, turned me into a Randroid. Considering that my parents were Marxists this would have been a serious problem.
Hmm... I seem to recall Chesterton arguing for the superiority of women at least once in my limited readings.
And this interesting discussion jogged my memory about another book I've read about the evils of a selfless altruism. Terry Goodkind's Faith of the Fallen.
I love reading all this discussion, but alas, my 25 year old self just isn't as widely read in this area as most of you are.
"Puppet Masters" is the one I never get tire of rereading, but I definitely think Arnold will appreciate "Starship Troopers". I'd put "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress" up there at the top of the rereadables list too.
I've never read any Rand and I must say from the discussion I have no interest in correcting that lack.
Elizabeth: If you have not read it, I very very highly recommend picking up Florence King's <i>Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady</i>. The book is a tour-de-force, and if the "Southern Lady" puts you off, note the "Failed" part of the title, which tells the real tale of the book.
It is a memoir of her youth, and amongst the many tales is her early teen-girlhood. While reading <i>The Fountainhead</i> for the first time, she became so emotionally moved and overwrought she took her favorite doll and pitched it out her bedroom window. Unfortunately, the family lived in an apartment a few floors up and the poor man she conked on the head with it made quite a stink and got her in a bit of trouble. Fortunately her bookish father (unlike her un-bookish mother and grandmother) managed to understand her incoherent babbling about how she had to get rid of the doll because she loved it. I am not doing the scene justice, but I was in tears reading it.
The entire book is worth reading from start to finish, but you made me immediately think of that scene.
Arnold: I do most strongly recommend <i>Starship Troopers</i> as an excellent introduction to Heinlein for a person such as yourself. Many others are obsessed with his <i>Stranger in a Strange Land</i>, mostly I think because of all the sex in it. But that's a book so full of magic and mysticism that it's really a poor representation of the author.
<i>Starship Troopers</i> is by far his most controversial work, the one people most often yelled at him for, and the one that even (completely erroneously) gets him labeled a "fascist" by many. That the book is actually the radical opposite of same flies right past most who hate it. It is probably best described as an extraordinary exploration and defense of Jacksonian values, which is why I'm quite certain you will enjoy it.
Martin: Regarding characters and such: I'd have to say I believe you are probably correct on all counts.
As for "Expanded Universe" — no, I'm referring to a book explicitely titled "Take Back Your Government." You can read about it here. It reads fairly well like a 1940s Perotista tract, at least what I read of it. That is not meant as a slap against it, I merely find it descriptive.
This thread is extremely fascinating. Heinlein and Rand were both Politically Incorrect thinkers. As to their views on men vis-a-vis women, they both sound to me like Transcendental Scientists. Norman Spinrad, and that novel in particular, has influenced me and my writing almost as much as has Ayn Rand. Ever since I read that book, everything reminds me of Femocrats vs. Transcendental Scientists. I sometimes think my whole purpose is to transcend Transcendental Science and create a Transcendental Femocracy. I'm an egotistical clitoris-worshipper.
Robert Speirs wrote:
"Oh, and also, Miss Rand did say many times, as Anderson points out, that sacrificing one's life can sometimes be a rational act."
Sacrificing one's life for one's highest values is certainly a selfish act. Where I differ from Rand, I think, is that I do not believe that ultimate values can be derived from reason, as they are premises, not conclusions.
In The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand (in the character of Gail Wynand defending Howard Roark) wrote
"We have never made an effort to understand what is greatness in man and how to recognize it. We have come to hold, in a kind of mawkish stupor, that greatness is to be gauged by self-sacrifice. Self-sacrifice, we drool, is the ultimate virtue. Let's stop and think for a moment. Is sacrifice a virtue? Can a man sacrifice his integrity? His honor? His freedom? His ideal? His convictions? The honesty of his feelings? The independence of his thought? But these are a man's supreme possessions. Anything he gives up for them is not a sacrifice but an easy bargain. They, however, are above sacrificing to any cause or consideration whatsoever. Should we not, then, stop preaching dangerous and vicious nonsense? Self-sacrifice? But it is precisely the self that that cannot and must not be sacrificed. It is the unsacrificed self that be must respect in man above all."
That is absolutely, most profoundly true, in every word. I must add, however, that the word "sacrifice" has in modern times been corrupted, even inverted. In its original, etymological meaning, it means the sacred act of consecrating a thing, of dedicating it to a Deity. In that ancient sense, it is the exchange of a lower for a higher value, in other words, selfishness. In that sense (and in that sense only), it is the sacrificed [i.e., consecrated] self that we must respect and revere above all.
My own view of Ayn Rand was perhaps best articulated in by the great E. Merrill Root in the National Review of January 30, 1960, his reply to Whittaker Chambers's infamous and erroneous attack. What Professor Root wrote is, perhaps, too long to quote here, but it stands as an eloquent defense of Ayn Rand from a Christian conservative point of view, showing that her noble values unconsciously flowed from a Higher Source. I would say the same of Friedrich Nietzsche as well.
"It is not the works, but the belief which is here decisive and determines the order of rank -- to employ once more an old religious formula with a new and deeper meaning -- it is some fundamental certainty which a noble soul has about itself, something which is not to be sought, is not to be found, and perhaps is not to be lost --The noble soul has reverence for itself."
-Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
PFC Koopmans: I envy you the lifetime of good reading you have ahead of you. And if I recall correctly the "PFC" in your nom-de-plume stands for "Private First Class." If I am correct in that, I will recommend to you my recommendation to Arnold, and that you pick up Starship Troopers. I believe you will appreciate it on multiple levels, and in a way that most who never served in a great Republic's all-volunteer army will never entirely understand.
Dean, Starship Troopers is one of the few Heinlein novels I stumbled opon before I encountered your excellent blog, and I made sure to read it again after finishing basic training. The character and ideas espoused by Lt. Col. Dubois made me sit up and take notice the first time I read them. More recently I finished The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and For Us, the Living. (I'm going to see what comments my dad has for the political system in that last one when I go home on leave, I'd like to see it attempted)
I'd love to hear about any other books you would recommend, and thank you for the way you run your blog.
Now if I could only get my hands on that book Chesterton wrote about Aquinas...
"Heinlein was also quite the sexist and believed that men had a duty to die protecting women."
Noble. Ayn Rand, in turn, once stated that she would die to protect her husband. That is not alruism. It would, to the contrary, be a supreme act of selfishness. An altruist, she wrote, would not tell you to give your life to save your spouse, he would tell you to give up your spouse's life to save ten random strangers. He would not tell you to die for your country. He would tell you to betray your country and become a "citizen of the world".
The word "altruism" is nowhere found in the Bible nor in any other ancient book. The word in the Bible for kindness, generosity, mercy, respect for the rights of others, is usually translated as "charity". Ayn Rand called it "benevolence", which, like Nietzsche, she saw as proceeding from the other virtues she extolled.
The word "altruism" was coined by an atheistic collectivist named Auguste Comte in the 19th century. He wanted to replace Christianity and the worship of God with "a religion of humanity", the worship of man not as an individual but only in the mass. He condemned Christianity as selfish for exalting the immortality of the individual soul. He founded a philosophy of "positivism", reducing everything to "science", and he also founded "sociology".
I wonder, therefore, why Rand didn't lash out at Comte the way she lashed out at Kant? Comte was obviously a real-life Ellsworth Monkton Toohey and a forerunner of Karl Marx. Myself, I regard Comte as one of my ideological arch-enemies, even as much as Akhenaton. I totally oppose both those men.
Arnold may not need saints, but he's also different from the typical Tarian or Randite when he chooses his response per teh situation rather than from general principles.
Calling Randism the opposite of Communism is informative in two ways. One Communism had its wax god...
Two, it may be the Rand was necessary, like chemo, for the West to battle the cancer of Communism. Still a poison, but one that does more good than ill. And one that does have good elements in it. Of course, thats why Rand is a danger, because of the good for a simple fallacy never attracts converts (except if they really hate Bush).
It was a close-run thing, and without Rand, we might not have survived free.
Enough, already. Arnold will read Heinlein. He had better go down smooth enough so I won't require some cold Point Special refresher to digest him with. Stefi wants no drunkards around the house.
SMA, you got me thinking, as always. Your question about why Ayn Rand never went after Auguste Comte in the same way she bombed out Emmanuel Kant, interests me. So here I go, back to Rand, and I will even investigate this Comte long and deep enough to ascertain why he came up with some tomfool notion of enshrining altruism. It's bad enough as a social philosophy. But as a religion? (sounds of barfing.)
triticale: Ah, that makes sense. In an awful lot of ways, Ginny was Heinlein's personal hero. Like Dean said, Heinlein believed women to be superior to men; and his Exhibit A for that position was Virginia Heinlein.
Arnold: You haven't read "Starship Troopers"? Somehow to me that sounds about like finding out that Jefferson never read Plato or Aristotle or any of the other classics. Owen has identified two others you should read: "The Puppet Masters" and "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress". All three are fairly short, and all three can be seen as parables about duty, honor, independence, and the struggle against aggressors and oppressors, from a rather American point of view. Heinlein visited the same ideals in many other works; but in those three, he hit the mark best, both as moral philosopher and as storyteller. (Trying not to spoil an ending here, but one of those books marks one of the only times I ever mourned the "death" of a fictional character.)
Dean: "Take Back Your Government". I seem to recall a little discussion of something like this, but I may have it confused with his "missile gap" ad. Thanks for the link!
Steven: Transcendental Scientists? Somehow I've missed out on Spinrad entirely. Is that book a good place to start?
And as to "what Heinlein really wanted out of women"..hmm, how about he wanted them 'easy', and open to notions of one-night stands, at least as a society-wide practise.
Of course, this was mostly before the Sexual Revolution, and so society hadn't proven this was mostly a terrible idea.
And this is basically de-sacralizing the sexual act, in effect, even though I think he still wanted to retain the magic. Can you do that? And should people be casually messing around with the primary engine of society?
If Jefferson would have wasted his precious time on Plato instead of sticking with Aristotle, they would have had to bury him with his head far up his own ass. (Plato was the altruist, more than 2000 years before Auguste Comte invented the term.)
But to tell you the utter, stark-naked, unimbellished truth, no, I never read "Starship Troopers".
(Never read Mao's little red book, either. Even though I saw it waved around by millions of screaming and gesticulating folks. Who probably threw them away right after Mao croaked and they stuck his widow in the pokey along with the rest of the Gang of Four.)
I can see that here goes my summer. Trying to be an instant expert in this non-Randian Randist who they tell me wrote snazzy science fiction. Better be as good as L Ron Hubbard.
Thank you! Rand did mention Comte condemningly in her introduction to For the New Intellectual, but I don't recall her mentioning him anywhere else.
Martin, a.k.a. UML Guy:
Yes, A World Between (the planet Pacifica, caught in the "Pink and Blue War" between the Femocrats and the Transcendental Scientists) is my favorite of Spinrad's novels, the one that resonated with me the most. I also loved his Agents of Chaos. He wrote a number of others, including a couple anthologies glorifying what he loved about America. He is, I gather, a man of the Left, but of the old-fashioned, patriotic kind of liberal, not too different from Dean. The first book I ever read of his was The Iron Dream, an alternative history in which Hitler became a science-fiction writer instead of a dictator. A story within a story. It cracked me up.
His plots are interesting, usually involving a lot of political intrigue. I love his characters. He has that ability to get inside the mind of a character with an alien, even repugnant ideology, and portray that character even sympathetically or at least with style, even a fictionalized Hitler. Chesterton had that ability also. The best case I ever read for the Muslim view of women was from one of Chesterton's villains in The Flying Inn. He also presented a valiant atheist in James Turnbull in The Ball and the Cross. Rand was not altogether lacking in that either. The most sympathetic portrayal of a Communist I ever read was Andrei Taganov in We The Living.
About me and Rand's novels: I have often thought that Rand's admirers (not necessarily Objectivists) tend to divide into those who like The Fountainhead more vs. those who like Atlas Shrugged more. I'm one of the former. Rand excelled at plot structure in both novels, but I find her characters deeper in The Fountainhead. She was closer to Nietzsche then and earlier. I tend to prefer her earlier works.
PFC Koopmans:
I salute you once again, and I dearly hope you find a copy of Chesterton's book on Aquinas. I have that book myself, I'm glad to say. Thomist scholar Etienne Gilson said of that book:
"I consider it without possible comparison the best book ever written on St. Thomas. Nothing short of genius can account for such achievement. Everybody will no doubt admit that it is a 'clever' book, but the few readers who have spent twenty or thirty years in studying St. Thomas Aquinas, and who, perhaps, have themselves published two or three volumes on the subject, cannot fail to appreciate that the so-called 'wit' of Chesterton has put their scholarship to shame. He has guessed all that which they had tried to demonstrate, he has said all that they were more or less clumsily attempting to express in academic formulas. Chesterton was one of the deepest thinkers who ever existed; he was deep because he was right; and he could not help being right, but he could not either help being modest and charitable, so he left it to others who could understand him to know that he was right, and deep; to the others, he apologized for being right, and he made up for being deep by being witty. That is all they can see of him."
One more book I must get of Chesterton is his Short History of England.
"Being generous is inborn; being altruistic is a learned perversity. No resemblance--"
Quite true.
I don't think Rand and Heinlein were all that far apart. Their styles were different, Heinlein gentler, Rand more hard-line. (Leave it to the woman to be more hard-line. Transcending Transcendental Science.... HAIL TO THE QUEEN OF ALL EVIL....!!!!)
Arnold Harris:
Very interesting about Plato vs. Aristotle. Spengler was an admirer of Heraclitus. Myself, of Empedocles.
Eric R. ashley wrote:
"And as to "what Heinlein really wanted out of women"..hmm, how about he wanted them 'easy', and open to notions of one-night stands, at least as a society-wide practise.
Of course, this was mostly before the Sexual Revolution, and so society hadn't proven this was mostly a terrible idea.
And this is basically de-sacralizing the sexual act, in effect, even though I think he still wanted to retain the magic. Can you do that? And should people be casually messing around with the primary engine of society?"
I'm against that. I'm against the Sexual Revolution. Call me a Sexual Reactionary, a Sexual Counter-Revolutionary, a Jehovanistic-style Gnostic. I'm absolutely against any de-sacralizing -- de-sexualizing -- of the sexual embrace. I hold that sex is ultimately either sacrament or sacrilege. I'm for the bondage of eternal fidelity, of total commitment. Tight and High. The Individual striving eternally for the Divine. "The Ego in the Infinite" (Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West. "The total passion for the total height" (Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead).
"The degree and kind of one's sexuality reaches up into the very pinnacle of one's spirit."
-Friedrich Nietzsche, The Joyful Wisdom
A very thoughtful comparison, Dean. I thought you or your readers might enjoy reading L. Neil Smith's words on these two giants:
"The Libertarian movement must go far to prove itself, but it may prove to be the one bright spot in an otherwise bleak era. The shadows of two powerful minds cast themselves over everything about that movement, whether we recognize it or not: the minds of Ayn Rand and Robert A. Heinlein.
"What's astonishing isn't that Rand and Heinlein differed with one another, but that, coming from such different directions, they agreed so often. Neither of these giants was very happy being called Libertarian, yet the monument Rand left us can't be effaced, no matter how many pests pay pigeon respects to it. She gave Libertarianism a philosophical discipline to serve as its brain and backbone. What Heinlein gave it, no less vital if we're to effect the changes we aspire to, was heart and guts."
I think that much of SF (not fantasy) and modern fiction pulls the wrong way, and so I view part of my job is to pull the tug of war rope the other way with my novels.
PFC Koopman
Thank you for your service. Per Terry Goodkind, I've read about four or five of his books. I think he is either objectivist or heavily influenced, but I think he also has Christianity intertwined in there too. He starts out on solid ground with the first books, but the stories get a bit thinner, and he gets out on thinner ice philosophically I think as the series goes on. Still there's some very interesting stuff...I was struck by the comparison between faith in Christ and swearing allegiance to the War Wizard --simply ask and receive. In his book, once you swear you're protected from the ravages of the almost unstoppable Emperor of Dreams.
He writes fiction meant to make you think.
Martin: Expanded Universe is, indeed, dated. Heinlein spends half the book glooming about the inevitable nuclear holocaust, for one. (I am just old enough to have caught the tail end of that feeling, and to anyone who doesn't remember the Cold War firsthand, lemme tell ya, when you're a child, dreaming about empty streets and ruined buildings is something that sticks with you for life.)
In general: Those who have not yet embarked upon Heinlein might want to know that there are two styles of his writing. The "juveniles" are not written down, but merely have the sex toned down to a kiss and a hug and the violence a bit gentled. The non-juveniles are considerably longer and stranger and are a definite love-them-or-hate-them kind of thing. In other words, don't be put off by the fact that the juveniles were written for a young audience since they have a lot of good writing in them.
How do you tell the difference? It's actually quite easy— the juveniles are the small ones on the bookstore shelf. I've always had a fondness for The Door Into Summer, probably because of the cat, but as mentioned above, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Starship Troopers are two of his best. And as for the rest— if you come across a familiar plot or two, remember that movie-makers and television alike have long mined authors for concepts. I can think of at least two obvious ones...
Jody: Classical economics so far as I know doesn't posit that all human behavior is rational, just that people make rational choices more often than not when given choices--and in most cases will correct their own mistakes. But there are limits, which is why even the classical economists generally took a very dim view of things such as slavery or debtor's prisons.
Eric R.: Hmm, well, I do think that Heinlein's view of sex generally would work better in a high-tech world where all sexually transmitted diseases are a minor nuisance at best and wherein birth control is 100% convenient and reliable. Mind you, I would agree that his view of sex was still just a bit juvenile and obsessive, but as you say he came up in an era far, far more sexually repressed than our own, and rightly noted how silly much of this was--even if he became obsessed with making the point over and over and over again.
While aware I'm about ready to hop into a debate that is tangential to the main thread and launched by a comment intended in jest, I am an academic, this is the internet, and it is well after midnight.
Actually, in classical economics models all human behavior is considered to be rational. Perhaps contributing to the confusion is the fact that different strands of economics use different definitions of rationality.
Classical economists' conception of rationality postulated that there was an objective goal/valuation (frequently personal profit) that every person strove to achieve when making their decisions. Mistakes and errors (frequently due toa lack of information) were permissable for classical systems as long as they averaged out.
So your examples of irrational behavior, classical economists would still call rational. Of course it was beyond the scope of classical economics that someone would have assign utility to anything other than increasing value/wealth.
The rationality employed by the Austrian school relaxed the objective goal/valuation (pure profit) to a subjective goal, but still considers mistakes and errors part of rational behavior as long as the person making the mistakes is leading a "purpose driven life" (I don't know of any text that uses that phrase, but I find it useful for classification purposes).
A much more rigid, and impractical definition of rationality (but very nice analytically) is employed by the Neoclassicists who require a person to have perfect knowledge of his utility function, to have perfect knowledge of the system, and be able to maximize his utility function.
In light of the slavery example you noted, Classicals would consider enslaving others to be rational as it increases wealth and particularly as many - like Ricardo - were labor theory of value guys, the Austrians could think it rational (depends on the utility function), and Neoclassicals would presumably call slavery irrational as it is not profit maximizing (presuming profit was the utility).
A nice discussion of the history of rationality in economics is given here (pdf).
So in summary, vernacular rationality is not the same as economic rationality (which actually has a few different definitions of its own) and the behavior you describe is considered rational in classical economics (but not in neoclassical economics).
However, rationality in the classical economics sense is clearly not what you intended which makes this all an exercise in mental onanism.
Jody: That makes perfect sense to me. Although a part of me thinks that some economists are obviously straining mightily to define as "rational" behaviors that are clearly self-destructive. My example of slavery was poorly phrased, because even though I was actually thinking of it from the slave's perspective, not from the slaveowner's perspective, you could still say that allowing yourself to be a slave might be considered a rational choice--I just don't think it usually is, in most cases.
Heinlein talked about this in more than one of his books. He detested the practice but noted sadly that many people chose to live in slavery--real literal slavery, not figurative--which is a sad but true fact. How common this was would vary from culture to culture and circumstances to circumstances of course.
No, you don't! And you're not small. C. S. Lewis is great. And if you like him, you'll love G. K. Chesterton, whose Orthodoxy was one of the things that converted Lewis to Christianity. Robert Farrar Capon is terrific too as a Christian writer. And then there are the classics of Christian literature (which is most of Western literature): John Bunyan, John Milton, Dante, Shakespeare.... And the Bible itself, of course. You're in good company.
As to economics, while I believe in the sanctity of private property, I reject the "Economic Man" of the Manchester school just as I reject the "Economic Man" of Karl Marx. I believe in Spiritual Man*, Heroic Man*, Free Man*. (*obviously including Woman)
Hehehe. One could read into that an implication that Rand was not sane, if one were inclined to raise some hackles...
I can't find it in the Notebooks, but I'm pretty sure Heinlein wrote, "Given time and enough ink, a philosopher can prove anything."
I disagree that this was sexist in intent (though perhaps in application). Despite his curmudgeonly ways, Heinlein was at heart a moralist, where "defense of the species" and "liberty of the individual" were warring tenets at the core of his morality (and aligning those two tenets was the moral ideal: a moral individual freely chooses to defend the species when he must, and a moral species leaves the individual alone the rest of the time). That duty to die protecting women was all about protecting those who can birth the next generation. But he explained it better than I can:
I refuse to touch the more general debate of whether he was sexist or not. That hasn't been settled in fifty years, and it ain't gonna get settled here.
I would love some specifics, if you're so inclined, and if Dean doesn't mind the use of his bandwidth. I haven't found "Tramp Royale" yet (and I usually buy books in person, where I can drool over them before I lay my money down). Is it worth hunting down? A lot of Heinlein's posthumous works have disappointed me. As with Tolkien, there was a reason he never published these works while alive.
Check out Spider Robinson's "Rah! Rah! R.A.H.!". Spider pretty well debunks the common confusion of Heinlein with his characters. Sometimes when a Heinlein viewpoint character believes something, it's to promote that belief; but sometimes, the character acts that way so that Heinlein can shoot holes in the belief. And sometimes, the same character can fill both roles: Lazarus Long is sometimes the font of Heinleinian Wisdom, and sometimes a pompous buffoon who needs to be put in his place (and sometimes both at once). The only characters I feel comfortable equating with Heinlein's views in every case are Lt. Col. Dubois in "Starship Troopers" and Prof. Bernardo de la Paz in "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" -- and I'm not so certain about de la Paz.
I think you get much more "pure" Heinlein in the essays in "Expanded Universe" and elsewhere. I would like to see how "Tramp Royale" compares to those.
(You know, Dean, that a Heinlein post almost always leads to a spirited discussion...)
On the other hand, I must be one of the fairly few longtime denizens of Dean's World who remains almost completely untouched by Ayn Rand and Objectivism. I read Anthem way back in high school, I've read various brief pieces about Rand and/or Objectivism, but it slid right off me like teflon. According to one diddly unscientific online poll about philosophy, the overlap between Ayn Rand and myself is something like 3%. I repeat, three percent. Versus 86% overlap between myself and Thomas Aquinas. You get the idea. :)
-Ayn Rand, We The Living
Against all enemies, I must defend to the death my values, my holy dogmas: My house and all that is in it. America -- my country. The West -- my civilization. My Gods and Goddesses (the Holy Trinity) and my Most High Goddess (the Queen of Heaven). My soul. And....
"....He that loveth his wife loveth himself."
-Ephesians 5:28
"....She that loveth her wife loveth herself...."
-Lesbians 11:38
"....the total passion for the total height...."
-Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead
Rand strikes me as a freak of nature, more of an idiot savant than a full human being. I feel torn between fear and pity; contempt and wonder.
But if Libertarians want to erect a statue to a saint, they would be wise to choose RAH over St. Ayn.
We need no saints. Only rational thinkers.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
It took me about two weeks to realize that all the Objectivists I knew were completely egotistical assholes. Rand herself wasn't that fun to be around, I hear. Objectivism seems to do that to people, somehow.
As for Heinlein's sexism--oh he was a sexist. He thought women superior to men. That's all there is to it so far as I can see. Arguing over whether this is sexist is mostly an exercise in verbal gymnastics.
Regarding Bernardo de la Paz, I am fairly certain Heinlein did NOT agree with the professor. Jerry Pournelle, who was friends for years with Heinlein, told me and some others back on the old Genie network that de la Paz was based specifically on a friend of Heinlein's, a man who created the idea of the "rational anarchist." He and Heinlein often argued over government and morality and, while they were friends, Heinlein thought he was wrong in many respects.
So once again we see that trying to tease out "the real Heinlein" from his fiction is a hazardous exercise. That is also an interesting Heinlein/Rand convergence/divergence, by the way.
Ayn Rand believed fiercely that her "objectivist" philosophy was so strong, so absolutely irrefutably correct on an "objective" basis, that she did not want her name associated with it. She insisted that any institutes or groups that studied it and promoted it NOT use her name. The philosophy should stand on its own outside of her. Or so she believed.
Alas, the truth is that disagreements over fine points of her philosophy inevitably leads to huge divergences. This inevitably led to competing groups of "objectivists." Eventually it led to the formation of "The Ayn Rand Institute" because one group of Randites claimed that the other Randites (er, sorry, "objectivists") had betrayed Rand's principles and erred on her philosophy. The Ayn Rand Institute is currently run by her former protege and student, in her name, in large part because of this.
In other words, objectivists come in multiple flavors, all of them dogmatically insisting that all of the others are wrong, have erred in some fundamental fashion, and are traitors to Rand's philosophy.
Heinlein never pretended to have all the answers, and you can explore the ideas he expounds upon without ever needing to satisfy for yourself which ideas represented "the real Heinlein." If he had any ultimate beliefs, they were mostly his own business. What he's left us with is a set of books that make us think and reflect and laugh or cry or be angry or sad or hopeful. A greater legacy I'd say.
Paul: I have read almost all of Heinlein's fiction, save the recently released one from the 1930s that I just haven't had time to pick up--maybe when I graduate. Tramp Royale I have not read, although I have read portions of it, and it is high on my list of books I need to read. I also have his book on taking back the American government and I must admit that I couldn't finish it. It reads mostly like a late '70s version of Ross Perot and his Reform party agenda--but it's so out of date I never could finish it.
Believe it or not Ayn Rand's philosophy has never made all that great an impression on me. I find reading about her far more interesting than I find reading her work itself.
Her fiction I find just awful. I have also had many run-ins, especially online, with "objectivists" who always dogmatically insist--just like the Marxists or the Jehovah's Witnesses--that they know the truth about me, my motives, everything I believe, and everything everyone else believes, based on their philosophy. And they are given to fly into rages when confronted with disagreement. Like Rand, they also tend to lack any sense of humor (except for the superior, haughty, "oh aren't you lesser beings so inferior" humor, anyway).
I tend to call them "Randbots" or "Randroids."
Most amusing are those who agree with perhaps 90% of Rand's work, but then will tell you EXACTLY where she erred and exactly where THEY have corrected her errors. In a sort of Darth Vaderish "now the student has become the master!" mentality I guess.
That these people never wind up having any real effect on the world around them, that they are relegated to such moldy obscure corners of the culture as the Libertarian Party and intense discussion cliques on the internet never seems to phase them.
By comparison, whether you were personally influenced by Rand or not, Rand has to be acknowledged as one of the most influential philosophers of the last few centuries, and perhaps the 20th century's most important. It is also hard not to admire the fact that at one time she was the only avowed philosophical thinker who gave a full-throated and unapologetic defense of individualism and of free markets, and of the value and morality of capitalism and individual freedom. In this she swum against a huge tide of collectivism and socialism and trendy Marxism. She was also one of the only philosophers of her day who openly spoke of the flat-out evil that was communism, too--and she was right.
One of her most endearing moments was, to me, when she told Phil Donohue that she would happily and inhesitantly say "God bless America," for even though she didn't believe in God she believed this was a truly wonderful country. And she believed that, again, at a time when it was highly unfashionable in intellectual circles to utter such sentiments.
I believe it was her upbringing in totalitarian Soviet Russia that led to much of her most dogmatic thinking: she rejected Communism so utterly and so thoroughly that she wound up creating a philosophy which was as dogmatic and absolutist as the Marxism she was raised in.
Still, she influenced a generation of important thinkers. Alan Greenspan is probably the most visible public figure--he was a longtime friend and contributed essays to some of her objectivist publications. But Ayn Rand fans are found all over the place in corporate America and in government now. Most of them are not "Randroids," but are people who read her thinking, embraced major parts of it, and put it into action in their lives and work.
Thus while I am not a huge fan of her work, I find it impossible to deny that her influence was huge. She definitely belongs in the ranks of the great philosphers of the last few centuries, if by "great" we mean "of enormous influence."
I think far less of Karl Marx and his evil philosphy than I do of Rand, but it's impossible not to acknowledge Marx's. Similarly, I find it impossible not to acknowledge hers.
You say, “...to believe that every human action can be based on rational principles ... is the height of absurdity.”
Well, just tell us which of your actions is going to be based on irrational principles and we will be sure to mistrust you when you are so acting. Sure, objectivism is an ideal system. No one's ever going to be 100% rational, not even Miss Rand, as a cursory review of her life will clearly show. But she set the right ideal. Just think. Would you ever trust someone who said that now and then he'd allow himself to act irrationally? That at random times he would give up on reason? One can never completely achieve the objectivist ideal. But I defy you to name other that's as good.
Oh, and also, Miss Rand did say many times, as Anderson points out, that sacrificing one's life can sometimes be a rational act.
Reason and rationality are the higher parts of the human brain, and they are hugely important; they are what ultimately separates us from the other animals. But to consider them the most important part of the human animal is like considering the steering wheel the most important part of a car. You could make a pretty good case for that--Ayn Rand seems to have spent her entire life making that case--but fans of the wheels, the brakes, and the transmission might have some pretty good arguments on their side. ;-)
Humor isn't rational. Sex isn't rational. Instinct is a powerful and important influence on human behavior, and it is entirely separate from rationality. You can find rational reasons for why certain instincts exist, but the instincts themselves are entirely separate from reason and often override it.
Those irrational instincts often lead us astray--but our rational mind also sometimes leads us astray. Marxism is an entirely rational system of thought. It also happens to be the most erroneous and insane philosophy in human history, and to have caused more death and destruction and misery than any philosophical framework of the last 100 years. But it is indisputably rational, and entirely the product of rational thinking.
Rand thought Marxism wrong, and thought she could prove it wrong through the same types of reasoning processes Marx used to reach his own erroneous conclusion. This was her greatest error and her greatest conceit. Simply looking at the human animal in all its glory proves that BOTH OF THEM erred on a fundamental level.
Go through a bitter divorce or deal with friends going through one and it will very visible that this is true. There are many times humans do not act according to rational principles.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
About Heinlein: reading his books at a young age also probably had permanent effects on my character, although it's much less easy to pinpoint them. I was born late enough that I was reading some of his sexually exploratory work as a pretty young person, and it's sort of funny now to go back and read some of this stuff now as an adult which I absorbed so uncritically as a kid. I'd agree that he's a sexist, although I think his sexism is hard on women as well as men. He argued forcefully that women were superior, but he also had some pretty specific beliefs about what 'real women' were like that many find distasteful.
Besides, people have been telling me for some 30 years, "Arnold, you've just got to read Heinlein."
So, what the hell.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
I think you're right, on all counts. But that's not the debate I'm shying away from. Rather, I see two other, more vitriolic viewpoints that I just want to avoid:
1. "'Women are superior to men' is somehow a bad thing to believe." Some people are so wedded to "gender is a social construct" that an attitude like Heinlein's makes them furious.
2. "That's not what he really meant, just what he said. He really wanted women barefoot and consigned to the kitchen or the bedroom." People who argue this are reading different books than I, apparently; but they're convinced beyond all argument.
These viewpoints -- not supported by his works at all, as far as I can see -- are unassailable for some. As you say, people aren't always rational.
This is why I qualified that assertion. I'm very sure that the vegetarianism-of-convenience and the rational anarchism weren't Heinlein at all. Yet at the core, de la Paz was a strong proponent of TANSTAAFL, liberty, and duty; and he did his darndest to sneak into place a limited government, all the while knowing he would fail. In those respects, I think he came closer to pure Heinlein (as he expressed himself in his essays) than many other major characters. I think Lazarus Long, Jubal Harshaw, and the Old Man (three characters I often hear cited as "Heinlein talking to the reader") in a lot of ways diverged far more from Heinlein's views than the Prof did.
Lazarus, frankly, was a scoundrel and a cad. He was just too selfish too often to really be trusted; and though many stories showed him gaining some maturity and responsibility, I never really believed it. He was a lovable lout, and a good man to have at your back in a fight. But in a lot of ways, he remained the whiny brat who just wanted Mama Maureen's attention (in some wholely unhealthy ways).
The Old Man (from "The Puppet Masters") is one of my favorite Heinlein characters: smart, decisive, and patriotic. He also had an ego the size of a small midwestern state, and it practically cost him the planet.
Jubal Harshaw seemed a lot like the Heinlein of the essays; but sadly, he was a Heinlein who had given up. He was just so sad and tired of battling the world that he decided to turn his back on it and take care of his own. That may have happened with Heinlein at some point; but if so, he never wrote about it. Heck, "Expanded Universe" was largely a one-man world saving effort.
The problem with all of these parallels (as Spider pointed out) was that (after his first novel) Heinlein wrote characters, not polemics. He was too good to write one-sided Omniscient Lecturers who Know What's Good for the Reader. They're flawed and human, with aspects drawn not just from Heinlein himself but from his acquaintances and his experiences. That's why I think Lt. Col. Dubois comes closest to pure Heinlein: he doesn't get enough screen time to really develop as a character, other than as a font of irritation-cum-wisdom; and "Starship Troopers" was intentionally written with more of a polemical slant.
Is that "Expanded Universe"? If so, did we ever come away with different impressions! Of course, I read it right when it came out. Maybe it is dated, and I'm just not remembering those parts.
Recall the Shatner song, "Has Been", where he sings about those armchair critics, Never Done Jack, Don't Say Dick, and Two Thumbs Don.
South Africa allowed a limited number of cigarettes to be brought in duty free for personal consumption. It turned out that this number applied to them as a couple. He groused about the 100% duty; she hid cigarettes about her person. By the time they reached Indonesia she was so fed up with Customs inspectors that she declared two pounds of heroin. He was very angry with her, pointing out that they were "strangers in a strange land" and should behave circumspectly, but later one of his characters (Podkayne's brother) pulled the same stunt.
And this interesting discussion jogged my memory about another book I've read about the evils of a selfless altruism. Terry Goodkind's Faith of the Fallen.
I love reading all this discussion, but alas, my 25 year old self just isn't as widely read in this area as most of you are.
I've never read any Rand and I must say from the discussion I have no interest in correcting that lack.
It is a memoir of her youth, and amongst the many tales is her early teen-girlhood. While reading <i>The Fountainhead</i> for the first time, she became so emotionally moved and overwrought she took her favorite doll and pitched it out her bedroom window. Unfortunately, the family lived in an apartment a few floors up and the poor man she conked on the head with it made quite a stink and got her in a bit of trouble. Fortunately her bookish father (unlike her un-bookish mother and grandmother) managed to understand her incoherent babbling about how she had to get rid of the doll because she loved it. I am not doing the scene justice, but I was in tears reading it.
The entire book is worth reading from start to finish, but you made me immediately think of that scene.
Arnold: I do most strongly recommend <i>Starship Troopers</i> as an excellent introduction to Heinlein for a person such as yourself. Many others are obsessed with his <i>Stranger in a Strange Land</i>, mostly I think because of all the sex in it. But that's a book so full of magic and mysticism that it's really a poor representation of the author.
<i>Starship Troopers</i> is by far his most controversial work, the one people most often yelled at him for, and the one that even (completely erroneously) gets him labeled a "fascist" by many. That the book is actually the radical opposite of same flies right past most who hate it. It is probably best described as an extraordinary exploration and defense of Jacksonian values, which is why I'm quite certain you will enjoy it.
Martin: Regarding characters and such: I'd have to say I believe you are probably correct on all counts.
As for "Expanded Universe" — no, I'm referring to a book explicitely titled "Take Back Your Government." You can read about it here. It reads fairly well like a 1940s Perotista tract, at least what I read of it. That is not meant as a slap against it, I merely find it descriptive.
Robert Speirs wrote:
"Oh, and also, Miss Rand did say many times, as Anderson points out, that sacrificing one's life can sometimes be a rational act."
Sacrificing one's life for one's highest values is certainly a selfish act. Where I differ from Rand, I think, is that I do not believe that ultimate values can be derived from reason, as they are premises, not conclusions.
In The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand (in the character of Gail Wynand defending Howard Roark) wrote
"We have never made an effort to understand what is greatness in man and how to recognize it. We have come to hold, in a kind of mawkish stupor, that greatness is to be gauged by self-sacrifice. Self-sacrifice, we drool, is the ultimate virtue. Let's stop and think for a moment. Is sacrifice a virtue? Can a man sacrifice his integrity? His honor? His freedom? His ideal? His convictions? The honesty of his feelings? The independence of his thought? But these are a man's supreme possessions. Anything he gives up for them is not a sacrifice but an easy bargain. They, however, are above sacrificing to any cause or consideration whatsoever. Should we not, then, stop preaching dangerous and vicious nonsense? Self-sacrifice? But it is precisely the self that that cannot and must not be sacrificed. It is the unsacrificed self that be must respect in man above all."
That is absolutely, most profoundly true, in every word. I must add, however, that the word "sacrifice" has in modern times been corrupted, even inverted. In its original, etymological meaning, it means the sacred act of consecrating a thing, of dedicating it to a Deity. In that ancient sense, it is the exchange of a lower for a higher value, in other words, selfishness. In that sense (and in that sense only), it is the sacrificed [i.e., consecrated] self that we must respect and revere above all.
My own view of Ayn Rand was perhaps best articulated in by the great E. Merrill Root in the National Review of January 30, 1960, his reply to Whittaker Chambers's infamous and erroneous attack. What Professor Root wrote is, perhaps, too long to quote here, but it stands as an eloquent defense of Ayn Rand from a Christian conservative point of view, showing that her noble values unconsciously flowed from a Higher Source. I would say the same of Friedrich Nietzsche as well.
"It is not the works, but the belief which is here decisive and determines the order of rank -- to employ once more an old religious formula with a new and deeper meaning -- it is some fundamental certainty which a noble soul has about itself, something which is not to be sought, is not to be found, and perhaps is not to be lost --The noble soul has reverence for itself."
-Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
It's also short and a good read. ;-)
I'd love to hear about any other books you would recommend, and thank you for the way you run your blog.
Now if I could only get my hands on that book Chesterton wrote about Aquinas...
Noble. Ayn Rand, in turn, once stated that she would die to protect her husband. That is not alruism. It would, to the contrary, be a supreme act of selfishness. An altruist, she wrote, would not tell you to give your life to save your spouse, he would tell you to give up your spouse's life to save ten random strangers. He would not tell you to die for your country. He would tell you to betray your country and become a "citizen of the world".
The word "altruism" is nowhere found in the Bible nor in any other ancient book. The word in the Bible for kindness, generosity, mercy, respect for the rights of others, is usually translated as "charity". Ayn Rand called it "benevolence", which, like Nietzsche, she saw as proceeding from the other virtues she extolled.
The word "altruism" was coined by an atheistic collectivist named Auguste Comte in the 19th century. He wanted to replace Christianity and the worship of God with "a religion of humanity", the worship of man not as an individual but only in the mass. He condemned Christianity as selfish for exalting the immortality of the individual soul. He founded a philosophy of "positivism", reducing everything to "science", and he also founded "sociology".
I wonder, therefore, why Rand didn't lash out at Comte the way she lashed out at Kant? Comte was obviously a real-life Ellsworth Monkton Toohey and a forerunner of Karl Marx. Myself, I regard Comte as one of my ideological arch-enemies, even as much as Akhenaton. I totally oppose both those men.
or traditional economics
Calling Randism the opposite of Communism is informative in two ways. One Communism had its wax god...
Two, it may be the Rand was necessary, like chemo, for the West to battle the cancer of Communism. Still a poison, but one that does more good than ill. And one that does have good elements in it. Of course, thats why Rand is a danger, because of the good for a simple fallacy never attracts converts (except if they really hate Bush).
It was a close-run thing, and without Rand, we might not have survived free.
SMA, you got me thinking, as always. Your question about why Ayn Rand never went after Auguste Comte in the same way she bombed out Emmanuel Kant, interests me. So here I go, back to Rand, and I will even investigate this Comte long and deep enough to ascertain why he came up with some tomfool notion of enshrining altruism. It's bad enough as a social philosophy. But as a religion? (sounds of barfing.)
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Arnold: You haven't read "Starship Troopers"? Somehow to me that sounds about like finding out that Jefferson never read Plato or Aristotle or any of the other classics. Owen has identified two others you should read: "The Puppet Masters" and "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress". All three are fairly short, and all three can be seen as parables about duty, honor, independence, and the struggle against aggressors and oppressors, from a rather American point of view. Heinlein visited the same ideals in many other works; but in those three, he hit the mark best, both as moral philosopher and as storyteller. (Trying not to spoil an ending here, but one of those books marks one of the only times I ever mourned the "death" of a fictional character.)
Dean: "Take Back Your Government". I seem to recall a little discussion of something like this, but I may have it confused with his "missile gap" ad. Thanks for the link!
Steven: Transcendental Scientists? Somehow I've missed out on Spinrad entirely. Is that book a good place to start?
Of course, this was mostly before the Sexual Revolution, and so society hadn't proven this was mostly a terrible idea.
And this is basically de-sacralizing the sexual act, in effect, even though I think he still wanted to retain the magic. Can you do that? And should people be casually messing around with the primary engine of society?
If Jefferson would have wasted his precious time on Plato instead of sticking with Aristotle, they would have had to bury him with his head far up his own ass. (Plato was the altruist, more than 2000 years before Auguste Comte invented the term.)
But to tell you the utter, stark-naked, unimbellished truth, no, I never read "Starship Troopers".
(Never read Mao's little red book, either. Even though I saw it waved around by millions of screaming and gesticulating folks. Who probably threw them away right after Mao croaked and they stuck his widow in the pokey along with the rest of the Gang of Four.)
I can see that here goes my summer. Trying to be an instant expert in this non-Randian Randist who they tell me wrote snazzy science fiction. Better be as good as L Ron Hubbard.
(Just joking around.)
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Being generous is inborn; being altruistic is a learned perversity. No resemblance--
Thank you! Rand did mention Comte condemningly in her introduction to For the New Intellectual, but I don't recall her mentioning him anywhere else.
Martin, a.k.a. UML Guy:
Yes, A World Between (the planet Pacifica, caught in the "Pink and Blue War" between the Femocrats and the Transcendental Scientists) is my favorite of Spinrad's novels, the one that resonated with me the most. I also loved his Agents of Chaos. He wrote a number of others, including a couple anthologies glorifying what he loved about America. He is, I gather, a man of the Left, but of the old-fashioned, patriotic kind of liberal, not too different from Dean. The first book I ever read of his was The Iron Dream, an alternative history in which Hitler became a science-fiction writer instead of a dictator. A story within a story. It cracked me up.
His plots are interesting, usually involving a lot of political intrigue. I love his characters. He has that ability to get inside the mind of a character with an alien, even repugnant ideology, and portray that character even sympathetically or at least with style, even a fictionalized Hitler. Chesterton had that ability also. The best case I ever read for the Muslim view of women was from one of Chesterton's villains in The Flying Inn. He also presented a valiant atheist in James Turnbull in The Ball and the Cross. Rand was not altogether lacking in that either. The most sympathetic portrayal of a Communist I ever read was Andrei Taganov in We The Living.
About me and Rand's novels: I have often thought that Rand's admirers (not necessarily Objectivists) tend to divide into those who like The Fountainhead more vs. those who like Atlas Shrugged more. I'm one of the former. Rand excelled at plot structure in both novels, but I find her characters deeper in The Fountainhead. She was closer to Nietzsche then and earlier. I tend to prefer her earlier works.
PFC Koopmans:
I salute you once again, and I dearly hope you find a copy of Chesterton's book on Aquinas. I have that book myself, I'm glad to say. Thomist scholar Etienne Gilson said of that book:
"I consider it without possible comparison the best book ever written on St. Thomas. Nothing short of genius can account for such achievement. Everybody will no doubt admit that it is a 'clever' book, but the few readers who have spent twenty or thirty years in studying St. Thomas Aquinas, and who, perhaps, have themselves published two or three volumes on the subject, cannot fail to appreciate that the so-called 'wit' of Chesterton has put their scholarship to shame. He has guessed all that which they had tried to demonstrate, he has said all that they were more or less clumsily attempting to express in academic formulas. Chesterton was one of the deepest thinkers who ever existed; he was deep because he was right; and he could not help being right, but he could not either help being modest and charitable, so he left it to others who could understand him to know that he was right, and deep; to the others, he apologized for being right, and he made up for being deep by being witty. That is all they can see of him."
One more book I must get of Chesterton is his Short History of England.
Quite true.
I don't think Rand and Heinlein were all that far apart. Their styles were different, Heinlein gentler, Rand more hard-line. (Leave it to the woman to be more hard-line. Transcending Transcendental Science.... HAIL TO THE QUEEN OF ALL EVIL....!!!!)
Arnold Harris:
Very interesting about Plato vs. Aristotle. Spengler was an admirer of Heraclitus. Myself, of Empedocles.
Eric R. ashley wrote:
"And as to "what Heinlein really wanted out of women"..hmm, how about he wanted them 'easy', and open to notions of one-night stands, at least as a society-wide practise.
Of course, this was mostly before the Sexual Revolution, and so society hadn't proven this was mostly a terrible idea.
And this is basically de-sacralizing the sexual act, in effect, even though I think he still wanted to retain the magic. Can you do that? And should people be casually messing around with the primary engine of society?"
I'm against that. I'm against the Sexual Revolution. Call me a Sexual Reactionary, a Sexual Counter-Revolutionary, a Jehovanistic-style Gnostic. I'm absolutely against any de-sacralizing -- de-sexualizing -- of the sexual embrace. I hold that sex is ultimately either sacrament or sacrilege. I'm for the bondage of eternal fidelity, of total commitment. Tight and High. The Individual striving eternally for the Divine. "The Ego in the Infinite" (Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West. "The total passion for the total height" (Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead).
"The degree and kind of one's sexuality reaches up into the very pinnacle of one's spirit."
-Friedrich Nietzsche, The Joyful Wisdom
That is where I stand.
"The Libertarian movement must go far to prove itself, but it may prove to be the one bright spot in an otherwise bleak era. The shadows of two powerful minds cast themselves over everything about that movement, whether we recognize it or not: the minds of Ayn Rand and Robert A. Heinlein.
"What's astonishing isn't that Rand and Heinlein differed with one another, but that, coming from such different directions, they agreed so often. Neither of these giants was very happy being called Libertarian, yet the monument Rand left us can't be effaced, no matter how many pests pay pigeon respects to it. She gave Libertarianism a philosophical discipline to serve as its brain and backbone. What Heinlein gave it, no less vital if we're to effect the changes we aspire to, was heart and guts."
http://www.heinleinsociety.org/rahandme/lneilsmith.html
I think that much of SF (not fantasy) and modern fiction pulls the wrong way, and so I view part of my job is to pull the tug of war rope the other way with my novels.
PFC Koopman
Thank you for your service. Per Terry Goodkind, I've read about four or five of his books. I think he is either objectivist or heavily influenced, but I think he also has Christianity intertwined in there too. He starts out on solid ground with the first books, but the stories get a bit thinner, and he gets out on thinner ice philosophically I think as the series goes on. Still there's some very interesting stuff...I was struck by the comparison between faith in Christ and swearing allegiance to the War Wizard --simply ask and receive. In his book, once you swear you're protected from the ravages of the almost unstoppable Emperor of Dreams.
He writes fiction meant to make you think.
In general: Those who have not yet embarked upon Heinlein might want to know that there are two styles of his writing. The "juveniles" are not written down, but merely have the sex toned down to a kiss and a hug and the violence a bit gentled. The non-juveniles are considerably longer and stranger and are a definite love-them-or-hate-them kind of thing. In other words, don't be put off by the fact that the juveniles were written for a young audience since they have a lot of good writing in them.
How do you tell the difference? It's actually quite easy— the juveniles are the small ones on the bookstore shelf. I've always had a fondness for The Door Into Summer, probably because of the cat, but as mentioned above, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Starship Troopers are two of his best. And as for the rest— if you come across a familiar plot or two, remember that movie-makers and television alike have long mined authors for concepts. I can think of at least two obvious ones...
Eric R.: Hmm, well, I do think that Heinlein's view of sex generally would work better in a high-tech world where all sexually transmitted diseases are a minor nuisance at best and wherein birth control is 100% convenient and reliable. Mind you, I would agree that his view of sex was still just a bit juvenile and obsessive, but as you say he came up in an era far, far more sexually repressed than our own, and rightly noted how silly much of this was--even if he became obsessed with making the point over and over and over again.
Good to see you here in this fascinating thread!
While aware I'm about ready to hop into a debate that is tangential to the main thread and launched by a comment intended in jest, I am an academic, this is the internet, and it is well after midnight.
Actually, in classical economics models all human behavior is considered to be rational. Perhaps contributing to the confusion is the fact that different strands of economics use different definitions of rationality.
Classical economists' conception of rationality postulated that there was an objective goal/valuation (frequently personal profit) that every person strove to achieve when making their decisions. Mistakes and errors (frequently due toa lack of information) were permissable for classical systems as long as they averaged out.
So your examples of irrational behavior, classical economists would still call rational. Of course it was beyond the scope of classical economics that someone would have assign utility to anything other than increasing value/wealth.
The rationality employed by the Austrian school relaxed the objective goal/valuation (pure profit) to a subjective goal, but still considers mistakes and errors part of rational behavior as long as the person making the mistakes is leading a "purpose driven life" (I don't know of any text that uses that phrase, but I find it useful for classification purposes).
A much more rigid, and impractical definition of rationality (but very nice analytically) is employed by the Neoclassicists who require a person to have perfect knowledge of his utility function, to have perfect knowledge of the system, and be able to maximize his utility function.
In light of the slavery example you noted, Classicals would consider enslaving others to be rational as it increases wealth and particularly as many - like Ricardo - were labor theory of value guys, the Austrians could think it rational (depends on the utility function), and Neoclassicals would presumably call slavery irrational as it is not profit maximizing (presuming profit was the utility).
A nice discussion of the history of rationality in economics is given here (pdf).
So in summary, vernacular rationality is not the same as economic rationality (which actually has a few different definitions of its own) and the behavior you describe is considered rational in classical economics (but not in neoclassical economics).
However, rationality in the classical economics sense is clearly not what you intended which makes this all an exercise in mental onanism.
Heinlein talked about this in more than one of his books. He detested the practice but noted sadly that many people chose to live in slavery--real literal slavery, not figurative--which is a sad but true fact. How common this was would vary from culture to culture and circumstances to circumstances of course.
I suck.
No, you don't! And you're not small. C. S. Lewis is great. And if you like him, you'll love G. K. Chesterton, whose Orthodoxy was one of the things that converted Lewis to Christianity. Robert Farrar Capon is terrific too as a Christian writer. And then there are the classics of Christian literature (which is most of Western literature): John Bunyan, John Milton, Dante, Shakespeare.... And the Bible itself, of course. You're in good company.
As to economics, while I believe in the sanctity of private property, I reject the "Economic Man" of the Manchester school just as I reject the "Economic Man" of Karl Marx. I believe in Spiritual Man*, Heroic Man*, Free Man*. (*obviously including Woman)