The 'Material' Wisdom of Robert Heinlein

Science fiction writers with more than a bit of wisdom tend to be favorite reads of mine. One might think of Heinlein's two most well known books as typical of the rest; Stranger in A Strange Land and Starship Troopers, yet that is not so. Many of Heinlien's books are topics of more general human and philosophical interest.

Something of a social realist, I enjoy the spiritual element in Heinlein that recognized so many potential areas of new, innovative philosophical thought. The implicatives for cosmology and social selection for actualization in a challenge-response criterion on the human side of experience-- extrapolations of given technologies and biological facts, are hypothetically elaborated.

His 'Time Enough for Love' is a complete enough treatment of the known scientific biological facts of life at the time, and of the centrality of heterosexual relations as the social foundation of life. His treatment of genetics is extraordinarily interesting, even in retrospect. The conclusions Heinlein sketches are physically possible though rather repulsive; Lazarus, aka. Woodrow Wilson Smith, is not the best of humanity—perhaps just one gifted at survival and common sense. As the eldest of all humans regenerated countless times through cloning and other techniques he lacks some of the arête or virtue that ought to transcend even the manifestly physically evident—

One can make moral decisions if suitably inclined toward spirituality without prioritizing matter for-itself. Moral meanings can cohere within a spiritual-intellectual matrix. Such a spiritual paradigm follows the a priori rather than an interpretive paradigm of the extensional or empirical matter of experience. The failing of Lazarus Long to be more than just an excellent log roller on the phenomena of life leads to unusual evolutions mixed in sentimentality.

Heinlein has outlined one way a wayward humanity could go if it were capable—personally I think he was overly optimistic regarding science applied to transmogrification of human life, yet he was unaware of some of the potential science has created since to more radically transform and end the present nature of human existence. Well, one may read the history of Attila and the Hun invasion of the Roman Empire for relief.

I haven’t enough understanding of genetics to answer the question that arises in reading ‘Time Enough for Love’; if female clones are made from a man’s x genetic component, and he impregnates them, what would the progeny be genetically—more clones, or permutated genetic sequencing? Lazarus Long reaches the conclusions along with society generally that the sole wrong in sexual reproduction is the production of defective progeny. Because all genes are screened before mating to determine if defective births would occur, it becomes morally a non-sequiter for Lazarus Long to have sex with relatives so if the genetic examination people determine that no defectives will result inn marriage. Morality lacks a spiritual element in the brave new world of the very long-lived.

Genghis Khan also has had several interesting history books written on his life and times that one may find good alternative reading. While the United States plants war eggs of offshore oil wells and onshore nuclear plants that will serve as accelerants in improvisational explosive devices for a future conventional war attack on the U.S. economy, these genetic moral war eggs for future material confusion are being sponsored by federal tax support too. Remotely piloted submersibles, r.p.v. and drone aircraft will be able to ignite upon foreign discretion any and all vulnerable offshore oil infrastructure when convenient. In 1989 the Exxon Valdez oil spill altered the state of Alaska policy from a growing transformation away from reliance on oil to one of just basic, survival. The Gulf Coast of the U.S.A. has also experienced a reduction in intelligence through a variety of mass insults. Incompetent levy maintenance before Hurricane Katrina, a profusion of offshore oil platforms often controlled by foreign powers—these levers of globalist power over the economic security of the United States are clear and present dangers largely ignored in the District of Corruption.

A U.S. political environment foisting a constellation of offshore oil infrastructure upon sensitive ocean habitat presents a what me worry defense posture. Taxpayers are expected to pay for what amounts to a corporatist oil defense military force to lock down the security of vast tracks of coastal waters from potential improvised jet ski vectors for explosives ordinance launched from distant ships smoke on the horizon, or helions on terror junkets from abroad locked on courses of self-destruct with grappling hooks and pentex. The Chairperson of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mullahs, has a plan to homosexually liberate the Navy with SecDef Gates. Congress is content with the defense response evidently. Reminds me of when Admiral Sanchez wanted 50,000 barrels of free oil from Alaska for the Pacific Fleet before the Exxon Valdez spill, and was turned down by Alaska Gov. Cowper. Oil disaster is always waiting to land on sensitive U.S. coastal environments, and probably those of Africa too.

In the story, Lazarus Long has lived for nearly 4700 years and recounts elements of his experience to a very great great...grandson. His experiences of society, politics, experience, space travel, pioneering of other worlds is full of interesting early American kinds of pioneering information as well. The book is a full kind of Cliff's Notes verisimilitude to making lists of things to fill a Conestoga wagon setting out for the unknown on an Earth-like world.

If one considers radical future galactic pioneering, it may be that complete self-reliance on non-technical items that could be forged from raw materials would be necessary. Independent pioneers might take advanced data bases along with them, yet high tech equipment requires a vast economic foundation to construct--if one part is missing the entire factory of culture may collapse letting the hapless pioneers starve. We may tend to look at Star Trek and magic box production machines as the future of real space colonization, yet that may be self-deceptive, for an independent colonization future of explorers and pioneers scattered throughout the galaxy may have no contact with an advanced civilization able to produce modern goods at all, nor could they take along such equipment with them and expect it to last forever. The Maytag repairman would be a long time in reaching an obscure planet several light years away.

That was one of the reasons I was so disgusted with President Obama's decision to skip the moon and raise the bar to some vague Martian future. Neglecting to establish a practical down-to-moon base of self reliant materials pioneers able to live without Earth resupply forever-even if that is just in potential and people only live their a few years at a time doing research-means that a practical, self-reliant Martian colony will as well be neglected and fail to appear the next century.

The federal government prefers 'flashy' one-off disposable symbolic ventures rather than pioneering bases on extra-terrestrial locations. As a leader in moon base development the U.S. Government could bring in teamwork from the International community of space developers, and missions of true space-ships constructed on the moon to be launched to mars in advance of human explorers, with supplies and shelters that could provide substantial survival redundancy to encourage a self-reliant facility as soon as possible. The President’s plan is simply a way to subvert the U.S. leadership in extra-terrestrial development.

That is not too surprising, for the U.S. economy is misdirected by the administration as it was by the previous three administrations. With the financial related service sector being nearly a third of the U.S. economy, and government much of the rest, there is a huge non-materially productive sector of the economy. When these sectors want to increase there income for employees and executives, essentially that means either printing more money, taking money away from the really materially productive sector, or finding cheap workers overseas to exploit. Unfortunately the latter outsources material production from our nation to nations A, B, C, D and E.

The federal government and others can of course borrow money from the materially productive countries to maintain or increase their standards of living for a while, but they won't want to have a substantial space pioneering mission on a moon or another planet for it would cost real money, and as the nation's material production declines many of the components would need to be made overseas. That is one of the fundamental problems with the United States today. Heinlein's books have some interesting ideas on society and economics as well, though perhaps not those given above.

That economic cycle of just increasing creature comforts--a dozen kinds of body wash as if Americans have become smellier than prior generations, fast food restaurants and other food outlets every 50 feet in many cities, 3/4s of young adults far overweight--this is a decadent generation trained that way by the indoctrination of consumerist supply and demand, or those without meaningful values. I believe that may have begun during the Vietnam War era when people got the scream yellow honkers from the Beatles, a Yellow Submarine or some such munchy ethic causality.

While various kinds of liberation occurred for the nation, I think kids suffered when their mothers no longer cooked at home making Yankee pot roast, corn beef and cabbage and various healthy foods. McDonald's is no substitute for home grown and cooked foods. A junk food generation smoking, piling of foreign financed public debt, canceling lunar development is challenged to find transcending, healthy social values. There is a clutter of non-valuable values making investment in the United States difficult.

Individualism was not only respected-it was unavoidable in pioneering generations, for technology had not advanced so far that women canning at home, cooking and so forth could be done without. Inventors in the United States were once world leaders, for the material opportunities to build and idea were in the United States rather than in China, India or Japan. Today, amongst those that are not corporate employees and are free to patent their own ideas, the extra costs of materializing an idea are much higher than before, since the lead in materials production increasing is transferring to China. One must not only have $3000 dollars for a pack of 5 patent applications, one must afford a patent search, higher a patent attorney and perhaps spend hundreds of thousands to defend a patent. Then one must perhaps fly to China to learn how one goes about finding materials producers willing and able to actualize the idea. In the meanwhile the clock is ticking and rivals have interest in your idea generally--and there are other problems such as hiring attorneys abroad to defend pirates of the idea producing in Thailand or some Quack province in China

The challenges presenting to Americans for the insipid federal response to the challenge of making patents affordable to poor, bright U.S. inventors will continue to create a serious loss of economic opportunity to foreign interests. I have given away several ideas myself in public writing after learning of the impossibility of actualizing patentable ideas in the U.S.A.

With the patent trickle up to globalists and the federal political tilt toward macro-economic drift--with utter federal economic incomprehension of the importance of renewability in resource use, defending the nation's borders and the need to set goals and parameters that prioritize national economic self-advantage as an obligation rather than actualizing a vague, amorphous capitalist global theory such that a trickle down to the United States is in the best interest of Americans rather than direct effort to invest and build a self-reliant, independent U.S. future economy,--the United States has set a course toward intentional national disadvantage.

There are those that rationalize that a disadvantaged America is somehow in the nation or the world's interests, and they are wrong. The rich may be comfortable with that idea, Bostonian elites may like that ideas a 'liberal', yet it is simple the result of a lazy and myopic greed. The elites are heavily invested in thee trans-national corporatism corrupting U.S. politics through the media control and through direct political influence.

The United States should present a strong nationalism to the world. A new nationalism that defends itself against terrorism at the borders and through covert foreign intelligence and military work abroad would be more effective and cost less than a misguided conventional war saturation of second world nations to temporarily compel them to like a hypocritical U.S. concept of democracy and perhaps George W. Bush or Barrack Hussein Obama themselves. Many of the poor will always hate the rich in every place on Earth. Many of the repressed will forever hate their oppressors. Many straight people will forever fight the hateful attitude of homosexuals that regard them as potential sex objects and urinate on the idea of marriage as a heterosexual fact. Homosexual 'love' of their straight brothers attitude may be reckoned the kind of love a lion shows to its prey. These things cannot be changed. What should be changed and can be defended are fundamental democratic values of national independence, avoiding of entangling foreign alliances. Self-reliance in economic so far as possible and practical, elimination of public debt and elimination of authoritarianism in any form domestically. All citizens should have an assurance of the necessary items of life such as food, clothing and health care, yet such should be accomplished through reforms that make social safety nets including retirement useful for the people that really need them as insurance against suffering, and as just potentially available to those than can afford to do without them.

One of Heinlein's points was that any nation that requires I.D. of its citizens is probably too advanced and set for collapse. I may not go that far with a somewhat anachronistic idea of Heinlein, yet without somewhere else to go through the invention of a faster than space-time travel method, we must proceed in such a way that the health of the planet's people and ecosystem are attended with extreme care and conservation.

We know that communism is a response to authoritarian oppression of the majority by a minority. It is a power minority bargaining position in war and for revolution. Communism is itself totalitarian and so undesirable by the majority that wish freedom, yet we know that following war and revolution, in the absence of a government chaos reigns until an authoritarian power emerges to rule generally. That is a reason why so many governments are dictatorial following revolutions of any sort--it is difficult to evolve.

In China we see this history--following the revolution against the imperial government a corrupt nationalist government was followed by a corrupt Japanese military presence as well as a civil war and an authoritarian Chinese government. With 1,300,000,000 people, China cannot afford to just get rid of its neo-authoritarian government for it requires regulation to prevent chaos and mass death.

So the Chinese Communist government pursues liberalization in economics to a limited extent to raise its standard of living. Simultaneously it experiences the double bind presented when its formerly majority agrarian rural economic foundation is replaced by internationalism, trading, investments and finance. Such investment has much risk, and brings circumstances to China not within their control. The worst risk is that sudden economic collapse brings deregulation or political revolution and a few million Chinese are killed in the chaos. The chaos is a social organizational phenomenal product of the dynamics of demography and geography more so than of political system choice.

As the United States leadership pursues rather self-deceptive political economics of global investments in the belief that it will benefit the world's poor countries rather than itself, and is a kind of benevolent mentor in economics while actually receiving vast profits for the globalist participating in the process and impoverishing many of its own citizens, it might be useful to look ahead and consider not just political correctness by real politics as well. Basic pioneering sorts of issues about self-reliance no not mean that one must be at war with one's international neighbors.

There are no magic money machines that produce social justice and economic opportunity for all people of the world at a distance better than at home. If one can rectify national economics to that of renewable natural resource basis with full employment and very low population growth with sobriety and dedication to investing in fundamental life bettering technology, one may invest at very low, non-usurious rates, cash in select foreign projects that would help raise a nation abroad toward a rational ecologically healthful way of life within a sustainable economic basis. Developing a moon base the next few years would show a political, economic and scientific competence in judgment that people are increasingly skeptical regarding its existence in U.S. politics.

Nations have periods of historical existence with few or no challenges, while some have many. Some nations may find challenges as forced options, while other nations may have few forced options and many opportunities from which they may choose to actualize few or none.

China with its large population and finite geography has experienced many forced political and economic options the past century. Since the end of the cold war the United States has experienced comparatively few. Arnold Toynbee believed that a nation with challenges (what William James would call forced options) could respond successfully or perish (or perhaps stagnate). Alternatively he found that without challenges—with an easy life, some peoples and nations have simply given away their advantage, lost the will to creatively advanced and otherwise have accomplished less with more than others that produced more with less. The United States has tended to give away its industry abroad, invested abroad, piled up vast debt, responded badly to external terrorist challenges financially speaking and failed to reform its own national interests at all well in the absence of a forced option to do so.

It may be so that intelligent concern can provide the information and stimulation for reform that is needed in the absence of an immediately compelling reason to do so. One may be content drifting, fishing, and drinking nectar with nubile lasses aboard the political love boat ship of state even while the sea is calm. Reason lets us know that the course may be unsustainable for a variety of reasons, and that waiting until the time of a forced option to pursue another course may be too late to successfully respond (a hurricane was over the horizon and the weather radio broke). It is time for the United States to get its house in order.