A Princess of Mars and a Messiah of Mars
Posted on 29 February 2012
In honor of Leap Day, I thought I should write a post in honor of the most famous long-leaper of all, the clean-limbed fighting man of Virginia, John Carter, Warlord of Mars.
I have recently been rereading the ‘Barsoom’ novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs to my boys, and I was pleasantly surprised to learn that my memory of them as trivial boy’s adventure tales was an underestimation.
They are honest-to-goodness science fiction, written with at least as much speculative thought and speculative wonder as anything by, say, Robert Heinlein, but with this difference: Burroughs was more a Victorian writer than a modern one, and did not buy into the conceit, so prevalent in modern writers, that assumes that man’s nature, nay, manhood itself, is a by-product of environment.
An examination of these two writers, one who portrayed a man named Carter on Mars, and the other, a Martian named Smith on Earth, is instructive.
Robert Heinlein is called the ‘Dean of Science Fiction’ because of his role as a pillar of Hard SF from the John W. Campbell Jr. stable of writers, and one of the writers defining Hard SF. He is clearly in the ‘Man is what upbringing molds him to be’ camp.
Allow me by way of illustrative example to quote a passage from Robert Heinlein’s most famous work, STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND, which concerns an orphaned child, Michael Valentine Smith, raised from infancy by Martians. Captain van Tromp is the chief officer of the second expedition to Mars, who recovers the now-grown Smith from Mars and returns him to Earth. At a hearing, he explains to the typically Heinleinian dunderhead (whose only purpose in the plot is to contrast the truth and clarity of the author’s viewpoint) the nature of Smith:
Captain van Tromp decided that it was time to throw a tantrum. “This man Smith–This ‘man!’ Can’t you see that he is not?”
“Eh?”
“Smith . . . is . . . not . . . a . . . man.”
“Huh? Explain yourself, Captain.”
“Smith is an intelligent creature with the ancestry of a man, but he is more Martian than man. Until we came along he had never laid eyes on a man. He thinks like a Martian, feels like a Martian. He’s been brought up by a race which has nothing in common with us–they don’t even have sex. He’s a man by ancestry, a Martian by environment. . . “
The jest of the novel is that Smith is a reverse Mowgli or anti-Tarzan, raised by beings to whom we Earthlings, with our monogamy and monotheism, are but savages.
More to the point, Smith is the anti-John Carter. That first and famous human visitor to Mars showed the savage and remorseless inhabitants of that warlike and dying planet the advantages of compassion toward lower animals and the romance of marriage.
As I said, It is often overlooked that the seminal space adventure novel A PRINCESS OF MARS was actually a legitimate science fiction story. The scientific conceit, which was indeed consonant with the science of the time, was that Mars an older planet than Earth, webbed with canals to draw water from the arctic regions by a shrinking but highly advanced civilization to extend their few remaining years on the dry and dying planet as far as possible.
Edgar Rice Burroughs further hypothesized that the Green Men of Mars were egg-layers who practiced remorseless eugenics and held all property in common, and hence raised their children communally, with no custom of courtship or marriage, no institution of motherhood or fatherhood. Consequently, the Green Martians are cruel and savage and dour to the point of insanity, having never known family or love.
John Carter is the only man on Mars who shows compassion to the monstrous domesticated animals of that globe. Woola the ghastly Martian hound-dog is one of the best loved characters of the piece. The blood brother and companion in arms of Carter is Tars Tarkas is the only Martian who ever loved his wife and knows the identity of his child.
It is significant to me that Burroughs always speaks of John Carter’s “advent” on Mars, a word that, to me, has religious overtones, even if not so intended by the author. John Carter perhaps is not a messiah, but he does save the planet from an global atmospheric disaster, he does overthrow the corrupt pagan religion of the South Polar regions, and he eventually becomes Warlord of the entire globe, the Jeddak of Jeddaks even if he is not the King of King and Lord of Lords.
As befits a scientific romance of the Victorian Age, John Carter shoulders the ‘White Man’s Burden’ mentioned by Kipling, of bringing notions of compassion and civility to a society both older and more barbaric than our own, albeit (since this is a Victorian romance) a society which retains the military virtues and sense of honor our own has lost.
Romantics of the Victorian Age were constantly admiring the native peoples their armies were so adroitly conquering, and suffered the haunting sense that industrial civilization was unsuitable for man (and idea common to this day, and still found in science fiction yarns: Cameron’s AVATAR springs to mind as an example).
A cynical Victorian man is likely to recoil from the romantic notion of noble savages on the grounds that savages are not noble; a ideologically correct modern girl is likely to recoil from the romantic notion of noble savages on the grounds that savages are not savage, and that it is judgmental, if not an insult, to think them so. John Carter, I am happy to say, is neither cynical nor ideologically correct. He is simply a gentleman of Virginia, with both the compassion and the valor that that implies.
But whether Burroughs intended it or not, there is a slight messianic overtone to John Carter’s advent on Mars, where he uses his strength and talents to win the admiration and love of the natives, and bring a measure of civilization and civility to that cruel world of war.
By bringing human compassion to Mars, John Carter revolutionizes the planet, restoring what the ancient Martians of a greener world once knew, then lost.
Heinlein’s Martians, perhaps by no coincidence, have a asexual communal child-rearing strategy similar to the Green Men of Barsoom. The young in their larval form, as nymphs, are left to fend for themselves in the arid and cold Martian wilderness. Heinlein likewise has his ‘Martian’ named Smith scorn family life in favor of free love, and scorn monotheism in favor of a particularly sterile and juvenile heresy called Gnosticism, which preaches all humans are gods, or at least free of obedience to the Ten Commandments.
In the course of the novel, Smith fornicates freely if sterily (no child ever comes of his many sexual encounters), commits acts of cannibalism (and the Heinlein yammerhead brought on stage for that purpose is decreed to be a bigot for objecting to it) and murder (but only of policemen doing their duty and convicts lawfully imprisoned and also of a religious leader who was, of course, merely a con-man) and is stoned to death, whereupon he is wafted to a oddly godless heaven, wearing comic-opera wings and halo.
He feeds no hungry, cures no sick, raises no dead, and preaches nothing to the poor. The mission of the poor, as best I can tell, is to be weeded out.
But he has begun the ‘Church of Nine Worlds’ (Pluto was a planet in those better days of long ago, if you recall) which will convert the elite of mankind to superbeings with Way Cool Mind Powers, who will live in sexual orgies and share all property in common, adoring themselves as the only self-aware gods on the planet.
By bringing Martian dispassion to Earth, Smith likewise revolutionizes the planet, abandoning what ancient Humans have always known.
The most touching and memorable scene in A PRINCESS OF MARS is when John Carter learns the story of Sola, the only woman of the Green Martian race capable of compassion. She was, in defiance of Martian custom, raised by her own mother, and loved by her real father, for for the two met and loved without the eugenic rape necessitated by remorseless eugenics. Since her parents knew and loved each other, the birth was secret, and Sola’s egg was not placed in the communal incubator by her mother. The mother is discovered visiting the child in secret to raise it, and for this forbidden display of maternal love, the mother is seized by the tribal chieftain, and tormented cruelly to death. The father, who was away at the wars during the tragedy, returns, conceals his rage, and waits many long Martian years for his revenge against his own chieftain. He is motivated by a passion, romantic love and fatherly compassion for his own daughter, which is unknown to the barren souls of the Green Men of that barren world.
The most grotesque scene in STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND is the scene where Mike the Martian (who in addition to being raised by Martians is the genius child of two genius astronauts of the first ill-fated expedition to Mars)becomes a carney, a Carnival showman, and comes to understand that the great majority of man are “chumps.” His immortal words are “I grok that they are chumps.”
(“Grokking” is Martian meditative unity, in this case meaning “full understanding.”)
This means that we rubes exist only to be mulcted of their pay by the cheap showmanship, lurid showgirls, and fake danger of the sideshow. When, at the zoo, Mike the Martian sees a big monkey beat a smaller monkey (who, in displaced rage rushes off to beat an even smaller) he erupts into the laughter his Martian heritage had hitherto denied him, and announces that he now understands mankind. We are all stinking apes and bullies and cowards and victims. And chumps.
Oh, did you think Mike the Martian mean that everyone else aside from you was the chump? Ah! That was the way I also read the book when I was young, and a chump, and I was played for a chump by this flimsy and coarse make-believe cynicism. You see, if we actually were nothing but smelly apes and cowards and bullies, we would not laugh about it. To take joy from the sorrows of the world is a work of angels.
For that matter, to take simple and rustic joy from the antics of a carnival is neither despicable, nor it is a matter, as the Martian sees it, of the cunning exploiting the stupid. If a farmer pays to see a wire walker perform what is admittedly a useless albeit difficult antic, or let his children watch the tumbling of slapstick clowns, where is there room for contempt in this? Would the wire-walker rather do farm work, and leave the farmer with no break in the monotony of his long days? The contempt that Mike the Martian has for common people is quite intoxicating and quite subtle: you do not notice yourself jeering at honest men and women along with him.
(As a man in the entertainment field myself — and I assure all and sundry that clown-acrobatics for a traveling circus is a more difficult and honorable profession than my own– I am grateful for every last one of them, because I know there are other and better things they can do with their book-buying dollar. I do not grok that my patrons and employers and beloved readers are ‘chumps’. I grok that I should be grateful.)
In a later scene, the last before his martyrdom, Mike the Martian confesses to his mentor, the Heinlein stand-in for Heinlein, Jubal Hershaw, that the teaching of Way Cool Gnosticism to the elite, which somehow cures original sin and makes all the cool kids live together in perfect harmony, may have a bad side effect of hindering Darwinian evolution:
“I am beginning to wonder if full grokking will show that I am on the wrong track entirely — that this race must be split up, hating each other, fighting each other, constantly unhappy and at war even with their own individual selves… simply to have that weeding out that every race must have.”
The poor messiah is sweating as if blood in his Gethsemane of his despair because there may not be enough death and destruction to cull the chumps from the herd and usher in the glorious birth of the superhuman like himself! Jubal Harshaw, his teacher and mentor, hurries to assure him:
“If one tenth of one percent of the population is capable of getting the news, then all you have to do is show them — and in a matter of some generations all the stupid ones will die out and those with your discipline will inherit the Earth. Whenever that is — a thousand years from now, or ten thousand — will be plenty soon enough to worry about whether some new hurdle is necessary to make them jump higher. But don’t go getting faint-hearted because only a handful have turned into angels overnight. Personally, I never expected any of them to manage it. “
I would like you to pause and grok, water brothers, the truly dismal and hateful nature of Jubal Hershaw’s philosophy, and, I presume, Mr Heinlein’s. He is saying here that you and I, the chumps and apes of life, ought and shall and will die off to make room for the superman, who in turn will die off when challenges proportionate to their existence rear their heads. Only through killing the weak does the Master Race evolve!
Ironically, this is also a notion as Victorian as the ‘White Man’s Burden’ of Kipling; it comes straight from the pen of Nietzsche, who somehow misreads Darwin to be a primer on moral ethics rather than an hypothesis on how new species arise. Part and parcel of the pseudo-Darwinist notion is that there is no such thing as human nature. If species evolve from one to the next, there is no fixed standard against which to judge whether or not an individual is acting properly or not for his species. Any aberrant behavior which is self destructive in one environment might by blind chance be the exact thing needed to insure the survival of many children in the next environment.
It is to be noted, of course, that STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND is a satire after the fashion of Jonathon Swift or James Branch Cabell, and is not meant to be anything other than that. Satires are like lemonade: they are meant to leave a sour taste in the mouth. A PRINCESS OF MARS is an adventure story. They are red meat stories. Such a tale is meant to nourish souls who hunger for adventure, and perhaps even to tell young men how to behave with the courage and chivalry demanded of Christians, or at least the courage and honor demanded of Pagans.
I am not criticizing a satire for being satirical, but I am proposing that the cream of the jest requires a belief that man is not man, that he has no fixed form or guiding spirit, no purpose in life other than to seek orgies and fight wars and father babies, preferably for other men to raise. It is an odd mix of Darwinism, lofty individualism, and rank hedonism.
On the other hand, for the adventure yarn to be an adventure, the image of man must be a heroic one. Indeed, the greatest adventure of all is begun when one recognizes that the image of man is the image and likeness of God.
Sometimes there is a kind of fatality in fictitious names, unsuspected even by their authors. Heinlein named his monster Smith simply because that, to his twentieth-century American ears, was the flattest and most mundane name he could imagine: a point on which Chesterton would have been happy to correct him. I do not know what inspired Burroughs to call his hero Carter, save that it sounds well. But consider:—
A carter carries things; a smith smites things. Of the two, the smith is much the more specialized specialist. A carter can carry anything, and may be the nobler for carrying noble things; a smith has no business smiting anything but metal, and is the worse for smiting anything else. Carter carries good manners and good morals from Earth to Mars, which (of all merely human things) are about the noblest cargo of all. Smith smites manners, morals, and men all together, to replace them with the sterile Nietzscheism of a sterile world; which is about the worst abuse of the smith’s hammer. But it is an abuse that the fallacy ‘man = environment’ naturally invites. Men may be carried, but they cannot be forged — no matter how many men the smith kills in the attempt.
Smith … was the flattest and most mundane name he could think of.
I resemble that remark! If Heinlein were still alive I’d have to refer him to TNSDUNSPHI: The National Society to Discourage Us of the Name Smith for Purposes of Hypothetical Illustration, founded by Glenn E. Smith of the University of Minnesota. (See page 50 of The Book of Smith by Elsdon C. Smith, 1980.
Allow me to reprint for your edification the article by GK Chesterton to which Tom Simon alludes:
For Persons of the Name of Smith
by G. K. Chesterton
Some time ago Mr. C. F. G. Masterman led a vigorous attack upon my timid and humble optimism, and declared in effect that when I maintained a poetry in all things it was I who supplied it. I wish I could claim that I had ever supplied poetry to anything; it seems to me that I am at the very best a humdrum scientific student noting it down. The sentimentalists, the sons of a passionate delusion, are those who do not think everything poetical. For they are wholly under the influence of words, of the vague current phraseology, which thinks “castle” a poetical word and “post-office” an unpoetical word, which thinks “knight” a poetical word and “policeman” an unpoetical word, which thinks “eagle” a poetical word and “pig” an unpoetical word. I do not say that there is not truth in this as a matter of literature; I do not say that in pure technical style there is not a difference between eagles and pigs. All I wish to point out is that the ordinary man in the street when he says that there is no poetry in a pig or a post-office is, in fact, merely intoxicated with literary style. He is not looking at the thing itself; if he did that he would see that it was not only poetical, but obviously and glaringly poetical. He thinks a railway-signal, let us say, must be prosaic, because there is no rhyme in it. But if he looked straight and square at what a railway-signal is, he would realise that it was, to take a casual case, a red fire or light kindled to keep people from death, as poetical a thing as the spear of Britomart or the lamp of Aladdin. It is, in short, the man who thinks ordinary things common who is really the man living in an unreal world.
But of all the examples of this general fact that have recently been called to my notice, there is none more peculiar and interesting than that of the family name of Smith, in which we have a splendid example of the fact that the poetry of common things is a mere fact, while the commonplace character of common things is a mere delusion. For, if we look at the name Smith in a casual and impressionable way, remembering how we commonly hear it, what is commonly said about it, we think of it as something funny and trivial; we think of pictures in “Punch,” of jokes in comic songs, of all the cheapness and modernity which seem to centre round a Mr. Smith. But, if we look at the plain word itself, we suddenly behold a poem. It is the name of a great rugged and primeval craft, a trade that is in the bones of every great epic of antiquity, a trade on which the “arma virumque” have everlastingly depended, and which they have repeatedly acclaimed. It is a craft so poetical that even the babies of village yokels stand and stare into the cavern of its creative violence, with a dim sense that the dancing sparks and the deafening blows are in some way wonderful, as the shops of the village cobbler and the village baker are not wonderful. The mystery of flame, the mystery of metals, the fight between the hardest of earthly things and the weirdest of earthly elements, the defeat of the unconquerable iron by its only conqueror, the brute calm of Nature, the passionate cunning of man, the origin of a thousand sciences and arts, the ploughing of fields, the hewing of wood, the arraying of armies, and the whole beginning of arms, these things are written with brevity indeed, but with perfect clearness, on the visiting card of Mr. Smith. The Smiths are a house of arrogant antiquity, of prehistoric simplicity. It would not be at all remarkable if a certain contemptuous carriage of the head, a certain curl of the lip, marked people whose name was Smith. Yet novelists, when they wish to describe a hero as strong and romantic, persistently call him Vernon Aylmer, which means nothing, or Bertrand Vallance, which means nothing; while all the time it is in their power to give him the sacred name of Smith, this name made of iron and fire. From the very beginnings of history and fable this clan was gone forth to battle; their trophies are in every hand, their name is everywhere; they are older than the nations, and their sign is the Hammer of Thor.
Anyone whose name is Smith may be connected with a Smith who was a lawyer in the reign of Henry VIII, or a Smith who was a Colonel in the British army at Blenheim, or a Smith who was a Cavalier, or a Smith who was a Puritan, or a Smith who was a Bishop, or a Smith who was hanged. All this kind of historic information exists in very perfect form. But it must be remembered that the origin of a great family should be not merely historic, but also prehistoric. Every single practical and triumphant thing in this world has begun, not with an accuracy, but with a legend. These dim, gigantic fables are the origins of all practical things. And behind the dimmest and most gigantic Smith, we may see the more tremendous outlines of the formless and fabulous Smith who was the son of Vulcan and the first conqueror of iron. The shame which many people feel about owning to such a patronymic or tracing its origin, is an extraordinary thing, but it is part of a very deep and general evil which has been going on for some time back. The interest in race, the interest in genealogy, which were professed by the ancient aristocratic world, were not bad things; they were in themselves good things. It is, at least, as reasonable to investigate the origin of a man as to investigate the origin of a cowslip, or a periwinkle, or a prairie dog; the herald with his tabard and trumpet holds his perfectly legitimate place beside the botanist and the conchologist and the natural history expert. What was wrong with the old heraldic speculations was not that they existed, but that they did not go far enough. They did not interest themselves in the blood of the yokel and they mystic paternity of the tinker. In other words, the evil was not that there was too much genealogy, but that there was not enough. And the real work to which democracy ought to address itself is that of extending this racial interest to the case of all ordinary men, of teaching the butcher to be proud of his grandfather, and the railway porter to remember his name with pride. For the single case of the name “Smith” is sufficient to indicate what profundities of origin and significance lie in all our names. The case of Smith is no mere accident; the case would be the same with any one of the common names which we account prosaic or absurd. “Jones” is more mean and preposterous even than Smith, and even those who bear the name of Jones do not probably remember that it is but a corruption of the name that Christ loved. There is not one of us that is not of noble origin, whatever we may be in essence.
Thank you, Mr Wright. I feel better now.
It is perhaps worth emphasizing that this is no mere flight of fancy by Chesterton; in every respect, here, he was telling the literal truth. I myself discovered the poetry and romance of the Smiths only when I became acquainted with a man of that name, who was the legal heir to the highest hereditary office in the service of one of the genuinely old and great Scottish clans: the office of chief smith to the laird. Such was the prestige of the office that it continued in legal existence even though its duties had been usurped by a parcel of mills in Glasgow, and the officeholders had emigrated to Canada.
It was a strict rule in the family that each heir in turn should be christened with all the names of his fathers since the office had come into the family, headed by a distinctive name of his own; so that my friend Smith had about twenty middle names. He used to rattle them off, title and all, with his forename at one end of the train and ‘Smith’ at the other, as a sort of amusing party trick.
[...] thanks to the inimitable John C. Wright, I begin to think I’m outgrowing Heinlein. Checkout Wright’s comparison of the two books, very much to Heinlein’s [...]
And managed to convince himself that life was the Olympics, at which it was possible to cheat — witness his rage at how the weak had triumphed over the strong. But in Darwinism, the proof of the pudding lies in the eating: that the “weak” conquered was proof they were strong.
The few eugenicists I have had the displeasure to meet (and one friend I suspect is getting there) all have one thing in common – they believe, against every visible measure, that they are the strong ones and that when their pure-strain utopia comes about, they will not be one of those eliminated. Yet none of them are on top now…
Everybody thinks they’ll be a Draka, nobody thinks they’ll be a serf.
I am amazed by this strain sometimes. The faction who is frustrated by the weak overcoming the strong. They don’t seem to “grok” what strength is. An alliance of twenty weak men is stronger than any single strong man in 99 out of 100 tasks. The remainder where individual talent shines tends to either by art, theft, or status games.
It is possibly one of the few ideologies I cannot understand.
Ponder the nature of envy, and you will understand them. They do not seek for themselves to live, these eugenicists: they want the productive and happy and normal people, the common man, to die.
No one honestly thinks you can breed men like cattle to bring out certain characteristics. The daydream rests on the sadistic intellectual fantasy of demeaning the people to the level of cattle.
Not to sound too Christian about it, but eugenics was conceived in the West among the antichristian intellectuals of the Late Victorian Age. It is mainly meant to desecrate the sacrament of marriage. Or at least, I speculate that is Uncle Screwtape’s interest in the matter, no matter what his human dupes say their reasons are.
You are a Christian, and I am slouching towards that inevitable reckoning, so never fear sounding too Christian to me. At the worst I can always put your worldview in the mouths of angels and monsters when I wish to make a creature sound wiser than I. At best you will point me in the right direction.
Anyway, envy has never been my sin. Perhaps I have taken them too closely at face value, and assumed they want to do as they say and save the world. Perhaps that was foolish of me.
The thing to bear in mind is that what they say is not at all what they believe themselves to be saying. They think they are saying that they want to save the world; but if you listen with attention to everything they say, and not merely the title that they attach to their supposed cause, you will come to a different understanding. What is the world to be saved from, and who is to inherit it? The answer, I am afraid, is that it is to be saved from their fellow human beings, who exist, and given to the Übermensch of genetic destiny, who does not exist. They are perfectly happy to sacrifice every real living thing on the altar of an imaginary monster, as long as the monster is of their own construction.
In the old technical language, now known to few people, this was known as the sin of Spiritual Pride, for which the other name is Satanic hatred.
To be contrary for a moment, are you familiar with the story “Poor Daddy” by Heinlein? I wonder sometimes how much Heinlein was really pushing the Sexual Revolution vs. pushing the boundaries just so he could be a trailblazer…..
I would have sworn I had read every SF story Heinlein ever wrote and more than once, but I confess I am not familiar with that one.
However, I will caution you that if you find a story by Heinlein praising fatherhood and childrearing, these are common themes in his work, and while you and I see a necessary connection between chastity and family life, Mr Heinlein does not. He maintains a libertarian attitude that a truly competent and superior man, what we might call ‘an Alpha Male’, can both be a patriarch and a polygamist, a good father figure and a patron of strip clubs. He simply did not think Christian sexual mores were necessary or desirable to maintain the family relations or to ensure proper childrearing.
I think it’s in “Requiem”. I bring it up because, in that story, the plot involves an opportunity of Sin, and the father’s dealing with that to protect his marriage and his wife’s chastity. Not a common Heinlein theme, I admit…..
That’s one of the Puddin’ stories, isn’t it?
The thing is Nietzsche appeals to a mind that is resistant to Left. They tend to be Doers rather than Thinkers. Now the heyday of Nietzsche and social Darwinism is past and except for singulartians nobody is dreaming of Superman. Still the secular Right (as it calls itself) is still pursuing its old enthusiasms: IQ, race-realism, HBD, dysgenic trends.
I am not sure you are using the words ‘Right’ and ‘Left’ to refer to anything I would recognize by those terms. Nietzsche was and is a revolutionary of the Leftist persuasion, and a friend to socialist ideas and an avowed enemy to Christianity, the bourgeoisie middle-class, industrialization. Nietzsche is not in the same intellectual heritage as Locke, Jefferson, Adams, Washington, and other partisans for the ideals of limited government and the rights of man.
The secular right of my acquaintance are libertarians, who have no interest in the topics you mention. Indeed the only rightwinger I have ever even heard speak or write about racial IQ issues is John Derbyshire of NRO, who no longer writes for them regularly, and who, frankly, I regard as a crackpot.
Are you one of those people who regards Nazis and Communists as opposites rather than as twins? If so, you are addressing the wrong audience.
Mr Wright,
You wisely eschew reading much secular right. But they do exist. The Secular Right is either libertarian hence globalist or it is nationalist. For example, the admirers of HL Mencken, of Buchanan, or what is called Alter Right.
The Nazis and Communists were neither twins nor polar opposites. CS Lewis in Pilgrim’s Regress does puts them together in the category of subhumans and I agree. But his is a Christian scheme and does not use the word Left either.
Nazis are national socialists. Communism is a term of protective coloration international socialism took upon itself during the dispute between Trotsky and Lenin, in order to differentiate the two camps. Like Pope and Antipope during a religious schism, both accused the other of betraying the ‘Left’ — which they, following the Napoleonic terminology, identified themselves with, that is, those who sough to reform and overthrow the Ancien Regime of Throne and Altar. So they called their foes ‘Right’ in the same way schismatic Popes call each other apostates, satanists, or atheists.
The Nazis and the Communists are identical in their methods, means, end results, and their view of human nature, which is Darwinistic and evolutionary and Hegelian. They differ only in which group they select as the ritualized scapegoat or ‘Goldstein’ on which to blame all evils: Nazis selected the Jewish Capitalists, and Commies selected the Capitalist Jews.
When the Nazis assumed the pose of challenging and defying the Commies, they identified themselves as ‘the Right’ meaning that they are anti-Communist. The communists were also opposed by the monarchy and the established church in Europe, as well as by the limited-government free market democracy in America. Since they opposed Communism, by the same warped terminology, they were called ‘Right’ and were likened from that day to this to Nazis.
It is a lie. Nazis favor big government (to say the least) and have no respect for any established Church (to say the least). Nazis are anti-clerical collectivist totalitarians who seek to disarm the populous and run the economy. Commies are anti-clerical collectivist totalitarians who seek to disarm the populous and run the economy. The ‘Right’ in America seek an armed populous forming a limited government and deny that any government has the power to “run” the economy.
So, if you are listing Pat Buchanan as a Right winger who preaches racial superiority of whites over untermenschen, kindly blow it out your ear. Commies calling Republicans Nazis and Racists is a falsehood that was tired and transparently false when it was first attempted in the 1930′s, and is now an octogenarian. In America, thanks to Lefty ‘affirmative action’ policies, race is tracked more closely than ever it was in Nazi Germany, albeit that being a member of any race the Left regards as ‘lesser’ or ‘disadvantaged’ wins sin-offerings and gifts rather than isolation, expropriation, detention, and death. The Leftist call any disagreement with their idiotic racial atonement rituals racism.
I have never yet heard an accusation of racism coming from the Left which turned out to be true.
Nonsense – the National Socialists approved highly of Nietzche, and those bright progressives the eugenists were certainly working in the same vein.
Unless “Rightist” is defined by Stalin, as someone who had the nerve to oppose him.
Dear Mr. Wright:
Another very interesting essay. And I basically agree with your argument. I too far prefer Edgar Rice Barsoom’s books to most of Heinlein’s later works beginning with STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND. For all his Victorian turn of language, Burroughs had a far more realistic view of human nature than did the later Heinlein, IMO.
You called STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND satire. I understand your argument, but I would also call STRANGER failed satire. I found it ponderous, heavy reading. And Heinlein seemed far too dead serious in his absurd views of sex and religion to have been TRULY satirical. That is, I found Jonathan Swift’s GULLIVER’S TRAVELS, George Orwell’s ANIMAL FARM, Juvenal’s SATIRES, or even Evelyn Waugh’s THE LOVED ONE far more “satirical.” That is, these writers made their points with both biting humour AND in such a way that they entertained and pleased readers. I found Juvenal poems FUNNY as well as tearingly satirical. I did not get that kind of pleasure from Heinlein’s STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND or I WILL FEAR NO EVIL.
Sincerely, Sean M. Brooks
A very good case has been made — I forget by whom, and I think it is one of those common arguments to which many hands and voices have contributed — that a satirist must be a conservative ex officio: because his satire will only bite if he compares the actual behaviour of human beings to an old established moral standard and finds them wanting. If his standard is not established, it will not be accepted by the audience and they will not feel the sting. You may justly satirize men for not being prudent, or brave, or honest, because sane people recognize these as good and desirable qualities. But if you try to satirize men for not being robots or whales or Houyhnhnms, you are imposing a standard of your own invention; you and your audience have already parted company. Such a satire may hit its professed target, but it will not do execution, because there is nobody in the vicinity.
Heinlein’s satire fails because he has not this sane ethical conservatism. He wants to tell us that men are foolish creatures, and he tries to do it by showing how they are inferior to supermen of his own imagining. Swift, Orwell, Juvenal, and Waugh, like all true satirists, do it by showing how men are inferior to their own professed ideals, which require no superman to stand as their godfather.
Hi, Tom! Thanks for your comments.
Yes, your explanstion of why Heinlein failed as a satirist makes sense. Because true satirists speak from a strong ethical base, whether Christian or derived from reason/natural law. That is why Juvenal and Jonathan Swift can still please us, while most of Heinlein’s later works are merely pathetic bores.
Sincerely, Sean M. Brooks
Mr. Wright, I can’t wait to see your response to this review from The Atlantic. Some flava:
The guy likes the movie, though.