What’s Wrong With The World Part X—More Ignorance—A Digression on Ingratitude
A Digression on Ingratitude
The leitmotif of these intolerant and intemperate partisans of Toleration and fablers about Modern Enlightenment is their ingratitude.
A most striking example of this I came across recently in a discussion, of all things, about Robert A. Heinlein.
Now, wherever you, dear reader, may have first come across and most vehemently and persuasively heard defended the core values of Modernism, feminism, individualism, and the modern sexual revolution, all I can say is that I came across them in the writings of Robert Heinlein.
Fearless of controversy, Heinlein was an unstinting champion of the equality of women and the individualism of men. No one person had more influence to persuade me of the rightness and good judgment of the modern contempt for the ancient virtues of chastity and self-control than Bob Heinlein. I venture to say that many, if not most, in the science fiction field who march beneath the banners of the sexual revolution would agree.
But such credentials carry no weight with the more modern Modernists: I have heard Robert Heinlein repeatedly excoriated because he was not a sufficiently vehement partisan advertising homosexuality and incest (even thought I can recall at least three novels of his where he does so).
The typical witch-hunt mentality of the Left was brought to bear on these discussions: Heinlein, an advocate of sexual liberty in all things, was now a sexist and a homophobe. Heinlein, the only and the foremost author of his day willing to have non-Whites as not only major characters but main characters, and who never portrayed bigotry or racism as anything but the most vile and reprehensible of traits, was now a racist and a bigot.
The wardroom of the dropship Rodger Young in STARSHIP TROOPERS was more crowded with more minorities than the bridge of the starship Enterprise, and the main character was a Filipino living in Brasil—and yet this book was dismissed as racist on the grounds that the enemy being fought were subterranean bugs, and for grunt in time of combat to call enemy forces by derogatory slang is the same (so goes the leap of logic) as race-bigotry.
The mere inhuman ingratitude on display among these folk I can but liken to the practices of Saturn: the Left castrate their own fathers and eat their own children. No mentor with an eye to his own self-interest would teach his students that the honorable repayment a student owes his mentor is to revile him, and to continue in the mentor’s teachings while robbing him of honor and of credit.
To this day, Robert A. Heinlein is condemned and derided by his own. This bold voice condemning race-bigotry at a time when none other in the science fiction field dared to do so, is routinely dismissed by up-to-the-latest-fad groupthink poseurs as a bigot. Creatures this ungrateful cannot be reasoned with, cannot be compromised with, cannot be left in peace. Since they do not honor their own, there is no chance they will honor reason, or the terms of a compromise, or the mutual benefit of a mutual peace. Surrender terms they not honor; parley they do not desire; quarter is not possible.
Yet such is the outcome of the fable of Darwinian enlightenment, such is the evolutionary necessity behind the Hegelian and Marxist fable of evolution saying that each new generation not merely supplants but rebels against and savages and destroys the old.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
