ROBERT HEINLEIN'S BRILLIANT CULTURAL ANALYSIS

From a 1953 essay called "Concerning Stories Never Written" included at the end of Heinlein's short story collection Revolt in 2100:

As for the second notion, the idea that we could lose our freedom by succumbing to a wave of religious hysteria, I am sorry to say that I consider it possible. I hope that it is not probable. But there is a latent deep strain of religious fanaticism in this, our culture; it is rooted in our history and it has broken out many times in the past. It is with us now; there has been a sharp rise in strongly evangelical sects in this country in recent years, some of which hold beliefs theocratic in the extreme, anti-intellectual, anti-scientific, and anti-libertarian.

It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so, and will follow it by suppressing opposition, subverting all education to seize early the minds of the young, and by killing, locking up, or driving underground all heretics. This is equally true whether the faith is Communism or Holy-Rollerism; indeed it is the bounden duty of the faithful to do so. The custodians of the True Faith cannot logically admit tolerance of heresy to be a virtue.

Nevertheless this business of legislating religious beliefs into law has never been more than sporadically successful in this country--Sunday closing laws here and there, birth control legislation in spots, the Prohibition experiment, temporary enclaves of theocracy such as Voliva's Zion, Smith's Nauvoo, a few others. The country is split up into such a variety of faiths and sects that a degree of uneasy tolerance now exists from expedient compromise; the minorities constitute a majority of opposition against each other.

Could it be otherwise here? Could any one sect obtain a working majority at the polls and take over the country? Perhaps not--but a combination of a dynamic evangelist, television, enough money, and modern techniques of advertising and propaganda might make Billy Sunday's efforts look like a corner store compared to Sears Roebuck. Throw in a depression for good measure, promise a material heaven here on earth, add a dash of anti-Semitism, anti-Catholicism, anti-Negroism, and a good large dose of anti "furriners" in general and anti-intellectuals here at home and the result might be something quite frightening--particularly when one recalls that our voting system is such that a minority distributed as pluralities in enough states can constitute a working majority in Washington...

...Impossible? Remember the Klan in the 'Twenties--and how far it got without even a dynamic leader. Remember Karl Marx and note how close that unscientific piece of nonsense called Das Kapital has come to smothering out all freedom of thought on half a planet, without--mind you--the emotional advantage of calling it a religion. The capacity of the human mind for swallowing nonsense and spewing it forth in violent and repressive action has never yet been plumbed.

No commentary from me needed. This speaks for itself.

Well, okay, maybe a little commentary.

First, I was obsessed with Robert Heinlein when I was in high school and read nearly everything he wrote that I could lay my hands on. I've recently jumped back into some of his stuff lately--I just finished his opus Stranger in a Strange Land, and it's been great fun realizing that a lot of the beliefs and attitudes about human existence I have today had their genesis with him. One Heinlein piece I didn't read when I was a teenager was the above excerpted essay, which I came across years later when I bought Revolt in 2100 at a used book store in New Orleans, but some years before I finally moved here. I re-read the essay last night, and decided it would fit in well with the themes I push here at Real Art, which is entirely appropriate given Heinlein's aforementioned role in my intellectual development.

Second, this essay excerpt is downright chilling when you think about the Tea Party movement. With its telegenic and charismatic leaders such as Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, with its tinges of racism and xenophobia, with its anti-science and anti-intellectual attitudes, all against the backdrop of this Great Recession we continue to experience, it is almost as though the Tea Baggers come straight out of a Heinlein story. But they didn't. This is real life. And, just by honestly observing the cultural currents in which he lived, the Grandmaster of Science Fiction predicted it nearly fifty years ago.

Pretty fucking amazing, no? At any rate, one thing we can learn from such a prophetic essay read in hindsight is that the writing is always on the wall. All we have to do is read it.

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