{"id":903,"date":"2016-07-10T05:47:25","date_gmt":"2016-07-09T20:47:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/balldiamondball.com\/blog\/?p=903"},"modified":"2017-07-06T17:46:34","modified_gmt":"2017-07-06T08:46:34","slug":"american-yahoo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/balldiamondball.com\/blog\/american-yahoo\/","title":{"rendered":"American Yahoo"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here’s my new essay on Heinlein & it’s secretively saying all sorts of things about American freedom!<\/em><\/p>\n

America was supposed to be a land of philosophy or a race of philosophers. American government was founded as a government of philosophers: It is the only government that prohibited tying a man\u2019s legal standing to his confession of faith. American courts & all other public institutions are forbidden from requiring an oath by God. This is done on the assumption that God does not enforce those oaths. American government is no more guaranteed by God than the truth of the official speeches of any American citizen\u2013or the good or bad that might come by that truth. Instead, a man speaks merely because is it natural to him to speak. Whether nature or reason will ground morality or the public good should be considered\u2013whether living together as human beings admits of scientific solutions. Of course, this godlessness is not the whole truth about America now or when American government was founded. It cannot explain attachment to the flag or anthem or the memorials of the Founders\u2013or the way Americans treat foreigners\u2013to mention only a few public things. But freedom is a powerful impulse in America.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d like to talk to you about the writer who put the most talent, & of the most American kind, into talking up freedom at the expense of any other consideration. That\u2019s Robert Heinlein. The other day, it was 109 years since his birth. Other people will have to tell you why he is an important or influential writer\u2013or why his writing might be of nostalgic interest. What I hope to show you is something that you might call human nature as it emerges when someone starts pushing against the limits of the conventional understanding of human nature. This Heinlein kept doing, apparently, because he believed in a form of scientific manliness. This for a while went together with American mid-century confidence & the Space Age.<\/p>\n

So let me tell you about Lazarus Long,<\/strong> the character in Heinlein\u2019s work that does most to confront mankind\u2019s American age & the post-American future. Heinlein was not good with names, but at least if he called a character Lazarus Long, you\u2019d know he\u2019d be long-lived, if not immortal.<\/p>\n

Lazarus Long is too<\/em> American in some ways\u2013he wants America to be a perpetual frontier but cannot help himself from helping people civilize the frontier in ways he eventually finds intolerable\u2013he wants to think of things in scientific rather than moral terms, but he has no use for the kind of civilization required to do the long, boring work that puts science at a man\u2019s command\u2013he has the modern man\u2019s rootlessness & hatred of authority, but he cannot help reverting to the study of ancients or living in the pre-modern situations about which the ancients wrote so eloquently.\u00a0He is always moving one way or the other, in-between defending his freedom & finding that freedom, once defended, unbearable.<\/p>\n

He doesn\u2019t want to die, but he\u2019s easily bored to death. This new Lazarus, instead of mortality, has to face a more American problem: Is there anything left to do? Having never thought through his taste for novelty, always busy satisfying it or dealing with the bad things to which it led him, the limits of his understanding end up looking like the limits of the world or of being as such. He is a man of action without any awareness of the greatest possibilities of human action. Lazarus Long believes in freedom & hates slavery with a passion Americans usually reserve for God. Why this should be is almost impossible to explain:\u00a0It is a religion, & the thinking behind religion he treats with showy contempt everywhere else.<\/p>\n

Lazarus Long is easily understood by his sayings, which are some of them practical, many polemic, & almost all overdone. He is, above all, graceless. This is his distinguishing feature as a story-teller. In America, this is part of realism or credibility. This is the way artful speakers affect artlessness\u2013a studied clumsiness is supposed to add manliness to what would otherwise be recognized as moralizing; it is supposed to present necessity as a fact, when it would otherwise be recognized as a fantasy. He continuously tries to explain this as the truth about the world\u2013he is primarily a man of action, has done & suffered more than any other man, & is mostly recounting his old deeds in his willful way.<\/p>\n

But he has admirable & lovable qualities as well\u2013he is a daring, incessant adventurer, a tolerable psychologist, & an observer of human societies. He tries to help people in ways he cannot fully understand because of his religion of freedom. Freedom is supposed to keep him available for new adventures, but of course it ends up making it impossible for him to find out what would be truly news to him about living with other human beings. He has never learned anything about the humans things that are not chosen, that do not properly emerge in the realm of freedom. Unchosen things he understands as necessity, or part of the world.<\/p>\n

Lazarus unfortunately has no capacity for reflection\u2013he is not aware of the inadequacy of his explanations nor of their self-serving quality. His philosophy\u2013everyone is a philosopher nowadays\u2013is scientific pragmatism. Reflection on human nature has a mythological beginning in evolution, of which there never was an experiential witness, & a direct application in various scientific measurements, the experience of which is inevitably disappointing. As I pointed out, the tenor of his works is to civilize the universe, which he nevertheless hates. This is why everything that he helps along ends up in a lifeless order he rejects & why he is forever going in search of more chaos to order willfully. Lazarus is an incessant god with powers indequate to his ambitions. If he has nothing of the philosopher\u2019s self-knowledge, this may be because he is so much more powerful than any philosopher\u2013merely remembering his deeds may be his replacement for self-knowledge.<\/p>\n

There are many characteristics here of American freedom<\/strong>. The libertarian might share the merchant mentality, the business acumen, even the hardy pioneering. From this point of view, economics is the mother of all science, necessity being the father. Of course, Lazarus goes a few steps beyond what most libertarians might admit in his love of freedom: He makes it clear that there are no rights nor any justice; that fair dealing has as much to do with strive as with friendship & that property is as much a religion as any other\u2013fit only for the mindless or cowardly.<\/p>\n

The conservative might admire hard work, the pioneer mentality, the lust for life\u2013Lazarus founds families endlessly, always in the American way, without assuming to control his children & letting nature do its work with some of his guidance about hard work. Of course, conservatives might see that the way he teaches freeom is mostly by making people incapable of trusting each other, to say nothing of the shocks they might get concerning his doctrine on religion & family. Perhaps Lazarus might be closest politically to conservatives, but on foreign affairs. Ignorance of the world & curiosity about the world meet in him in the American fashion, & he believes in trade as much as defense, with no special sympathies or antipathies, except a hatred of authority, above all slavery. As a man of affairs, Lazarus is only really competent as a diplomat in troubled situations, where cunning & restlessness do their best work.<\/p>\n

The liberals might admire in Lazarus everything the social conservative finds troubling or scary or distasteful. Even more, Lazarus is pretty radical as a cultural relativist & does not even try to defend, but only indulge what he thinks of as his own prejudices. He, as I said, believes in scientific pragmatism. Were it not for his hatred of human organizations, he would be exactly what Progress demands or needs. He believes science can arrange human affairs for the best\u2013that what gets in the way is human irrationality, religion & family above all, & that a cunning man could deceive mankind into seeing their self-interest by the proper combination of technological progress & social engineering. He is one of the creators of more than a few Brave new worlds. He is also one of the more decided to reject them. Love of scientific power & hatred of what it does to man meet in him. Lazarus is an embodiment of the old joke about Americans: They love nature almost as much as the conquest of human nature.<\/p>\n

\r\n
\r\n \r\n <\/i>\r\n <\/a>\r\n <\/span>\r\n<\/div>
\r\n \r\n <\/i>\r\n <\/a>\r\n <\/span>\r\n<\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here’s my new essay on Heinlein & it’s secretively saying all sorts of things about American freedom!<\/em><\/p>\n

America was supposed to be a land of philosophy or a race of philosophers. American government was founded as a government of philosophers: It is the only government that prohibited tying a man\u2019s legal standing to his confession of faith. American courts & all other public institutions are forbidden from requiring an oath by God. This is done on the assumption that God does not enforce those oaths. American government is no more guaranteed by God than the truth of the official speeches of any American citizen\u2013or the good or bad that might come by that truth. Instead, a man speaks merely because is it natural to him to speak. Whether … Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2465,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-903","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/balldiamondball.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/903","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/balldiamondball.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/balldiamondball.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/balldiamondball.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2465"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/balldiamondball.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=903"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/balldiamondball.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/903\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":904,"href":"https:\/\/balldiamondball.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/903\/revisions\/904"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/balldiamondball.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=903"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/balldiamondball.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=903"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/balldiamondball.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=903"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}