I just finished Charlie Stross's _The Family Trade_, and now I once again remember why I swore *never* to buy series books until the series was completed and the author had moved on to other things...
At the top of the pile right now are Muller, _Adam Smith in His Time and Ours_; Bordo, Taylor, and Williamson, eds., _Globalization in Historical Perspective_; Andy Kessler, _Wall Street Meat_; and amazon has just delivered _Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell_...
Well, I said it was *difficult* for Protestantism to take the works of mercy fully seriously; I didn't say it was *impossible.* And I have always been struck by the way that the religious strands of pre-Civil War Abolitionism were more about making the Abolitionists feel righteous than about freeing slaves.
But it is a very good question--what's special about this branch of revivalism. Take a look at http://www.pandasthumb.org/pt-archives/000588.html...
Two answers, I think:
(1) Protestantism always has a hard time taking the works of mercy seriously: they are, after all, a manifestation and consequence of faith, not the main event. Is it better, after all, to fast twice a week and tithe 10% to the poor; or to pray, "Lord, be merciful to me, a sinner"? Protestantism leans heavily toward the second. And this movement is hyper-protestant.
(2) From their perspective, they are engaged: Antiabortion = Abolitionism.
Nah. Bash Rousseau. Anyone with such a Total Conception of Virtue is danger.
Stick with Montesquieu, Voltaire, de Tocqueville, Zola, Aron...
And while we are at it, remember and honor de Gaulle, Clemenceau, and at least one other guy.
Brad DeLong, proud to live in a town called Lafayette
I have not yet managed to screw my courage to the sticking place, but congratulations!
>>Surely the social credit people had more in mind.<<
There's distributional stuff (taxes progressive, social credits egalitarian). And there are some fuzzy thoughts about how in the real world we live in the bankers--somehow--get hold of the lion's share of the seigniorage.
But I've always thought that the bottom line is that the Social Credit people were... confused. The same way someone is confused who, I don't know, thinks a bottom-up anarchy resolves itself into a polite, libertarian society, rather than into something like the sixteenth-century Scottish Highlands--where everyone is either a clan member to be aided, a clan enemy to be killed, or a stranger to be robbed....
>>By the way, are there any good references describing/debunking Social Credit?<<
Social Credit.... Every year, as the economy expands, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing prints up a huge honking mass of dollar bills and the Federal Reserve buys bonds and credits banks with reserve deposits at their local Feds. This supply of purchasing power is created literally out of nothing. (In the real old days, we'd have had to employ a bunch of miners to dig gold and a bunch of stampers to stamp the gold coins, but we're not on a gold standard anymore.)
Who gets this extra supply of $$$$ created out of nothing? Under our system, the government does--and as a result our collective taxes are lower by some... $50 billion in 2002 (I don't have the 2003 number handy). That's about $800 per household per year.
"Social Credit" would hand out this "seigniorage" directly to families, in $800 a year lots (and would make some changes in the banking system that Crediteers hope would boost the annual amount that could be handed out), rather than letting the government snarf the purchasing power itself.
Likely net effect? In a year the average household pays $800 more in taxes (because the government cannot draw on the seigniorage, and has to tax or borrow to pay its bills), and receives 8 crisp new $100 bills...
We left-techno-social-utopians too are Heinlein's children... of a sort.
I will confess that _Starship Troopers_ was a much better novel between when I was 14-18 than it has been since I was 18. When I was 18, you see, I realized it wasn't a parody.
But between when I first read it at 14 and 18, I thought it was a parody. Think of it: Why does Johnny Rico fight? Does he fight for truth? No. Does he fight for justice? No. Does he fight for liberty, equality, fraternity? No.
Johnny Rico, at the end of the book, fights for the biological expansion of the human race and for no other purpose. He is the mirror image of a bug warrior, who fights for the biological expansion of the bug race and for no other purpose. Between when I was 14 and 18, I read _Starship Troopers_ as the story of how you turn a young male adolescent--a not-too-bright, spoiled young male adolescent--into a mindless unreflective killing machine. I mean, Heinlein couldn't have meant that book to be read straight, could he?
Of course, when I was 18 I decided that he could and did. And all of a sudden it became a much less interesting book.
>>Oh, one more thing: Brad, I've heard many people say what you said, that Moon is a Harsh Mistress is a great book, but personally I think everything he wrote after Stranger sucks. The really good books are the juveniles, especially Star Beast, Citizen of the Galaxy, & Have Space Suit Will Travel.<<
You... you... you... you PANSHINIST, you!!
>>Part of Clute's argument, though, is that he wasn't allowed to fully engage the real issues by his public and so wasn't allowed to do realistic extrapolation. He's got a point; Heinlein's more radical extrapolations--the web, b'gosh--have been more on target that the conservative extrapolations he was more usually allowed...<<
Say, rather, that Heinlein had only one decade rather than three decades to be Heinlein. He spent the 1940s and 1950s enslaved to Astounding and to Scribners, and only in the 1960s could he get up on his hind legs and really write novels that PREACHED: _Starship Troopers_ preaching how the MI would make a man out of you (or, rather, the human equivalent of a mindless Bug warrior out of you), _Podkayne of Mars_ preaching how career moms are dangerous, _The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress_ preaching bottom-up libertarian self-organization plus line marriage (never mind if young punks nearly off your Lafayette), _Farnham's Freehold_ preaching... I'm not going to go there... _Stranger in a Strange Land_ preaching whate'er you grok it to preach...
Clute thinks that with three decades--the 1940s, the 1950s, and the 1960s--rather than one--the 1960s--to really be Heinlein, we would all be vastly enriched.
The alternative point of view, of course, is that nobody needed a strong editor more than Heinlein. Heinlein needed to be a slave. He could be a slave to a strong editor. Or he would be a slave to his own preachiness--and for him to become a slave to his own preachiness would destroy his talent in short order.
On this interpretation, Heinlein in the 1940s and 1950s was often great because his preachiness was kept submerged. His preachiness still functioned as an enormous source of subterranean energy, yes, but energy in the service of Story, and not its master. Heinlein's escape from editorial control in the 1960s--into Panshin's Age of Alienation--produced some wonderful but also some very odd things. And what followed the 1960s was not pretty.
So which is it? In the parallel universe in which Heinlein was allowed to be Heinlein in the 1940s, are we all now shaking our heads about how it's too bad that he flamed out into right-wing solipsistic lunacy in the 1950s and 1960s, and how if only a strong editor had been around to curb his preachiness he might have been truly great?
Or is John Clute right, and are we the pathetic dweebs in the unfortunate alternative universe that is deprived of the greatest of the masterworks of Robert Anson Heinlein?
Let me stand up and say what, IMHO, is Robert Heinlein's unspeakable, unforgivable, unexpiable, most savage, most atrocious crime:
The first Heinlein book I ever read was _The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress_.
Ever since, whenever I have started reading something he has written, I've thought as I began, "Maybe this will be as good as TMIaHM." It never was. Some were pretty good. Many were OK. Some were real stinkeroos. But I always ended each one with a feeling of profound disappointment and betrayal: it had not lived up to its promise of being a TMIaHM quality work. Not once has Heinlein lived up to the expectations I had set for him. Not once.
Now I am terrified that the same thing is happening to me with Terry Pratchett. You see, the first TP I ever read was _Small Gods_...
The gravamen of Patrick Nielsen Hayden's complaint is the Catholic Church hierarchy's declaration that my friend M---- and her significant other E----- are "doing violence" to their adopted son J----, and that God hates their action of raising him in a lesbian household.
Certainly not what I would say, were I ever to believe that I stood in the line of Apostolic Succession and wore the Shoes of the Fisherman...
More proof that there will always be an England, or that the British educational system produces a wittier class of soldier than the American, or something...
Yes. But may I first feel sad for all the people who are going to die? And then may I go reread _A Deepness in the Sky_ to escape from war, terror, biocontrol, nuclear war, and betrayal?
"Errors and No-Facts." That's how Robert Dole's staff on the Senate Finance Committee in the mid-1990s would refer to Robert Novak and his partner, Rowland Evans...
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