I can't put Heinlein down...

I tore through two Heinlein novels this weekend, to the chagrin of my sleep schedule. Glory Road didn't impress me—it was funny in a few places and in general a compelling story, but it didn't have enough meat to it to satisfy me. There was a classic Heinleinian critique of democracy at the end, however:

Democracy can't work. Mathematicians, peasants, and animals, that's all there is—so democracy, a theory based on the assumption that mathematicians and peasants are equal, can never work. Wisdom is not additive; its maximum is that of the wisest man in a given group.

But a democratic form of government is okay, as long as it doesn't work. Any social organization does well enough if it isn’t rigid. The framework doesn’t matter as long as there is enough looseness to permit that one man in a multitude to display his genius. Most so-called social scientists seem to think that organization is everything. It is almost nothing—except when it is a straitjacket. It is the incidence of heroes that counts, not the pattern of zeros.

Citizen of the Galaxy, on the other hand, was much more thought-provoking. The protagonist is repeatedly ripped from his comfort zone and forced to adapt to new situations and cultures, and yet through it all he manages to succeed and find his calling. Not as much knock-down drag-out fighting action as in Glory Road, but it's an enjoyable, uplifting, and moderately paced bildungsroman.

What a mess...

Why am I so frustrated by this stupid election? Tocqueville knows why:

The greater the role that the executive power plays in directing the affairs of government, the greater and more necessary its habitual functions, the more dangerous such a state of affairs becomes. In a nation that has become used to being governed by the executive, and still more in a nation that has become accustomed to being administered by it, elections are invariably sources of profound disruption.

That explains the record election spending, among other things. So what's the solution? Heinlein puts it in perspective:

Certainly the game is rigged. Don’t let that stop you; if you don’t bet, you can’t win.

Vote.

Violence never solves anything?

Heinlein has a bit to say through one of his characters in Starship Troopers about the morality of pacifism:

Anyone who clings to the historically untrue—and thoroughly immoral—doctrine that "violence never solves anything" I would advise to conjure up the ghosts of Napoleon Bonaparte and of the Duke of Wellington and let them debate it. The ghost of Hitler could referee, and the jury might well be the Dodo, the Great Auk, and the Passenger Pigeon. Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and freedoms.

Though I don't exactly think of Robert "What's wrong with incest again?" Heinlein as an authority on morality.

Bread and circuses

Kevin has been asking some insightful questions lately, and in general making everything sound all gloomy, so I thought I would... continue the trend with a great Heinlein quote (from To Sail Beyond the Sunset, a truly terrible book):

The America of my time line is a laboratory example of what can happen to democracies, what has eventually happened to all perfect democracies throughout all histories. A perfect democracy, a 'warm body' democracy in which every adult may vote and all votes count equally, has no internal feedback for self-correction. It depends solely on the wisdom and self-restraint of citizens… which is opposed by the folly and lack of self-restraint of other citizens. What is supposed to happen in a democracy is that each sovereign citizen will always vote in the public interest for the safety and welfare of all. But what does happen is that he votes his own self-interest as he sees it… which for the majority translates as 'Bread and Circuses.'

'Bread and Circuses' is the cancer of democracy, the fatal disease for which there is no cure. Democracy often works beautifully at first. But once a state extends the franchise to every warm body, be he producer or parasite, that day marks the beginning of the end of the state. For when the plebs discover that they can vote themselves bread and circuses without limit and that the productive members of the body politic cannot stop them, they will do so, until the state bleeds to death, or in its weakened condition the state succumbs to an invader—the barbarians enter Rome.