One guy remarks that this book is required reading for Air Force officers. As the son of a Master Sargent, I find that hilarious. Heinlein posits that several conservative, military assumptions are correct, and then invents a (science) fictional world in which this is true. As an act of imagination, it’s great. As proof of concept, it’s ludicrous.
Don’t get me wrong, I like the action, and the values expressed are admirable; however, the philosophy and its underlying logic are fundamentally flawed. Take his discussion of juvenile delinquents and the instruction of puppies (my pp. 120-125) versus the installation of morality in voters (my pp. 188-196) as a larger justification for the whole fictitious system.
In the former, he asserts that corporeal punishment is necessary as it accesses the pain system to instruct–that it is a time proven method to help instill morality in man, who has no innate sense of morality, and that the prohibition against it is pure liberal “fuzzy headed wishful thinking,” based in pseudoscience. Of course, the best current science says he’s wrong about punishment, and that psychological methods are both more effective and therefore more dangerous, but assume he’s right about man having no innate sense of morality and that man can be instructed.
In the latter, he asserts that we cannot just require service of everyone and give everyone voting franchise, because man must develop social and moral virtues himself, “if he has them thrust upon him, he will vomit them out.” So how is corporeal punishment not “thrusting moral virtue upon him?” Conversely, if children can be instructed, why not young adults? It’s fuzzy-headed wishful thinking fueled by flawed logic and conservative assumptions, and it’s further been debunked.
