So, What Did You Learn from Robert Heinlein?
Competence
"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, con a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects." --Time Enough for Love, RAH, 1973.
Read the quotation closely. Within this single paragraph is the essence of what a human should be able to do with his or her life. Like everyone else, there are a couple of the jobs mentioned I have never been able to master. On the other hand, I was so facile at pitching manure I fled the farm before I was eighteen to avoid continued employment. I have known only a few people who have come close to mastering them all.
Velma (a redhead right off a 1940s Heinlein cover) asked me at dinner last night how to find sane people to marry. At the time, I cobbled together an answer involving practical methods within a city to contact and identify like-minded individuals. Now that I’m back in the arms of my family, I realize there was a much better question to ask: "How do I find competent people to marry?" In a family, you can put up with a great deal more insanity or eccentricity than you can incompetence.
Velma, if you want a marriage to work, look for a family who can do ten or more of the things listed above. If you want a life in which every day is an adventure, look for one where they can do fifteen. If you ever, ever find someone who can do all twenty-one, call me immediately, we can always find a new house to make room for more people.
Freedom
It is obvious that I'm a libertarian—I talk about it in many of the posts I have submitted to the blog. The ideal of personal freedom and responsibility, which is the basis of libertarianism is in every one of Heinlein's books and stories. My opinion is that for the human race to survive the next fifty years we're going need a new kind of freedom—the freedom from the prison of old paradigms.
Jason, another redhead, (they were coming out of the woodwork everywhere last night—I was looking over my shoulder for Gay Deceiver from Number of the Beast) was describing an experimental community in San Francisco in which he had lived for six weeks. This community was interested in the question, "What would happen if decisions were made using strictly intuition, not logic?" Their questionable methodology involved limiting decision-making within the community of fifty to the female members with the stipulation that no explanation ever needed to be given for their decisions.
"So," I asked, "how often were the decisions the right ones?"
"Well, about half of them were right," Jason replied in his slow, West Texas drawl, "but the thing was, one hundred percent of them were different."
A lot of the problems causing the world grief at the moment are old ones. Perhaps the reason they're still here is that we've not yet found the methodology to work the solutions. We need the freedom to think differently in order to find that methodology.
Paying It Forward
Robert Heinlein had an extremely rare blood type—AB negative. Had it not been for the generosity of a half-dozen strangers who donated blood for him, he would have died twenty years before his time. After they saved his life, he led, participated in, and otherwise shilled for blood drives nationwide. At the convention this weekend, over 12% of the attendees gave blood—five times the national average.
During the course of my life, I have had a set of mentors to show me different ways of living it. My father taught me the virtue of proceeding against any odds when the cause was just. From my Uncle Harry I obtained a love of the eccentric, knowing that it was all right to be different as long as you were good at it. I learned from Steve Errede, physicist extraordinaire, that genius was useless unless it was directed, but when it was, it was a force that could define the universe. Lastly, from my husband, Sean, I learned that sometimes you can communicate better with silence and affection than you can with all of the words in Bartlett's.
Over the past twenty-five years, I've seen it as my duty to apprentice young people I have encountered. I'm going to have a party at the end of my tenure at the university and invite them to my house so they, for once, will get to meet each other and find out the stories are all true, no matter how outrageous. They've gone on to successful careers and with any luck at all, they left my tutelage possessing the freedom of thought I described above and using that freedom will be able to make a mark on the world, perhaps diverting it from its course toward perdition.
Optimism
Saturday night, I listened while Peter Diamandis told us his business plan would (if it worked) result in his people, having been on the Moon three years, waving to NASA when they finally arrived. The human race is at its most critical point since the glaciers receded and large-scale agriculture became possible. Moore's Law, the doubling of computing power every eighteen months, leads us to the conclusion that if it does not slow down (and that is unlikely, since the intervals between doublings is decreasing) a one-thousand dollar laptop in 2027 will have the number of computations per second that a human brain does.
This vast increase in the speed of computation, combined with an unlocking of the human genome and nanotechnology, (all of which were discussed at the conference this weekend) will, in only twenty years, give individuals the power currently held by small nations. The problem will then not be that Kim Jong-Il has access to the ability to build weapons of mass destruction, but that Joe Six-Pack does. Since September 11, I've been watching humanity riding in a racing car heading for a cliff without any visible way out. I had despaired of our survival.
I don't feel that way anymore. Conference attendees sat down and seriously discussed my theories of family dynamics and brainstormed ways to extend those theories to differing forms of human relationships. (I was also asked for an autograph in the hallway by people I didn't know, which downright freaked me out.) There was a slide on the screen Saturday night describing the amount of platinum in a nickel-iron asteroid and investors told jokes about buying precious metal futures to finance the trip. A young woman with the kind of childhood that no one should have to live through showed me that despite that, she had faith that human beings were good and loving and that we were going to make it through so that the children of men would play among the stars.
We're going to make it, folks. We're going to make it. This I believe with all my heart.
l
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