Transhuman and Subhuman: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth Read Free

of life he pleases: but then again, an unusual number of we modern men substitute an attitude toward science which is indistinguishable from a cult belief, as if science will discover laws of history or psychiatry and tell us the truth about human nature that will set us free; or else it is indistinguishable from an occult belief, as if new discoveries will harness parapsychological or psionic powers, and a New Age will dawn of mystic revelation, or an expression of some life-force or evolutionary end-purpose moving us down the channels of time toward Utopia; or else it is indistinguishable from devil worship, as if science justified or required the extermination of the unfit, the unborn, the unwanted, or the genocide of lesser races in the name of dry-eyed and ice-hearted Darwinism, or looks upon mankind as an expendable raw material out of which to build the superman.
    These four types represent the four stages of a path of decay toward the nihilist abyss: the Worldly Man, the Cultist, the Occultist, the Anarchist.
    In sum, science fiction precisely reflects both the exhilaration and also the discontent of man in his modern world, particularly his attitude toward the magical and supernatural.
    The exhilaration comes from one source: the greater liberty, knowledge, technology, and wealth we enjoy than our medieval and ancient forefathers. The discontent comes from the same source as the discontent of our forefathers, which our greater liberty, knowledge, technology, and wealth cannot assuage, and indeed quite aggravates, namely, the depraved, corrupt and self-destructive nature of human nature.
    The writings of Robert Heinlein serve as a perfect example of the Worldly Man, that is, the man who rejects Revelation, and seeks truths nowhere but in practical morals and empirical facts. The attitude portrayed in his writings toward religion is ecumenical neglect and contempt. Christianity is a source of a threat to liberty, as personified by Nehemiah Scudder (who is overdue, since he was predicted to be elected in 2012) but never depicted as a source of any goodness, charity, or beneficial reform.
    Other religions, particularly esoteric or even Martian, are worthy of respectful disbelief. The attitude tolerates religion provided it is castrated and kept as a private pastime for lesser beings. One day we will outgrow it.
    The Worldly Man is content to mind his own business and seek his own pleasures after his own fashion, and demands his neighbors do the same. The business he minds is to maintain the public peace (as in
Starship Troopers
) and to get laid (as in
Stranger in a Strange Land
).
    The virtues needed to accomplish this can be lauded — no one waxes more poetic in his praise of the sacrifices of servicemen than Mr. Heinlein — but those virtues have no metaphysical or theological foundation. For the Worldly Man, “absolute truth” is a question for folk with too much time on their hands.
    Ayn Rand does not display this avuncular tolerance for Christianity: the religion is condemned as an unambiguous evil, and its practitioners as hatred-eaten mystics. (Other religions, one assumes, find no more favor in her eyes, but there is only one she condemns.) This is not the impatience of a Worldly Man for the mirage called absolute truth; this is the odium of one who defends an absolute truth against its rivals, or, to be precise, the hatred of a heresiarch for orthodoxy.
    Rand is an example of a Cultist amid the science fiction community (and do not tell me Ayn Rand is not a science fiction writer: an inventor discovers the secret of a self-generating power source from atmospheric electricity, and combines in a secret society with other inventors of supermetals and voice-activated locks and mirage-casting ray-screens and with masters of pirate battleships to overthrow the evil world masters who control a sound-wave disintegration ray? John Galt is cut from the same pattern as Doc Savage or the Gray Lensman).
    The Cultist