this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2025
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I might start throwing Heinlein in the same bucket as GK Chesterton. Wrong a lot, but wrong in interesting ways, and so close to getting it.
That whole book is a wild read. It's about how and why to be involved in politics. Some of it is kind of a 1940s manual on how to operate a campaign, but a lot of it is talking about why it's important to be engaged and pay attention, and also stuff like this:
Heinlein has plenty of issues, but I feel like a lot of people overlook his positives.
I feel like a lot of people forget just how wildly different the time Heinlein was raised in was. He may have been wrong-headed in our current view about a fair amount of things--particular his work prior to the mid-60s or so--but that's a cultural issue, rather than someone that was pig-headedly stupid. The quote you have--"[...] forbidding gambling, sale of liquor, sale of contraceptives, requiring definite closing hours, enforcing the Sabbath [...]--is especially ironic because AFAIK Heinlein appears to have had open/polyamorous marriages (...or multiamorous/polyerotic, if you're a linguistic pedant); that sort of inclination should be quite antithetical to laws enforcing religious doctrine or sexual morality.
I don't know that there's any irony there. In my reading, the passage is actually advocating against such laws. And is aimed at the kind of thinking that leads to such laws.
I don't think he is condoning or advocating for such thinking in that passage - more saying that, if you do want these kind of laws (while he lists some contemporary examples) you have to realise that it won't actually work and will have other, negative consequences. That's not him necessarily condoning the thinking or actual moral standing of those examples. Just pointing out what he sees are the realities of such laws.
I dunno. Sounds like he's not opposed to them, just doesn't think that they're effective without going after root-cause issues. (...Which, I would like to point out, is one of the huge fucking problems that people in favor of banning guns have. E.g., address the root causes of violence, and you stop the violence without curtailing the civil right.) He doesn't seem to have a problem with addressing the root causes so that there's no need for the laws in the first place, and doesn't appear to be arguing against the things he lists as being 'social ills' in the first place. (He did think that the youth of his time were declining morally, which is a tale that goes back to at least the Greek city-states.)
Fundamentally though, yeah, laws alone rarely change behavior; you need to change the material and social conditions to change behavior.