Category: Book Reviews

I had occasion to re-read Heinlein’s Starship Troopers recently after a pleasant encounter with Helldivers 2, which constitutes a delightful parody of the 1997 Verhoeven film that is, in turn, a missed-the-mark parody of the 1959 book.

There is a long ongoing controversy over ST over whether or not it is fascist. I’m not completely disinterested in that debate, but I’m not going to get into it much here. Rather, I would like to talk about how I’ve read the book differently over time.

ST is one of those books I re-read every ten years or so, like Lord of the Rings or Dune; there is something about it that makes it special, and that core shifts depending how old I am. I read it first as a teenager, then as various versions of a twenty-something, a thirty-something, and now, a late forty-something. The text has not changed; I am still reading the same tattered second-edition paperback. I am the variable.

What strikes me now are these observations.

Heinlein chose to write in first person for Johnny Rico. This is a good move for a bildungsroman variant. Rico transforms several times over the course of the plot; once when he reaches the “hump,” again after his first drop, again when he decides to “go career,” and again after OCS.

Rico is also writing from the future, looking back, so ST is also a variant of a military memoir, an genre way older than science fiction, and typically uneven in quality. Heinlein uses one of that genre’s tricks, time compression, extensively; Rico bounces between lingering on brief encounters that maybe took a few minutes, and skipping weeks or months at a time. He obsesses over the righteousness of the hanging of a deserted soldier that killed a young girl for several pages, but refuses to depict the actual hanging; “The drums held a sustained roll and it was all over.” The minutiae of rank and company composition are described in almost excruciating detail, but we learn almost nothing about the structure of government behind the military or how the “franchise” of voting after military service actually plays out as Rico seemingly never leaves the MI.

I recently finished a chapter on utilitarian ethics for a book, so I was especially interested in revisiting the Colonel Dubois/Major Reid lectures. They are not the only two characters that deliver what are effectively sermons on deontological or “duty” ethics (the Commandant is another), but they are the most obvious and clear in their pedagogical purposes. Debois’s last lecture sums up the general thesis:

“… But duty is an adult virtue – indeed a juvenile becomes an adult when, and only when, he acquires a knowledge of duty and embraces it as dearer than the self-love he began with.”

Rico is depicted as taking this message to heart, though it takes some time into his service before the full “embrace” occurs. And returning to what I said I would avoid, I don’t find this statement or any of the “moral philosophy” in the book to be fascistic. It’s just Kantian duty ethics through a military lens, compatible with any society with a standing volunteer force, and while the book is certainly pro-military, that doesn’t mean the Mobile Infantry are willing pawns of a Mussolini-style regime. While fascism by definition places the military at the center of society, as the central goal is conquest and expansion, any given military is not automatically fascist, or even right-wing.

The most pressing question for me is if Rico understands duty.

Dubois has given him the knowledge of duty, and he eventually embraces it (using Dubois’s own words here), but does Rico understand the choice he has made?

I’m not sure he does.

Rico’s father Emilio may illustrate my concerns. Emilio returns in the last third of the book as a new MI recruit himself, having discovered with the help of a “hypnotherapist” that he was dissatisfied with his relative wealth and he needed to do something:

He stopped, and then said very softly, “I had to perform an act of faith. I had to prove to myself that I was a man. Not just a producing-consuming economic animal – but a man.”

A man Emilio’s age going into therapy and changing as a result is pretty progressive for a 1959 novel, and still so in 2024 – and it perhaps anticipates the entire “male studies” idea a few decades in advance, which is a typical slow Thursday for Heinlein.

But I’m not sure Emilio understands duty either. Knowledge is not understanding, and commitment, however faithful, is not understanding either.

My 2024 read is this. Both Rico and his father have different but related male identity problems that they resolve by joining the MI. Their choice is an adult one and made with considerable and generous consent: Heinlein goes to great length to show that the exit ramps from the MI are plentiful, starting with a 48-hour grace period after signup and countless ways to be mustered out at any stage of one’s career. The MI do not want anyone who is not 100% committed and capable; they are not cannon fodder, but highly trained professional technicians.

However, I get no real sense from the book that anyone who is not in the MI or perhaps the Navy is, well, human. Civilians are a sentient species, but lesser.

And so Rico and his father cannot be men unless they are MI or at least military-adjacent. This is where the duty ethics falters. Can a truck driver be a man, in this vision of the future? A grocery store clerk? A programmer? Schoolteachers can be if they are former military like Dubois, but as Heinlein does not hide, Dubois and the MI are haughty and place themselves as a cut above hoi polloi. Dubois’s treatment of Rico changes completely after he enlists, and this same “you’re one of us” treatment has multiple layers as Rico advances through the ranks – the officers have their own mini-society, the cap troopers that have dropped have another (and if they have dropped together, that’s another level), and so on.

I give Heinlein, whose Navy career ended at lieutenant j.g. due to illness, credit for describing these social structures with accuracy and how advanced technology could change them and also fail to change them at all. Some Rico’s episodes seemed pulled straight from Heinlein’s experiences on the “wet navy” Lexington, the first American aircraft carrier.

But there’s a tunnel vision there. Can a man be a man without military experience? Do all men share that same restlessness that would drive one toward voluntary service? Is Dubois right when he claims:

“The best things in life are beyond money: their price is agony and sweat and devotion… and the price demanded for the most precious of all things in life is life itself – ultimate cost for ultimate value.”

There are only 10,000 MI, Heinlein states, on a planet with seemingly billions of other men. Are they all as “dissatisfied” as Emilio Rico? I suspect that many are not, and that they have successfully found other ways to both embrace and understand the adult virtue of duty without military service. They became fathers, husbands, businessmen, doctors, technicians, engineers, artists, among many other respectable and valuable roles, and few, even, perhaps, writers of science fiction. And they performed such roles with selfless abandon while others did not, as happens in any human organizational structure.

Heinlein is not claiming otherwise, of course; rather, he is focused on one duty path that he himself could not complete due to circumstances beyond his control, and writing a good yarn at the same time. Yet I wonder if Rico knew he had other options to be a man, as his father puts it. Does any 18-year-old? Are all of them doomed to stumble, as I did myself, from role to role, trying to find one that worked? Some find one quickly and stay there. Others never find one and stay trapped in a perpetual childhood. Others find a place to stand eventually.

ST is still on the bounce in 2024. And yet I wonder, by placing the MI on a pedestal, that the value of Heinlein’s call to duty is diminished. You can of course add the fascism critique to this if you wish, but having read the entire Heinlein oeuvre that veers across the entire expanse of political philosophy, it just doesn’t hold up.

It has just come to my attention that Kent Brower via the Journal for the Study of the New Testament offered a review of my book Rhetoric and the Synoptic Problem last year, in JSNT 45.5, and it is pleasantly positive.

I have no contact information by which to thank him, or to respond to the very mild critique in the last sentence, so I’ll do it here:

Much of his detailed work is illuminating to this conversation; would
it have been enhanced by engagement with Bauckham, Bond, Breytenbach or Burridge, to name but four?

Most likely, but it would have required Chapter 1 to be twice as long, or I would have had to add a separate chapter solely on gospel “genre.” My dissertation covered more ground on the dangerously broad genre question to which the B-surnames are all drawn. For the book, I chose to keep the survey of the SP nasty, brutish, and short.

Computer Power and Human Reason by Joseph Weizenbaum was first published in 1976. My interest in ethics had not, until recently, steered me toward it, but having now obtained a copy and considered Weizenbaum’s arguments, I’m quite pleased I did.

It is not a book about computers, or programming, or “computer science,” or even an anti-AI screed. Rather, I’d call it a set of increasingly intense philosophical essays about what computers are capable of and what they should be used for, two things that are not necessarily the same, as well as what it means to be human and what it means to be ethical.

Weizenbaum holds that “computers,” speaking broadly, may eventually exhibit what we might call intelligent behavior, but that behavior, limited by the digital switching of 0’s and 1’s, will be that of aliens and fundamentally different; they cannot ever have human intelligence. Why? Because humans have self-directed goals and purposes and wills, and interact with the world in a fundamentally different way (having experiences rather than data). We can both exhibit and feel pride and cowardice, fear and joy, all qualia, and mostly importantly, we can judge matters, rather than simply make decisions, based on our unique, relative experiences. While computers excel at laborious bureaucratic tasks beyond any single human, they cannot ever have the human experiences that actual humans use as the foundation for their values, which then allow humans to make judgments.

Weizenbaum repeatedly quotes a former colleague that challenged him to come up with something a computer could do that a judge (presumably of the legal variety) could not, with their answer being a flat “nothing.” The vigorous humanism of his book-length rejoinder is something to behold. Not only does he castigate the slippery-slope, positivist argument that human-like AI is inevitable as with all technological progress, but he twists the knife further, noting the decision to pursue AI research blindly is itself inhuman. As computers cannot judge like humans, they cannot be ethical, and Weizenberg warns that they should not ever be given work that involves judgment. There are hints of the networked world-to-come in his chapters, but just like anyone in 1976, he doesn’t see just how quickly miniaturized, networked computers are coming.

What he does see clearly are the ethical concerns. He notes any future speech recognition will ultimately only serve the cause of increased surveillance – check. Weizenberg was the programmer behind ELIZA, the famous therapist chatbot, and was alarmed at how quickly some people connected to its lines of code like it was a real human being.

What would he think of modern speech recognition and generative AI? Nothing good. My earlier assessment of ChatGPT is more or less the same as his description of the limits of AI, though he pushes it much farther, noting (even as today) the increased dehumanization and automation of modern society, and lamenting the passive acceptance of a overly computerized future where humans cede more and more power to computers that can never have any real knowledge of human experience, and accept, without thinking, an overly technical approach to complicated human problems.

There are two related passages I’d like to replicate here as they spoke to me as a sometimes disgruntled English professor:

During the time of trouble on American university campuses, one could often hear well-meaning speakers say that the unrest, at least on their campuses, was mainly caused by inadequate communication among the university’s various constituencies, e.g. faculty, administration, students, staff. The “problem” was therefore seen as fundamentally a communication, hence a technical, problem. It was therefore solvable by technical means, such as the establishment of various “hotlines” to, say, the president’s or the provost’s office. Perhaps there were communication difficulties; there usually are on most campuses. But this view of the “problem” – a view entirely consistent with Newell and Simon’s view of “human problem solving” and with instrumental reasoning – actively hides, buries, the existence of real conflicts…

… instrumental reason converts each dilemma, however genuine, into a mere paradox that can then be unraveled by the application of logic, of calculation. All conflicting interests are replaced by the interests of technique alone.

p. 266

This man certainly worked at a university.

The last chapter, “Against the Imperialism of Instrumental Reason,” is a powerful attack on a soulless worship of reason as inhumane. The climax of the argument, for me, is this:

The lesson, therefore, is that the scientist and technologist must, by acts of will and of the imagination, actively strive to reduce such psychological distances, to counter the forces that tend to remove him from the consequences of his actions. He must – it is as simple as this – think of what he is actually doing. He must learn to listen to his own inner voice. He must learn to say “No!”

Finally, it is the act itself that matters. When instrumental reason is the sole guide to action, the acts it justifies are robbed of their inherent meanings and thus exist in an ethical vacuum. I recently heard an officer of a great university publicly defend an important policy decision he had made, one that many of the university’s students and faculty opposed on moral grounds, with the words: “We could have taken a moral stand, but what good would that have done?” But the good of a moral act inheres in the act itself. That is why any act can itself ennoble or corrupt the person who performs it. The victory of instrumental reason in our time has brought about the virtual disappearance of this insight and thus perforce the de-legitimization of the very idea of nobility.

p.276

Bravo. The closing chapter is quite strong, but I’ll limit myself to one more paragraph:

… It is a widely held but a grievously mistaken belief that civil courage finds exercise only the context of world-shaking events. To the contrary, its most arduous exercise is often in those small contexts in which the challenge is to overcome the fears induced by petty concerns over career, over our relationship to who appear to have power over us, over whatever may disturb the tranquility of our mundane existence.

p. 276

When we do not think what we choose to do matters, that is a remarkably good indicator that it does.

The insidious nature of the worldview, then, that Weisenbaum critiques is a mental trap that shuts down what makes us human – our will and agency.

Computers, by the end of the book, become a metaphor or tool for understanding what makes us human – and what does not. There is a very powerful assembled argument that the highly specialized knowledge that computer science and data-driven research claims to possess is at a serious disadvantage when compared to the comfortable familiarity with ambiguity in the humanities. The discussion of language models and composition in earlier chapters suggests Weizenbaum was not field-cloistered from literature and writing – this is a interdisciplinary work.

When I read such arguments, I think about the contemporary anti-intellectual politics of Florida and Texas, but I also think about the larger awareness of the “rhetoric of science” concept since the writing of this 1976 book and the mixed and increasingly sour bag of candies that the Internet turned out to be. I also think about every interaction with a corporate entity I’ve ever had, and how my own university works.

It’s hard to find a print copy of this book, but an ebook version is not difficult to find. I highly recommend it. It has aged well. As a closing thought, the epistemology of The New Rhetoric seems quite capable with Weizenbaum’s ideas here as a reckoning with WWII, though his examples primarily concern Vietnam.