Child, Get Acquainted

"If you live among [humans] long enough, one day you will see how funny we are – and you will laugh."

Robert A. Heinlein - Stranger in a Strange Land

 

______________________________________

Spoilers gradually increase in severity down this page. Definitely read Stranger. If I can convince you of nothing else... just read it.

______________________________________

I don't mention this book nearly as often as I should. I love Heinlein's work in general (not to say he didn't have his weak points) but it was the reluctant hero's mentor Jubal Harshaw who, in my late teens, became first among the equals of Elrond Halfelven and Paul Atreides and Ender Wiggin and Spock and Hamlet and Professor Challenger and Rahan and all the other aloof or offputting, cerebral heroes so rarely given their due in popular entertainment.

 

Stranger is a book about understanding. Do not take this to mean sympathy, though it can incorporate it. It coined the term "grok" meaning immersion, imbibing of a concept to the extent of conjoining with it. Unfortunately the novel's storied past, from the apocryphal anecdote about it being written on a bet with L. Ron Hubbard, to its shocking the mores of polite society even to this day and onward, to the impact it had on '60s hippie culture in the U.S., to Heinlein's distaste for his fans' literalism, can easily overshadow the narrative's own beauty. Commentators will gleefully miss the forest for the myriad barbs Heinlein deliberately planted, from religious arguments to whether female characters are empowered / demeaned, to nudism or free love or authoritarianism or economics or anarchism or the rampant pacifist murders or the cannibalism, etc., etc.

It is a packed little novel, and it needed to throw so many elements at you precisely to put its characters to the test most readers fail. It epitomizes Science Fiction's mind-expanding attitude in focusing on individuals' intellectual ability to adjust their perception to a shifting reality. It should be required reading for today's degenerate snowflakes, our politically correct pro-censorship lynch mobs whose attitude is rather to outlaw reality because it offends their parochial sensibilities. Despite Jubal's rants as author's avatar, despite unabashedly bashing religion and prudishness and the human ape in general, Heinlein never failed to return to the topic of intellectual growth allowing Mike to transcend the human condition insight by insight. For all its intrinsic if muffled shock value, Stranger in a Strange Land pivots on its most deceptively innocuous passages.

 

"Nurse, have you ever seen that sterile laboratory at Notre Dame?"
"No. I've read about it."
"Healthiest animals in the world - but they can't ever leave the laboratory. Child, I'm not running a sterile laboratory. Mike has got to get acquainted with 'filth,' as you call it - and get immunized to it."
[...]
"They stood for quite a while in front of a cage containing a large family of capuchins, watching them eat, sleep, court, nurse, groom and swarm aimlessly around the cage, while Jill surreptitiously tossed them peanuts despite "No Feeding" signs.
She tossed one to a medium sized monk; before he could eat it a much larger male was on him and not only stole his peanut but gave him a beating, then left. The little fellow made no attempt to pursue his tormentor; he squatted at the scene of the crime, pounded his knucks against the concrete floor, and chattered his helpless rage. Mike watched it solemnly. Suddenly the mistreated monkey rushed to the side of the cage, picked a monkey still smaller, bowled it over and gave it a drubbing worse than the one he had suffered - after which he seemed quite relaxed. The third monk crawled away, still whimpering, and found shelter in the arm of a female who had a still smaller one, a baby, on her back. The other monkeys paid no attention to any of it.
Mike threw back his head and laughed - went on laughing, loudly and uncontrollably. He gasped for breath, tears came from his eyes; he started to tremble and sink to the floor, still laughing.
[...]
"Of course it wasn't funny - it was tragic. That's why I had to laugh. I looked at a cageful of monkeys and suddenly I saw all the mean and cruel and utterly unexplainable things I've seen and heard and read about in the time I've been with my own people and suddenly it hurt so much I found myself laughing."

 

 

Hilariously in retrospect, those lines on "filth" were prompted by a woman's outrage at a pornographic image yet followed just a few pages later by visiting a new-fashioned, feel-good megachurch. One can practically hear the author chuckling in the background: Filth? Let me show you some real filth!

More importantly, the discussion of laughter and filth sets up the Man From Mars' headlong dive into human culture to observe the animal in its self-imposed habitat, including a carnival and the zoo trip above, to wade in filth. While the start of the novel might prompt readers to expect Mike to impose presumably superior Martian values onto a backward humanity, by the end, having grokked his own people, he explicitly states his goal to avoid such a scenario. His closing act deliberately exploits humanity's worst tendencies for a chance at long-term logical reaction in the opposite direction to allow the species to expand on its better tendencies, not by redefining social reality but by understanding and building upon it.

In other words, this work of fiction so common to the development of left-wing thinkers over the past fifty years proposed the exact opposite of today's "progressive" head-in-the-sand attempts to rewrite the world by denying it. Reality hurts. And we must be able to laugh at it.