Orson Scott Card’s Failure to Make the Case for Traditional Marriage against Robert A. Heinlein

In a recent interview on National Review, Orson Scott Card responded to comparisons between him and Robert A. Heinlein particularly in regards to Ender’s Game and Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. Both of these novels are works of military science fiction that deal with wars set in a future world against giant insect-like creatures. According to Card, while he has read a number of Heinlein’s novels, he has never read Starship Troopers and decided never to read it when he was told of the similarity to Ender’s Game. Card goes on to point out that his and Heinlein’s politics could not be further apart; Heinlein was a libertarian while he is an ardent communitarian.

I take it as a given that Card is familiar with a certain aspect of Heinlein’s work connected to his libertarianism that, while it does not appear in Starship Troopers, permeates almost everything else he wrote. I speak of course about Heinlein’s advocacy for polyandrous relationships and group marriage. For example in the Moon is a Harsh Mistress the colonists on the Moon take to group marriage as a practical solution to their situation. They have far more men than women so instead of forcing most of the male population to be celibate (funny that the issue of homosexuality is never raised) every woman has multiple husbands. While the more puritanical citizens of Earth look askance at such behavior, the Moon colonists have embraced this alternative lifestyle and fight to maintain it. Whatever one may think of Heinlein’s ideas, there is no question that he was a brilliant man and one of the truly great visionary writers of the twentieth century. His views cannot merely be cast aside and ignored.

In Ender in Exile, Card’s recently published sequel to Ender’s Game, Card sets up a very similar situation with the soldiers now turned colonists on the former bugger world now named Shakespeare. There is a shortage of women, something that will not be rectified for decades to come when the first batch of colonists arrive. The acting governor of Shakespeare, Vitaly Kolmogorov, makes the very un-Heinlein like decision to maintain monogamy. He has all the women distributed in marriage by lottery, with a little cheating on the side to cover certain particular situations. All men who do not win out in this lottery are forced, in theory at least, into a life of celibacy. In its own way Card’s decision to defend monogamy under such extreme conditions is equally as radical as Heinlein’s willingness to abandon it.

Card puts a human face, Sel Menach, to the situation and then turns him into his mouth-piece. Sel nobly turns down his assistant, Afraima, who comes onto him. (As a side point of interest, I should mention that both of these characters happen to be Jewish.) Not only does Sel turn her down, he also asks that he either be allowed to quit or to have her fired so that she would no longer serve as a temptation. This whole bit is a remarkably lousy piece of writing that serves no purpose in furthering the book other than to foreshadow an equally lousy scene later on in the book when Ender has to keep his own teenage hormones in check.

I have no problem with Card arguing for traditional social values. Particularly in this present climate, we need every voice we can get. And Card has generally been one of the more effective voices out there. It is precisely because of the situation we are in today, though, that we need something better than: “Monogamy has been proven, over and over, to be the optimum social arrangement. It’s not about genes, it’s about children – they have to grow up into the society we want them to maintain.” (Pg. 104) What exactly is so great about monogamy and when has it been proven over and over to be the best to the extent that one would make such a sacrifice when Heinlein offers such a tempting solution?

The Society Building Story and its Implications for Individualism and Faith

I have written a number of posts dealing with Orson Scott Card, Stephenie Meyer and their use of society building stories in their fiction. Before leaving the issue (for now), I thought I should say a few words to wrap things up. In looking back at my posts on the topic I realized that I failed to adequately explain why I think this issue is so important. Stephenie Meyer’s decision to follow Card’s lead is not a matter of artistic copying but of a shared critique of modern individualism and a shared religious vision.

At its heart, the society building story, in which a small group of individuals, with little reason to care for one another, are thrown together and attempt to build a society with one another, possesses an ambiguous relationship with individualism. If one wanted to be simplistic one could even accuse it of being anti-individualism. The characters start off as relatively independent individuals. The plot turns on their decision to surrender their independence and tie themselves down to the needs of the group. For example, in The Host, Wanderer surrenders herself to helping her community of free humans. With Ender, however strong he might be, he needs some sort of group to give himself up to. This is a far cry from the sort of do it alone heroic individualism at the heart of so much of modern fiction and of science fiction as well. This is not the work of Robert A. Heinlein; this is most definitely not Ayn Rand.

One could even link this to the religious beliefs of Card and Meyer. Card and Meyer are both Mormons, a religious group known for its strong sense of group discipline. Card and Meyer could therefore be read as anti-moderns, whose message is that, to find fulfillment, one must reject the individualism of modern secular society and submit oneself to the demands of the group; much in the same that Mormons and followers of other religions allow themselves to be controlled by the dictates of their group.

In a sense, though, the society building story used by Card and Meyer is strongly individualistic. The characters freely choose to bind themselves to their newly built society. So this act of society building is ironically very much the act of individuals; they could not have succeeded unless they were such strong individuals. Also, this act of society building is done in defiance of some other society. Wanderer rejects the perfect society of the Souls. The Cullen family of Twilight, by their very existence, is a rejection of the Volturi and their value system. Ender’s Dragon army fights the system at the Battle School even as it plays its mock battles against other armies.

This ambiguity about individualism is also at the core of work of Robert A. Heinlein, the father of heroic individualism within science fiction, as well. In certain respects, Heinlein is a forerunner for both Card and Meyer. While Starship Troopers glorifies the individual soldier it is also a remarkable ode to duty and an indictment of modern society’s inability to install a sense of duty and responsibility within its members. Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress can be read as a society building novel itself. It is about a computer led rebellion by the residents of the Moon against the rule of Earth. The people living on Heinlein’s future Moon reject the paternal statism of the countries of Earth and strive to build their own libertarian state. The real struggle in the story is not over whether the people of the Moon can defeat the occupation forces from Earth but if such a diverse group of people can band together as one group.

Card and Meyer are hardly supporters of the sort of polyamorous marriages that Heinlein advocated. Card and Meyer belong to the mainstream Mormon Church, not to one of the polygamous sects, so they are not into alternative lifestyles. As I see it, their use of society building stories has a distinctively religious component to it. Any religious group operating in the western world today operates, to a certain extent, on a similar model as the societies found in the work of Card and Meyer. All religious groups are, in one way or another, counter-cultures. In a secular state, the government cannot be used to advance the cause of any religious group. Even more importantly, in a secular society, the very ethos of the society is contrary to the values of established religions. One can see communities of faith as collections of renegades from the general society who have been thrown together by circumstances other than their personal like for each other and must join together to form their own alternative society.

The society building story as it is used by Card and Meyer carries the distinct stamp of their Mormon faith. Mormonism is a religion organized in a highly authoritarian manner, but also one in which power is closely centered at the base. The Mormon religion does exert a tremendous amount of control over the day to day lives of its followers; members most give tithes to the Church and serve the Church in the field as missionaries. That being said the Church maintains no paid clergy; instead, leading members volunteer to serve for a fixed period of time. What is truly fascinating about how Mormons operate is their system of wards. Wards are small chapters, usually encompassing a single city or neighborhood. For Mormons, wards operate as an extension of the family; there are ward meeting and ward picnics. Mormons fall under the authority of a given ward simply by living in a given area. They do not get to choose who their fellow ward members are; if they do not get along with other members of their ward they do not have the option of breaking away and creating a new ward. (Considering all the fights and splits that go on in synagogues, I can see the advantages of such a system.) So an individual Mormon’s relationship to a ward runs in terms of a society building story. One is thrown in with a group of people that one has no particular reason to care for. In such a situation, there is no other choice but to build for oneself, out of such material, a society, and even a family.