Why is Character such a struggle?

I hadn’t thought much about Robert Heinlein’s Scribner juveniles for many years. I wrote that letter to Virginia Heinlein that I mentioned before and what I said was true but rather vaguely recalled: I couldn’t have quoted you chapter and verse to back up what I said, or even named the specific book I was thinking of.

Last year I got a gift from my Internet friend Kent “Dullhawk” McManigal – a box of old sci fi books including a couple of Heinleins. One of them was Red Planet.

Red Planet is one of the books that made Heinlein’s career, ‘way before Stranger in a Strange Land though related to it in an oddly direct way I’d completely forgotten. What made the book special to me when I was a boy was the way the protagonists’ society was structured, along with a series of rather strange assumptions.

The character on the cover is a red herring: It’s not a cheap kid’s-book version of a saurian alien but a schoolboy in a pressure suit. And he’s wearing a gun, which was jarring to an eight-year-old (or however old I was, I don’t remember) kid and extremely cool. No doubt Heinlein intended that his target audience should regard it as extremely cool, and pay attention when he started preaching the philosophy behind it. Which he did through the protagonist’s father:

“What’s this about you leaving your gun where the baby can reach it?”
Jim flushed. “It wasn’t charged, Dad.”
“If all the people who had been killed with unloaded guns were laid end to end, it would make quite a line up. You are proud of being a licensed gun wearer, aren’t you?”
“Uh, yes, sir.”
“And I’m proud to have you be one. It means you are a responsible, trusted adult. But when I sponsored you before the Council and stood up with you when you took your oath, I guaranteed that you would obey the regulations and follow the code, wholeheartedly and all the time – not just most of the time. Understand me?”

In the unlikely frontier society of Red Planet, going armed was not a right or a privilege but an obligation. It was a symbol of adult citizenship in a dangerous world. Adulthood didn’t come automatically with age, it was achieved. People expected you to live up to it, because failure to do so could get you or them killed.

This was heady stuff at the time. It gave me a lot to think about. Later Jim Marlowe and his sidekick travel to boarding school at the capitol where they accidentally uncover a (government!) plot against his community. They confront the plotters, are imprisoned, escape, brave many dangers to go home and spread the word – and are taken seriously!

I’ll go ahead and admit that even as a little boy I had a hard time suspending my disbelief through some of this. But what struck me about the story was the way the protagonists and their parents were driven by ethics and principle. They made hard choices that hurt them, when other choices were more easily available. (The fact that some other characters made those easier choices and often suffered for it was probably not accidental.)

The very concept of ethics and principle was new to me. Undoubtedly I’d encountered it before but simply hadn’t paid attention. I was paying attention now, in my clueless way. Faced with overwhelming malevolent force that came from the very authorities he had been taught to respect, Jim Marlowe chose – ethically – neither to duck and cover nor to assume that he was wrong and authority was right, but to fight the authority. Interesting.

The subject came to mind this morning when I read two items: A short part of an interview with some guy in New York:

“What was your mother’s best quality?”
“How do you say in English— she always flew straight. Sometimes it makes your life much easier to go a little to the left, or a little to the right. She was a Catholic in communist Poland and it was not good to be a Catholic during that time. Especially because she was a teacher. It was very difficult for her, to be a Catholic and raise three children. It would have been much easier for her to join the Communist Party. But she never did.”

Then there was a long reprint of a 1941 Harper’s article titled “Who Goes Nazi?”

Mr. A has a life that is established according to a certain form of personal behavior. Although he has no money, his unostentatious distinction and education have always assured him a position. He has never been engaged in sharp competition. He is a free man. I doubt whether ever in his life he has done anything he did not want to do or anything that was against his code. Nazism wouldn’t fit in with his standards and he has never become accustomed to making concessions.

Mr. B has risen beyond his real abilities by virtue of health, good looks, and being a good mixer. He married for money and he has done lots of other things for money. His code is not his own; it is that of his class—no worse, no better, He fits easily into whatever pattern is successful. That is his sole measure of value—success. Nazism as a minority movement would not attract him. As a movement likely to attain power, it would.

You can easily see what all these people, real or imaginary, have in common. It is a question of character. Whatever you call it – ethics, morality, principle, code, standards, ‘flying straight’ – they do not allow themselves to be pushed right or left by outside pressures. They are aware of what is right and what is wrong, and they act on that awareness even when such action harms them.

I’ve encountered this principle before. It’s not always fun to live with. But I keep running into assurances that it is the direction I need to travel if I want to arrive at my chosen destination.

He who does these things shall never be moved.

I want to be the sort of man who can be killed, but who can never be moved against his will. Sooner or later (I prefer much later) I’m going to die. That’s a given, there’s no way around it. The end of the matter, everything having been said, is this: Beyond the inevitable “Aw, shit,” I want to know in that last moment that I did well. I want to die proud of myself.

I don’t understand how that became such a struggle. It shouldn’t be so much to ask of myself.