Search This Blog

Tuesday 6 December 2011

There won't always be ...

I start this blog with a quotation from a speech that Robert A. Heinlein gave at the Third World Science Fiction Convention in Denver in July 1941:

 “There won’t always be an England – nor a Germany, nor a United States, nor a Baptist Church, nor monogamy, nor the Democratic Party, nor the modesty tabu, nor the superiority of the white race, nor aeroplanes – they will go – nor automobiles – they’ll be gone, we’ll see them go.  Any custom, technique, institution, belief, or social structure that we see around us today will change, will pass, and most of them we will see change and pass.”

The world has changed greatly, since Heinlein spoke these words a few months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour.  The Third Reich, the British Empire and the USSR among other major powers have all passed in to history.  Japan is now a pacific democracy.  China is once again a major power.  The European Union has arisen, appears to have reached its zenith and faces its nemisis in the unravelling of the Euro.  Well over a hundred former colonies are now independent states.

The social changes in these seventy years have been every bit as profound.  Many of these changes such as political correctness and multi-culturalism have been driven by the ideas of the Frankfurt School Marxists. Their approach has become that of all progressive / left wing / socialist politics.  It is broadly a revolutionary attempt to ensure that every prior custom, law, belief and institution passes, regardless of its history, wisdom or utility.

To take a current Scottish example, the SNP and other progressives are seeking to undermine the institution of marriage through legislation enabling same sex marriages in churches.  When taken together with other equality legislation, the result will be that before long churches will not be enabled but rather compelled to perform such marriages.

Once they succeed in that, one wonders how long it will be before the SNP come back with proposals to legalise polygamy?  After all they will have bridges to rebuild to Scotland's Muslim community, a community that they have so keenly courted in the past, and what better way to please the more conservative elements in that community.  Look again at Heinlein's prophetic words; He predicted the passing of monogamy.

1 comment:

  1. The replacement for monogamy he predicted in many of his books was multiple spouses (spice?) with at least as many husbands as wives. This has not happened in a formal way, nor very much in an informal.

    This may count as one of Heinlein's few misses but then I once thought that of his predictions of the end of the USSR and of free enterprise space development.

    ReplyDelete