He also had the nerve to claim that Western Culture was worth fighting for

From Shock Therapy by Sarah A. Hoyt.

Her framework argument is that western intellectuals and academia have been advocating the destruction of Western Civilization without comprehending the net value for good created by Western Civilization. She uses bon pensant criticism of popular authors such as Agatha Cristie and Robert Heinlein as a test. She argues that both had a fundamental common sense and therefore respect for Western Civilization that shocks and outrages the vapid, preening intellectual of today.

This allows Christie to look at the fashionable nightclub crawling women and divine beneath the fashionable dissipation a longing for domesticity. It allows her to treat the upper class communists as poseurs. And it reaches beneath to show that the bright young things were much like everyone else since the beginning of time: they wanted to partner, succeed and reproduce.

This is Christie’s unforgivable crime as far as todays cognoscenti are concerned. Had she spent her time bemoaning the horribleness of proletarian living, the oppression of women, the unique racism and evilness of western culture, she’d be required reading in schools today. (And not nearly as popular, but that’s something else.)

Heinlein’s crime is to an extent similar. No one could accuse Heinlein of being conventional—but a lot of what he did then has become conventional wisdom now, from self-consciously having varied ethnicities in his books, to tweaking conventional morality and religion. His goal was – I think – to make people uncomfortable and to make them think.

But like Agatha Christie he had a certain practical horse sense, come, I think, from growing up in a family that lived, financially, close to the bone.

He might enjoy goring sacred cows, but like Christie he had no doubt that sacred cows or not, Western culture (and in his case American culture in particular) was the most prosperous and advanced in existence, the one that had the best chance of propelling man forward to a destiny among the stars. He also dared have women who liked men and wanted to have children (in his defense, at the time that didn’t even rise to the level of a sacred cow, it was simply an observation of human nature and biological fact.) He also had the nerve to claim that Western Culture was worth fighting for.

[snip]

World War I was terrible, and for many reasons, including the prevalence of pictures and news, the fratricide/civil-war quality of it, the massive number of casualties. It shocked an entire generation into … writing an awful lot about it, and into trying to tear down the pillars of civilization, believing that Western Civilization (and not human nature, itself) was what had brought about the carnage and the waste.

Do I need to tell you they were wrong? That they were wrong in turning against Judeo Christianity and Western civ, and capitalism, and industrialization?

[snip]

Other than Western civilization and countries influenced by it, the evils of racism, sexism and rigid class (and tribe) structure are, if anything even more hardened than they were before.

That I’m saying is that Western civilization AND capitalism (particularly the greater affluence created by it) are what brought about the erosion of those ancient evils to which ALL OF HUMANITY is prey.

Blaming Capitalism or affluence or industrialization for those evils is like blaming the cat for removing the scones from the oven and eating them – with jam and cream, mind you. (Yes, younger kid did that. He seemed absolutely convinced it was true, too. He was four.)

And invoking to resist these evils the untamed primitive (No? “Smash capitalism” and well… OWS in general) which IS the found of these evils is not only insane, it is counterproductive.

It is also where our culture has been for the last twenty years, caught in a recursive loop where everything – such as the collectivist massacres and poverty around the world – that doesn’t fit the narrative is swept under the rug, and “shocking” things that shock no one are continuously hurled Tourette’s-like at the one civilization that COULD have been shocked by WWI or seen anything wrong with death on that scale. (Hint, other cultures BRAG of how many they kill/how many of them are killed in war.)

Which is why people like Christie and Heinlein are reviled. Because if you read them you might get the idea that well… there were people wanting to smash capitalism back in the twenties, and that they were poseurs and a little ridiculous. Or that women CAN be competent, brilliant and still wish to create a new generation of humans.