Heinlein's moral universe

All of my familiarity with Robert Heinlein's work comes from the last few years.  I have often heard the name and the associations with it, but I did not really have any first-hand knowledge until I came across a copy of Farnham's Freehold (1964) in a small, secondhand bookstore in Cleveland.  The book is Land of the Lost-ish and somewhat entertaining for what it is, but is presents some troubling elements.  The eponymous Farnham is a strong man figure who out-wits and out-matches all those around him, even winning the hand of his ineffectual son's girlfriend as a replacement for his own wife.  There are some standard atomic war fears with a touch of time travel technology thrown in.  Simply, Farnham is transported to a distant future in which a non-white race has risen to power and whites are enslaved.  However, all of those in power are inept and are prejudiced against science, which Farnham uses to his own advantage to gain prominence despite his alien status.

What is more interesting about the book is the way that it interacts with Heinlein's other work.  

The second novel I read by Robert Heinlein is The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966), which is a vastly superior novel.  In this book, Heinlein describes a settled moon whose inhabitants share a neocolonial relationship with those still on Earth.  The people living on the Moon are exploited to provide a better standard of living for others and have little say in their own fate.  The protagonist, with the help of an advanced computer, develops a de-centralized network of revolutionaries to free the Moon from the imperialist hold of the Earth.  Whereas Farnham was positioned as a powerful outsider who gains insider status through his novelty and sheer force of will, the protagonist in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress gains power through his anonymity.  He is unsuspecting and only partially in control of his own fate (his computer friend does much of the actual planning and organizational work).  In some ways, Heinlein has flipped the source of power from the strong man to the loose network, or, from the single source of power to the collective.  This latter rendering of power was at odds with my expectations of Heinlein; it seemed out of line with the paternalistic, quasi-authoritarian that I had read about.

Most recently, I read Starship Troopers (1959) with my sci-fi book club and was equally torn over where he actually stands.  Having seen the Paul Verhoeven adaptation of the novel, I was uniquely positioned to understand that this is a novel about guys in space fighting bugs.  Actually, the movie does pick up on some other aspects of the novel that I am not really interested in commenting on at the moment aside from the Michael Ironsides character (I think he plays Sgt. Zim.  I am writing this whole thing from memory, so bear with me on this).  Throughout most of the novel, Rico is a seemingly reluctant soldier who excels in the infantry.  His motivations for joining the armed services is nominally to gain citizenship but are actually more murky.    Rico spends most of the novel in school or in training and it becomes very clear that, in this world at least, that discipline and corporal punishment have replaced touchy-feely liberal values to create a better, more ordered world.  In a class called History and Moral Philosophy, Rico and his classmates learn about the days when social workers would try to understand the reasons people commit crimes, which led to roving gangs and a world on the edge of breakdown.  Their instructor reassures them that floggings have really taught thugs their place and everyone is better off.  The nature of citizenship and the right to franchise are also discussed.  Rico's instructor informs the class that it is right that only those who have served in the armed forces should gain full citizenship and the right to vote because they are the only ones capable of putting the needs of the nation above the needs of the individual.  

This last bit is where I lose the thread, again.  Restricted right to the vote and full citizenship seem more in line with the paternalistic Heinlein but his reverence for community-mindedness (not nationalistic, but more communal, as described in the novel) turns the corner back to the Heinlein I recognized in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.  

This is a post without an end, an analysis without a conclusion.  I partially think that Heinlein is all of these things, that he believed in a mish-mash of philosophy and instinct that does not always add up.  Another part of me thinks he might just have adopted different ideals for different books in the service of the stories.  Because sci-fi is a speculative genre, he was able to play out different scenarios based on what he was thinking at the time.  Another part of me wants to give up trying to piece together an over-arching view of him as a writer and just take the books as they come.  But where I finally come down, as my training compels me, is to two conclusions.  The first is easy; I need to read more Heinlein.  Beyond this question about his politics, I do like his writing.  The second conclusion is a bit more complex.  There is a tension between the strong individual who wishes to take control of their own fate and the place that the individual has in a collective.  Farnham is a strong individual who struggles against a world that doesn't make sense to him to return to normalcy.  In The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, the protagonist feels allegiance for the community on the Moon against the community on Earth.  He creates a world that relies on the collective power of many individuals united together against an outside foe.  Finally, Starship Troopers demonstrates the extent of the tension in the infantry.  Service to the collective becomes service to self.  Heinlein seems interested in the way that self-interest knocks against other motivations.  He seems to recognize that self-interest sometimes dictates agents to band together or even sacrifice themselves for something bigger than themselves.  This is the central tension that these novels seem to share.