From Starship Troopers to Starship Consumers.

But where's the citizen in all that?

You’ve probably heard of Paul Verhoeven’s 1997 film Starship Troopers, even if you’ve never seen it. (It’s not his best film, but it’s a reasonable way to pass two hours.) The film is based, extremely loosely, on a 1959 novel of the same name by the American SF writer Robert Heinlein, and is a satire on militarism in American life after the 1990-91 Gulf War. Here, I’m not writing particularly about the book or the film: I’m principally  concerned with some themes that first appeared in the book, and how they have developed in popular culture and politics over the last sixty-odd years, as well as the implications for the future. In particular, what is citizenship, and is it only a question of asserted rights, or do you have to do something in return?

It’s normal to add “controversial” before “novel,” in the case of Starship Troopers (henceforth mostly SST), although the book doesn’t seem to have been controversial when it came out, nor in the 1960s when I first read it. Rather, the experience and understanding what of War was, changed from Vietnam onwards, and this reflected back on the book, so that its assumptions about war and the military seemed increasingly anachronistic. If you want to read the full gory story of the allegations and ignominy heaped on the book and its author over the last few decades, this Wikipedia article is a good start.

Starship Troopers is a novel of the Second World War, in terms of its moral universe and the military forces, training and type of combat it describes. At the time of the book’s publication, nearly all of its audience would have served in the Second World War, or had mothers and fathers who had done so. That generation—that of my parents—had no doubt of the justice of the cause they fought for, nor of the necessity of it. Although my parents always said “I hope you never have to go through a war,” they did not regret their participation. The kind of revisionist history which has gained so much ground since the 1960s was unknown to the popular culture of the time, and among those who had participated.

As its title indicates, Heinlein’s book is about the experiences of the ordinary combat soldier. We learn that the Mobile Infantry are a low-status branch of the military, looked down on by the more glamorous Arms. They are the ones who fight and die on the ground, who operate, as the book recounts, in conditions of panic, confusion and chaos. There is very little Hollywood-style heroism in the book: rather, It has a lot in common with “mainstream” novels of WW2 of the same era, like James Jones’s The Thin Red Line, or Irwin Shaw’s The Young Lions. The war it describes is symbolically that against the Japanese in the Pacific, and it is an infantry war. There are no super-weapons, no intelligent drones, no orbital bombardment platforms, no force-fields. The point of view is that of the ordinary foot-soldier, who often has little idea of what is going on, and has no special talents or abilities beyond his training. (The protagonist, Juan Rico is a Filipino, as it happens.) The battle scenes don’t take up much of the book, and the two episodes described in detail both involve disasters and evacuations.

Starship Troopers was one of a series of books that Heinlein wrote in the 50s and 60s exploring different ideas about possible future societies. But whilst Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) was generally praised for its apparent early embrace of ‘sixties counter-culture and its challenge to organised religion, SST has remained in the dog-house. In this book, as with the others, Heinlein insisted that he was simply trying out ideas, but evidently some ideas are more inherently acceptable than others. In SST, he asks, what would a society constructed on the basis of military virtues look like? How would it function?

It depends, obviously, on what we mean by military virtues. For a start, they are not the same as “warrior” virtues. In early societies, there was no moral dimension to warfare in the sense that we would understand it: a hero was a good fighter who killed many people. (Go and see The Northman if you don’t believe me.) So the heroes in Homer are described not just as “slayers of men,”but also with epithets like “destroyer of cities” (ptoli-pórthios), which has quite a precise meaning in Greek history: the physical destruction and looting of the city, the killing of all the males and the enslavement of the women and children.  Such epithets belong to an age of individual and small-group combat, in a world where, crudely, might was right as long as you did what the gods wanted. We have, thankfully, moved on since then. Now military virtues also have to be distinguished from military ethics, which are largely a question of behaviour in wartime, although the two are often confused. Military ethics would include obedience to the laws of war, protection of non-combatants, avoidance of unnecessary force and casualties, etc. Military virtues on the other hand, are classically things like courage, loyalty, resilience, discipline, comradeship, teamwork and self-sacrifice: the polar opposite, in other words, of the values of a Liberal society. Such virtues are therefore dependent for their existence on concepts of society and community, of the protection of the weak, and of identification with one’s country, that have been progressively abandoned in our society.

Of course, like all sets of virtues these are normative and aspirational, and, as with all sets of virtues, real militaries often do not live up to them in practice. But they remain powerful mechanisms for self-motivation nonetheless. (The young Europeans who went to fight for ISIS in Syria often showed very similar motivations: above all, to lead a life that had significance, rather than just being a consumer.) But such virtues aren’t necessarily confined to regular militaries. They apply equally to partisans and resistance fighters, to those who struggled for so long to overcome the apartheid system in South Africa, or to those who fought the German occupiers in World War 2. (There is at last a proper Resistance Museum in Paris, which you should see.) Come to that, they apply to many non-military emergency services, to mountain-rescue teams, lifeboat crews, and the volunteers from the Paris Fire Service who went into Notre Dame Cathedral,  knowing that it could collapse on them at any moment.

A Liberal civilisation like ours, based on the assumption that humans are autonomy-seeking, rational, utility-maximising machines, cannot cope with this kind of normative system, for all that society (remember society?) actually depends on people who do accept it, for its very survival. So the temptation is just to ignore this awkward system, and try to construct a cotton-wool society at home where nobody is unhappy and there are no challenges, and to promote world peace (by some definitions) abroad. To the extent that the Liberal imagination accepts War at all, it is essentially as a series of punishment beatings of Bad People carried out by the West, with no casualties on our side. To kill someone with a drone, or to bomb a militia group from altitude, does not require courage, and so does not require acceptance of the legitimacy of military virtues. This enables a reconciliation of opposition to militarism on one hand, with a disturbing enthusiasm for using violence on the other. (Though confusingly, since 24 February 2022, it has been decided that military virtues are fine after all: I can’t keep up with this.)

The most controversial suggestion in SST is that full citizenship, including the right to vote and hold office, should be restricted to military veterans. Now again, this benefits from a bit of context. When the book was written, the vast majority of adults had military experience, in WW2 or the Korean War, or just as peacetime conscripts. This was true throughout the western world, even in Britain, where conscription was not abolished until several years later. (The Beatles were just slightly too young to have done National Service.) Throughout the Cold War, European states depended on mass conscription of young people for territorial defence, and military service was regarded as a rite of passage into adulthood. In some countries it was the only way of getting a reliable education, in others it was a way of uniting a disparate population. The result was that most politicians, business leaders, journalists and intellectuals had served in the military, although in some countries at some periods, civic service was available as an alternative. (Jacques Chirac, President of France from 1995-2007, was a paratroop officer in Algeria.) It’s not clear that such societies were more “militaristic” than societies today. And it’s worth noting that in SST most recruits only serve a few years, roughly equating to the kind of time a conscript would have served in the Cold War. Interestingly also, there is no officer recruitment: all officers are promoted from the ranks, and women are quite strongly represented, as of course they had been in WW2.

Thus, what Heinlein described was not so different from the norm of his time. Likewise, it reflected a view, uncontroversially common then on both Left and Right, that citizenship was an active matter, and that a citizen was therefore someone who played an active and useful part in the running of society.  This is, of course, a very old view, and it is clear that Heinlein explicitly had the Greek and Roman notions of citizenship, in mind when he was writing. Now It is normal to award Athenian democracy low marks, because only about ten per cent of Athenians were citizens. But to be a citizen in Athens was also to have responsibilities: you had to provide your own weapons and equipment, you could be called up to serve in the Army, you could be picked for jury service, or even chosen by lot to do a job in the city administration.

The notion of active citizenship, which had been given a new impetus by the coming of mass democracy, has been steadily dismantled in recent decades. The Liberal concept that has replaced it is, as you’d expect, one of autonomous utility-maximising individuals owing nothing to anyone or anything, and entering into a series of implied or actual contracts with providers of services in the place and situation where they happen to find themselves for the time being. The withering-away of the state and its replacement by private contractors, as well as the transfer of powers of decision to judges and supranational institutions, are conceived, among other things, as a way of breaking the link between the individual and the community or nation. The less the nation and the community are able to do for you, the less loyalty you will feel towards them. For one tendency, this is to inoculate the citizenry against the baleful effects of nationalism and reduce the chances of war. For another tendency, the objective is to transform citizens into indistinguishable consumers, with no discernible national, cultural or, linguistic differences.

Neither of these objectives has really succeeded. People are stubbornly attached to their group and their identity, and will actively seek out those like them to form a community to identify with, even perhaps a virtual one, to which they can perhaps contribute something. Indeed, society, by any reasonable definition, seems to depend on such identification and such participation for its very existence. At least, since 24 February 2022, it has been decided that aggressive patriotism and flag-waving are now acceptable again, so long as it’s somebody else’s flag. But this doesn’t address the problem of an incapable state and a population serviced by private contractors with no concept of public duty.

In today’s ideology, therefore, there are no citizens, but only service-accessing autonomous individuals. They have rights but not responsibilities. They may demand anything the law allows, or anything they think it should allow. Rights to all services are granted (education, health, security, the right to vote) without any counterpart other than (in certain cases) money changing hands. Access to money gives you more rights, as we’ve discussed, and it also gives you a wider choice of who to demand them from. Now it’s obvious enough that this argument contains a basic design flaw. Rights, as we’ve seen, are also an attempt to impose obligations on others. So if I want to exercise my rights, then machines or magic can’t do that for me. I need the cooperation of actual human beings. But if we all decide that we only have rights and no responsibilities, then in the end nobody will actually be able to exercise their rights.

Take a mundane example of active citizenship. You and I both live in a reasonably high-risk burglary area. Because of partial de-funding, the Police don’t patrol much any more. As a result, there are lots of petty burglaries and vandalism. Maybe you suggest that we should engage a private security firm to patrol instead, but such patrols are expensive, and anyway their effectiveness is questionable. So I suggest that we set up an informal scheme where people take it in turns to walk around the area when they have the time, and report anything suspicious, as well as reminding people if they’ve left their windows open by mistake, for example. You indignantly reply that you don’t see why you should put yourself out for others, to whom you owe nothing. Most people agree with you, and so the petty crime gets worse, and the right to security is undermined.

Starship Troopers, portraying a very different society to that, spawned a whole series of imitations and counter-blasts on the same theme of aliens threatening Earth, and how Earth responded. There are a couple of points I want to make about them, so if you’re really not into SF, look away now, and I’ll see you in the next paragraph. As I suggested, SST was the product of a time and place. Other books were as well. Joe Haldeman’s 1976 novel The Forever War was written directly out of his experience of serving in Vietnam, and generalised that experience as Heinlein used the tropes of novels of World War 2. The state and the military are blundering and incompetent, and the war in the end is not worth fighting. The Ender series by Orson Scott Card tells the story of a boy genius military commander who defeats and exterminates an alien race and then feels sorry  about it. Most curious, perhaps, is John Scalzi’s 2005 novel Old Man’s War. In a pitiless universe of a violence and cruelty which even Alfred Rosenberg might have thought excessive, Earth's military forces wage war against genocidal alien races some of which literally eat each other. The mysterious and all-powerful Colonial Defence Forces recruit elderly people (almost all Americans, it seems) who receive new super-powered bodies, and train with super-weapons to destroy alien races. (In one particularly gruesome scene, the soldiers from Earth literally crush small aliens under their boots.) Only the fittest survive. All of these books were highly praised and rewarded. Haldeman and Scalzi, at least, claimed that their books had some relationship with SST, but in neither case are the same issues of citizenship raised: Haldeman’s hero is conscripted (as the author was) and Scalzi’s turns out to be a naturally high-performing soldier, promoted to Captain after destroying a couple of alien races. Thus have assumptions about war and the citizen changed.

Insofar as Science Fiction is often an excellent guide to the ideas of its time, we should look at one example in more detail. I’ll briefly consider the Culture series of novels by Iain M. Banks, the first of which, Consider Phlebas, (1987) does actually feature a war of sorts, albeit of a very different type. Most of the other Culture books feature at least small-scale conflicts as part of the plot. Now Banks was at the other political extreme from Heinlein (a non-doctrinaire Socialist against the other’s right-wing libertarianism) but the differences aren’t really political. Banks’s Culture is a humanoid, post-scarcity, utopian society largely run by benevolent Artificial Intelligences, known as Minds. Although a few humans are involved in the war (there would be no story otherwise), they are individuals with some freak talent or special training.

What’s important here is the effect of thirty years of social change on the concept of citizenship and service. In the Culture novels, there is none, at all. Everything everyone living in the Culture could ever want is provided instantly and for free. There are no laws, and no constraints on personal behaviour. Decisions seem mostly to be taken by the AIs, although some form of mass polling appears to be used occasionally. The members of the Culture are not citizens, because there is nothing to be a citizen of: no flag, no Constitution, no territory, no structures of any kind. Living on immense sentient starships, they are simply consumers.

It’s immediately clear that the Culture novels were an early sighting of the increasing aspiration of those born in post-war generations to live in a state of permanent childhood, or at least permanent adolescence. (Banks said early on that the Culture was his own idea of utopia).  The Minds, obviously, are the parents, and are as omnipotent in the books as we thought our own parents were when we are small. Any injury can be healed by them, any want supplied. The humanoids spend their time as children would like to: an infinite supply of sweets, no school tomorrow, endlessly indulgent parents and free to play all day. All wishes can be catered for, whether it’s to change sex or grow a pair of wings to fly with. (It’s significant that the second book in the Culture series is entitled The Player of Games.) Indeed, it’s hard not to think that life in the Culture must be pretty boring for most people, which is why virtually all of the books feature contact with alien races, who are generally much more interesting, and members of the Culture who specifically want to get out of it.

Now, I don’t want to disparage Banks’s books, which I have always thoroughly enjoyed, but a comparison of these two novels does demonstrate how far popular cultural ideas had moved in only thirty years: essentially, the space of a generation. It is also instructive to compare Banks’s works with actual children’s books of earlier eras. The books of Enid Blyton, for example, for all their faults, show children as independent agents, having adventures and solving problems without adult intervention. But if that was the childhood fantasy world of the 1950s, today’s childhood fantasy world is, indeed, a bit like Banks’s Culture, where all-powerful beings protect (or should protect) children from harm of any kind.

Not just popular culture, but also intellectual fashion, has, continued to move in the same direction. As I noted in an earlier essay, the concept of Rights, which appeared almost out of nowhere in the eighteenth century, has come to dominate our cultural and political discourse. But as the philosopher Alasdair Macintyre observed (just about the time, as it happens, when Consider Phlebas was being written), believing in the objective existence of Rights is like believing in fairies and unicorns.  Rights were invented as “part of the social invention of the autonomous moral agent.” And because, as we have seen, rights entail obligations, much of modern society therefore consists of people and institutions seeking to impose moral duties on each other.

Now it’s important to understand what I am arguing. This is not an argument about the superiority of tradition and custom over modernity, or some imagined need to subordinate interests of the individual to society, still less is it a simple plea for a return to another age. It is rather an argument for facing, and perhaps attempting to deal with, what Liberalism and its uncouth younger brother Neoliberalism, have done to traditional concepts of society and community. And neither is it another iteration of the “individual versus society” argument. That is a non-argument anyway, since it supposes something called “society” which exists outside and beyond the individuals who constitute it. I am part of the “society” you hold responsible for some problem, as are you. You are part of the “society” that I might seek to rebel against, as am I.

Liberalism is, after all, based on the autonomous, rational, utility-maximising moral agent. The mechanism by which society functions is competition between these agents, regulated in extremis by a State with very limited powers. Those problems that cannot be solved by individual competition should be contracted out for professional management by others. Politics amounts to the hiring of one of a series of competitive teams to manage those affairs which are unavoidably collective. The use of force is entrusted to hired professionals who are not encouraged to identify with their clients, and may go on to work for others later. Other services should be provided by the State only if there is no alternative.

In reality, of course, a modern society cannot be run this way, not can all problems be solved by paying someone to make them disappear. The Market (the right-wing magical and parental equivalent of the Culture’s Minds) cannot deal with everything, and in general it’s precisely what it cannot deal with which is most important. In addition, the Market, once internalised by a society, starts to progressively infantilise it, by taking agency away from people.

Starship  Earth, which has been having maintenance issues recently, is now running into some extremely serious and fundamental problems. The crew, whose commanders haven’t been paying much attention to flight control for a while, suddenly finds that it’s encountering difficulties it never imagined and has no idea how to deal with. There are no Minds to save us, and no amount of money will buy a way out. Things called sacrifices and collective effort may be needed. It’s unfortunate that the crew, or at least its western consumer component, has never been less well prepared.