Stories: Beyond This Horizon (G.033ab) April/May 1942
Unfortunately, I won't be around much for follow-up conversation about this (as I'm shipping out to Basic on Thursday) but I wanted to put down my thoughts on this before I forget.
A couple of days ago, I was putting up firewood and ruminating on connections between Maslow's hierarchy of needs and the themes in Heinlein's second-published novel Beyond This Horizon. I wondered if Maslow's theory was published early enough to have influenced Heinlein, or if they had simply reached similar conclusions independently. But with the internet not handy at the time, I forgot to follow up.
Then this evening, a web-based comic page that I follow, "Dinosaur Comics" based its latest gag on Maslow...
http://www.qwantz.com/comics/comic2-1583.png...which reminded me to look into the timing question. It turns out that Maslow first published his hierarchy of needs concept in an article called "A Theory of Human Motivation" in Psychological Review in 1943, whereas Heinlein's novel was written in 1941 and first published as an Astounding serial in 1942.
For those who may not have heard of it, Maslow's hierarchy of needs is a theory about individual human motivations. It asserts that once a person's more basic needs are met, other needs that are less vital to survival come to the fore. From most basic to least the hierarchy levels start with physiological needs, then safety needs, social needs, esteem needs, self-actualization needs, and finally transcendent needs. (Here's the wiki link: .)
My assertion is that in Beyond This Horizon, Heinlein explores a very similar (if evidently independently conceived) needs-hierarchy concept, but as it effects society as a whole rather than the individual. Specifically, it explores the effect that the satisfaction of all of the lower level needs might have on the character of a society. "All of them should have been very happy —" are the first words of the novel, and its basic problem. Once the basic physiological and security needs of the individuals in a society are met sufficiently that they need no longer preoccupy them, will they be satisfied, or will they ask "now what?" Or as one of the protagonists, Hamilton Felix, might ask: "that's well and good, but why should I care? Or even lift a finger to perpetuate this? What's the point?"
Just as Maslow asserts that an individual who has met all of his more basic needs would then be impinged upon by transcendent (i.e. spiritual) needs, the solution proposed in the climax of Heinlein's novel is for society to seriously tackle the numinous questions of the universe, using the scientific method and all of the vast resources at their disposal. This is a solution to the problem in two different senses: if positive answers to the great philosophical questions are found, the question "what's the point?" may very well be answered, but in any case the search for such answers constitutes a good-enough-for-now answer to the "now what?" question.
Well, that's what I wanted to say about Maslow and Beyond This Horizon. Um... Thoughts?