It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom….
If Robert Heinlein could not achieve social change through his political efforts, perhaps he might achieve it through the pen, to gain that “new birth” that is so central to his fiction.
Anybody who has read Robert Heinlein will recognize that he offered provocative commentary on our society and advocated for radical social change. Indeed, his politics have often confused people. How could a man who supported the Socialist Upton Sinclair and the Democrat FDR become a supporter of arch-conservative Republicans Barry Goldwater and Jeanne Kirkpatrick? As Heinlein once explained to Alfred Bester in 1959, “I’ve simply changed from a soft-headed radical to a hard-headed radical, a pragmatic libertarian….” Heinlein’s apparent change in politics makes sense if viewed this way: he saw problems that were not being solved and went to the political forces he believed had the greatest chance of solving them. In 1938, the most dangerous problem he perceived was the Great Depression, and he looked to FDR and Upton Sinclair for results; in 1959, it was nuclear war and communism (a hatred for which Heinlein developed before World War II, not with the Cold War). He supported Barry Goldwater in 1964 because he believed Goldwater would be far more effective against the Soviets than Lyndon Johnson.
Throughout his career, he would suggest solutions to the problems he perceived in society, always implicitly, if not explicitly. Oliver Wendell Holmes said, “Man’s mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.” Heinlein’s writing does just that, stretching our minds, teaching us to think and learn, even while entertaining us. If we want to solve persistent problems, we have to think about them in new ways. In criticism of his later works, particularly from the time of Starship Troopers on, the most frequent objection is that Heinlein is “lecturing” the reader. If only all of our teachers could hold such wonderful seminars! As is evident in For Us, The Living, from the very beginning he wanted to present controversial ideas in his work. In writing for Astounding, he learned to produce commercial fiction, focusing on plot and characters and sheer story. Once he built an audience who would read whatever he wrote, he moved the challenging themes back to the forefront, as in this first novel. If readers were outraged by his ideas or by their presentation, so much the better.
Late in life, Robert Heinlein told bookseller Alice Massoglia that he was going to have to change his name and write under a new one. Shocked, she asked, “Why?” His answer: “Because I think I’ve insulted everybody I can as Robert Heinlein!” Heinlein wanted to provoke response in order to wake up his readers and lead them to really think about the issues at hand.
As Heinlein told Campbell, For Us, The Living was “entirely concerned with the origin of certain dominant human thought patterns and how they might change if changes in the economic and social matrix shifted the survival values of these dominant mores. It attempted to show that most ethical standards were relative—that the terms vice and virtue depended on the psychological matrices.” In this way, For Us, The Living reads more like one of his late novels, rather than one of his earlier works. The more didactic Heinlein of the later novels was always there, subdued in the Heinlein who wrote for Astounding and collected those paychecks. With the publication of For Us, The Living, the pattern of Heinlein’s career takes a completely different shape—the later novels are not an aberration but the completion of a full circle.
So what unusual ideas does Heinlein present in this novel?
Ever hear of the metric system? Clearly, Heinlein felt it was a better standard of measurement, as his future society uses it exclusively.