Looking Backward to the Present
“Looking Backward” by Edward Bellamy.
Photo courtesy of by Make It Old and licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.
By Shane Kimberlin
In 1888, a utopian novel from a Massachusetts writer was published, first to modest sales and acclaim. The book, “Looking Backward: 2000-1887” by Massachusetts writer Edward Bellamy, gathered considerable steam and, in its second printing, sold more than 400,000 copies in the United States in less than a decade, only behind “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and “Ben Hur: A Tale of the Christ” in sales.
“Looking Backward” tells the story of Julian West, a 19th century capitalist who falls asleep for 113 years. When he's awakened by a certain Dr. Leete, he discovers the world has changed. A non-violent revolution, the good doc explains, brought forth a world without war, taxes, crime and corruption. There are no politicians, professional athletes, lawyers, soldiers or merchants. People start working at 21 and retire by 45. Nobody does jury duty because there are no more juries, because the judges are always right. Everything is super clean. There is no money, only government credit. Everyone likes their job. It is basically what Disneyland wishes you'd think it was.
You probably have never read “Looking Backward” or even heard of it, but it enraptured much of the nation’s middle class in the 1890s. A political movement inspired by the book’s ideals rapidly emerged, confusingly named “Nationalism” but bearing much of the hallmarks of scientific socialism. “National Clubs” organized by self-named “Bellamyites,” held weekly meetings, brainstorming ways of realizing Bellamy’s progressive vision in their own society.
“Looking Backward” is not a good novel in the ways one normally measures what makes a novel good, such as memorable characters, compelling story or moving writing. While a world without conflict is a lovely thought, it makes for turgid reading. The entire plot (and how it is plot) is essentially a carnival ride, where a baffled stranger enters a strange land, and gets to marvel at how said strange land is way better than his own while another guy answers his questions. This is a familiar plot device in fiction. It occurs in the first few explanatory scenes before something happens. “Looking Backward” makes it the entire story.
Bellamy wrote with great imagination and conviction, but he lacked the wisdom and powers of observation of a great writer, that ability to truly understand humanity. “Looking Backward,” stuffed full of glowing monologues like the world’s most intense timeshare presentation, is a sort of updated Socratic dialogue with bowler hats. It assumes there is an inevitable line towards progress, and progress is one where the variables of real choice are wiped away for the sake of security. It is cheerfully authoritarian in nature and, like every authoritarian work, lacks self-awareness.
It is also glaringly wrong in its predictions the way all bad prophetic books are, all the way up to “The End of History” by Francis Fukuyama and “The World is Flat” by Thomas L. Friendman. A typical passage from Bellamy’s tortured, verbose prose:
“With a tear for the dark past, turn we then to the dazzling future, and, veiling over our eyes, press forward. The long and weary winter of the race is ended. Its summer has begun. Humanity has burnt the chrysalis. The heavens are before it.”
Of course, the 20th century rebutted with a twisted, cruel punchline. Two world wars, the Holocaust, genocides, the very non-peaceful revolution of Russia, the gulags, and the invention of weapons capable of destroying all life itself, chrysalis included. The long and weary winter, it turned out, was only beginning.
We shouldn't be too hard on Bellamy. He came up during the Gilded Age, when the richest one percent of Americans owned over half the available land, the wealthiest two percent owned a third of the wealth, and the top ten percent, three-quarters. Inexhaustibly wealthy men, such as John D. Rockefeller and Dale Carnegie, were deemed either “Captains of Industry” or “Robber Barons,” depending on one's perspective. Work for the average citizen was often brutal and dangerous. “Looking Backward” was a response, like all speculative fiction, to the present as much as a forecast of the future.
Bellamy died in 1898, but if he had fallen asleep like his titular hero and woken up in our far-off year of 2021, he might have found some parallels. Here too reside political fantasists, no longer long-winded authors but Twitter-savvy idealogues, both far-right and far-left, crafting possible futures for their giddy audience in 140 characters or less at a time, saying, emphatically, over and over, “if only, if only….” Here too reside our Titans of Industry, our Robber Barons, our Kings of Late-Stage Consumer Capitalism, both believers in a non-violent technological revolution and keepers of a boatload of lawyers on payroll.
Multi-billionaires have entered a new space race, hoping to send humanity to the stars, preferably with their logo on the side. Elon Musk hopes to be buried on Mars. He sent a red convertible into space a few years ago to the song “Space Oddity” by David Bowie. Back in July, both Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos rocketed outside the atmosphere and, disappointingly for some, came back. Branson beat Bezos by nine days. Boys will be boys.
"We're going to build a road to space,” Bezos told the world in a post-flight press conference, “so that our kids and their kids can build the future. And we need to do that. We need to do that to solve the problems here on Earth. It's not about escaping.” One wonders if the road to space will involve an Amazon warehouse on the moon. Same-day delivery is a guarantee, after all.
It doesn’t stop there. Many a rich man has started a company to develop global Wi-Fi using space satellites. The most prominent is Starlink, founded by Musk. This means that the entire world will have an internet signal. That maybe there are areas on this Earth that benefit from no electronic connection, such as places of worship or the wilderness, is not up for discussion. That maybe there might be a thing as too much connectivity, information or immediate gratification isn’t either. That such a technology could be used for mass surveillance in a way Orwell couldn't even fathom is quite possible, and only a fool would think otherwise. These questions and concerns reside within the field of wisdom, not knowledge, and no amount of money can ever buy them.
What will happen to our modern Bellamys and Rockefellers of the world, the draftsmen and builders of peculiar Edens? What will 22nd century people think of them, and us, when they look backward? Perhaps they’ll laugh and empathize, shaking their heads at how some things never change. Or maybe they’ll be bitter and hold us responsible for whatever world we made.
As we look backward to our present and forward to an uncertain future, we must never forget the lessons of the past. All utopias are perfect until they are filled with people. Then problems begin, and each so-called paradise becomes, in its own way, a special kind of hell. But there is a consolation. Flawed humans, merely through the daily act of living, can make a valiant mockery of all such overbearing schemes and, in the end, defeat them. We must, then, live, and keep on living.
Like what you read? Get started on Shane’s fictional series “The Wish Belly.”
