Looking Backward: 2000-1887 (1888)

Oh hey, proto-scifi utopian whatever!

[LATER...]
Oh hey, book I never wrote a review for! Okay, here's what: Looking Backward was a blockbuster hit in 1887 - according to Wikipedia "the third-largest bestseller of its time, after Uncle Tom's Cabin and Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ." This is mystifying because it's basically a boring socialist tract.

"Does it then really seem to you that human nature is insensible to any motives save fear of want and love of luxury, that you should expect security and equality of livelihood to leave them without possible incentives to effort?" (63)

Unfortunately, it turns out that the answer to this question is yes.

A little short on the plot, very short on the characterization. Lots of babbling about how great the world will be when the socialists inevitably win.

Falling into the standard trap of utopianists (?), merrily pretending that people are terrific because that's the only way utopias work, Bellamy mentions that all prisons have disappeared, those few "criminal" elements left consigned to asylums...but then, "A man able to duty, and persistently refusing, is sentenced to solitary imprisonment on bread and water till he consents" (83) - one of the book's very few hints at the dangers of an essentially totalitarian society. (While elections happen, the elected officials are allowed to do very little.)

There's almost zero accurate forecasting of the future. It's credited (har!) with inventing credit cards, but they bear zero resemblance to actual credit cards so I'm not buying that (har!).

Bellamy imagines the future economy with great, mind-numbing detail, but it doesn't occur to him that music or art might have changed in the slightest. He's prescient on one front, though. He imagines a future where publishing is entirely egalitarian: anyone who wants to can write a book, and if enough people like it then it gets published. We're totally doing that now, and [b:it's working out great!|10818853|Fifty Shades of Grey (Fifty Shades, #1)|E.L. James|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1300842729s/10818853.jpg|15732562]

This is not a very good book. ( )

Rather tedious proselytizing for the author's views, very little actual action.

Read 1926 Houghton-Mifflin ed., hardcover, 337 p. ( )

There was a time once when this was revolutionary. I was impressed by what it correctly foresaw, but disappointed about how much that this utopia was still influenced by the antiquated ideas about gender and the past. As for socialism itself, the whole idea seems to have trappings of utopianism. ( )

With the exception of "telephone music" as a precursor to modern day radio, Bellamy's work is less science fiction and more a well written manifesto for Marxism. Unfortunately, Bellamy was more concerned with an unrealistic utopian socialism and criticism of capitalism than historical fact. Two centuries prior, Bradford's "Of Plymouth Plantation" detailed how the colonists attempt at collective farming aka communism discouraged production- in fact, only when the colonists resorted to private land ownership did the settlement produce positive results. The subsequent history of the 20th century has further proven Bellamy's ideas a failure. ( )

Bellamy's utopia is important to understanding the context of economic transformation at the end of 19th century America--to the inception of new ideas in the nascent Age of Corporation Capitalism. It is a useful corrective to the idea that Americans have always discounted as "un-American" collectivist solutions to the impasses of economic development. Though one may look back across the fields of carnage in WWI and WWII and find Bellamy's optimism about the ability of man to be human to man, it is important to take him in context. His contribution is the idea that reform and collectivism, in his word "Nationalism," are not aimed at "de-humanization" but I rather at the realization of the secularized ideal of Christian community here on earth. With the blinders of Cold War mentality on, it would be tempting to overlook the sources of reformism in the Populist and Progressive movements in America.

As both Eric Fromm and Celia Tichi note in their forwards Looking Backward, Bellamy was an inspiration to vast reform movements (esp. Populism) and in high demand as a public speaker. 5 Looking backward at his book, we can appreciate some of the thinking behind the Populist and Progressive movements.

The boundless optimism of Bellamy's book leaps out from the page. Though it may seem strained at times, his faith in rational organization for the good of all gives flesh 'and blood to the bones of "Corporation Capitalism." The ideal of corporate organization was not bad, so we learn from Bellamy, but rather the selfishness which accompanied the disorganized, Spenserian infighting amongst individual capitalists. This was exactly the faith of reform movements in turn-of-the-century America. Liberty was increased in the society of Boston in the year 2000 because workers could enjoy a life free from want. It is exactly this life of plenty which rational corporate economic organization could provide for the masses of Americans which Bellamy spoke to.

Go into some of the specific examples in Chapters V XXII, and XXV. .. 5

Eric Fromm, "Forward," In Looking Backward, 2000-1887 by Edward Bellamy, New York: New American Library, 1960. After explaining the true nature of the socialism as a movement for liberation of the individual in pre-WWI America, even Fromm succumbs to the Cold War temptation to sing the praises of the status quo. "Thus far the free enterprise system is vastly superior to the communist system because it has preserved one of the greatest achievements of modern man, political freedom ..." (xviii) The implicit dichotomy, a product of Cold War thinking, certainly narrows our choices in finding a useable past.

Celia Tichi, "Forward," In Looking Backward, 2000-1887 by Edward Bellamy, New York: Penguin Books, 1985. Tichi and Fromm are especially useful for putting the concept of an "industrial army" in perspective. The Union Army served as Bellamy's model. "Militarism" is one of the concepts which must be understood in context, as must "Nationalism" and "socialism."