tThis might be the dumbest book I’ve ever read. I respect and understand what Bellamy was trying to do, but for mercy of the reader, don’t try to deliver something like this in a fictional setting if you’re not going to bother making your characters anything more than endlessly chattering names without agency or thought or reflection or personality, who only recite the philosophy of the writer. And don't make it fiction if you don’t have a plot or a story or action or development of some basic activity or any of the things that make fiction worth reading. The philosophy, as stupid as it already is, was delivered in the most heavy-handed and tiresome way possible. Mr. Bellamy would have benefited from making this a pamphlet or a newsletter. Making a one dimensional, boring world out of this dry philosophy was a horrible idea. Edward Bellamy’s prose is delightful, sometimes beautiful, and that makes it harder to so severely dislike his actual writing. That being the quality of Looking Backward as a story, as a work of fiction. So it pains me to say that despite his flowing, thoughtful, semi-frequently poetic writing, the book is just not good. I hate to put more effort into this review than it’s worth, but the book was so bad that there has to be something somewhere in writing that says so. After the “plot” sets in (and simultaneously pauses until it picks up 130 pages later, only to once more be put on hold for another 30 pages) almost every page or two shares a horrifying idea that no thinking person could truly call close to utopia. There are a handful of good ones, but so few and far between and already forgotten are they that I’m not going to be able to give them much attention.In Bellamy’s 21st century, over the duration of only 113 years, mankind has been reduced to automatons who have somehow, without explanation, bypassed thousands of years of human nature to evolve into transcendental beings who never lie, who think only of others, never of themselves or their well being, who live entirely selfless lives somehow filled with plenty, all wanting the exact same things, who operate like thoughtless ants in a colony, without desires, opinions, or individuality, as part of an industrial army. America is anti-individuality, preferring instead to think of itself as a mere superorganism that operates as such, with its drone-like constituents, lesser organisms, humanity, carrying out its necessary operations to survive. Markets are crushed, private industry is eviscerated, self-reliance is thrown to the wolves, private property is redistributed as public space, money is replaced by a meaningless credit system based on nothing, where every single working person is given exactly the same ‘credit’ despite job, despite need, despite personal taste, despite effort, despite ability, talent, intelligence, experience, and the big, all powerful God-Eye all-knowing American Government takes over everything, right down to the way you listen to music, make your food, go outside, and buy stuff. And you have no employer but the almighty holy American Government. You work for this faceless mother brain that decides everything for you, that calls all the shots in every avenue of life, and is never wrong. And there is never the idea that it could be wrong because such ideas are forbidden and frowned upon. Newspapers, instead of existing to spread news of the world or share important information, act as a megaphone for public opinion, to re-indoctrinate anyone who’s strayed too far from the totalitarian control. All products and things and, no really, everything artificial in existence, is produced by the American government through some kind of generic, uninspired country-wide Industrial Army, which has become the most important thing in the nation. Competition is squashed. There no longer exist motivations for innovation, for invention, for progress, because humankind has seemingly collectively decided that this communist regime of the new America is ‘perfect’ and everything is as foretold by some bogus Christian prophecy about an age where everything is just like this. And the scariest part is that this is called a utopia. Yes. This utilitarian wasteland of slaves to the machine that is at times both laughable and horrifying, was seen as a utopia by Edward Bellamy when he wrote this in 1887-88. Perhaps if I had been alive in the 19th century this would have looked more like a utopia than it does. But even then, no thinking person could rightfully think the answer to all the country’s problems was to give the government TOTAL CONTROL OVER EVERYTHING AND EVERYONE. That’s the only aspect of this book that is science-fiction, this unbelievable enslavement to and adoration of and trust in this command center over the whole population. That, and the way the human race has somehow evolved out of every single defining characteristic that has shaped humanity over the last thousands of years into some glowing golden race that doesn’t think, but is joined as a throbbing collective. That’s not really sci-fi, though, closer to fantasy.In Bellamy’s future, everyone is “equal” only in the sense that they’re treated radically different than their own efforts or talents or abilities or experiences merit. Despite the shabby explanations given, there is no realistic argument in Bellamy’s book that explains why any person would go into medicine, science, engineering, or how anyone could become a professional musician, artist, writer, or actor. The only thing that kept me reading this book was to see how far down the rabbit hole of stupidity it would go. And it went far. Interestingly, in this “utopia,” everyone shares the same opinions on everything, because everyone receives the same education. Hence, no one disagrees on things like the value or quality of literature or art, because education, and education alone, are credited for sculpting a person’s mind and perception. Democratic processes determine who gets to write, who gets to be an artist or a musician, and without explaining further, I think you can already put together how this leads to an obvious state of creative stagnancy and decline. As far as production is concerned, I mentioned the Industrial Army. America’s industry is now organized exactly like the military. Who is at the top of this army? The President. As scary and as stupid as this sounds, it’s actually scarier and stupider. Things are produced only based on exact demand, or on the interest in demand people vote on. This means nothing new or innovative or unique or interesting or of interest to a select few will ever be created. Everything is a mass produced, generic item that only exists because it has been calculated that people will like it. And no members of this Industrial Army are allowed to vote for the President, who is, in fact, also the leader of said army. So much for equality, eh?Want to make some food in your kitchen for dinner? Can’t. There are only ‘public kitchens’ where you go to share food with people. If you want something specific, well, you can’t buy it. Better hope it’s already there. Want to throw your clothes in the wash so they’ll be clean by tonight? There are only Laundromats. Better hope there’s a spot for your three weeks of clothes! Have an amazing idea, and want to develop it and sell it? Too bad. Only big mother government gets to sell things. But after you pour years of your own money and time into developing this thing, maybe you can pitch it to the god-eye government to see if they will support it. So then big mother government will send a poll out to the country and get all kinds of votes and pledges on who is immediately interested in your product or invention. Unless you receive an overwhelming amount of support for your ingenuity and effort, you will be denied, and your hard work will go to waste. You have no option of selling it to someone you know, or building a reputation with your things. NO, don’t even think of it. Selling is strictly prohibited.There is no ambition in Bellamy’s utopia. There is no moving forward. What is it, in this fictional year 2000, that drives people to do things? What gives them the momentum to design or build something new for the good of others? Honor and patriotism. No joke. Honor and patriotism are considered to be the highest values to people of the 21st century. It is for these two reasons people do anything. Want to spend nine years inventing some useful thing that will benefit mankind for the rest of time? You won’t see a dime of good fortune come your way. Dimes don’t mean anything. Instead, you get the good feeling of honor, and the knowledge that you’ve served your country. With incentives like this, it’s no surprise the nation has stagnated into a hole of tedium and uninteresting literature. That’s another thing: the description of literature in this time sounds awful. And according to Bellamy, all crime in the world is caused by one thing: inequality. So once that’s wiped out, crime disappears. Nice fiction. So things like rape and murder and abuse and arson and any other product of sad human reality magically vanishes when equality enters the picture. Bullshit. Bellamy understands humanity no better than a rabbit understands humanity. Prisons are gone, the legal system is radically simplified (along with the removal of lawyers after it is recognized the whole system of cryptic laws is artificially designed to necessitate the existence of lawyers by the lawyers themselves,--one of the few things appealing about Bellamy’s world), but all because of asinine assumptions by Bellamy, being out of touch with humanity even in his own day. So crime isn’t really a problem, but let’s say you choose not to work for a while. BOOM! you’re thrown in prison, solitary confinement with nothing but bread and water. So you rape and murder a family, and you’re sent to a fine rehabilitation center. You decide you’ve worked enough and would like a vacation: cruel and unusual punishment. Utopia!Oh, and it’s still called the United States, but there are no states. All the states have been consumed into the motherbrain of America, exactly against the design and point of America in the first place. So states’ rights and all that shit: gone. Small governments: that’s a joke. Try one megauniversal conglomerate ultragovernment that is exactly the thing of nightmares and horror. Looking Backward was the third most popular book of its time. This can only mean the 19th century was far more horrible and nightmarish than one could imagine. A world where Bellamy’s utopia looks like a step forward must be hell. I knew it wasn’t all rainbows and sunshine, but this has me thinking it was an utter tortuous existence for all but the most wealthy. The ideas of “equality” in Bellamy’s book are an obvious improvement from his time. But it’s false equality, forced equality. It’s the kind of equality that immediately breeds inequality by engineering a highly artificial reality that operates against nature. It’s the kind of false equality where a person who studies ten years to be a doctor, while sacrificing the finer things in life to devote himself to his studies and the honing of his very specific skills, in the end at 45 years of age and with a wife and three kids, gets the very same pay, the very same home, bed, lifestyle, luxuries, and pleasures that a single 19 year old grocery store clerk gets. That’s not true equality, that’s the kind of false equality that would never work, because it reduces the great to nothing, and raises the nothing to great, and there is no incentive for anyone to do anything or be anything more than the minimum, and human nature itself works against this. This is the equality that benefits the lazy, the uninspired, those lacking ambition, and that punishes those who are the opposite. Bellamy’s solving the problems of his day like solving a playground dispute with a nuclear warhead. He’s solving inequality and wealth disparity and property disparity with a horrifyingly cold and degrading totalitarian state that turns its people into numbered slaves to its own cause. Although Bellamy tries, time and time again, to try to convince the reader that there is plenty of incentive for people to do important jobs, hard jobs, professional jobs, creative or innovative work, he falls on his face every time. It’s like me telling you that in the near future, all humankind will empathize perfectly with everyone else because we will magically have the ability to read each other’s thoughts, see each other’s memories and emotions and ideas in perfect clarity, rendering us fully capable of knowing one another entirely. Bellamy uses the same bullshit to convince his readers the year 2000 will work like this, because humankind will have magically evolved to some egoless, thoughtless, desireless, impersonal, anti-individual state of cosmic connectedness where we have no interests or desires or opinions of our own, no awareness of the self, but instead voluntarily and happily choose to slave away for the united prosperity of mother government who feeds us and pumps us full of credit and generic things to keep us going. If Bellamy’s year 2000 is a utopia to you, it can either be that you’ve imagined nothing better because you live in an unfortunate place in the world, that you are a high school socialist still learning the ways of the world, or you are a power hungry sociopath who wants to be the top of that mother government who rules with an unquestioned iron fist over all her people. I think Bellamy was stuck in the second option. And don’t even get me started on the story. As I said, there’s nothing to it. It’s not a story. It’s tireless exposition in a heavy-handed way for Bellamy to preach his ideas. No characterization, no plot, no action, no philosophy, nothing. Even the one dimensional characters are brainless automatons representative of Bellamy’s ‘future world’ who can only recite facts, not think. And the narrator, the displaced 19th century man, is easily the most braindead character I’ve ever encountered. There is nothing to him but to ask softball questions to the guy championing Bellamy’s philosophy, without the ability to critically analyze anything, who is immediately convinced he is wrong at every turn simply because he is told, “Oh, in the future we know that people from your time were wrong. Look at us now. You were wrong. We are right, and have figured out literally everything there ever was to figure out with humanity. There is no value in your time or in your people or in your perspective or your opinions, because listen, we have determined that our way is right. And don’t you go acting like this totalitarian reich doesn’t make perfect sense to you! WE will be the ones who show dismay and surprise at YOU when you say anything about YOUR time. WE will be the ones to act like you are absolutely insane for thinking money should buy anything.!” I mentioned that Bellamy is preaching his philosophy through the whole book. This is taken very literally when he even goes so far as to employ an actual preacher to treat us to more monologue exposition.There is a small hint at a plot, as I mentioned earlier. But it quickly pauses for 130 pages, and when it picks back up it’s really more of a subplot. But that subplot is far more interesting than the exposition that’s been going on for over a hundred pages by now. Although the outcome of this subplot was hugely predictable, it actually resulted in a decent love story with a unique and creative slant to it. Standing alone, this could have made for a good short story. As it is, it almost feels out of place in this bookThis work exists only to critique the ways of the 19th century, and at that purpose it succeeds. To be honest, there are a handful of things Bellamy criticizes accurately, such as the nature of money and its inherent worthlessness, the archaic cryptic nature of the legal system, the glamour and prestige of overpaid athletes, the problems with education, the wastefulness and aimlessness of much of capitalism, as well as its allowance for more harm than good in some sectors. There are a few more. Even when Bellamy invents a process by which a much more intelligent and able and qualified President is ensured to be elected, instead of those we get now, it’s all for nothing when observing the role the President takes in this gloomy world. So while there are a few valid criticisms offered, and an underlying theme of hope and prosperity for mankind, which no one could have a problem with, every solution proposed is dismayingly awful, short sighted, lacking in fundamental psychology, and is the creation of pure fantasy that on the surface seems fine, but under a little scrutiny and reflection seems awful. While it is clear Bellamy put a lot of work and thought into the concepts of change he proposes, he doesn’t seem to look at their implications. Bellamy’s shortsightedness doesn’t limit itself to these radical changes in societal operation, but extends to things like art, music, clothing, speech, and technology. Somehow in 113 years, as I’ve already pointed out, humanity has simultaneously transcended mere humanity to become beings of selfless, loving, trusting, purely hard working essence who never get sick or have things wrong with their brains, while also being reduced to opinionless and thoughtless automatons--YET, technology has not advanced in all that time, music has stayed the same, art is the same, and clothing is the exact same. If ever Bellamy wanted to project a positive, imaginative, plausible world, certainly he would have made room for, and given time and thought to, these enormous aspects of human creation. Yet, in his seemingly limited imagination these things have stayed exactly the same. And that’s bizarre and disappointing. But interestingly, it’s also explained very well in Bellamy’s world, though I doubt he intended for it to be. You see, none of these things possibly could evolve or move forward or progress in Bellamy’s 21st century, because humanity would have no means to do so. Like I said, ambition is dead. Creativity is gone. There will never be a revolutionary technological advancement, another Shakespeare or Melville or Dickens (who Bellamy professes his love for) or Mozart or Chopin, there will never be new ideas because there is no room for them, since everything is already “perfect.” Perfectly stagnant.I have commended Bellamy on his prose. I will also commend him on the merit that his overall vision is positive and good. The details of his vision for change, not so good. But even with a “story” that I didn’t care about, and characters flat as the paper they were printed on, parts of the book were beautiful and inspiring in a kind of vague, but progressive way. Not enough so to make the other 95% of it forgivable. I’ll close this longwinded waste of space by saying that in Bellamy’s world, this book would have never found its way into my hands. I bought this at a used book store because it looked and sounded cool. In Bellamy’s world, people cannot buy or sell things. Not from or to each other, that is. You can only buy things from big mother government. You can’t sell your things. You can only give them away. There is no possibility for a marvelous place like the used book/music/movie/tv/game/comics/everything store at which I found this book. There’s no large repository of used items to find new owners, new homes. If something is old and no longer considered vitally important to the populace by the government, it stops being produced, and you’ll never in your life have a chance to find it. Everything that you have that you can’t find someone to take, but that you no longer want, just becomes trash. Bellamy’s future is more wasteful than any other he could have imagined.
I started reading Edward Bellamy's classic utopian novel Looking Backward on a three-hour train ride back home. It was night, dark outside, and my eyes flitted from the screen of my e-reader to the dark void outside and back. I like to peer out at the towns the train passes so furtively, reduced by speed, distance and time of day to a few lights strewn across the landscape. When I sit in a train and look outside, I cannot help but turn into the stereotypical dreamy passenger. The reflective surface of the window seems to positively invite reflection.The plot of Looking Backward is extremely straightforward. A man, Josiah West, who suffers from insomnia has a soundproof basement bedroom made for him, and uses mesmerism to fall asleep. One night as he does so the house above him catches fire, in which the servant who was supposed to wake him perishes, and he ends up sleeping for days and months and years and decades until finally, in 2000, the chamber is found and he steps into the future (in perfect health).It's a bit much to call Looking Backward a novel, and I think it would probably be more appreciated by modern audiences if it were considered as a document capturing the spirit of the times in which it was written, the political turmoil of the fin-de-siècle. Most of it is filled with tedious harangues comparing Bellamy's brightly lit future with the horrors of the present (isn't the present always, as if almost by default, horrible?). It's telling, too, that in his explanations Bellamy largely glosses over how the utopian society came to be (he offers a vague explanation of businesses conglomerating until they just become one state-run “company” and talks of one unlikely angelic generation which “laid aside the social traditions and practices of barbarians, and assumed a social order worthy of rational and human beings”). While there are many holes to poke in Bellamy's collectivist society anyway, and history has already taken care of deflating those dreams, it still strikes me that it is a far easier job to describe a spurious perfect society than to describe how we can get there.For all its optimism, Bellamy's future reads to me like one of those modernist nightmares of eerie perfection. It makes me uncomfortable perhaps precisely because it would be well-nigh heavenly – the “uncanny valley” version of heaven. It reminds me of an apt description of Facebook I recently read: “Like a New Urbanist dream neighborhood where every lamppost and shrub seems unnervingly designed to please you, there's a soullessness about the place. The software's primary attributes - its omniscience, its solicitousness – all too easily provoke claustrophobia. Bellamy's futuristic inhabitants opined that “it would be considered an extraordinary imbecility to permit the weather to have any effect on the social movements of the people.” In this sense he certainly seems prescient, because I reckon many people feel that way, and we certainly live in a society in which being comfortably numb is something to strive for. But me personally, I'd rather just get soaked every once in a while. All throughout Looking Backward, I am reminded of Raoul Vaneigem's slogan: “Down with a world in which the guarantee that we will not die of starvation has been purchased with the guarantee that we will die of boredom.”Still, “hindsight is better than foresight”, as Bellamy himself remarks, and it is all too easy to look back and say that he was wrong and/or naïve. What touched me, staring out of that train window, was that I was reading the words of a dreamer of more than a century ago, and that his dreams were still pure. I could all too easily imagine Bellamy, in overly formal 19th century garments, sitting in his padded room, looking out over gray, gray England, pondering better days ahead. It is the same beautiful optimism that is written all over the various art movements of the early 20th century; a belief that better times were to come, if we could only get our act together. And here I was, a 21st century dreamer, and I couldn't believe in any of that. Maybe that's just me, but I'm not so sure. Habermas once wrote of an “exhaustion of utopian energies” in our age. Utopias just don't seem very fruitful in these times of effectivity and rationality. These are hard times for dreamers. They will have to dream back first, to the age of Bellamy, in order to dream forward again with the same gusto our forefathers had.STRANGERI should be a fool not to know that I cannot seem to you as other men of your own generation do, but as some strange uncanny being, a stranded creature of an unknown sea, whose forlornness touches your compassion despite its grotesqueness."- Edward Bellamy, Looking BackwardBut what touched me most of all, despite the fact that the plot here is like a footnote to the politics, is the horrible predicament and fate of the story's protagonist. He becomes, as Dutch author Hella Haasse phrased it, “forever a stranger”, homeless in mind if not in body. Both the future Boston he ambles through wide-eyed and his own Boston whose social order now repulses him are ultimately beyond him.and I can't remember if I read or dreamed about them-a sect on the Mayflower called the Strangers-four or five adults who gathered in the holdand spoke to no one through the three month passage.When the boats landed on the beachthey walked into the North American forestand were never seen again.- David Berman, “World: Series”
What do You think about Looking Backward: 2000-1887 (2000)?
Looking Backward, by Edward Bellamy, is sort of a Rip Van Winkle type story. The main character, Julian West, is one of the wealthy elite in the Gilded Age. By use of 'Animal Magnetism' he's put into a trance by a quack doctor where he fails to wake up for 113 years. When he wakes up, It's the year 2000- and the United States, along with the rest of the world, has created a utopian governmental and social structure. Accompanied by the man who woke him, Dr. Leete, he learns of the many new aspects of society and its many improvements.I liked the book; it was certainly an entertaining scenario, and it was fun to (pun intended) look backward through Looking Backward. However, I did have a few issues with the book. While Bellamy certainly did a good job predicting modern developments (credit cards and the United Nations even!) and outlining the changes applied to the many aspects of industry and social order, I feel like he glossed over some of the most important parts. He seemed to assume that human morality had taken a sharp turn for the better and that human ambition had become more communally-motivated rather than self-motivated. Whenever Julian West would ask Dr. Leete a question about the forces that in real life led to the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, the answer would usually be something along the lines of how much society enjoyed the new system and therefore lost the desire to do bad things. The people in his utopia seemed to act very little like people in the real world and therefore renders his utopia scenario obsolete. His main characters aren't very believable either. Dr. Leete and his family act very artificially.I really did like the book; I just feel like more could have been done with it. It might have made more of an impression on someone reading it in 1887, but reading it in 2013, I was separated by 2 degrees of separation: 126 years between myself and the author and another 113 years between the author and his predicted utopia.
—Alex Freitag
In Bellamy’s Boston in the year 2000, many things have changed from how they were in 1887, and the consensus among the book’s characters is that they have changed for the better. I do not imagine many people would argue the merits of the eradication of poverty and war. But when one looks more closely at gender roles, “utopia” becomes a bit more blurry.The fact that women have jobs outside the home is exciting and progressive. However, they are still treated as quite secondary to men. Being “inferior of strength to men, and further disqualified industrially in special ways” women work within an entirely separate labor structure (257). The men discuss it as if the women are playing at work. “Under no circumstances is a woman permitted to follow any employment not perfectly adapted, both as to kind and degree of labor, to her sex” (257). Further discourse shows that rather than seeing women as deserving of work just as they are, men “let them” work as long as it does not interact with their “serious” industry. Dr. Leete says that “they permit them to work at all only because it is fully understood that a certain regular requirement of labor, of a sort adapted to their powers, is well for body and mind” (257). In other words, they permit them to work because it makes them prettier. One sees the condescension even more clearly when Dr. Leete explains, “We have given them a world of their own, with its emulations, ambitions, and careers, and I assure you they are very happy in it” (259). And finally, to see how little society’s respect for women has “progressed,” we learn that their main role and value is still as producers of children. In fact “the higher positions in the feminine army of industry are intrusted only to women who have been both wives and mothers, as they alone fully represent their sex” (261).Perhaps this is a challenge that no utopian writer has yet conquered: creating a society that everyone thinks is utopian. In Bellamy’s future society, Dr. Leete explains that “we have nothing to make laws about. The fundamental principles on which our society is founded settle for all time the strifes and misunderstandings which in your day called for legislation” (208). Even if we concede that the elimination of money and personal property would obviate many laws, how can we be convinced that there are no legal or moral issues on which people disagree?The yearning to create a perfect society has captured many artists, and will no doubt continue to do so. But who decides what is perfect, much less what is better? Who defines progress?
—Jessica
Edward Bellamy is a distant relative of a friend of mine. Until my friend sent me a link to a Wikipedia article about Uncle Ed, I’d never heard of him. But I thought I’d take a look at one of his books, which I was to learn was one of the most popular, most influential books of late Nineteenth and early Twentieth-Century America. Indeed, all over America it spawned Bellamy clubs devoted to promoting Edward Bellamy’s social theories.Looking Backward was written in 1887. By the magic of imagination, it looks backward onto 1887 from the year 2000. It anticipates, for America and for the greater part of the world, a workers’ paradise that arrives, not by violence, but by the good common sense of people everywhere who, when the time is ripe, give in to the irresistible force of social evolution.For me, part of the fun of the book was the way it sometimes resonated, sometimes clashed, with four other works: Plato’s The Republic, Voltaire’s Candide, Marx’ The Communist Manifesto, and Skinner’s Walden II.In Looking Backward, Edward Bellamy is by turn clairvoyant (he anticipates the credit card, electronic home entertainment, and a Walmart-style shopping center), incisive (his critique of capitalism is on target), quaint (he imagines that all Americans will eventually adopt the fashions, the manners, and the values of the Nineteenth-Century American privileged class), naïve (he believes you can end human rivalry by eliminating the perceived need for rivalry), chauvinistic (his view of women is of sugar and spice and everything nice), pedantic (he has given us one talkie book!), sweet (he breaks up the talk with the story of a budding romance), and engaging (for all the talk, and for all the odd little quirks, he keeps you reading).But, most of all, from the perspective of the actual, factual Twenty-First Century, in Looking Backward, Bellamy is profoundly disturbing. By Bellamy’s reckoning, there should never have been a Great War, but there was. There should never have been a Russian Revolution, but there was. There should never have been a Great Depression, or a Second World War, or the atrocities of National Socialism, or any such, year after year after year. There should never have been a Stalin, or a Hitler, or a Mao, or any of their ilk, year after year after year. But there have been. So, why? That it so urgently raises that one question is why Looking Backward remains relevant this side of the year 2000.
—Dean Summers
