Rating: 3/5, average
Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy was written in 1887 and was the third best-selling novel of its time after Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Ben Hur. It also inspired “Bellamy societies” who met to discuss Bellamy’s work or start utopian communities based off of the society in Looking Backward. Despite the novel’s popularity at the time, I had never heard of it before someone suggested it for our science fiction book club, so I was really curious to see what got people so passionate about it back then and why it’s completely dropped off the radar since then.
Looking Backward is about a Bostonian who is put into a hypnotic sleep in 1887 and wakes up in the year 2000. In the future, all the corporations in the United States have gotten so large they merged into one single megacorporation run by the U.S. government (so essentially socialism by way of unchecked capitalism). This actually doesn’t seem that far-fetched since we have “everything stores” like Wal-Mart and Amazon and services like Google that are trying to control global business, with the byproduct of making business more efficient.
In Boston of the year 2000, the workforce is organized into an “industrial army”. Children go to school until they are 21, and then they choose jobs according to their talents and interests and work from the ages of 21-45. If there are too few people interested in a field of labor (like janitorial duty), the government reduces the hours required to make it more attractive. University is free until age 21, but really difficult, so only people that are cut out for it are able to stay. Everyone is paid the same wage yearly and given a credit punch-card which they can use at government warehouses. Social norms strongly discourage laziness, but in case that fails, anyone who refuses to work is locked away and given bread and water.
There is a separate corps for disabled people and a separate corps for women in addition to the main corps for able-bodied men which have different types of work and fewer hours. All the cooking and cleaning is done by the industrial army, which Bellamy argues is more efficient than individual women doing the individual cooking and cleaning. There are no jails, criminals are treated in hospitals instead (except for the people who don’t work, that seems to be the only thing treated as a crime, lol). Bellamy says that there is almost no insanity because people aren’t stressed about making a living.
Everybody earns the same wages, but there’s still social prestige to working in more challenging fields like law or medicine. Writers have to pay to be published, and they set their own royalties on their books. If they get enough credits in royalties, they can be exempted from the service for a period of time. This is basically how self-publishing works now, so that was pretty on-point. Bellamy also predicted larger class sizes in schools – he said everything would be made more efficient by scaling up.
The homes people live in are simple, but the public spaces are extravagant. I thought it was amusing that all the streets are covered by giant umbrellas when it rains instead of people carrying their own umbrellas.
Bellamy actually did a great job predicting radio technology – the people in his future have tubes in their houses that they can use to listen to live music any time of day, with different channels playing different music, and schedules passed out every week. This was pretty impressive, considering radios weren’t widely used until the 1930s.
Bellamy makes some great arguments against the capitalist economy of his time and for socialism:
- Everyone is dependent on the state, but independent of each other. This means the poor aren’t dependent on the rich, the employed aren’t dependent upon their employers, women aren’t dependent upon men, children aren’t dependent upon their parents. Bellamy says the interpersonal dependence people suffer under capitalism causes “the maximum of personal humiliation to all classes of recipients”. Without class relationships of dependence, the lower classes wouldn’t feel like they have to suck up to the upper classes and the upper classes wouldn’t feel entitled to abuse the lower classes.
- Lots of resources are wasted when people compete instead of collaborating. Competition encourages people to monopolize and misuse resources. Bellamy compares labor to a water source that should be regulated, lest some fields be dried out and others be flooded.
- Inequality makes life worse for everyone because the educated and rich have to live surrounded by the uneducated and poor. “The cultured man in your age was like one up to the neck in a nauseous bog solacing himself with a smelling bottle.” In the preacher’s sermon at the end, he points out that in the Victorian age “the lives of the more sensitive and generous-hearted of them were rendered well nigh unendurable by the intensity of their sympathies.”
- Both classes are haunted by the specter of Anxiety: Poor are anxious to make ends meet and rich are anxious not to lose their wealth.
- Living under capitalism has a lot of other psychological downsides, like associating your self-worth with your salary, making human relationships feel more strained and artificial, being constantly assaulted by advertisements, and being expected to live up or down to the class in which you are born instead of being free to do what you love.
Would I want to live in this society? Yes, actually it sounds great… all you have to do is try and you can get by, and if you work a really unpleasant job you only have to work a couple hours a day. Personally, I have trouble finding work, so guaranteed work for a guaranteed income sounds F*cking amazing.
Do I think this society would work? I have no idea. Bellamy goes into a fair bit of detail, and things do seem to be going that way with the consolidation of major conglomerates, but it still feels far-fetched. I think he has things worked out pretty well at the lower end of the labor market, but I don’t know if social prestige would be enough incentive to get people to do the work necessary to gain the skills to work at the higher end of the labor market. I’m also not certain what kinds of activity would be considered acceptable and which would be considered not worthy of state funding.
I think of this book as sort of an anti-Atlas Shrugged. There’s not much of a plot to this book, since it’s mostly a political manifesto. They both drag like hell through the middle and have a long speech at the end. This book had the advantage of brevity, though, at 240 pages to Atlas Shrugged‘s 1168. The reason I give this book a 3 and Atlas Shrugged a 4 though is because I felt I learned more from reading Atlas Shrugged, since it was a perspective I wasn’t already in tune with.
The first 20% of Looking Backward sets up the protagonist’s past life and his awakening into the world of the future, the middle 60% is an explanation of the utopian society, and the last 20% is a review and wrap-up. Its structure is very straightforward, and I would say this is not a book you would read for pure entertainment. I did enjoy most of Bellamy’s metaphors for society, but I found they got repetitive after a while. I thought it was a slog until about 80% through, where it started to pick up speed.
I really liked the last 20%, and one scene in particular where the protagonist goes through the slums of Boston and then returns to his fiancee’s dinner table and describes to them the evils of capitalist society and the beauty of the future communist society and they respond by kicking him out of the house. It reminded me a lot of the scene in The Vegetarian where Yeong-hye goes to her husband’s boss’s house and everyone is scandalized that she doesn’t eat meat. People like to live oblivious to the suffering their lifestyle causes others, and they often do get angry if you point out their selfish (though conventional) behavior.
Anyway, before I close this review, I just wanted to mention how many things in this book reminded me of H.P. Lovecraft. The protagonist is definitely an anxious type and has to be put to sleep by a hypnotist every night. There’s a scene after he awakes in the year 2000 where he almost goes mad. He also lives in Massachusetts. They also both have a dread of the encroaching slums on their dwindling estates. They share both a fear and a fascination for Arabic culture (the protagonist dreams about being an Abencerrage and then describes the children in factories living like those in “Moslem towns”).
In closing, I thought the book was okay. I wouldn’t really recommend it, to be honest. It’s boring and doesn’t teach you much, but it’s kind of quaint and it does make you more motivated to do something about income inequality and more open to alternatives for our economic system.
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