Article by Edward Bellamy: “When American author and journalist Edward Bellamy published his utopian novel Looking Backward: 2000–1887 in 1888, he didn’t know that it would be one of the best-selling books of the era; that it would inspire political groups around the world; or that it would influence the thinking of some of the most prominent intellectuals of the time.
All this he didn’t know. But he did know that the slums, sweatshops, and unsafe factories he observed as America industrialized in the second half of the nineteenth century, alongside the skyrocketing wealth of a handful of men, couldn’t represent the pinnacle of human society; there had to be something better.
One of the fundamental ways we misperceive the world is by believing that the ways things are is the way they have to be; that the world as it is today reflects the natural order of things. Looking Backward was Bellamy’s attempt to help people avoid falling into this cognitive quicksand. Because if the way things are is the way they have to be, what use is there trying to change them? Or, even if change is possible, you’re constrained by the “nature of things,” so there is only so much you can do. Through the novel, Bellamy imagined what the world could be in the year 2000, if humans realized their rational and moral potential, and hoped to inspire readers to work toward achieving it.
The lead character in Looking Backward is Julian West, a well-to-do thirty-something living in Boston who falls into a deep sleep in 1887 and wakes up over a century later in the year 2000. When West comes to, he discovers a utopian society, free from war and economic and social injustice, and full of community and solidarity. As the novel unfurls, West learns chapter by chapter how society has been organized in order to achieve this.
There is a guaranteed income (similar to a universal basic income); work is tied to motivation and duty as opposed to external incentives; and the good life is found through relationships rather than material consumption. And of course West is tasked with explaining to those in 2000 what things were like in the nineteenth century—they find it hard to believe society could have ever tolerated such inequality and injustice. (And like any good science fiction author, Bellamy was the first to dream up several inventions, including the clock radio and the idea of a payment card—there is a monument to the credit card in Russia with Bellamy’s name on it.)…(More)”.
