ON MONDAY AND TUESDAY, I’d discussed Looking Backward, Edward Bellamy’s 1888 utopian tract.
In it, a “refined” young man of 1880s Boston awakens from a 113-year trance to find himself in the all-enlightened, worry-free Year 2000. The doctor who’d revived him (and the doc’s comely daughter) then spend the rest of the book telling him how wonderful everything has become.
The chief feature of Bellamy’s future is a singular, government-run “Industrial Army” that owns all the means of production and distribution, employs every citizen aged 21-45 (except child-bearing women), and pays everybody the same wage (less-desirable jobs offer shorter hours or other non-monetary perks).
Obviously, nothing like that ever happened. Soviet communisim was a police-state regime that used egalitarian ideals to justify its brutality. Euro-socialism featured government-owned industrial companies that operated just like privately-owned companies, only less efficiently and less profitably.
But could Bellamy’s fantasy have ever worked in anything close to its pure form? Undoubtedly not.
It would’ve required that everybody (or at least enough people to impose their will on the rest) submit to a single, purified ideology based on rationality and selflessness. Any uncensored history of any major religious movement shows how impossible that is, even within a single generation.
We are an ambitious and competitive species. The “rugged individualist” notion, long exploited by U.S. corporations and advertisers, has a real basis in human nature.
We are also a diverse species. Especially in the U.S. whose citizens are gathered from the whole rest of the world. Bellamy’s totalized mass society would require a social re-engineering project even greater, and more uprooting, than that of the steam-age society he’d lived in. The kindly-doctor character’s insistence that all these changes had coalesced peacefully, as an inevitable final stage of industrial consolidation, may be the least likely-seeming prediction in the whole tome.
As I wrote previously, most utopian fantasies require that everybody in a whole society conform to the writer’s prescribed sensibility. (Some even require that everybody belong to the writer’s own gender or race.)
In most cases, the prescribed sensibility is that of a writer, or at least of a planner–ordered, systematic, more knowledgeable about structures than about people.
The impossibility of such monocultural utopias hasn’t stopped writers and planners from thinking them up. But at least some folks are realizing any idealized future has to acknowledge that people are different from one another and always will be.
We’ll talk more about this idea of a post-mass, post-postmodern future in future weeks.
TOMORROW: Musings on Biggest-Shopping-Day Eve.
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