Backward -- a Positive Spin

¶ … Backward -- a positive spin on an Orwellian future?

In his 19th century philosophical novel Looking Backward, the socialist Edward Bellamy prophesizes a kind of quasi-Marxist, yet utterly moral utopia. The nation is the "sole capitalist and land-owner" in Bellamy's fictional universe (Chapter 11). In other words, all property is held in common by all of the citizens (Chapter 11). The world is so bountiful that everyone retires at age forty-five except judges. There is no crime and thus no need for prisons or mental hospitals, Depression, suicide, mental illness, and even deceit are eliminated, as poverty and the economic and social divisions between rich and poor have been eradicated. All able-bodied individuals work happily at the occupation to which they are best suited and both men and women work in this liberated vision of the future, but they work by choice, not by compulsion.

The men and women work in service of the state, and the state provides for all of their needs. Life is, rather than more bureaucratic as one might assume under socialism, vastly simpler, says a resident: "We have no such things as law schools," as everyone intuitively understands the demands of the law (Chapter 19). "The law as a special science is obsolete. It was a system of casuistry which the elaborate artificiality of the old order of society absolutely required to interpret it, but only a few of the plainest and simplest legal maxims have any application to the existing state of the world. Everything touching the relations of men to one another is now simpler, beyond any comparison, than in your day" (Chapter 19). The instinct of compassion towards one's fellow man and woman is the main moral and legal standard of behavior for citizens.

However, although Bellamy insists that all residents are happily obedient by choice, there is something Orwellian about the denial of all negative emotions in the hearts of the citizens. Are the citizens really so happy, or just afraid to say that they are not happy? It is difficult to look at the stridently militaristic lifestyles of the citizens and not see echoes of the Soviet Union. There is freedom of choice, Bellamy insists, in career choices and how women choose men that are most fit to be their consorts, but how much of this choice is determined by state pressure, or would be if his vision became reality, seems debatable.

Admittedly, even according to the happy residents, certain required actions by law are imposed, such as "every man shall serve the nation [as a soldier] for a fixed period" (Chapter 11). But this is seen as a positive, as traditionally capitalist free societies left every man to "his choice....between working, stealing, or starving" (Chapter 11). Of course, men could still serve in the army, even in Bellamy's time, but this is ignored in the construct of the novel. All requirements that instruct citizens to serve the state are seen as benefits, unlike those in other lands, as these requirements are ostensibly taken on willingly, and called "merely a codification of the law of nature - the edict of Eden - by which it is made equal in its pressure on men, our system depends in no particular upon legislation, but is entirely voluntary, the logical outcome of the operation of human nature under rational conditions" (Chapter 11).