Looking Backward

 It is notorious that utopias are a great deal easier to gesture toward as a negative ideal than to describe as a positive one. When we invoke the utopian ideal as a contrast with the world around us, we can easily see the inadequacies of the latter. But, the more we try to describe the "perfect" society that should replace it, the more it sounds unappealing. As Orwell pointed out long ago, no one has yet succeeded in portraying a utopian society in which we can imagine actually being happy. 

As a result, utopian literature always manages to carry conviction so long as it is denouncing the evils of the present, but it becomes utterly unpersuasive as soon as it tries to articulate the New Jerusalem that would come after it. 

Even the first and perhaps best utopian novel is no exception to this. The first part of Thomas More's classic work is far and away the more human part. We cheer on his disgust and outrage at the social injustice of sixteenth century England, with its enclosures and bloody codes. But who among us would actually want to live in the utopia that More conjures in the second part of the novel, which he offers (only half-seriously) as a blueprint for its replacement? 

The same holds true, I find, for Edward Bellamy's utopian novel Looking Backward: 2000-1887: an acknowledged American classic that I read this week. The most powerful sections of the novel are the ones set in Bellamy's own century. His searing indictment of a society of ruthless competition, in which the weak are left to perish, rings entirely true. It is only when he turns to describing the perfect world to replace it that, suddenly, "the oracles are dumb or cheat" (James Thomson). 

Bellamy begins his book with a metaphor for nineteenth century society that depicts it as a great coach in which the elite ride in luxury, while a team of all the rest of the human species strains at the ropes to pull them laboriously up a mountain. It's easy even for those riding in comfort to see the injustice of the situation, Bellamy notes. But this awareness makes it all the harder for them to change it—because the worst thing they can imagine is losing their seats, and having to join the struggling laborers below. 

This does perfectly well describe life in a capitalist society. Most people do not clutch their possessions so tightly out of mere avarice. The more common problem is that we all live under the shadow of what Bellamy calls "Uncertainty." As Bertolt Brecht once put it, in describing life in Los Angeles, "[C]oncern about being thrown into the street/ Consumes the inhabitants of the villas no less/ Than the inhabitants of the barracks." (Firmage trans.) And that surely is a vision of hell. 

This is the great fact of the economic situation that ethical theories like those of Peter Singer failed to take into account. In a famous article, Singer argued that every person had a moral obligation to devote their surplus income—above the level required for their own subsistence—to the maintenance of others through charity. To do otherwise would be tantamount to seeing a drowning child in a lake and refusing to throw them a rope. 

As a college student, when I first read this essay, I found it very persuasive. I thought—how could any of us not spend our excess income on the claims of humanity, after reading this? And the critiques of the other philosophers did not seem at all convincing. I seem to recall reading a response from Thomas Nagel (I think it was), arguing something to the effect that "Singer may be right in theory, but we all know we're not going to do that—because then we would have to give up our season tickets to the opera!"

In actual adult life, however, Nagel's description of the economic situation seems as far afield as Singer's. In reality, a vanishingly small part of my income is spent on discretionary luxuries for myself (and none of it at all on opera tickets). But that also doesn't mean (mea culpa) that I spend the remainder on charity. Rather, most of what does not immediately disappear into rent, utilities, and other unavoidable expenses goes into my savings. 

This worldly asceticism of mine, meanwhile, is not due simply to greed—but rather to the fact that my future income is not indefinitely guaranteed. I have no idea when I might be unemployed in the future. Right now, I'm on a part-time contract to provide freelance writing for a nonprofit. What could be less certain to continue indefinitely into the future? So any income I don't spend needs to be hoarded against the future day when I have no more earnings to live on. 

The fact that neither Singer nor Nagel thought of this suggests more than anything perhaps the odd and unrepeatable position of the mid-century American academic. Members of this profession truly were living in a post-scarcity utopia. So long as they had tenure, they could count on guaranteed lifelong employment at a generous professional salary. So any money they kept really was retained for their discretionary immediate use—season tickets to the opera, e.g.

Bellamy was wiser and more humane in recognizing that the failure of private charity in his era to remedy all ills was not due exclusively to the grasping and greedy nature of humankind. Rather, it was due to economic "uncertainty" that affected the rich as well as the poor and that, under capitalist conditions, could force the one to trade places with the other at any moment. The rich therefore had no choice—if they wished to provide security to themselves and their families—but to go on seeking more. 

This is perhaps why human psychology never seems to reach a point of satiation. There is no amount of money that a person can attain that will guarantee them perfectly against all future potential reversals of fortune. Like Croesus, no matter how rich they become, they might still die poor. 

"It is perhaps for this reason," as E.H. Carr writes in The Twenty Years' Crisis, "that the exercise of power always appears to beget the appetite for more power." No one thinks they are grasping for more—rather, that they are merely shoring up their current position against potential future threats. This is why—as Carr puts it—every party to every war thinks they are fighting a defensive war, even if a preemptive one. And every economic coup is meant merely to offset the threat of future loss. 

In pointing out the universal insecurity and misery of this situation, Bellamy is far from wrong. And moreover, his plea for utopianism makes for a better political program than many, because he recognizes that everyone has an interest in promoting greater economic security. He does not portray the effort to build the just society as a matter of the good overcoming the evil—but rather of people uniformly recognizing their mutual self-interest in promoting the same goal. 

But to say that economic insecurity is a bad thing (which no one could doubt) is not the same thing as to explain how to solve it. After all, it would require a tremendous material base of prosperity and abundance to ensure every member of the human family perfect immunity from the threat of impoverishment. 

How is this reign of plenty to be achieved, though, if not by means of private competition? After all, the economic war of all against all—however morally repulsive—has undeniably been the greatest engine the world has yet known for accumulating great sums of wealth. 

Bellamy, to his credit, has actually thought this through more than many a socialist writer before and since. He recognizes, as some have not, the problem of incentives. Moreover, he has a solution that would probably prove workable. I'm just not sure it is one that any of us would have cause to desire. 

Bellamy's future utopia—in which his nineteenth century protagonist awakens to find himself, in the then-distant year 2000— has, we soon learn, adopted a system approximating that of universal basic income. Every member of society, by virtue of their humanity, is issued a "credit card" that entitles them to a certain dollar amount to spend at the state-owned warehouses dispensing goods. Within the limits of the credit allowance in their account, how they spend this money is discretionary (though they may lose the privilege and become wards of the state if they are reckless "spendthrifts" with it). 

One will quickly object: why would anyone work, in this future society, if their income is guaranteed to them in the same fixed amount no matter what they do? And, for those who do work, why would they exert themselves to any special effort, if the reward is the same no matter what? And, then, in turn, if no one is doing productive labor, or making special efforts, or saving and investing any money (since all are allowed only the same fixed amount), then how does society produce the enormous surplus every year that it would take to support all its members in a life of such abundance? 

Bellamy replies: other incentives are provided. For one thing, participation in society's "industrial army" is compulsory for all citizens. Compulsory how? At first, Bellamy's twentieth century interlocutor, Doctor Leete, is vague on this point (Leete serves throughout the novel as the expounder of Bellamy's own social theories and the expositor of his utopia's social plan—the nominal nineteenth century protagonist of the book often being reduced merely to the role of Socrates' interlocutors in the Republic. "Ah, it is just as you say!").

Leete at first says that a term of service in the industrial army is so much taken for granted that no one thinks to shirk it. It is simply the social norm. And this, indeed, is plausible enough. In a society where such service was legally compulsory, it would soon enough come to be internalized as obligatory. But presumably, such compulsion is still backstopped at some stage of remove by the threat of government coercion. 

And indeed, this proves to be the case. In a later section, Doctor Leete lets the cat out of the bag. A person who absolutely refuses to do service in the army, he admits, will be "sentenced to solitary imprisonment on bread and water till he consents." (No wonder Hayek saw in socialist planning a "road to serfdom," or Belloc saw in the same a path to the "servile state"!)

This of course makes sense. In seeking to encourage the mutual cooperation that is needed on a large scale to sustain a complex modern order, human society has only so many tools at its disposal. Society can try to encourage people's participation through appealing to their self-interest—hence the mutual exchanges of the economic marketplace that Bellamy denounces as a cruel war of all against all. Society can also appeal to people's sense of disinterested altruism. 

Bellamy argues that this latter motive—the motive of "honor"—is currently underutilized in society, and he is no doubt right. He questions why the military should be so effective in calling forth motives of self-sacrifice, if we could not also translate those motives into peaceful economic activity. And indeed, I'm sure a lot more collaboration could be gotten out of people on a society-wide scale if we recognized public service as something we esteem. 

But even Bellamy does not pretend that pure altruism can be the sole motivating force needed to sustain complex social machinery consistently and indefinitely. He is insistent, after all, that the new social order he promises does not depend upon any wholesale remaking of human nature. People need to be placed into a new environment, he argues, but they do not need to suddenly become angels. And historically, altruism and voluntarism may have been powerful forces, to be sure—but they are seldom observed to operate for long or on a large scale outside of very small human groups (typically ones whose members are genetically related to one another). 

Bellamy must therefore call in some other motive to human cooperative endeavor. But what? Well, once altruism and the mutual exchanges of the marketplace are accounted for, there is only one thing left—state coercion (in other words—Weber's "organized violence"). And, as the passage above indicates, Bellamy did in fact leave room for such coercion in his social scheme. 

At the same time, however, he argues that such coercion would be minimal. It would be no worse than the inevitable coercion already found in any society. After all, people are compelled to work under our current social system by the threat of starvation, Bellamy argues; is forcing them to work under the threat of solitary confinement that much worse? By demanding labor under force of law, Bellamy argues (through Doctor Leete), his perfect society is merely enforcing "the edict of Eden." 

Besides, he argues, the fear of this punishment is only a small motivating factor within the industrial army of the twentieth century. The far more potent incentives to production, he argues, are the prizes people hope to win, the ranks they hope to attain at periodic "regradings," the ribbons and honors and privileges that are accorded to the most devoted workers. In short, it is a society of Stakhanovites. 

All too often, the objection is raised to schemes like Bellamy's that they would not "work" in practice. To the contrary, however, I can see such a system "working" perfectly well. People can indeed be induced to labor by the promise of empty trophies, hollow markers of relative prestige, and the ultimate threat of punishment lying beneath them. The British professional classes would not have lasted so long if people were not deeply motivated by the allure of pointless accolades. And the Soviet economic system endured for decades through enforcing compliance at the barrel of a gun. 

The problem with such a system is not that it would necessarily crumble, or that it could not succeed in at least feeding and clothing people and providing them with a bare level of subsistence. The problem is rather that it is hard to imagine it yielding the best human society we can conceive of. It is a system that would reward the sorts of personalities that thrive best in bureaucratic hierarchies—adepts in the arts of toadying and bootlicking, in short. 

Indeed, Bellamy frequently analogizes his future society to a military organization expanded to encompass the entirety of society. And a vast army that punishes and court-marshals the insubordinate, while rewarding its loyal members with ribbons and medals, could no doubt last for a very long time. Its members would assuredly know their social roles; they would have a position and a guaranteed income and a place in line at the government ration dispensaries. 

But, such a person we can only imagine in the role of W.H. Auden's "Unknown Citizen," employee of the immense benevolent bureaucracy, "Fudge Motors." Indeed, Bellamy's smug Doctor Leete sounds as if he would be very content indeed operating as a functionary for Fudge Motors. One can easily imagine him responding to the closing questions of Auden's poem exactly as the poem's self-satisfied bureaucratic speaker does: "Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:/ Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard." 

Indeed, Auden's poem offers a perfect window into how what seemed a "utopia" to a nineteenth century writer like Bellamy would quickly come to seem a dystopia to a twentieth century one—as soon as governments around the world actually started to try to put ideas like Bellamy's into practice. 

Of course, Bellamy is too much of a good liberal and civil libertarian at heart to have had any sympathy for the Bolshevik model—had he lived to see it. He is aware that there is an obvious downside to having the government control literally everything. Therefore, he carves out certain professions that are exempt from the "industrial army." 

To be sure, Bellamy (who studied for the bar but never practiced) declares—with Jack Cade—that in his utopia, there will be no lawyers. And rightly so. But the other liberal professions will persist and simply operate outside the bounds of the state. 

Writers and ministers, for instance, may make a living for themselves if they choose—if they can induce enough of their fellow citizens to support them through voluntary expenditures from their credit cards. Thus, practitioners of these literate professions are the only members of society who will remain subject to market mechanisms. And if they fail to make a living by these means, they must return to do their service in the "industrial army." 

But if Bellamy can recognize that—at least with regard to literature and religion—it is better to rely on a system of free exchange (even if it induces selfish competition) than to subject them to state control (and it is worth noting that at least one of these professions was close to Bellamy's heart; Looking Backward would go on to become a bestseller; so perhaps he had good reason to see competition in the literary marketplace as a social good—it was clearly one form of competition in which he uniquely could thrive!), then could he not see that something similar might be true in other domains as well, even if these fields were less dear or well known to him personally? 

Moreover, Bellamy wishes us to believe that the society of the future would see service in the "industrial army" as equally honorable a life course as any other—even as some members (writers and ministers, e.g.) manage to escape from service in it to win a life of relative leisure and reflection, and other members manage to enter highly-esteemed intellectual professions through passing rigorous exams. 

Would this "equality of honor" for all jobs and professions really last for long, though, under such conditions? Or is what Bellamy is describing not actually something closer to a universal workhouse, where the detritus of economic life are forced into hard labor at the barrel of a gun, while the lucky winners of the "meritocratic" rat race are free to live lives of artistic and intellectual splendor, casting pitying and deprecatory glances on the ones left behind? 

In all these ways and others, what Bellamy is ultimately describing seems not so much a free, let alone a perfect society, as a monstrous tyranny of bureaucrats, social workers, teachers, engineers, scientists, and doctors. It is like the British system of "barristers," with their arcane prestige hierarchies of wigs, inns of court, university ties, blue bags, and silk tights—except extended to cover every single aspect of society. The people who are skilled at following well-trodden professional paths arrayed in hierarchical stages would thrive in such a setting. But god help the rest of us!

From the vantage point of the present—long after the year 2000 has passed, which Bellamy envisioned as the remote future—we can at any rate say that society did not choose to adopt Bellamy's vision of the good life. We did not decide that nationalizing all industries was the best course, and that we would rather live under a tyranny of bureaucrats than under the tyranny of competition. A government monopoly over all productive economic activity seems far less desirable to us now than it did to Bellamy in the 1880s. 

But does this mean that none of Bellamy's predictions came true, or that he has nothing to teach us? Surely not. For one thing, twenty-first century society has attained a level of material prosperity incommensurate to that of former ages, just as Bellamy predicted it would. In some of his passages on this subject, Bellamy is prescient—and in this sense, he was writing downright good sci-fi. Bellamy's notion that in the future, people would be able to listen to recorded music on demand, foretells the radio by many decades; and in his belief that by the year 2000, people could even order up music to match their current mood, he almost seems to foresee something like Spotify. 

Nor were these great achievements of abundance wrought purely through market mechanisms. Government did indeed play a significant role in removing some of the worst cruelties of Bellamy's age. People in his era lived with a degree of economic uncertainty that would be unthinkable to us today—and the government solutions we ultimately found to these evils seem so obvious and par for the course to us now, that we might indeed explain them to a visitor from the nineteenth century with the same level of indulgent arrogance and smug condescension that Doctor Leete employs. 

For instance, it's impossible for us to imagine now living in a world where all one's life savings could vanish overnight, if one's bank happened to go under in a financial panic. The idea that the government could simply insure all of these deposits up to a certain level, through a federal scheme, must have seemed exotic and utopian to people in Bellamy's era—but it seems perfectly natural and obvious to us now. 

Likewise with social security. One of the many moving passages in Bellamy's book occurs when he describes the pathetic attempts of people in his era to purchase "life insurance," when precisely what their society utterly lacked was any true financial "insurance" in any sense—any certain guarantee that a person who had worked all their life would not end up destitute at the end of it. The fact that we would actually provide a system of federalized old age pensions now seems inevitable to us—but it must have struck Bellamy's conservative contemporaries as just as "socialistical" and utopian as his other schemes. 

Bellamy's horror and indignation at the poverty, inequality, and general insecurity of his era still moves us, therefore—and from the vantage point of the present, we can say that he was partially right. Society can actually solve some of these problems—or at least, significantly improve them. And it can do so through concerted effort organized at the government level. 

As much as it is tempting, then, to regard Bellamy's socialist paradise as refuted by cruel experience—to say, when we regard the spectacle of vicious human competition and economic cruelty, as Vachel Lindsay once put it—"So [man] will be, though law be clear as crystal,/ Tho’ all men plan to live in harmony"—as tempting as it is to scoff at Bellamy's utopia, I say—it could yet be the case that he was more right than wrong. The evils of his time were not all as ineradicable as the conservatives of the era liked to believe. And so, what right do we have to say, in our era, that the lingering evils of our time—the evils that we have not yet managed to abolish—must be any more permanent and inevitable? 

I don't think writing another utopia will get us much closer to the solutions to these evils. But pointing to what is currently lacking, what we don't like about the present, and what needs to change, can actually move us in the right direction. Bellamy is proof of this. As I say, few of us would want to live in the utopia he describes. But we can all agree, upon finishing his book, that we are with him in wanting to change the nineteenth century he describes. Social justice, then, can indeed be approached apophatically. We can point to what utopia isn't, even if we don't yet know what it is, and thereby approach the more just and perfect society by a sort of sideways motion—never quite looking forward, but always instead (pun intended) looking backward.

Indeed (spoiler alert), there is a passage late in Bellamy's novel in which the protagonist wakes up to find himself all the way back in the nineteenth century. His journey through the Boston of his day, realizing what an appalling contrast it makes to how human beings should live, is one of the most moving in the book. Seeing the tenements and squalor and injustice and self-seeking all around him, he cries, "I have been in Golgotha [...] I have seen Humanity hanging on a cross!"

The protagonist then wakes up again, to find himself back in the twentieth century (another spoiler alert). He realizes that his journey back to the nineteenth century was itself the dream—or, rather, the nightmare—rather than his visit to the future. He likens his sense of relief upon making this discovery to that of "an escaped convict who dreams that he has been recaptured and brought back to his dark and reeking dungeon, and opens his eyes to see the heaven's vault spread above him"—so great is the contrast between the deplorable world of Bellamy's century and the plenteous reign of justice in the future. 

But then, interestingly, Bellamy's protagonist introduces a note of wistfulness for the flawed and iniquitous century he left behind. He notes that, during his brief return in his nightmare to the world of the nineteenth century, he had played the role of the prophet. He had urged his contemporaries that a better way was possible, only to be met with scorn. Now, upon finding himself in the perfect twentieth century world instead, he realizes that he has become the inheritor of a world that he did nothing in his own time—when he actually lived there—to bring about. He therefore almost wishes he could return to the nineteenth century, so that he could be a part of building the better world, rather than simply awakening one day to find all of this noble work already finished and behind him.

"Better for you, better for you," he then reflects, "had this evil dream been the reality, and this fair reality the dream; better your part pleading for crucified humanity with a scoffing generation, than here, drinking of wells you digged not, and eating of trees whose husbandmen you stoned [...] Better, truly."

Bellamy's point, no doubt, is that it is actually our privilege—we, the readers in an imperfect present, rather than denizens of the future—that we are not in the position of the protagonist. It is our privilege that we are still trapped in a flawed world, rather than utopia. It is to us and our generation, then, that falls the task of improving the world. It is to us that falls the glory of inheriting this broken and sorry world, and having the chance to contribute our share to redeeming it. 

And indeed, thank god, he's right. Praised be, we do not live in utopia. We live in a world of human drudgery and sorrow and iniquity, just as Bellamy did. But we also live in a world that is manifoldly improved compared to the one Bellamy inhabited. And so—even if we cannot envision the ideal utopia—we certainly are not entitled to say that no further improvements are possible. 

We can say that we cannot imagine wholly doing away with motives of self-seeking and competition and coercion in human life. But we can say that their force and cruelty—the strife of existence—can at least be gradually modulated and attenuated with time. We can say that there is no reason why any person in today's world should be deprived of food, shelter, or medical care that is within our society's power to provide. 

We can say, with Bellamy, that it is society's obligation to provide for the weak and sick and indigent, as much as for the strong, seeing as we all stand on the shoulders of what society has provided for us before, and that none of us (as Obama liked to point out in some of his most eloquent moments) is truly a "self-made man." We can say, as Bellamy did, that "A solution which leaves an unaccounted-for residuum is no solution at all; and our solution of the problem of human society would have been none at all had it left the lame, the sick, and the blind outside with the beasts, to fare as they might. Better far have left the strong and well unprovided for than these burdened ones[.]"

We can say, in short, that even if we cannot abolish human nature, we can nevertheless strive eternally to better it. As Vachel Lindsay concluded the poem I quoted above: after acknowledging the ineradicable selfishness of base human nature, he nonetheless urged in the end: "Come, let us vote against our human nature[.]" This was, as he put it in the title of the poem, the reason "why I voted the socialist ticket." And so, let us join him. Let us vote for utopia—"To heal our everlasting sinfulness/ And make us sages with transfigured faces."