Book Review: Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy

(Chapter Headings: Introduction)

Hello, my name is Matitya and welcome to Matitya’s Many Musings on a Myriad of Matters. Today’s topic, “Matitya, what is your problem with Edward Bellamy?”

(Chapter Headings: Explanation)

In my second Musing , I took a cheap shot at the Socialist book Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy. I did that because, even though it’s nominally a novel, it’s a manifesto. It led more people to Socialism than Karl Marx did. When Bellamy died in 1898, the American Fabian declared

“It is doubtful if any man, in his own lifetime, ever exerted so great an influence upon the social beliefs of his fellow-beings as did Edward Bellamy. Marx, at the time of his death, had won but slight recognition from the mass; and though his influence in the progressive struggle has become paramount, it is through his interpreters, and not in his own voice, that he speaks to the multitude. But Bellamy spoke simply and directly; his imagination conceived, and his art pictured, the framework of the future in such clear and bold outlines that the commonest mind could understand and appreciate.” Given the influence of Bellamy’s book on the Socialist movement, it’s fair for me to comment on that book’s content.

With that in mind, here is my review.

(Chapter Headings: General sentiments)

The short version is, it’s worth reading but nothing to write home about. Now I’ll give you the long version.

(Chapter Headings: Premise)

The story has a good premise. The main character, Julian West, because he suffers from insomnia hires his servant Sawyer to hypnotise him. Then Julian’s house catches fire and Sawyer fails to rescue him but Julian survives and remains in stasis until he is woken by Doctor Leete in the year 2000. Julian is in a future world radically different from his own and he falls in love with Dr. Leete’s daughter, Edith. This premise can work. In Rip van Winkle by Washington Irving, Rip is tricked into going to the colonial New York mountainside by dwarves who bewitch him into falling asleep for the next twenty years. When Rip wakes up in post-revolutionary New York, he struggles to adapt to the new era. Irving does a good job in showing how harsh the toll of time takes upon “poor Rip van Winkle”.

In the 2005 movie Ultimate Avengers: The Movie, Captain America is frozen in an iceberg while fighting alien Nazis in 1945, and rescued 60 years later. Captain America struggles to adapt to living in 21st Century America, though it’s not as pronounced as in the Rip van Winkle story. The Man out of Time premise also works in the other direction. In A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, a 19th Century blacksmith named Hank Morgan is knocked out in a fight and wakes up in King Arthur’s England and that book was quite good.

The question is, did Bellamy do something interesting with his (pretty good) premise? Not really.

(Chapter Headings: The political message)

When Dr. Leete wakes Julian West, he reveals that the government has become “the sole employer” and as a result poverty, crime, war et cetera no longer exist. When Julian and Dr. Leete converse, Leete focuses on explaining on what the world is like now and as a result, he spends all his time talking about how they have created a utopia by making the government “the sole employer”. When Julian begins his relationship with Edith, which you would think would be the focus given the book is nominally a romance novel, she spends almost all her time explaining to him how much better life is than it was in his day because the government has become “the sole employer, the sole corporation”. There is even a scene where Julian goes to Church and the Pastor gives a sermon about how much better everything is now that the government has become “the sole employer” and even declares it to have made the Ten Commandments redundant. He sounds like a terrible pastor (more on that in a moment.) In a scene towards the end of the book, where Julian dreams that he’s in the 19th Century again, Julian spends all his time trying to convince everyone he knew that they should seek to eliminate poverty by making the government the “sole employer” though his pleas fall on deaf ears. When he wakes up and realises he’s still in the year 2000, Julian is relieved to live in a world which has eliminated all the problems of society by making the government “the sole employer”.

To paraphrase Whittaker Chambers “Looking Backward can be called a novel only by devaluing the term. It is a massive tract for the times. Its story merely serves Mister Bellamy to get the customers inside the tent, and as a soapbox for delivering his Message” The question is “why not just write it as a manifesto instead of a novel?” And that is a question that I cannot answer.

(Chapter Headings: Is political messaging in fiction bad?)

Books can have political messages and be good. Mark Twain’s novels were hardly subtle in their condemnation of slavery and racism. That said, when Bellamy’s book includes this obnoxious a political message, it’s fair to ask if it did a good job arguing in favour of it. To which the answer is, no. I’m not saying that simply because it has a message with which I disagree. I liked the movie Oppenheimer even though (in real life) I do think the US government was right to strip Dr. Oppenheimer of his security clearance. And I do think that movie did a good job in getting the audience to sympathise with Oppenheimer as this was happening. So a work of fiction can have a political message with which I disagree and still do a good job presenting the case for that message. Looking Backward doesn’t.

(Chapter Headings: Bellamy vs the Ten Commandments)

I’m going to begin with the religious argument. In Looking Backward, the Pastor proclaims the redundancy of the Ten Commandments in a world where the government is the “sole employer” and “sole corporation”. And I will now roast him to shreds for it.

Even if I were to accept that the government nationalising all corporations, becoming “the sole employer” and abolishing private property in favour of a system of equitable distribution would eliminate all poverty and crime, we would still have to deal with the seventh commandment.

Exodus Chapter 20 Verse 14 says “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” Deuteronomy Chapter 5 Verse 18 says “Neither shalt thou commit adultery.” In each case, this is listed as one of the Ten Commandments. So the question is, even if I were to concede all of Bellamy’s points, how would Socialism prevent adultery?

(Chapter Headings: Socialists vs Marriage)

There were people in the Socialist movement who argued that it would. Charles Fourier advocated for the abolition of marriage. Fourier insisted that marriage was “slavery for women and a sexual prison for husband and wife” asserting that it should be replaced with free love. Fourier recanted some of these views later but still said that marriages should only become committed monogamous relationships after the birth of children and emphasised that the main concern about extra-marital affairs was the risk of sexually transmitted disease rather than having a moral problem with adultery. Likewise, Marx and Engels argued for the abolition of marriage in Communist society (presumably the abolition of marriage would negate the possibility of adultery.)

Despite this, Julian and Edith get engaged at the end of the book and are implied to get married after the fact. There is no indication that their union was anything other than a traditional marriage. So, Fourier, Marx and Engels cannot provide an explanation for how adultery would be prevented by a Bellamy-style utopia. Plato can provide an answer but it’s not a good one.

In The Republic, Plato engages in a thought experiment wherein he advocates the creation of an Ideal State ruled by wise Philosopher-Kings who figure out who should get married to whom by closely monitoring their subjects but have the marriages officially decided by lottery. While the Philosopher-Kings secretly fix the lottery to assure that every man gets the most suitable wife and every woman the most suitable husband. Theoretically speaking, the wise government leaders choosing everyone’s spouses for them and consistently making the right decision could lead to a situation where everyone had a suitable mate and as such no one even had the temptation to commit adultery. Even if that worked, the government forcing the people to marry whomever it wants them to marry is abominable. And the purpose behind this Platonic program, to assure the breeding of the best for the next generation, is eugenics. And anyone with a heart, a brain and a spine knows to condemn eugenics. At least, when George Orwell wrote 1984 and set it in a future where the government fixed everyone’s marriages for them, it was dystopian.

That said, when Julian asks Edith to marry him and she says yes, this is entirely legal, and the book contains no indication that their marriage was secretly arranged by the government. So that brings us back to asking “how does the government nationalising everything prevent adultery?” to which the real answer is “it doesn’t and it can’t.” And the same applies to the tenth commandment which forbids coveting “thy neighbour’s wife”. So even in Bellamy’s utopia, at least two of the Ten Commandments are as relevant as they ever were. Not to mention “thou shalt not murder”.

In Looking Backward, Dr. Leete claims that when the government became “the sole employer” it eliminated poverty and thus any rational motive to commit murder. So the only people who still kill others are the criminally insane who are treated as sick rather than evil. Julian is apparently not smart enough to ask the question “What about when a man is romantically attracted to another man’s wife and kills his rival to make her available?” The man in that scenario is sane. There would still be murder in Bellamy’s world even though his characters claim it a thing of the past. And if a man coveted his neighbour’s wife and they had an affair and the neighbour found out and killed them both and was jailed for it and the neighbour had young children at the time then that would still put the children in a bad situation and maybe even lead to them cursing G-d and rejecting His authority. But even if that didn’t happen, there is no clear way for government ownership of the means of production to lead to the people refusing to worship false gods, refusing to say G-d’s name in vain or anything like that. It’s likewise implausible that Socialism would somehow lead to people honouring their parents. So Bellamy’s religious argument is just awful. Unfortunately, it’s not the only argument he makes.

(Chapter Headings: Globalism)

When Julian asks Dr. Leete if Socialism were established only in the United States or in the world writ large, the good doctor responds by saying it was the latter. He reveals that, to eliminate the problems of society, the nations of the Earth came together and established one world government and as a result, it was possible to implement Socialism. The governments of the world simply deciding to establish a global political order for the betterment of humanity is quite high on my list of things I do not anticipate happening. Even if this were a possible goal, it still would not be a desirable one.

In the 20th Century, Doctor Albert Einstein argued strongly in favour of the necessity of establishing a one world government on the grounds that global governance was the only possible antidote to war. In 1947, in an open letter he wrote to the United Nations, Einstein said “No international organization can be stronger than the constitutional powers given it, or than its component parts want it to be. As a matter of fact, the United Nations is an extremely important and useful institution provided the peoples and Governments of the world realize that it is merely a transitional system toward the final goal, which is the establishment of a supranational authority vested with sufficient legislative and executive powers to keep the peace. The present impact lies in the fact that there is no sufficient, reliable supra-national authority” and “that the only guarantee for security and peace in this atomic age is the constant development of a supra-national government”. Einstein had much more of a case then Bellamy ever had given the Cold War gave Einstein a legitimate reason to worry about the possibility of nuclear war. Even so, Einstein was wrong and really should have known better about this.

My reason for saying that Einstein should have known better is because as a Jew who hailed from Germany and as someone who supported the Allies against the Nazis during the Second World War, he should have been aware of how easily a liberal society can become a totalitarian one. Weimar Germany was a liberal democracy but didn’t stay that way after Hitler came to power. And Hitler was democratically elected. So if every country in the world were to fuse into a single country with a single government, then what would happen when another Hitler would be elected? Even though a great many countries turned away Jews fleeing Hitler’s efforts to murder all the Jews of the lands he conquered, if there were a one-world government then there would not even be other countries to which anyone could try to flee. So unless there’s a 0 % chance of a genocidal maniac coming to power, then there is no good case for one-world government. In authoritarian societies, this simply cannot be prevented. Liberal democratic societies try to prevent people like Hitler from coming to power as best they can but do not always succeed. Tyrants get themselves elected in liberal societies that they then destroy all the time. The argument for global governance is terrible.

(Chapter Headings: The dream sequence.)

Despite everything that I’ve been saying, there were good parts of the book. For instance, at one point in the book, Julian falls asleep, wakes up in 19th Century America and is told that his experience of being in the future was just a dream. When he reunites with his fiancée from the past and her friends, he is shocked that they don’t seem to believe that anything can be done about the plight of the poor. When he challenges them by making the case for Socialism, they are all horrified and scandalised and turn against him. That was a scene, where I felt badly for the character of Julian West, which is the kind of scene which should happen more frequently given he’s the protagonist and as such I should care about him. And then Julian realises that he cannot accept a world which tolerates poverty and then he wakes up in the year 2000 and is relieved that his return to the past was all a dream. That was not a good ending to that sequence. That said, it could have worked if 2000 were the dream and 1887 the reality. That way, Julain could still have the same realisations about 19th Century poverty that he had in the book and decide that he could and should try to do something about. Being scolded for preaching Socialism in the 19th Century could easily lead to him deciding that the world Dr. Leete showed him was only a dream but maybe he could make it a reality. And Julain could then resolve to do precisely that. If the book ended that way, then it would result in

1) The protagonist being likable and having well-defined goals and

2) The book making an emotionally compelling case for Socialist political activism, instead of the case it made.

Sadly, that’s not how it ended.

(Chapter Heading: Final Thoughts)

I don’t hate Looking Backward or anything like that. I don’t even really dislike it, though the heavy-handed political messaging gets rather frustrating. There are good things about the book. It has a neat premise, it could have worked as the love story it was nominally telling if Bellamy were more concerned with developing the characters than with the political arguments he was making, and the dream sequence in the book was a really good scene (despite being drastically weakened by the revelation that it was a dream.) Even so, this book is so closely wed to the political argument it’s making that agreeing with its message might be practically a prerequisite for finding it good. So my verdict on this novel is that it’s worth reading but nothing to write home about.

(Chapter Headings: Concluding remarks)

My name is Matitya and this has been an episode of Matitya’s Many Musings on a Myriad of Matters.