MAY 12, 2009 --

LPR recently read Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy. This novel published in 1888, tells the story of Julian West who fell asleep in 1887 and woke up in the year 2000 Bellamy’s tale is a variation on Thomas More’s Utopia (and likely precursor to Huxley’s Brave New World).

Bellamy, like More. for example, envisioned society without “money.” Per Bellamy, banks and stores had become “obsolete” by 2000, once commodities had been nationalized.

People began the year with government-issued credits and would purchase items at government distribution centers – using “credit cards” – although made of pasteboard, not plastic.

Julian is told that “buying and selling is essentially antisocial in all its tendencies. It is an education in self-seeking at the expense of others... .” Further, he was told, “The nation is rich, and does not wish the people to deprive themselves of any good thing.”

And this: “No man any more has any care for the morrow, either for himself or his children, for the nation guarantees the nurture, education, and comfortable maintenance of every citizen from the cradle to the grave.” The “individualism” of the 19th century was regarded as “excessive” by the year 2000. In the Bellamy story, there is a single capitalist: “[t]he nation.”

Julian is also told, “the very fact that the nation would be the sole corporation in the field would, it was seen, relieve the undertaking of many difficulties with which the partial monopolists had contended.”

Herewith a few more observations on the year 2000 as envisioned by Bellamy: no lawyers; defendants, if guilty, usually admit their guilt; no state governments, There is no private property and, consequently, little need of legislation, there being “nothing to make laws about.” Selfishness is “suppressed” in the name of “the true concert of industry.” For the people of Bellamy’s 2000, “individualism” not only blocked a sense of “common interest;” it destroyed a sense of responsibility to future generations.

For LPR, then, it is not unreasonable to wonder if the Obama administration has been influenced by Bellamy’s description of what the U.S.A. would be like, today. That is, should we wonder if the country is in the process of being “bellamized?”

Whether Bellamy left it for readers to visualize two additional words in the title -- to Tyranny -- by the time they completed the book, is, of course, another matter.