VI
The great part of Looking Backward is a discussion of this perfected form of industrial organization; the manner in which it is worked; and the effects of complete economic equality in doing away with the necessity for the greater part of the legal machinery of the present day, since crimes with an economic motive would almost, according to Bellamy, be unthinkable. Here and there however we have glimpses of the social life of this new age.
First of all, there floats before our eyes the picture of a vast body of superannuated persons, who for the most part spend their time in a sort of country-club existence. They can travel, because the other countries in the world are likewise nationalized, and by a simple system of bookkeeping foreign credit for goods and personal services can be transferred from one country to another; and they can take up special vocations and hobbies during their superannuated years; but it is equally plain that their work has not done very much to foster intellectual or emotional maturity, since in relation to the citizens the state exists as a “Great White Father”; and there is good reason perhaps for the great interest in sport which characterizes Bellamy’s utopia. Games are organized, apparently, upon lines of industrial guild rivalry; just as one has sports nowadays between rival battleship squadrons perhaps; for “if bread is the first necessity of life, recreation is a second, and the nation caters for both.” The demand for bread and circuses, our guide explains, is recognized in the year 2000 as a wholly reasonable one. Both work and play are external to the citizen’s inner trends and interests; and we should not be surprised if an infantile element predominated in the character of this happy republic.
This externalism, this impersonality, seems to characterize the whole scene. We follow Julius West and his new love, Edith, into a modern shop, where everything is displayed by sample, and an order for goods is sent to a central warehouse, and along with undoubted economies of space and time, we note that there is an almost complete absence of personal contacts or relationships: more than ever the worker has become a cog in the machine, more than ever he deals with a thin, barren, abstract world of paper notations, more than ever his desire for social contacts is dammed up; and so, more than ever, there must be occasion in this new age for stimulants and socialities beside which the roller coasters of Coney Island and the promiscuities of a modern dance hall would be insipid things. Bellamy does not show us what these compensatory institutions would be: but he has invented a high-powered engine of repression, and he does not fool us when he conceals the safety-valve. Unless there is a safety-valve his universal army, under a rigorous discipline for twenty-four years, is bound to blow up the works. We can guess when we read the cheap illustrated papers, when we go to the movies, when we watch the behavior of the crowds on Broadway, what this twenty-first century Utopia would be like—it would be all that a modern city is, exaggerated. In The New Society, Dr. Walter Rathenau drew a picture of a socialized modern society, moving along its present path without any change in its aims and ideals; and that nightmare of his must be added to Bellamy’s dream in order to define it.
It is the same with every other institution. There is a big communal restaurant in which each family of the neighborhood has a private room; this is the place where the principal meal is ordered by the family, and served by young conscript waiters. Am I at fault if I point out that this universal hostelry is a little too elaborate and mechanical; that there is more promise of a genuine utopia in Plato’s olives and cheese and beans, simply served, than in the “perfection of catering and cooking” which the new age boasts? So one could go down the line and enumerate the mechanical marvels which take the place of a fully humanized life; marvels like the telephone concerts and sermons which astoundingly anticipate by thirty-odd years the radio broadcasting service which is now a prevalent mania in America. Are these things, as Aristotle would have said, the material bases of the good life, or are they substitutes for the good life? There may have been some doubt as to the answer in Bellamy’s time; but I think there need not be any at present. In so far as these instruments are consonant with humanized purposes they are good; in so far as they are irrelevant they are so much rubbish—idiotic rubbish. A free public library is a good thing; but a free public library devoted exclusively to distributing the novels of Gene Stratton Porter and the uplift books of Mr. Orison Swett Marden would not contribute so much as a useful platitude towards a vivid and stimulating society.
There is no escaping the problem of ends and the problem of ends, if I may be permitted a pun, belongs at the beginning. Subordinate to humanized ends, machinery and organization—yes, complicated machinery and organization—have undoubtedly a useful contribution to make towards a good community; unsubordinated, or subordinated only to the engineer’s conceptions of an efficient
