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Looking Backward

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Looking Backward

By: Edward Bellamy
Narrated by: Edward Lewis
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About this listen

 The hero is anyone who has ever longed for escape to a better life. The time is tomorrow. The place is a Utopian America. This is the backdrop for Edward Bellamy's prophetic novel about a young Boston gentleman who is mysteriously transported from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, from a world of war and want to a world of peace and plenty. Translated into more than twenty languages, and the most widely read novel of its time, Looking Backward is more than a brilliant visionary's view of the future. It is a blueprint of the "perfect society," a guidebook that stimulated some of the prominent thinkers of our age. John Dewey, Charles Beard, and Edward Weeks, in separate surveys conducted in 1935, listed Edward Bellamy's novel as the most influential work written by an American in the preceding fifty years.(P)2000 Blackstone Audiobooks Classics Science Fiction Fiction

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genius.

This book is a work of genius. Often funny. Often saddening, contrasted with today's society.

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Bait

In his 1888 novel Bellamy foists his idyllic lie that it is only the corrupt institutions of man that have driven poverty, despair, and evil.
Indeed, his detailed description of the utopic society belongs, as he says, to heaven. I say heaven because that is the only place that the selfish and deceptive nature of the human heart can be transformed into altruistic, generous benevolence toward others.
We humans do not display our corruption merely to supply our physical necessities. Have you ever met a child? One who has been provided every physical, and indeed, emotional support and care still consistently seeks to assert himself above all others. In the vernacular we call him "spoiled." When he does not have his prideful passions constrained (most effectively with a swat on the bottom), he is intolerable as an infant and, if left unchecked, becomes a self-entitled menace to society the like of which this philosophy seems to have currently produced an army.
Bellamy's hopeful reverie is a falsehood conjured by Darwin and Marx directly, the likes of which is the bait that every tyrant dangles over the downtrodden and ignorant masses unknowingly yearning to be born of the Spirit and not of the flesh.
We might forgive Bellamy's ignorance of the actual 20th century which lived out the horrors of collectivism in its several guises of fascism, socialism, and communism. Hitler, Stalin, and Mao being the heavy hitters, showed centralisation for its true colours. None of these established their empires out of mere lack of basic necessity, yet they certainly used that cause as a pretext to grow their armies.
Beware this seductive lie: "It is not within ME to commit evil, but only "they" who have caused this to befall me." We are each capable of the most heinous of acts. The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?

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