Looking Backward: From 2000 to 1887. The Book That Launched a Movement (Chapters 8 through 14)

September’s book for Thom Hartmann’s Well-Read Troublemakers’ Book Club

PART TWO. His Title Is His Humanity (Chapters 8 through 14)

Last week we left Julian West on Dr. Leete’s rooftop, demanding to know how a nation that employs everybody decides what and how to pay them. This week Bellamy answers with the most radical idea in the book.

First, though, West has to get out of the house.

Chapter 8 opens with him waking up the next morning, thinking for a blissful moment that he’s back in 1887, then remembering that he’s not. He walks the streets of 20th century Boston alone and comes back home badly shaken.

Washington Street has no stores. State Street has no banks. Freaking out, he asks Leete if the merchants and bankers had been, “Hung them all, perhaps, as the anarchists wanted to do in my day?”

Leete says no, that they simply became obsolete.

“There is neither selling nor buying nowadays.”

Every citizen, he explains, receives an equal annual credit on the public books and a card to draw against it at the public storehouses. Money has been kept as a word but abolished as a thing.

“The term, as we use it, answers to no real thing, but merely serves as an algebraical symbol for comparing the values of products with one another.”

Then West asks the question he’s been circling around ever since his first night awake in this new era: If everybody’s credit comes from the nation, what decides how much each person gets? Here’s how it plays out in the book:

“‘His title [to wealth and credit],’ replied Dr. Leete, is his humanity. The basis of his claim is the fact that he is a man.’

“‘The fact that he is a man!’ I repeated, incredulously. ‘Do you possibly mean that all have the same share?’

“‘Most assuredly.’”

West sputters that some men do twice the work of others. Leete’s reply takes on the “conservative” and “libertarian” world views with a startling simplicity:

“The amount of the resulting product has nothing whatever to do with the question, which is one of desert. Desert is a moral question, and the amount of the product a material quantity. It would be an extraordinary sort of logic which should try to determine a moral question by a material standard. The amount of the effort alone is pertinent to the question of desert. All men who do their best, do the same.”

When West protests that nobody will work hard without the carrot of money and the stick of hunger, Leete points out that nineteenth century America never believed that either.

When it wanted men to die for the country, he says, it didn’t offer higher wages: instead, it offered honor, duty, and the gratitude of their fellow citizens, “and never was there an age of the world when those motives did not call out what is best and noblest in men.”

The industrial army of 2000 runs on rank, badges, public recognition, and the simple fact that “diligence in the national service is the sole and certain way to public repute, social distinction, and official power.”

Edith Leete then takes West shopping, and Bellamy has some fun. The store is a single great hall with samples of everything, no salesmen pushing anything, and your orders are shot by pneumatic tube to a central warehouse and delivered to your home within the hour.

Shades of ordering groceries online, or listening to streaming music: in Chapter 11 Edith leads West into her home’s “music room,” where live performances from acoustically prepared halls are piped by wire into every home, and she can choose from a printed program what she’d like to hear.

Keep in mind, Bellamy imagined this in 1888, before anyone had built a radio. He also imagined the credit card.

Chapter 12 goes deeper into how the industrial army grades and promotes its workers, and then into what happens to people who can’t work at all. West assumes the sick and disabled are objects of charity, a sentiment against which Leete nearly explodes.

“’Who is capable of self-support?’ he demanded. ‘There is no such thing in a civilized society as self-support. In a state of society so barbarous as not even to know family cooperation, each individual may possibly support himself, though even then for a part of his life only; but from the moment that men begin to live together, and constitute even the rudest sort of society, self-support becomes impossible.’”

Every worker, Leete argues, inherits the accumulated knowledge and machinery of the whole human past, which accounts for “nine parts to one” of what he produces. The disabled are co-heirs to that inheritance.

“Did you not rob them when you put them off with crusts, who were entitled to sit with the heirs, and did you not add insult to robbery when you called the crusts charity?”

The section closes, in Chapter 14, with rain, as the Leetes take him out to dinner without umbrellas, because the whole sidewalk has been roofed over.

Leete remarks that in the nineteenth century, when it rained, Boston “put up three hundred thousand umbrellas over as many heads, and in the twentieth century they put up one umbrella over all the heads.”

At the public dining house, West is startled to see an educated young man waiting tables without shame. The word “menial,” Edith tells him, is obsolete.

Leete explains that “to accept a service from another which we would be unwilling to return in kind, if need were, is like borrowing with the intention of not repaying,” and that a system dividing people into classes “weakens the sense of a common humanity.”

Next week our tour of the book continues into newspapers, elections, crime, and the schools. But for now, let’s consider Leete’s question: Who among us is actually self-supporting? And what would our politics look like if we answered that question honestly?