Utopia Lost

I have always had a love for history and enjoyed science fiction as history that hasn't happened yet. One of those books that was required reading back in high school that was Edward Bellamy" Looking Backwards which was kind of like history and science fiction mixed together. The protagonist, Julian West, is put under a deep hypnotic sleep in 1887 and awakens in the year 2000. Julian has a chance to see how far humanity as progressed.

The book is almost totally forgotten today but was third most published title of the 19th century and strong seller though the first half of the 20th. Overall it is an optimistic tale of how through cooperative effort and planning for the public good everybody gets to live in a world of personal freedom and material prosperity.  Of course it's a Utopian vision of how the future can be it and was fun to see how many things Edward Bellamy had gotten right.  There was the ubiquitous credit card and mass distribution of goods through what we would recognize as a shopper's club. With affordable transportation there would be a decentralization of cities into satellite communities, small green belted urban villages, which may have been the best vision of what the suburbs could have been.   

These days the ideas of Edward Bellamy are not in fashion. He championed the nationalization of industry were enterprises would be operated as  non-profits.  Successful managers would be paid more than less successful ones and every citizen would be a collective stockholder in the nation's prosperity. One irony is Germany operates its national health care system on a this model and they have the excellent affordable universal health care that we don't.  The unregulated economy of the United States in late 1800's would create unpredictable cycles of boom and bust. There would be periods of rapid growth in wealth followed by devastating depressions. People of that time saw Looking Backwards as a possible and reasonable plan to escape this cycle and have something better.

Science fiction can examine the past and present by comparing it to a fictional future or by making the future an exaggerated parody of the past. The genre can  ask what would it be like if we could do almost anything we can imagine, though so far history shows us that no matter how many technological advances we make -people still remain people.

Maybe the biggest impediment to Utopia isn't the technology but our own human short comings.  That fear, belligerency and selfishness promotes and justifies the kind of waste that enrich a few and impoverish the rest of us.  One of the great economic potlatches and orgies of waste is our own military spending. Depending on who's numbers you use the United States is responsible for just under or just over one half of all the world's  military spending.  If you include NATO the supposed free countries of the world out spend the rest of the world by more than 2 to 1.  Which means we are not getting our money's worth or it's time for a new strategy.

One of the complaints of the post Cold War era is that the world is less stable. When the Soviet Union was the other super-power both us and them were in competition to spend development money in every corner of the planet were we could buy a friend.  Plenty of that money was wasted but some of that money did help the people it was suppose to. During the 1950's and 1960's the world economy grew at a much faster rate and that growth spread much deeper into the underdeveloped third world.  

Money should not be wasted but not all waste is equal. Spending billion dollars on a weapon that does work means that most of that doesn't get to circulate back into the economy. As a billion dollars in misguided social spending will still have spin-off benefits because that money has to be spent (as a defective weapon might be placed in storage or kept in reserve). Almost every dollar the government provides in social programs it gets spend locally as wages, rent, food and heat. It's inefficient, certainly it would be better if everyone had employment at a living wage. Since that is politically impossible right now, it guarantees government spending either providing a minimum amount of food stamps or more money to hire extra police to keep hungry people from rioting.      

The big disappointment of Utopian dreams isn't that the goal is so far away, because it's not.  Utopia is unobtainable because we rather fight that live in peace, because we rather dominate others that mind our own business, because we are much more focused on  what divides us than what we have in common.

These's one quote that comes to mind as I'm writing this. I had ask somebody about the failure a business deal they were negotiating. He shook his head, "it would have worked if I could have convinced everyone to stick with their second greediest position."  

For thirty after Looking Backwards was published there were about two hundred chapters of Bellamy Clubs across the country. Could such a thing could happen again and maybe this time we recreate Eden on their own. I like to believe it closer than we think