Days of Future Past
The same blind spots commonly afflict utopian
predictions, according to University of Maryland History Professor James B.
Gilbert. As an illustration, Gilbert discussed Edward Bellamy's Victorian novel
Looking Backward: 2000-1887 and its sequel, Equality, which
depict an American utopia of the year 2000.
Bellamy, Gilbert noted, omitted the private market from his ideal society,
substituting instead rationality and central planning. The market often
disrupts forecasts of technology's future. For example, Gilbert said, "The
French never realized that the major use of the Minitel system through their
telephones would be to make dates--that it would be a kind of trysting place."
But centralized planning introduces costs: the market generates not only
irrationality and waste but also ingenuity and inventiveness.
Bellamy's books also depict a society of complete equality, whereas "inequality
is a fact of life in American society," Gilbert observed. "Technology has
always been applied differentially according to social, economic, cultural, and
intellectual distinctions." For instance, affluent schools tend to have more
and better computer equipment than poor schools.
In addition, Bellamy omitted the influence of culture, believing that reason
alone would shape the technological future. "But culture is technology and
technology is culture," said Gilbert. Culture invariably uses science and
technology, and frequently abuses them as well, producing such pseudo-sciences
as astrology.
Finally, Bellamy envisioned a society where problems are easily isolated,
addressed, and solved. "Utopian thinking assumes that technology will allow you
to eliminate social problems, and probably even those people who create social
problems," Gilbert said. "You'll be able to isolate not only people from each
other but also technological advances from each other, with no interaction of
people and technologies amongst themselves."
In these respects, Gilbert said, American utopianists frequently err. They
forecast a blissful future untouched by the complex, often contradictory,
forces that shape society and its use of technology.
On reaching my chamber that night I did not open the musical telephone that
I might be lulled to sleep with soothing tunes, as had become my habit. For
once my thoughts made better music than even twentieth century orchestras'
discourse, and ... held me enchanted till well toward morning, when I fell
asleep.
"It's a little after the time you told me to wake you, sir. You did not come
out of it as quick as common, sir."
The voice was the voice of my man Sawyer....
It was, of course, very plain. All that about the twentieth century had been
a dream. I had but dreamed of that enlightened and carefree race of men and
their ingeniously simple institutions, of the glorious new Boston with its
domes and pinnacles, its gardens and fountains, and its universal reign of
comfort....
"I have had an extraordinary dream, that's all, Sawyer," I said, "a most
extraordinary dream."
Edward Bellamy
Looking Backward: 2000-1887 (1887)
