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GENIUSES LOOK INTO THE FUTURE
When we go from economic and philosophical geniuses to literary geniuses, the predictive powers seem to gradually become more muddled.
Bellamy’s protagonist arrives somehow in the year 2000 and is then filled in on the many innovations in the U.S. since Grover Cleveland was president. Bellamy doesn’t get things exactly right, but he comes close. By 2000 all industries have been what Bellamy calls “nationalized.” Bellamy popularized the word – he was looking for a way to avoid calling socialism “socialism.” Progressives have been at it ever since, calling socialism “The Federal Reserve Bank,” “FCC,” “DOT,” “FDI,” “DOE,” “USDA,” etc. Delivery of commercial goods is almost instantaneous in Bellamy’s novel, in case you thought Amazon was something new under the sun. Working hours have been drastically reduced. Bellamy isn’t specific about how this was done. But these days, Facebook, Twitter, and computer solitaire in office cubicles have, in effect, reduced hours of actual working to a George Jetson level. Everyone is able to retire at 45. Bellamy made an error here. A glance at Social Security and Medicare balance sheets indicates that almost nobody will be able to retire, ever. But Bellamy was closer to reality when he describes crime as having been turned into a strictly medical problem. Isn’t that what all good liberals say? “Criminals aren’t evil. They’re sick. They need to be treated, not punished.” That’s why, after my dog ate the Roomba, I didn’t whack him with a rolled-up newspaper. Instead, I sent him to the dog psychiatrist for weekly sessions of “bark therapy.”
JULES VERNE (1828- 1905) , the celebrated
French novelist, poet, and playwright, invented the science fiction genre with works like Twenty Thousand
Leagues Under the Sea and Around the World in Eighty Days . Many of the practical innovations he foresaw, like submarines and air travel, were, indeed, invented. Verne wrote From the Earth to the Moon in 1865 and Around the Moon in 1870. He was slightly off about the technical mechanisms of space travel. Shooting Apollo 11 out of a cannon was not an idea that would have worked... But he was right about a Florida blastoff and a Pacific Ocean splashdown. And judging by what’s happened since the end of the Apollo program, Verne was absolutely right about the political elite’s attitude toward lunar-travel innovations. He had his own elite moon-voyaging protagonists express the view that it costs too much, there’s nothing up there, so why bother to go again? The American author and political progressive
EDWARD BELLAMY (1850- 1898) published his utopian novel, Looking Backward , in 1888. By 1900, more
copies of Looking Backward had been sold in America than any novel except Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin .
68 | September 2017
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