Algemeen Oudheid en Middeleeuwen 1501-1600 1601-1700 1701-1800 1801-1900 1901-2000 2001-nu Stalinisme Maoïsme Neoliberalisme Socialisme Neomarxisme en Kritische theorie Algemeen Complottheorieën Irrationaliteit Irrationaliteit (Bijgeloof en religie) Leugens, desinformatie, propaganda Klokkenluiders"“There is neither selling nor buying nowadays; the distribution of goods is effected in another way. As to the bankers, having no money we have no use for those gentry.”" Jeremy BELLAMY - Looking backward 2000-1887, p.50-51
Jeremy BELLAMY"‘The book is one to be read and considered seriously,’ the poet, designer, and political activist William Morris commented suspiciously in his review of Looking Backward (1888) in 1889, ‘but it should not be taken as the Socialist bible of reconstruction; a danger which perhaps it will not altogether escape.’ Edward Bellamy’s celebrated utopian romance, only the second novel published in the United States to sell a million copies, after Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin antiquated attitude to sexual politicsm (1852), rapidly became a best-seller once it had appeared in its second edition in 1889. It persuaded thousands of readers to become socialists, most famously the labour leader Eugene Debs. It did so because of its eloquent indictment of capitalist society, undoubtedly; but also because, in spite of Morris’s admonition, these readers interpreted it precisely as the socialist bible of reconstruction, a kind of fictional guidebook to post-capitalist society. The book quickly acquired cult status." [mijn nadruk] (vii)
"Bellamy described his scheme as ‘Nationalist’, first, because his utopian dream was premissed on the idea that, in order to end class society, a democratic, though highly centralized, nation-state needed to control all those aspects of production and consumption currently monopolized by competing capitalist companies;" [mijn nadruk] (viii)
"Like most middle-class people in this period he feared both the monopolistic capitalist companies and the militant socialist societies that opposed them. He disliked the prospect of the dictatorship of the proletariat quite as much as he disliked the prospect of plutocratic rule. Consequently his distinctly ambivalent vision of socialism –– a socialism that, in important respects, resembled simply a more humane and morally acceptable species of capitalism, the triumphant outcome of a passive and peaceable historical process –– appeared to be symptomatic of the average American’s hopes and fears at a time of pervasive social, political, and economic unease." [mijn nadruk] (ix)
"A number of the book’s contemporary readers were even moved to become the authors of utopias themselves. Some were openly motivated by fear of its potentially deleterious mass appeal. Alfred Morris, for example, attacked Looking Backward quite explicitly from the right in Looking Ahead! (1892). William Morris attacked it implicitly from the left in News from Nowhere (1890–1), a haunting utopian romance that promoted the peaceful pastoral vision of a communist society formed in the aftermath of violent socialist revolution. Some of the book’s contemporary readers were in contrast motivated to compose utopias by devoted enthusiasm for Bellamy’s secular vision of the heavenly city, like Bradford Peck in The World a Department Store (1900). Others either used it simply to promulgate their own political programmes, like Richard Michaelis in A Sequel to Looking Backward, or ‘Looking Further Forward’ (1891); or lifted plot devices from the book, like H. G. Wells in his dystopian fantasy When the Sleeper Wakes (1899). Bellamy himself published a sequel, Equality, in 1897. According to Krishan Kumar’s calculations, at least sixty-two novels directly indebted to Bellamy’s utopian model were published in the United States and Europe between 1889 and 1900."(x)
"The image of the coach, in spite of the rhetorical skill with which it is sketched, is a largely pre-industrial one: it ignores the technology of nineteenth-century capitalism and its commodified social relations, and it focuses attention instead on the quasi-feudal privileges and abuses of the capitalists themselves. Capitalism’s fundamental mechanism, the profit motive, which constantly remakes relations in the marketplace and restlessly drives technological developments, is missing from Bellamy’s allegorical account of the system’s operations." [mijn nadruk] (xiii)
[De inleider is blijkbaar een voorstander van het kapitalisme. Maar misschien is het wel goed dat er op kapitalisten ingegaan wordt, dat is een stuk minder abstract dan het systeem. Het systeem zonder mensen is niets. We moeten oog hebben voor die mensen en mensen verantwoordelijk stellen voor wat het kapitalisme met zich meebrengt.]
"In Equality, completed after almost a decade of political activism, his critique of capitalism is less compromised and he is in addition openly committed to the socialist and feminist movements. In the sequel too, however, as his preface makes quite explicit, Bellamy’s conviction is that capitalism needs to be modified, albeit systematically, rather than abolished. So the preface characterizes the evolution of society described in Looking Backward as the result of ‘replacing private capitalism by public capitalism’, which involves ‘organizing the machinery of production and distribution, like the political government, as business of general concern to be carried on for the public benefit instead of private gain’. It is even more apparent that Bellamy’s utopian ideas in the late 1880s are premissed on the dream of a reformed and fully humanized state-capitalist system rather than one resembling the decentralized model of communism that William Morris for example promoted." [mijn nadruk] (xiv)
"For the book remains immensely potent, in spite of the fact that it no longer represents a vital call to political action, and in spite of the fact that several aspects of its utopian blueprint, including the idea of the industrial army, and an antiquated attitude to sexual politics, seem positively unattractive in the aftermath of the twentieth century." [mijn nadruk] (xvii)
"He built in this respect on polemical, often dystopian novels from the second half of the nineteenth century, like George Chesney’s The Battle of Dorking (1871), that depicted dramatic social alternatives to the present unfolding in the immediate future. Looking Backward therefore conjoined the utopian genre with the form of the so-called imaginary history ..." [mijn nadruk] (xviii)
"In the absence of uncolonized space, Bellamy’s utopian vision, appropriately enough, centred on a man who penetrates a temporal frontier and who thus helps to build a perfect community in the future rather than in some hitherto untouched geographical territory. The end of the expansionist period of American history, combined no doubt with the decline of those practical utopian experiments that had been set up by communitarians in the 1840s and 1850s, helped to create the local conditions in which Looking Backward intervened so successfully in the literary tradition of utopia. However, Bellamy’s conception of utopian temporality cannot be separated from his conception of utopian space." [mijn nadruk] (xviii)
"The utopian dream of the future and the dystopian nightmare of the present are inseparable aspects of Bellamy’s book."(xxii)
"The book did more than merely help contemporary readers to understand the epochal shifts of capitalist society at the fin de siècle; it enabled them to experience everyday life in all its alienation because of the phantasmagoric realism of its dreamed, ‘retrospective’ descriptions of the tenements and slums, and indeed the upper middle-class dinner parties, of the nineteenth-century metropolis. The utopian function of Bellamy’s book makes the present present."(xxiv)
"For in literary and psychological terms the most powerful sections of Bellamy’s utopia are unquestionably its dystopian passages. And if in the book’s afterlife it has predominantly acted as a political inspiration to socialists, then it has also indirectly informed one of late twentieth-century science fiction’s darkest visions of the future. The sinister and crepuscular setting for the dramatic climax of Ridley Scott’s dystopian film Bladerunner (1982), the apartment block that J. F. Sebastien inhabits, is the Bradbury Building, which had been designed in 1893 as a deliberate attempt to embody the utopian description of that beautiful light-filled department store described in the chapter on shopping in Looking Backward. This seems ironically appropriate: both because of the haunting intensity of those dystopian elements that, as I have insisted, are so central to Bellamy’s utopia; and because, in the twentieth century, so many of the social dreams of the late nineteenth century subsequently darkened into nightmares."(xxx)
"Living as we do in the closing year of the twentieth century, enjoying the blessings of a social order at once so simple and logical that it seems but the triumph of common sense, it is no doubt difficult for those whose studies have not been largely historical to realize that the present organization of society is, in its completeness, less than a century old. No historical fact is, however, better established than that till nearly the end of the nineteenth century it was the general belief that the ancient industrial system, with all its shocking social consequences, was destined to last, with possibly a little patching, to the end of time. How strange and wellnigh incredible does it seem that so prodigious a moral and material transformation as has taken place since then could have been accomplished in so brief an interval!" [mijn nadruk] (3)
[Meteen kritiek op het kapitalisme.]
"... the author has sought to alleviate the instructive quality of the book by casting it in the form of a romantic narrative, which he would be glad to fancy not wholly devoid of interest on its own account."(3)
Hoofdpersoon in dat verhaal is Mr. Julian West die geboren werd in 1857 en zijn verhaal vertelt in 2000 als iemand van ongeveer 30 jaar oud.
[De metafoor van 'the coach' op p.6-8 is alleen al een prachtige kritiek op de bezittende klasse die de armen uitbuit. Volg de annotaties voor een verdere uitwerking. En Julian was dus deel van die bezittende klasse met alle opvattingen van die klasse.]
Julian is een slechte slaper. Hij laat zich soms in slaap mesmeriseren. Met enig risico. Dat doet hij ook in 1887.
Maar hij wordt vervolgens wakker in 2000 in een vreemd huis bij vreemde mensen. Hij denkt dat het een grap is of een groots opgezette leugen. Maar als zijn gastheer (Dr. Leete) hem meeneemt naar het dak van zijn huis en de stad Boston van 2000 laat zien, is hij overtuigd.
Bespreking van nieuwe dingen. Geen schoorstenen te zien bijvoorbeeld.
"“To speak of small things before great,” I responded, “I really think that the complete absence of chimneys and their smoke is the detail that first impressed me.”
“Ah!” ejaculated my companion with an air of much interest, “I had forgotten the chimneys, it is so long since they went out of use. It is nearly a century since the crude method of combustion on which you depended for heat became obsolete.”"(24)
De materiële welvaart valt hem op. Dr. Leete legt het uit:
"“No doubt, as you imply, the cities of that period were rather shabby affairs. If you had the taste to make them splendid, which I would not be so rude as to question, the general poverty resulting from your extraordinary industrial system would not have given you the means. Moreover, the excessive individualism which then prevailed was inconsistent with much public spirit. What little wealth you had seems almost wholly to have been lavished in private luxury. Nowadays, on the contrary, there is no destination of the surplus wealth so popular as the adornment of the city, which all enjoy in equal degree.”" [mijn nadruk] (62-63)
Hij leert de vrouw en dochter van Leete kennen.
"Mrs. Leete was an exceptionally fine looking and well preserved woman of about her husband’s age, while the daughter, who was in the first blush of womanhood, was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen. Her face was as bewitching as deep blue eyes, delicately tinted complexion, and perfect features could make it, but even had her countenance lacked special charms, the faultless luxuriance of her figure would have given her place as a beauty among the women of the nineteenth century. Feminine softness and delicacy were in this lovely creature deliciously combined with an appearance of health and abounding physical vitality too often lacking in the maidens with whom alone I could compare her. It was a coincidence trifling in comparison with the general strangeness of the situation, but still striking, that her name should be Edith." [mijn nadruk] (25)
[Zijn verloofde in 1887 heette Edith. ]
"Though I supposed curiosity was the chief motive of her interest, it could but affect me as it would not have done had she been less beautiful." [mijn nadruk] (26)
Meer over 2000 tegnover 1887. Hoe staat het met het arbeidsprobleem (labor question)? Dat is er niet meer, zegt Leete.
"The solution came as the result of a process of industrial evolution which could not have terminated otherwise. All that society had to do was to recognize and coöperate with that evolution, when its tendency had become unmistakable.”"(29)
" But when the era of small concerns with small capital was succeeded by that of the great aggregations of capital, all this was changed. The individual laborer, who had been relatively important to the small employer, was reduced to insignificance and powerlessness over against the great corporation, while at the same time the way upward to the grade of employer was closed to him. Self-defense drove him to union with his fellows." [mijn nadruk] (31)
"Oppressive and intolerable as was the régime of the great consolidations of capital, even its victims, while they cursed it, were forced to admit the prodigious increase of efficiency which had been imparted to the national industries, the vast economies effected by concentration of management and unity of organization, and to confess that since the new system had taken the place of the old the wealth of the world had increased at a rate before undreamed of. To be sure this vast increase had gone chiefly to make the rich richer, increasing the gap between them and the poor; but the fact remained that, as a means merely of producing wealth, capital had been proved efficient in proportion to its consolidation. The restoration of the old system with the subdivision of capital, if it were possible, might indeed bring back a greater equality of conditions, with more individual dignity and freedom, but it would be at the price of general poverty and the arrest of material progress." [mijn nadruk] (32)
"“Early in the last century the evolution was completed by the final consolidation of the entire capital of the nation. The industry and commerce of the country, ceasing to be conducted by a set of irresponsible corporations and syndicates of private persons at their caprice and for their profit, were intrusted to a single syndicate representing the people, to be conducted in the common interest for the common profit. The nation, that is to say, organized as the one great business corporation in which all other corporations were absorbed; it became the one capitalist in the place of all other capitalists, the sole employer, the final monopoly in which all previous and lesser monopolies were swallowed up, a monopoly in the profits and economies of which all citizens shared. The epoch of trusts had ended in The Great Trust.
“Such a stupendous change as you describe,” said I, “did not, of course, take place without great bloodshed and terrible convulsions.”
“On the contrary,” replied Dr. Leete, “there was absolutely no violence. The change had been long foreseen. Public opinion had become fully ripe for it, and the whole mass of the people was behind it." [mijn nadruk] (33)
"“And, in heaven’s name, who are the public enemies?” exclaimed Dr. Leete. “Are they France, England, Germany, or hunger, cold, and nakedness? In your day governments were accustomed, on the slightest international misunderstanding, to seize upon the bodies of citizens and deliver them over by hundreds of thousands to death and mutilation, wasting their treasures the while like water; and all this oftenest for no imaginable profit to the victims. We have no wars now, and our governments no war powers, but in order to protect every citizen against hunger, cold, and nakedness, and provide for all his physical and mental needs, the function is assumed of directing his industry for a term of years."(35)
"We have no parties or politicians, and as for demagoguery and corruption, they are words having only an historical significance.”"(35-36)
"“The national organization of labor under one direction was the complete solution of what was, in your day and under your system, justly regarded as the insoluble labor problem. When the nation became the sole employer, all the citizens, by virtue of their citizenship, became employees, to be distributed according to the needs of industry.”"(36)
" “It is regarded as so absolutely natural and reasonable that the idea of its being compulsory has ceased to be thought of. He would be thought to be an incredibly contemptible person who should need compulsion in such a case. Nevertheless, to speak of service being compulsory would be a weak way to state its absolute inevitableness. Our entire social order is so wholly based upon and deduced from it that if it were conceivable that a man could escape it, he would be left with no possible way to provide for his existence. He would have excluded himself from the world, cut himself off from his kind, in a word, committed suicide.”" [mijn nadruk] (37)
" It both begins later and ends earlier than the average working period in your day. Your workshops were filled with children and old men, but we hold the period of youth sacred to education, and the period of maturity, when the physical forces begin to flag, equally sacred to ease and agreeable relaxation. The period of industrial service is twenty-four years, beginning at the close of the course of education at twenty-one and terminating at forty-five. After forty-five, while discharged from labor, the citizen still remains liable to special calls, in case of emergencies causing a sudden great increase in the demand for labor, till he reaches the age of fifty-five, but such calls are rarely, in fact almost never, made. The fifteenth day of October of every year is what we call Muster Day, because those who have reached the age of twenty-one are then mustered into the industrial service, and at the same time those who, after twenty-four years’ service, have reached the age of forty-five, are honorably mustered out." [mijn nadruk] (37-38)
"“Every man for himself in accordance with his natural aptitude, the utmost pains being taken to enable him to find out what his natural aptitude really is. The principle on which our industrial army is organized is that a man’s natural endowments, mental and physical, determine what he can work at most profitably to the nation and most satisfactorily to himself."(39)
"Of course you will see that dependence on the purely voluntary choice of avocations involves the abolition in all of anything like unhygienic conditions or special peril to life and limb. Health and safety are conditions common to all industries. The nation does not maim and slaughter its workmen by thousands, as did the private capitalists and corporations of your day.”"(41)
Er volgen nog andere economische kwesties. Maar de vraag hoeveel mensen verdienen met hun werk blijft even liggen. Hij gaat slapen.
Als hij weer wakker wordt is hij een tijdje in de war en erg emotioneel als hij zich realiseert waar hij is en in welk jaar. Hij gaat door Boston lopen om te ontspannen. Als hij weer 'thuis' is, troost Edith hem.
Hij vertelt over wat hij zag aan het echtpaar Leete. Geen winkels en geen banken.
"“We have simply dispensed with them. Their functions are obsolete in the modern world.” “Who sells you things when you want to buy them?” I inquired. “There is neither selling nor buying nowadays; the distribution of goods is effected in another way. As to the bankers, having no money we have no use for those gentry.”(...) trade existed and money was needed in your day simply because the business of production was left in private hands.(...) Everything was procurable from one source, and nothing could be procured anywhere else. A system of direct distribution from the national storehouses took the place of trade, and for this money was unnecessary.”" [mijn nadruk] (50-51)
"People nowadays interchange gifts and favors out of friendship, but buying and selling is considered absolutely inconsistent with the mutual benevolence and disinterestedness which should prevail between citizens and the sense of community of interest which supports our social system. According to our ideas, buying and selling is essentially anti-social in all its tendencies. It is an education in self-seeking at the expense of others, and no society whose citizens are trained in such a school can possibly rise above a very low grade of civilization.”" [mijn nadruk] (52)
Men komt terug op de salarissen. Iedereen krijgt hetzelfde crediet waarmee hij of zij dingen kan aanschaffen.
"“You see,” he said, smiling, “that it is not merely that we have no money to pay wages in, but, as I said, we have nothing at all answering to your idea of wages.”"(54)
"The way it strikes people nowadays is, that a man who can produce twice as much as another with the same effort, instead of being rewarded for doing so, ought to be punished if he does not do so."(55)
Edith neemt Julian West mee winkelen om hem een idee te geven van hoe dat in 2000 gaat.
"There was nothing in the exterior aspect of the edifice to suggest a store to a representative of the nineteenth century. There was no display of goods in the great windows, or any device to advertise wares, or attract custom. Nor was there any sort of sign or legend on the front of the building to indicate the character of the business carried on there; but instead, above the portal, standing out from the front of the building, a majestic life-size group of statuary, the central figure of which was a female ideal of Plenty, with her cornucopia."(60)
[O geweldig: geen reclame :-).]
"I saw then that there was fastened to each sample a card containing in succinct form a complete statement of the make and materials of the goods and all its qualities, as well as price, leaving absolutely no point to hang a question on. “The clerk has, then, nothing to say about the goods he sells?” I said. “Nothing at all. It is not necessary that he should know or profess to know anything about them. Courtesy and accuracy in taking orders are all that are required of him.”"(61)
[O, geweldig: geen verkopers :-).]
"“Oh, no,” she replied. “We buy where we please, though naturally most often near home. But I should have gained nothing by visiting other stores. The assortment in all is exactly the same, representing as it does in each case samples of all the varieties produced or imported by the United States. That is why one can decide quickly, and never need visit two stores.”"(62)
[Koppel het aan computers en internet en het wordt allemaal nog efficiënter ]
Hij luistert met Edith naar muziek via een soort van huisomroep/ziekenomroep, een service die 24 uur per dag alle mogelijke muziek levert.
[Zoals altijd duiken technieken op die auteurs kennen. ]
Over nalatenschappen en erfenissen:
"The fact that the nation is the sole capitalist and land-owner of course restricts the individual’s possessions to his annual credit, and what personal and household belongings he may have procured with it. His credit, like an annuity in your day, ceases on his death, with the allowance of a fixed sum for funeral expenses. His other possessions he leaves as he pleases.”"(68)
"“Our washing is all done at public laundries at excessively cheap rates, and our cooking at public kitchens. The making and repairing of all we wear are done outside in public shops. Electricity, of course, takes the place of all fires and lighting. We choose houses no larger than we need, and furnish them so as to involve the minimum of trouble to keep them in order. We have no use for domestic servants.”"(70)
Over de opbouw van de "industrial army".
"With a view to these two ends the industrial army is organized. First comes the unclassified grade of common laborers, men of all work, to which all recruits during their first three years belong. This grade is a sort of school, and a very strict one, in which the young men are taught habits of obedience, subordination, and devotion to duty. While the miscellaneous nature of the work done by this force prevents the systematic grading of the workers which is afterwards possible, yet individual records are kept, and excellence receives distinction corresponding with the penalties that negligence incurs." [mijn nadruk] (72)
[Dat roept natuurlijk vragen op. Wat als iemand ongehooraam blijft en asociaal? Het verhaal dat volgt schildert een hiërarchie gekoppeld aan een waardering. Het is een meritocratie. Krijg je toch weer klassen en standen en betere mensen en slechtere. ]
"A man able to do duty, and persistently refusing, is sentenced to solitary imprisonment on bread and water till he consents."(75)
"“I should not fail to mention,” resumed the doctor, “that for those too deficient in mental or bodily strength to be fairly graded with the main body of workers, we have a separate grade, unconnected with the others,––a sort of invalid corps, the members of which are provided with a light class of tasks fitted to their strength. All our sick in mind and body, all our deaf and dumb, and lame and blind and crippled, and even our insane, belong to this invalid corps, and bear its insignia. The strongest often do nearly a man’s work, the feeblest, of course, nothing; but none who can do anything are willing quite to give up. In their lucid intervals, even our insane are eager to do what they can.”"(76-77)
Het is geen liefdadigheid, maar een recht.
"“I am to understand, then, that the lame, the blind, the sick, and the impotent, are as well off as the most efficient, and have the same income?” “Certainly,” was the reply."(77-78)
"Therefore it is, as I told you this morning, that the title of every man, woman, and child to the means of existence rests on no basis less plain, broad, and simple than the fact that they are fellows of one race––members of one human family. The only coin current is the image of God, and that is good for all we have."(79)
[Ugh ... Toch weer god? ]
"“How happened it,” was Dr. Leete’s reply, “that your workers were able to produce more than so many savages would have done? Was it not wholly on account of the heritage of the past knowledge and achievements of the race, the machinery of society, thousands of years in contriving, found by you ready-made to your hand? How did you come to be possessors of this knowledge and this machinery, which represent nine parts to one contributed by yourself in the value of your product? You inherited it, did you not? And were not these others, these unfortunate and crippled brothers whom you cast out, joint inheritors, co-heirs with you? What did you do with their share? 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?" [mijn nadruk] (79)
[Mooi. ]
"“Yes,” replied Dr. Leete, “the great nations of Europe as well as Australia, Mexico, and parts of South America, are now organized industrially like the United States, which was the pioneer of the evolution. The peaceful relations of these nations are assured by a loose form of federal union of world-wide extent. An international council regulates the mutual intercourse and commerce of the members of the union and their joint policy toward the more backward races, which are gradually being educated up to civilized institutions. Complete autonomy within its own limits is enjoyed by every nation.”"(82)
[Zoals gewoonlijk kunnen Amerikanen het niet laten de wereld te redden en chauvinistisch te zijn.]
"A nation simply does not import what its government does not think requisite for the general interest. Each nation has a bureau of foreign exchange, which manages its trading. For example, the American bureau, estimating such and such quantities of French goods necessary to America for a given year, sends the order to the French bureau, which in turn sends its order to our bureau. The same is done mutually by all the nations.”"(82)
Ze gaan eten in het collectieve eethuis.
"It is the worst thing about any system which divides men, or allows them to be divided, into classes and castes, that it weakens the sense of a common humanity. Unequal distribution of wealth, and, still more effectually, unequal opportunities of education and culture, divided society in your day into classes which in many respects regarded each other as distinct races."(91-92)
[Zo is het maar net. ]
Over de literatuur van die tijd die Jules natuurlijk nog helemaal niet kent. Gesprekken over hoe een boek wordt geselecteerd / gepubliceerd, over dagbladen en tijdschriften.
"The highest of all honors in the nation, higher than the presidency, which calls merely for good sense and devotion to duty, is the red ribbon awarded by the vote of the people to the great authors, artists, engineers, physicians, and inventors of the generation."(96)
[Het volk bepaalt wat goed is. Brrr. Hopelijk is het dan niet zo oppervlakkig als vandaag de dag.]
"Any man in his thirty-third year, his term of service being then half done, can obtain an honorable discharge from the army, provided he accepts for the rest of his life one half the rate of maintenance other citizens receive. It is quite possible to live on this amount, though one must forego the luxuries and elegancies of life, with some, perhaps, of its comforts.”"(99)
Edith bloost als Jules zijn dankbaarheid naar haar uit. Over of Jules de voorvaderen van Edith gekend heeft in Boston. Ze aarzelt. Dr. Leete neemt hem mee naar het centrale warenhuis.
" I am outside the system, and don’t see how I can get in; there seems no way to get in, except to be born in or to come in as an emigrant from some other system.”"(104)
Over het productiesysteem, de organisatie en de planning.
"“That would be tyranny indeed,” replied Dr. Leete, “and you may be very sure that it does not happen with us, to whom liberty is as dear as equality or fraternity. As you come to know our system better, you will see that our officials are in fact, and not merely in name, the agents and servants of the people. The administration has no power to stop the production of any commodity for which there continues to be a demand. Suppose the demand for any article declines to such a point that its production becomes very costly. The price has to be raised in proportion, of course, but as long as the consumer cares to pay it, the production goes on. Again, suppose an article not before produced is demanded. If the administration doubts the reality of the demand, a popular petition guaranteeing a certain basis of consumption compels it to produce the desired article. A government, or a majority, which should undertake to tell the people, or a minority, what they were to eat, drink, or wear, as I believe governments in America did in your day, would be regarded as a curious anachronism indeed. Possibly you had reasons for tolerating these infringements of personal independence, but we should not think them endurable."(108)
"“I am sure,” said Dr. Leete, “that it is within the truth to say that the head of one of the myriad private businesses of your day, who had to maintain sleepless vigilance against the fluctuations of the market, the machinations of his rivals, and the failure of his debtors, had a far more trying task than the group of men at Washington who nowadays direct the industries of the entire nation. All this merely shows, my dear fellow, how much easier it is to do things the right way than the wrong."(110)
Over de 'gepensioneerden', de mensen na hun 45ste.
"But it is not our labor, but the higher and larger activities which the performance of our task will leave us free to enter upon, that are considered the main business of existence."(115)
"Middle age and what you would have called old age are considered, rather than youth, the enviable time of life. Thanks to the better conditions of existence nowadays, and above all the freedom of every one from care, old age approaches many years later and has an aspect far more benign than in past times."(116)
Misdaad betaat niet meer, dus er zijn ook geen gevangenissen. Voor het grootste deel omdat er geen armoede meer is. Voor een ander deel omdat alle mensen goed opgevoed en onderwezen worden.
"“Your courts must have an easy time of it,” I observed. “With no private property to speak of, no disputes between citizens over business relations, no real estate to divide or debts to collect, there must be absolutely no civil business at all for them; and with no offenses against property, and mighty few of any sort to provide criminal cases, I should think you might almost do without judges and lawyers altogether.”
“We do without the lawyers, certainly,” was Dr. Leete’s reply. “It would not seem reasonable to us, in a case where the only interest of the nation is to find out the truth, that persons should take part in the proceedings who had an acknowledged motive to color it.”" [mijn nadruk] (119)
"“You have given up the jury system, then?” “It was well enough as a corrective in the days of hired advocates, and a bench sometimes venal, and often with a tenure that made it dependent, but is needless now. No conceivable motive but justice could actuate our judges.”"(121)
"“We have no such things as law schools,” replied the doctor, smiling. “The law as a special science is obsolete. It was a system of casuistry which the elaborate artificiality of the old order of society absolutely required to interpret it, but only a few of the plainest and simplest legal maxims have any application to the existing state of the world. Everything touching the relations of men to one another is now simpler, beyond any comparison, than in your day. We should have no sort of use for the hair-splitting experts who presided and argued in your courts."(121)
"Most of the purposes for which governments formerly existed no longer remain to be subserved. We have no army or navy, and no military organization. We have no departments of state or treasury, no excise or revenue services, no taxes or tax collectors. The only function proper of government, as known to you, which still remains, is the judiciary and police system. I have already explained to you how simple is our judicial system as compared with your huge and complex machine. Of course the same absence of crime and temptation to it, which make the duties of judges so light, reduces the number and duties of the police to a minimum.”"(123)
Jules bezoekt de bunker waarin hij gevonden werd, samen met Edith.
"It had been suggested by Dr. Leete that we should devote the next morning to an inspection of the schools and colleges of the city, with some attempt on his own part at an explanation of the educational system of the twentieth century."(128)
"Nowadays all persons equally have those opportunities of higher education which in your day only an infinitesimal portion of the population enjoyed."(128)
"If, indeed, we could not afford to educate everybody, we should choose the coarsest and dullest by nature, rather than the brightest, to receive what education we could give. The naturally refined and intellectual can better dispense with aids to culture than those less fortunate in natural endowments."(130)
"“There is still another point I should mention in stating the grounds on which nothing less than the universality of the best education could now be tolerated,” continued Dr. Leete, “and that is, the interest of the coming generation in having educated parents."(131)
Ook lichamelijke opvoeding is een belangrijk onderdeel van het curriculum.
Over de economische welvaart die ontstaat als alle verspilling wordt losgelaten.
[Dit is een groot hoofdstuk met flink wat kritiek op het kapitalisme. ]
Het geheim van Edith van toen Jules wakker werd. Ze wil er niet over praten.
[Ergerlijk. ]
"“By the way,” said I, as the doctor read aloud to us some of these items, “what part did the followers of the red flag take in the establishment of the new order of things? They were making considerable noise the last thing that I knew.” “They had nothing to do with it except to hinder it, of course,” replied Dr. Leete. “They did that very effectually while they lasted, for their talk so disgusted people as to deprive the best considered projects for social reform of a hearing. The subsidizing of those fellows was one of the shrewdest moves of the opponents of reform.”
“Subsidizing them!” I exclaimed in astonishment. “Certainly,” replied Dr. Leete. “No historical authority nowadays doubts that they were paid by the great monopolies to wave the red flag and talk about burning, sacking, and blowing people up, in order, by alarming the timid, to head off any real reforms. What astonishes me most is that you should have fallen into the trap so unsuspectingly.”"(148)
[Waarom zo negatief over het socialisme? ]
"“Oh no!” replied the doctor. “The labor parties, as such, never could have accomplished anything on a large or permanent scale. For purposes of national scope, their basis as merely class organizations was too narrow. It was not till a rearrangement of the industrial and social system on a higher ethical basis, and for the more efficient production of wealth, was recognized as the interest, not of one class, but equally of all classes, of rich and poor, cultured and ignorant, old and young, weak and strong, men and women, that there was any prospect that it would be achieved."(149)
Over de rol van vrouwen die Jules nog steeds als ornamenten voor mannen ziet.
"Our women, as well as our men, are members of the industrial army, and leave it only when maternal duties claim them. The result is that most women, at one time or another of their lives, serve industrially some five or ten or fifteen years, while those who have no children fill out the full term.” “A woman does not, then, necessarily leave the industrial service on marriage?” I queried. “No more than a man,” replied the doctor. “Why on earth should she? Married women have no housekeeping responsibilities now, you know, and a husband is not a baby that he should be cared for.”"(150)
Maar...
"The heavier sorts of work are everywhere reserved for men, the lighter occupations for women. Under no circumstances is a woman permitted to follow any employment not perfectly adapted, both as to kind and degree of labor, to her sex. Moreover, the hours of women’s work are considerably shorter than those of men’s, more frequent vacations are granted, and the most careful provision is made for rest when needed. The men of this day so well appreciate that they owe to the beauty and grace of women the chief zest of their lives and their main incentive to effort, that they permit them to work at all only because it is fully understood that a certain regular requirement of labor, of a sort adapted to their powers, is well for body and mind, during the period of maximum physical vigor. We believe that the magnificent health which distinguishes our women from those of your day, who seem to have been so generally sickly, is owing largely to the fact that all alike are furnished with healthful and inspiriting occupation.”"(151)
"“They are under an entirely different discipline,” replied Dr. Leete, “and constitute rather an allied force than an integral part of the army of the men. They have a woman general-in-chief and are under exclusively feminine régime."(151)
[Vrouwen hebben en houden hun eigen arbeidswereld gescheiden van mannen.]
"The lack of some such recognition of the distinct individuality of the sexes was one of the innumerable defects of your society. The passional attraction between men and women has too often prevented a perception of the profound differences which make the members of each sex in many things strange to the other, and capable of sympathy only with their own. It is in giving full play to the differences of sex rather than in seeking to obliterate them, as was apparently the effort of some reformers in your day, that the enjoyment of each by itself and the piquancy which each has for the other, are alike enhanced. In your day there was no career for women except in an unnatural rivalry with men. We have given them a world of their own, with its emulations, ambitions, and careers, and I assure you they are very happy in it. It seems to us that women were more than any other class the victims of your civilization." [mijn nadruk] (152)
"“It would seem to follow, from what you have said, that wives are in no way dependent on their husbands for maintenance.” “Of course they are not,” replied Dr. Leete, “nor children on their parents either, that is, for means of support, though of course they are for the offices of affection."(154)
"What would become of personal liberty and dignity under such an arrangement? I am aware that you called yourselves free in the nineteenth century. The meaning of the word could not then, however, have been at all what it is at present, or you certainly would not have applied it to a society of which nearly every member was in a position of galling personal dependence upon others as to the very means of life, the poor upon the rich, or employed upon employer, women upon men, children upon parents."(154)
"“I can, however, to some extent, imagine it,” replied the doctor. “But the fact you celebrate, that there are nothing but love matches, means even more, perhaps, than you probably at first realize. It means that for the first time in human history the principle of sexual selection, with its tendency to preserve and transmit the better types of the race, and let the inferior types drop out, has unhindered operation.The necessities of poverty, the need of having a home, no longer tempt women to accept as the fathers of their children men whom they neither can love nor respect. Wealth and rank no longer divert attention from personal qualities." [mijn nadruk] (156-157)
"“You were speaking, a day or two ago, of the physical superiority of our people to your contemporaries. Perhaps more important than any of the causes I mentioned then as tending to race purification has been the effect of untrammeled sexual selection upon the quality of two or three successive generations."(157)
"Our women have risen to the full height of their responsibility as the wardens of the world to come, to whose keeping the keys of the future are confided. Their feeling of duty in this respect amounts to a sense of religious consecration. It is a cult in which they educate their daughters from childhood.”"(158)
Over religie en kerk Ze luisteren naar een preek via de radio, maar het kan ook in een kerk. Mr. Bartons preek.
"Despising themselves de mensen uit de 19e eeuw, they despised their Creator. There was a general decay of religious belief. Pale and watery gleams, from skies thickly veiled by doubt and dread, alone lighted up the chaos of earth. That men should doubt Him whose breath is in their nostrils, or dread the hands that moulded them, seems to us indeed a pitiable insanity; but we must remember that children who are brave by day have sometimes foolish fears at night. The dawn has come since then. It is very easy to believe in the fatherhood of God in the twentieth century."(166)
"Soon was fully revealed, what the divines and philosophers of the old world never would have believed, that human nature in its essential qualities is good, not bad, that men by their natural intention and structure are generous, not selfish, pitiful, not cruel, sympathetic, not arrogant, godlike in aspirations, instinct with divinest impulses of tenderness and self-sacrifice, images of God indeed, not the travesties upon Him they had seemed. The constant pressure, through numberless generations, of conditions of life which might have perverted angels, had not been able to essentially alter the natural nobility of the stock, and these conditions once removed, like a bent tree, it had sprung back to its normal uprightness." [mijn nadruk] (168)
"The betterment of mankind from generation to generation, physically, mentally, morally, is recognized as the one great object supremely worthy of effort and of sacrifice. We believe the race for the first time to have entered on the realization of God’s ideal of it, and each generation must now be a step upward." [mijn nadruk] (171)
[Een totaal lege manier om over de Schepper en zo te praten. Nutteloos. ]
Jules voelt zich eenzaam en raakt verliefd op Edith. Zij houdt ook van hem. Maar ze heeft de behoefte hem uit te leggen waarom ze op het eerste gezicht al verliefd op hem was. Ze blijkt de overgroot-iets te zijn van Edith Bartlett, zijn verloofde in de 19e eeuw. Dat was dus haar grote geheim.
"“Under any ordinary circumstances, Mr. West, I should say that this step had been taken on rather short acquaintance; but these are decidedly not ordinary circumstances. In fairness, perhaps I ought to tell you,” he added, smilingly, “that while I cheerfully consent to the proposed arrangement, you must not feel too much indebted to me, as I judge my consent is a mere formality." [mijn nadruk] (178)
"After sundry ineffectual attempts at parting, she finally insisted that we must say good night. I was about to imprint upon her lips the positively last kiss, when she said ..."(179)
[Erg 19e eeuws relatie-opvattingen? Waarom gaan ze niet meteen met elkaar vrijen? ]
Was het een droom?
"All that about the twentieth century had been a dream. I had but dreamed of that enlightened and care-free 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. The amiable family which I had learned to know so well, my genial host and Mentor, Dr. Leete, his wife, and their daughter, the second and more beauteous Edith, my betrothed,––these, too, had been but figments of a vision."(180)
Als hij uit gaat kan hij niet anders dan walgen van hoe het Boston van 1887 is ten opzichte van het Boston van 2000 waarover hij droomde. En de reacties van de mensen op alles wat hij vertelt zijn erg negatief. Maar dan wordt hij weer wakker in het Boston van 2000. Nee, het was geen droom.
"As with an escaped convict who dreams that he has been recaptured and brought back to his dark and reeking dungeon, and opens his eyes to see the heaven’s vault spread above him, so it was with me, as I realized that my return to the nineteenth century had been the dream, and my presence in the twentieth was the reality."(193)
"For I had been a man of that former time. What had I done to help on the deliverance whereat I now presumed to rejoice? I who had lived in those cruel, insensate days, what had I done to bring them to an end? I had been every whit as indifferent to the wretchedness of my brothers, as cynically incredulous of better things, as besotted a worshipper of Chaos and Old Night, as any of my fellows. So far as my personal influence went, it had been exerted rather to hinder than to help forward the enfranchisement of the race which was even then preparing. What right had I to hail a salvation which reproached me, to rejoice in a day whose dawning I had mocked?"(193)