- Cody, Beth.
Looking Backward: 2162–2012.
Seattle: CreateSpace, 2012.
ISBN 978-1-4681-7895-1.
-
Julian West was a professor of history at Fielding College, a midwestern
U.S. liberal arts institution, where he shared the assumptions of his
peers: big government was good; individual initiative was suspect; and
the collective outweighed the individual. At the inauguration of a time
capsule on the campus, he found himself immured within it and, after
inhaling a concoction consigned to the future by the chemistry
department, wakes up 150 years later, when the capsule is opened, to
discover himself in a very different world.
The United States, which was the foundation of his reference frame,
have collapsed due to unsustainable debt and entitlement commitments.
North America has fragmented into a variety of territories, including the Free States
of America, which include the present-day states of Oklahoma, Missouri,
Kansas, Iowa, Nebraska, Colorado, Utah, Nevada, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming,
and North and South Dakota. The rest of the former U.S. has separated into
autonomous jurisdictions with very different approaches to governance. The
Republic of Texas has become entirely Texan, while New Hampshire has chosen
to go it alone, in keeping with their porky-spine tradition. A rump USA,
composed of failed states, continues to pursue the policies which
caused the collapse of their railroad-era, continental-scale empire.
West returns to life in the Free States, which have become a classical
libertarian republic as imagined by
Rothbard.
The federal government is
supported only by voluntary contributions, and state and local
governments are constrained by the will of their constituents. West,
disoriented by all of this, is taken under the wing of David Seeton,
a history professor at Fielding in the 22nd century, who welcomes West into
his home and serves a guide to the new world in which West finds himself.
West and Seeton explore this world, so strange to West, and it slowly
dawns on West (amidst flashbacks to his past life), that this might
really be a better way of organising society. There is a great amount of
preaching and didactic conversation here; while it's instructive if you're
really interested in how a libertarian society might work, many
may find it tedious.
Finally, West, who was never really sure his experience of the future
mightn't have been a dream, has a dream experience which forces him to
confront the conflict of his past and future.
This is a book I found both tiresome and enlightening. I would highly
recommend it to anybody who has contemplated a libertarian society but
dismissed it as “That couldn't ever work”. The author is
clear that no solution is perfect, and that any society will reflect
the flaws of the imperfect humans who compose it. The libertarian
society is presented as the “least bad discovered so far”,
with the expectation that free people will eventually discover even
better ways to organise themselves. Reading this book is much like
slogging through Galt's speech in
Atlas Shrugged (April 2010)—it takes
some effort, but it's worth doing so. It is obviously derivative of
Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward
which presented a socialist utopia, but I'd rather live in Cody's future than
Bellamy's.
June 2013 