It is both entertaining and highly enlightening to look at past accounts of the future. These attempts at crystal gazing are rarely accurate in the sense of predicting the ways in which future generations will live - think of the cartoon "The Jetsons" and compare this to your own life - but when they are well written they are quite accurate in terms of revealing the assumptions that a generation makes about human nature. Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward is an example of just such a well-written inaccurate-but-accurate view of the past. His ideas about how we would be living at the turn of the 21st century are wrong in many of their particulars, but he provides us with a profoundly intelligent understanding of the world in the last decades of the 19th century. Bellamy's vision of the future - based on his own assumptions about human nature - is a blend of the idealistic and the practical. His protagonist - who is an insomniac who can only seem to achieve the blessing of sleep through being hypnotized by a mesmerist and ends up sleeping for over a century until he is brought out of his trance - finds himself in a world from which the worst of human behavior and human sorry has been removed. Wars are gone, as is discrimination. There is no crime and even little sorrow.
How have all of these changes been wrought? Through the simple but to Bellamy miraculous changes brought about through the installation of a state that ensures that each person is indeed allowed to take accordi
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