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said, were he with us now (and especially if he wasn t,
back then, a hopeful visionary with great expectations
galore), when we can make prophets of ourselves, or by
association, as eager, willing (sometimes, decidedly gul-
lible) readers, part of a collective farsighted response: a
culture of upbeat anticipation? Poor Pascal, anyway so
 depressed, so in need of Prozac, so immersed in the
tortures (the self-torture) of an accusatory Catholicism
worthy, actually, of some of the frenzied Puritan divines
who began to settle America around the time he was
being so  hard on himself, not to mention the rest of
us! Instead, we wear our binoculars, scan the coming
years, extrapolate from what now is to what, for sure,
will be, go further, give ourselves permission to run way
ahead, down through more than the decades.
One such look ahead was ironically titled Looking
Backward Edward Bellamy s fictional effort in 1888
to envision the America of our time. He gives us a Bos-
ton both flourishing and fair-minded, the proverbial
 city on the hill of its Puritan forebears realized at
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CHAPTER IV
last in the year 2000. He gives us a socialism that is
appealing, vibrant: an egalitarian world that is a telling
contrast to the Gilded Age. Now, at the start of a new
millennium, the America that Henry George described
in Progress and Poverty (1879) had given way to a coun-
try of bustling cities and towns all of whose inhabitants
lived comfortable and connected lives.
When Bellamy s central character, Julian West,
wakes up, scans the business and cultural life of Bos-
ton and beyond, he has sailed during his long sleep
across a century and more of strife and injustice, landed
safe and well on the shores of a  promised land  with
electricity and credit cards and shopping malls and a
version of the radio: a novelist s uncanny capacity to
imagine predictively a strikingly different life from the
one he observed daily. But Bellamy s utopian story, so
often hailed for the accuracy of its depiction of our con-
temporary habits and gadgetry, is really a moral and
psychological fantasy, an idea of a nation whose citizens
are kindly, contemplative, courteous, and, above all,
uninterested in grabbing all they can get, no matter the
consequences for others. Bellamy believed us Americans
to be perfectible within, even as he saw us becoming
rich; he portrays us as both just and tolerant. For him,
our great lust would be for benevolence: our idealism
wouldn t be deterred; our minds and hearts would
flourish under such circumstances. Here is a civilized,
humane Superego, well able to tame judiciously the
now attenuated and discreet pressures of the Id, and an
Ego free ( free at last ) to pursue virtues as well as prop-
erty. Meanwhile (the irony!) we, who live in the Amer-
ica Bellamy foretold, find ourselves  looking backward,
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WHERE WE ARE HEADED
making all too suggestive and melancholy comparisons
between the economic and social disparities of the late
nineteenth century and those of our time.
To be sure, not all futurist fantasies have been confi-
dently joyful hymns to our dreams become a realized
series of breakthroughs. In the darkest hours of this cen-
tury and, maybe, of all centuries, only fifty years ago,
George Orwell, in 1948, gave us his well-known 1984.
There he called a halt to the Ego the one George Eliot
and Sir Willoughby in their different ways knew, the
one Pascal and Freud knew, the one Pascal thought
would always be, or the one Freud thought might well
one day emerge. Dorothea s  theoretic mind in Mid-
dlemarch, Sir Willoughby s endlessly vain mind in The
Egoist, Pascal s portrayal of an Ego also quite self-
preoccupied, though with no true conviction of its ul-
timate virtue, quite the contrary, and Freud s portrayal
of an Ego buffeted, but also potentially capable of tak-
ing matters into its own hands (taking its owner, after
all, to see a psychoanalyst: will as the Ego s great instru-
ment of assertion, no matter an Id that resembles Pas-
cal s description of a side of us) all of that, in Orwell s
premonitory chronicle, becomes almost irrelevant. For
the time was approaching (only thirty-six years ahead,
a couple of generations at the most) when the Ego as
rendered by all four of those writers, two novelists, two
scientists with speculative tendencies, would be mere
putty in the hands of something larger than any human
being, something with a momentum of its own, a
strangely impersonal (and inhuman) construction of so- [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]