AustLit

Letters ponders the way successive generations consider themselves and their way of doing things superior to those who have gone before. He discusses Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1887) and condemns the utopia it presents as being 'as intellectually parasitical as it is pharisaical', and suggests that as future generations will sneer at previous generations anyway, we may as well provide them with plenty to abuse us with instead of worrying what they will think of us.