notes on thomas more's utopia

to be quite honest I started this review more like a book report, where I went in quite strategic depth about everything. It had it's charms I guess, in the way that charm can sometimes cleverly substitute for authenticity. (Sorry if any tones of passive aggression come through -- If you can't tell, I've got a lot on my mind.)

So Utopia. It's where we got the word itself -- Greek chopped up into a new word which effectively means 'no land'. From the beginning More is both clear and unclear on this line of truth/fallacy; the book like many books of the time is furnished with circumstantial details and exposition in order to make it look and sound like a factual narrative. From that angle it's merely a highly impassioned travelogue for a commonwealth that does not exist.

What Utopia really is is a thesis -- on how to structure society in such a way as to scrap all the things that make suffering occur and persist. Sir Thomas More was Catholic and an Englishman born in the late 15th century to a line of lawyers; he was also interested in Humanism and a good friend to Erasmus. You can sort of read between the lines, from that information, as to what kind of values the fictional inhabitants of Utopia have -- and you would be maybe only half wrong. More spends a grueling amount of pages on the religious scruples of the Utopians; they're monotheistic, but tolerant of other religions in a syncretic way. The only thing they're intolerant of is no religion at all, which tracks for even the most progressive of renaissance Catholic thought, I suppose. Of which More was quite progressive for his time and place -- giving his daughters a classic education, favoring drinking water instead of light beer.

I'm not going to go chapter by chapter through Utopia. Everything I do want to say scholastically about the book was written down in the margins by the previous owner of my copy in 1947 -- including my favorite annotation of his, pictured at the end.

Rather here are my thoughts. I think I'd have loved it as teen freshly struggling away from 'centrist' (conservative) politics -- that's the audience more or less (ha) that More is writing for, which has to be remembered. There's an assumed goodness at heart and a pain for the suffering of others that is obviously the guiding light of his writing the book itself. Among problems I was astonished to realize have always, always existed: the need for education reform, prisons as punishment vs. rehabilitation, and corporate greed in the form of buying and holding 'useless' land (which people just so happened to have lived on).

But More's frame of reference is one of a white, affluent man within, at the time, one of the most powerful empires in the world. This taints even his most kindhearted aspirations of societal engineering with a bit of ugliness that is hard for a modern reader to ignore -- and let me be clear, I don't think they should, but I'll get back to that.

When More speaks of perfect society built on friendship and mutual trust, he slips very casually in that all the dirty jobs will be done by 'bondmen'. Bondmen comes from the word bondage, which is itself a fancy word for slavery. When he says that the Utopians prefer subterfuge to outright war, he adds slyly that when war is needed, they extradite the bloody labor to the Zapoletes. These folk live "five hundred miles from Utopia eastward. They are hideous, savage, and fierce." And if you had any doubt, More states that they are "born only for war"; that "this is the only craft they have to get their living by". The only reason the Utopians find the Zapoletes good for their dirty work of war is that they hope by doing so, the entire population will eventually die out by killing each other.

I read this book in a kind of horrified, prolongued stare. I think it was an important read -- to understand that century of humanity, even in one small fraction, by how they fantasized about 'perfection'. It wasn't very hard for my mind to jump from More's own personality to those of 'good' people living within other empires, especially the one I live in. It's not even a cognitive disconnect between imagined virtue and complicit daily wrongs; because the complicit daily wrong is drafted for years as 'part of the greater good'. Knowing that this book was published two centuries and change before America started it's own equally flawed 'utopia' only makes things clearer to me in a very, very sickening way.

In essence, it was a frustrating, appalling, and educational read. A very human one. The older I grow the more I think goodness and evilness are both inherent to humanity, and not one more than the other. Reading things from history that have such a deliberate smack of both sides is rare for me -- both a horror and a treat. As humans we keep making the same mistakes in the way we act towards eachother; I think the same war has happened since the beginning of time, just repeated with different trappings and new blood. It's kind of cathartic in a cynical way, and hopeful in a dire one, I guess, to read stuff from so long ago that is still so very current, even in it's flaws. We'll always have the same problems, but we'll always be wanting to solve them. The wanting always exists, but you have to be brave enough to divert the comfort of desire into the uncertainty of action.

here's N.N. Evans (the prev, probably long dead owner) annotation that i love best. it's adjoining More's very dubious section on euthanasia, and reads "so natural law! nonsense".