Топик: Thomas More Utopia

“But at the same time, More took the liberty to suppose a commonwealth built on the pessimism about human nature propounded by St. Augustine, More's most cherished author. Augustine believed that secular government was ordained by God to restrain fallen humankind from hurtling creation into chaos. Without secular authority to enforce peace, sinful human beings would topple into perpetual violence; so the state exists to keep order.” (Mikhail Bakhtin)

A major source of violence among fallen human beings is cupidity, a form of lust. Sinful human beings have an insatiable desire for things. For Augustine there was no end to it.

So if we look at Utopia with More's Augustinian eye, we see a witty play on how life might develop in a state that tried to balance these two impulses--human depravity and a communist system aimed at checking the destructive individualism of corrupt human nature. It is carnival, a festival, not a plan for reform. When the carnival is over, and we come to the end of the book, reality reasserts itself with a crash. More did not see in Utopia a plan of revolutionary reform to be enacted in Christian Europe. Remember the subtitle

The six-hour working day in Utopia also represents an eternal check against the tendency of an acquisitive society to turn human beings into beasts of burden to be worked as if they had no claim over themselves. Set over against the misery of peasants depicted in the vision of Piers the Plowman or against the child labor of early industrial America or the sweatshops of modern Asia, the Utopian limitation on labor is a way of saying that life is an end in itself and not merely an instrument to be used for someone else.

It is perhaps also a rebuke to those of us for whom work and life come to be identical so that to pile up wealth or reputation makes us neglect spouses, children, friends, community, and that secret part of ourselves nourished by the willingness to take time to measure our souls by something other than what we produce.

The sanitation of the Utopian cities is exemplary. The Utopians value cleanliness and they believe that the sick should be cared for by the state. The Utopians care for children. Education is open to all. They like music, and in an age that stank in Europe, the Utopians like nice smells. To average English people of the Sixteenth Century – living in squalor and misery.

But to middle-class people like ourselves, our messy and fragmented society looks good in comparison to Utopia. Here More's Augustinian conception of sinful humankind becomes burdensome to the soul, for in the Utopian commonwealth, individualism and privacy are threats to the state. I suspect that we see as clearly as anywhere in Utopia just why communism did not work. The weight of human depravity was simply too much to be balanced by eliminating private property. Yet it is worth saying that More did not ignore that depravity. Utopia is full of it.

“No locks bar Utopian doors--which open at a touch.” (Thomas More, Utopia, tr. Paul Turner, London, Penguin, 1965, p. 73) The only reason the Utopians can imagine for privacy is to protect property; there being no private property, anybody can walk into your house at any time to see what you're doing. Conformity is king. All the cities and all the houses in the cities look pretty much alike. Of the towns Raphael says, "When you've seen one of them, you've seen them all." (Thomas More, Utopia, tr. Paul Turner, London, Penguin, 1965, p.71)

The Utopians change houses by lot every ten years just so they won't get too attached to any endearing little idiosyncrasies in a dwelling. The Utopian towns are as nearly square as the landscape will allow; that means they are built on a grid. I can imagine nothing more similar to Utopian cities in our own day than the sprawling developments outside our great cities where every house looks like every other house and where even the people and the dogs in one household bear a startling resemblance to all the other people and all the other dogs in the neighbourhood.

I think in fact that Utopian women have a somewhat better time of it. A small number of Utopians are allowed to spend their lives in study, freed from the obligation to manual labour that is imposed on everyone else. Women are among this privileged group. Divorce is permitted if husbands and wives prove completely incompatible and if the case is investigated by the authorities. But a husband is forbidden to divorce his wife merely because she has become ugly. In Utopia no old rich men throw out the old wife and take a new young trophy wife in exchange. The same harsh penalties for adultery apply to both sexes. Husbands chastise their wives for offences. But erring husbands are punished by their superiors in the hierarchy of men.

Utopia is a male-dominated society. Women have no political authority; that authority is all placed in the hands of fathers. It is hard to escape the suspicion that sexuality is stringently limited as part of a general belief that passion of any kind is dangerous to the superior rationality that only men can possess.

Conclusion

Let me close by making a point that I implied above. Utopia is thus not a program for our society. It is not a blueprint but a touchstone against which we try various ideas about both our times and the book to see what then comes of it all. It helps us see what we are without telling us in detail what we are destined to be. Utopia becomes part of a chain, crossing and uncrossing with past and present in the unending debate about human nature and the best possible society possible to the kind of beings we are. Utopia becomes in every age a rather sober carnival to make us smile and grimace and lift ourselves out of the prosaic and the real, to give ourselves a second life where we can imagine the liberty to make everything all over again, to create society anew as the wise Utopus himself did long before in Utopia. His wisdom is not ours. But it summons us to have our own wisdom and to use it as best we can to judge what is wrong in our society in the hope that our judgment will make us do some things right, even if we cannot make all things new this side of paradise.

Bibliography

· Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World , tr. Helene Iswolsky, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1984.

· Harry Levin, The Myth of the Golden Age in the Renaissance, New York, Oxford University Press, 1969.

· More, Thomas. Utopia. Trans. Paul Turner. New York: Penguin Books, 1965.