The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 6 January 2016
by Sir Thomas More
Do we all dream of a perfect world? Do we dream of Utopia? Given the political conflict so characteristic of our public discourse these days, it is often hard to imagine that everyone dreams of living in a perfect world. So many seem determined to make the world more complex, more violent, more fearful. But, surely, it is a basic human desire, the dream of Utopia. Philosophers have, of course, debated the possibility of a perfect nation since antiquity. But, where does the modern vision of Utopia originate? That's a simple enough question to answer, with this short, dense, and weirdly brilliant book, which first appeared at the beginning of the 16th century, and yet still feels incredibly immediate and modern. Much of what Sir Thomas More writes is a critique and a response to the state of the social structures of his day. He was an official in the court of Henry VIII, and he paid for his progressive notions with his life. Of course, the book's enduring relevance may be a depressing notion, given that nearly five hundred years have passed and our basic class structure is mostly unchanged. The poor and working-class still struggle beneath an upper class ever more removed by its celestial wealth and privelege.
The book opens with a chapter in which a group of hypothetical thinkers and travelers discuss the state of class structures, with a focus on the enclosure movement in Britain, the privatization of vast agricultural lands that enriched the noble classes and made agriculture a corporate business rather than a collective endeavour. Resources once held in common for the subsistence of the community were given over to cash crops and livestock to be used for revenue generating enterprises that sent products overseas and returned riches to the ever fewer owners. More's critique of this shift is scathing.
From there, he turns to a fictional traveler, recently returned from the fictional South American island nation of Utopia. The traveler describes in detail much of the life and landscape of this supposedly perfect republic. All goods are held in common. The economy is based on supplying the basic needs for everyone. There is no currency, and gold and silver are reserved for children's baubles and chamber pots. Everyone does work beneficial to everyone else, and there is a much greater reserve for leisure time that is used, mostly, for intellectual pursuits. There is no class, no wealth, and no poverty. Warfare is rationalized and religion is given over to a Christian concept of collective welfare. Much of what is here has been tried to one degree or another over the past several centuries. Most of these experiments have been small communal affairs. Some, like Soviet Russia or Maoist China, have taken some of these ideas to extremes. What we have long since found is that human nature is not easily turned toward a selfless common community cooperation and equality. Not from above, anyway. It is hard to imagine any of More's Utopian visions working in today's world of division, cultural diversity, identity politics, and the absurd accumulation of wealth amongst a tiny minority. Few Utopian projects can work, unless the population is first deeply and uniformly dedicated to the idea of the common good. On the other hand, there is much that More describes of his Utopia that hardly sounds perfect. For example, the death penalty for aldulterers, slavery for all other offenses, and ostracism for atheists. Again, however, the reader needs to see More's Utopia in its own cultural context, that of Henry VIII's England. More's conventional moral stance came from a world dominated by the late Medieval Catholic church, and his progressive critiques didn't play well in the halls of wealth and power.
But, Utopia still plays in our cultural and social dreams. It is an idea and an ideal which is still studied, imagined, tested and hoped-for five centuries later. People remain divided on what Utopia might ultimately look like, from the hippie vision of back-to-the-land primitivism to the high-tech world of the coming Singularity. The absurdity of its extremes does not mean we shouldn't strive for a dream of cooperation and the elimination of the extremes of wealth and poverty, power and powerlessness.