Thomas More Utopia

THE UNIVERSITRY OF LATVIA

Faculty of Foreign
Languages

Thomas More

"Utopia"

Open University

5 course

Contents

·   
Introduction

·   
“Utopia”

·   
The
Second Book

·   
Conclusion

·   
Bibliography

Introduction

The "dark" Middle
Ages were followed by a time known in art and literature as the Renaissance.
The word "renaissance" means "rebirth" in French and was
used to denote a phase in the cultural development of Europe between the 14th
and 17th centuries.

Thomas More, the first
English humanist of the Renaissance, was born in London in 1478.  Thomas More
wrote in English and in Latin. The humanists of al1 European countries
communicated in the Latin language, and their best works were written in Latin.

His style is simple,
colloquial end has an unaffected ease. The work by which he is best remembered
today is "Utopia" which was written in Latin in the year 1516. It has
now been translated into all European languages.

"Utopia" (which
in Greek means "nowhere") is the name of a non-existent island. This
work is divided into two books.

In the first, the author
gives a profound and truthful picture of the people's sufferings and points out
the socia1 evils existing, in England at the time. In the second book more
presents his ideal of what the future society should be like.

“The word
"utopia" has become a byword and is used in Modern English to denote
an unattainable ideal, usually in social and political matters. But the writer
H.G. Wells, who wrote an introduction to the latest edition, said that the use
of the word "utopia" was far from More's essentia1 quality, whose
mind abounded in sound, practical ideas. The book is in reality a very
unimaginative work.” (Harry Levin, “The Myth of the Golden Age in the Renaissance.” 1969.)

Thomas More's "Utopia" was the first literary work in which the ideas
of Communism appeared. It was highly esteemed by all the humanists of Europe in More's time and again grew very popular with the socialists of the 19th century.
After More, a tendency began in literature to write fantastic novels on social
reforms, and many such works appeared in various countries.

“Utopia”

The historical Thomas
More, the author of Utopia, was an extraordinarily complicated man who tied up
all the threads of his life in his heroic death. The real man is to me much
more interesting than the plastic creation adored by his most fervent admirers.
The Utopia is the sort of complicated book that we should expect from so
complicated a man.

It is heavy with irony.
Irony is the recognition of the distance between what we say and what we mean.
But then irony was the experience of life in the Sixteenth Century - reason
enough for Shakespeare to make it perhaps his most important trope while the
century was drawing to a close. Everywhere in church, government, society, and
even scholarship profession and practice stood separated by an abyss.

In Utopia three characters
converse and reports of other conversations enter the story. Thomas More
appears as himself. Raphael Hythlodaeus or Raphael Nonsenso, as Paul Turner
calls him in his splendid translation is the fictional traveler to exotic
worlds. More's young friend of Antwerp Peter Gillis adds an occasional word.

Yet the Thomas More of
Utopia is a character in a fiction. He cannot be completely identified with
Thomas More the writer who wrote all the lines. Raphael Hythlodaeus's name
means something like "Angel" or "messenger of Nonsense." He
has traveled to the commonwealth of Utopia with Amerigo Vespucci, seemingly the
first voyager to realize that the world discovered by Columbus was indeed a new
world and not an appendage of India or China.

Raphael has not only been
to Utopia; he has journeyed to other strange places, and found almost all of
them better than Europe. He is bursting with the enthusiasm of his superior
experiences.

But how seriously are we
to take him? The question has been much debated. The Thomas More in the story
objects cautiously and politely to Raphael's enthusiasms.

Anyway, the main point
about renaissance dialogues and declamations such as Utopia is that their
meaning depends on how we hear them. How we hear them depends on what we bring
to them.

“More was one of the most
thorough and consistent thinkers in the Sixteenth Century. He argued everything
like the splendid lawyer he was. I believe that when we read Utopia
dialectically, through his other works, we may penetrate to some degree the
ironic screen that he has thrown over the work. Even so, complete certainty
about his meaning sometimes eludes us.” (Harry Levin, The Myth of the Golden
Age in the Renaissance, New York, Oxford University Press, 1969.)

The
Second Book

The second "book"
or chapter in More's work – the description of the island commonwealth
somewhere in the New World. I shall leave aside the fascinating first book,
which is a real dialogue--indeed an argument between the traveler Raphael
Nonsenso and the skeptical Thomas More. I shall rather discuss the second book,
Nonsenso's description of this orderly commonwealth based on reason as defined
by the law of nature. Since the Utopians live according to the law of nature, they are not
Christian. Indeed they practice a form of religious toleration – as they must is they are
to be both reasonable and willing to accept Christianity when it is announced
to them.

What is the Utopian
commonwealth? What does the little book mean?

“As opposed to the
official feast, one might say that carnival celebrated temporary liberation
from the prevailing truth and from the established order; it marked the
suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions.
Carnival was the true feast of time, the feast of becoming, change, and
renewal. It was hostile to all that was immortalized and completed.” (Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, Indiana University Press, 1984.)

Utopia provides a second
life of the people above and beyond the official life of the "real"
states of the Sixteenth Century. Its author took the radical liberty to
dispense with the entire social order based on private property, as Plato had done
for the philosopher elite in his Republic.

“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.