13 May 2008
Thomas More’s Utopia
Lecture Outline
* “Eutopia” vs. “Outopia”
*the meaning of More’s Utopia
*what does Utopia assume about people? – in other words, what are the “natural” qualities of humanity?
*Satire?
*the great chain of being and its social implications
*microcosm and macrocosm
“Eutopia” vs. “Outopia”
*two different source words in Greek that could be referenced by “utopia”
* Eu-topos means “good place”
* Ou-utopos means “no place”
*a joke? Is “Utopia” a good place that can never be? (see the other place names in More’s book) or is it a place that should never be? Is this work satirical?
The meaning of More’s Utopia
From Wikipedia article on More:
“The novels principal message is the social need for order and discipline, rather than liberty.”
From http://www.apostles.com/utopeuth.html
(from their “About” page:
Mission Statement
Apostles.com is dedicated to providing information on the twelve apostles of Jesus Christ, current events of interest to Catholics and other Christians, and important issues of concern to all people of faith. )
“It is important to remember that More did not agree with everything in Utopia. There is no doubt that More was opposed euthanasia, yet it was practiced by the Utopians.
“Utopia is an imaginary society where people have designed the best society they could conceive of with the use of natural reason. However, they have been denied the truths of divine law. As Peter Ackroyd points out in his recent biography of More (The Life of Thomas More, Nan A. Talese, Doubleday, 1998.), "That is why they encourage euthanasia, condone divorce and harbour a multiplicity of religious beliefs- all of which actions were considered dreadful by More himself and by Catholic Europe. This may be no ideal commonwealth, after all, but a model of natural law and natural reason taken to their unnatural extreme."
From the BL’s website on Utopia and art,
http://www.bl.uk/learning/histcitizen/21cc/utopia/more1/celebration1/celebration.html
* "The Utopian's attitude towards death reflected their attitude towards religion and reason. It also reflected the pursuit of pleasure and the common good; a less individualistic society meant individual death mattered less. English people in the 16th century would have been familiar with death in a way that modern people, for the most part, are not."
Reception
*enormously popular, initiated an entire genre of literature still enormously popular today, especially in its darker twin format, dystopia, and most popular of all, “false utopia”
*Bacon’s New Atlantis; Erewhon (“nowhere”) but also much of science fiction (Star Trek; Blade Runner; Logan’s Run; Brazil; 1984)
*Vasco de Quiroga, 1537-1565 governed as Bishop of Michoacán, instituted Utopian principles following More’s book
Read more about Vasco de Quiroga here.
Vasco de Quiroga image source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Vasco_de_Quiroga.jpg
What does Utopia assume about people? – in other words, what does it presume are the “natural” qualities of humanity?
*The two books of the Utopia cover the current state of England from a Utopian perspective (represented by Raphael Hythlodaye), and the description of Utopia itself. What perspective on England does Utopia offer?
*describes Europe as a dystopia:
pg 20L: on the death penalty for robbery: “no penalty that can be devised is sufficient to restrain from acts of robbery those who have no other means of getting a livelihood. “
Pg. 21 L: many Western states destroyed by their own standing armies
Pg. 21 R: cannibal sheep
Pg. 22 L: buying foreign livestock and raising and selling it in England: “I think the whole mischief of this system has not yet been felt.”
Pg. 23 R: the example of the Polylerites (people of much nonsense): those who are convicted of theft are “sent unguarded to do public works” – tip of the ear cut off.
Pg 26 L: reason why Raphael won’t advise kings:
“doubtless Plato was right in foreseeing that if kings were not philosophical themselves, they would never approve of the advice of real philosophers; from their youth they are usually infected and saturated with wrong ideas…. So if I gave clever advice to some king, and tried to uproot the seeds of evil and corruption from his mind, do you not think that as a result, I would be immediately banished or ridiculed?
Beginning of description of Utopia, page 30 R:
“here we have the right of private property, while there everything is held in common.”
31 R, after describing how happy the Utopians are,
“I doubt that such well being could be achieved where private property exists. For when everyone aims to have as much property as possible, even where there is a great abundance of wealth, it is all still shared by a few, while the rest are in poverty. And it generally happens that the one class deserves the lot of the other, for the rich tend to be greedy, unscrupulous and useless, while the poor tend to be well behaved, simple, and by their daily labor more useful to the community than to themselves. I am utterly convinced that no just and even distribution of goods can be made, nor any perfect happiness be found among humans, unless private property is utterly abolished. While it lasts, there will remain a heavy and intolerable burden of poverty and anxieties for the greatest and best part of mankind. I admit that this can be relieved to some extent, but I maintain it cannot be removed.”
32 L: opposing view, from More’s narrator:
“Life can never be happy or satisfactory, where all things are held in common. How could a sufficient supply of goods be kept up? Each person would spend less time working. If personal gain does not motivate the individual, he becomes lazy and relies on the industry of others.”
BOOK 2
Pg 34 L: the people from the city all spend 2 years working in the country, and are then rotated back into the city (to provide food via agriculture)
Pg. 35 R: Every ten years they actually exchange their houses by lot
39 L, on work: “The constitution of the state has one objective: that so far as public needs permit, as much time as possible should be withdrawn from the service of the body and devoted to the freedom and culture of the mind. It is in this that they deem the happiness of life to consist.”
42 L, on travel: “Now you can see how there is no chance of evading work, and no pretext for idleness – no wine shop, no ale house, no house of prostitution, no opportunity of corruption, no unlawful places of resort. Everything is open to everyone, and everyone is bound either to perform the usual work or to be taking lawful and respectable recreation.
46 L, on virtue: “They define virtue as a life according to nature, for which God intends us. Humans, they say, in following the guidance of nature in desiring one thing and avoiding another, obey the dictates of reason. Reason first of all inspires in humans a love and veneration of the Divine Majesty, to which we owe both our existence and our capacity for happiness; secondly, it urges and admonishes us to lead lives as free from care and as full of joy as possible, and because of our natural fellowship with other people, to help them to also obtain that end.
*Pleasure as a key foundation of Utopian society – pleasure defined as of the soul and of the body (pg. 48 R).
“To the soul they ascribe intelligence and the delight that is bred of contemplation of the truth; to this is added the pleasant recollection of a well-spent life, and the confident hope of happiness to come. Bodily pleasure they divide into two categories. The first is that which fills the sense with perceptible sweetness…The second category of bodily pleasure, they say, is that which consists in a calm and harmonious state of the body; this occurs when a person’s health is not interrupted by any disorder.”
Pg. 50 L: In any other case they think it makes no sense for a person to be hard on himself.”
Pg 54 R, on law and politics: “in their opinion a just law must be easily understood.”
55 L, on treaties: “What is the use of a treaty, they say; did Nature herself not sufficiently bind one person to another?”
57 L and R on warfare: they first try to encourage the enemy to kill its own leader; sow the seeds of dissension by trying to encourage a relative of the king in his hopes for the throne; they hire a foreign militia to fight for them.
Satire?
39 R: on colonization: “Wherever the natives have a lot of unoccupied waste land, they found a colony as a branch of the parent stem, under their own laws, joining with the native population, wherever they are willing to dwell with them. When they do join with them, the two groups easily grow into the same way of life and manners, to the great advantage of both peoples. By their arrangements they make the land sufficient for both, which previously seemed barely adequate for the one. If the natives refuse to live according to their laws, they drive them out of the territory that they define for themselves. If they resist, they fight against them; for they think the most just cause for war is when people does not use its soil but keeps it void and vacant, and still forbids the use and possession of it by others, who by the law of nature ought to be supported by it.”
43 R on gold:
“their chamber-pots are made from gold and silver, as are certain other containers for the humblest of uses….those who are to be shamed on account of some offence must wear gold earrings, finger rings, chains around their necks, and gold circlets on their heads.” (Anemolian ambassadors)
52 R-53, on choosing mates (included in the section on “Slavery”):
“In choosing mates they favor seriously and strictly a custom that seemed to us very foolish, and extremely ridiculous. The woman, whether a maiden or a widow, is shown naked to the suitor by a worthy and respectable matron, and similarly the suitor is presented naked before the maiden by a discreet man. We laughed at this custom and condemned it as foolish, but they on the other hand marveled at the notable folly of other nations.” (Pony analogy)
pg 61 L and R on the Christian convert
“Only one of the Christians got into trouble, while I was there. As soon as he was baptized, in spite of our protests, he began to speak publicly of Christ’s religion with more zeal than discretion, and began to be so heated in his preaching that he not only declared that he preferred our religion to any other, but also condemned all others as profane in themselves. He loudly declared the followers of other religions impious and sacrilegious, and said that they were worthy of eternal punishment. After he had been preaching in this style for some time, they arrested him, not for despising their religion, but for stirring up strife among the people. They tried and convicted him, and sentenced him to exile. Among their most ancient principles, is a rule that no one shall be attacked for his religion.”
67 R, the narrator’s response to Raphael’s story:
“When Raphael had finished his story, I couldn’t help thinking that many of the manners and laws of that people are absurd – not only their way of waging wars, their ceremonies, their religion, and their other institutions, but most of all that which is the chief foundation of their whole structure, the way in which they live communally and share goods, without any money dealings. By this alone all the nobility, magnificence, splendor and majesty, the true glories and ornaments of a commonwealth, are utterly overthrown. Yet since I knew Raphael was wearied from telling his tale, and I was not certain that he could brook any opposition to his views…Therefore I praised the Utopian way of life, and also Raphaels’s account of it, and took him by the hand and led him into supper….I cannot agree with all that he said, but I readily admit that there are many things in the Utopian commonwealth that are worth wishing for in our own states – much as there may be little hope of ever seeing them realized.
The great chain of being and its social implications (microcosm and macrocosm)
Image source: http://www.departments.bucknell.edu/history/carnegie/aristotle/chainofbeing.html
A great chain of being from 1579, Didacus Valades, Rhetorica Christiana
For info on the philosophical meanings and consequences of the Great Chain of Being concept of the social order, see Peter Suber's webpage on the topic:
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/courses/re/chain.htm
Note for the purposes of this course that the chain connects all life and even inanimate objects -
everything in creation - in a hierarchical order that is stable and constant. The social order was thought to mirror the order of the great chain of being.
Microcosm and Macrocosm
The social order (a part of the entire world) mirrors the order of all of creation (the whole).
In the same way, a family (with the husband at its head, and the wife and children and servants underneath) echoes the order of the whole.
The animal kingdom (ranging from lions to worms and insects) is also arranged according to such an order.
The social order (king to beggar), family, and animal kingdom are microcosms. The whole of creation is a macrocosm.
It is part of early modern belief systems that a part of a system can be expected to display the same hierarchical pattern as the whole. This is the relationship between microcosm and macrocosm.
Read more about the relationship between the Great Chain of Being, and the parts of the whole in the section on the Great Chain of Being, here. Note that this entire page is worth reading and is helpful if you're struggling with some of the core ideas of the period.
The following hierarchy is taken from jackytappet's website:
http://jackytappet.tripod.com/chain.html
God
Angels
Kings
Queens
Archbishops
Dukes/Duchesses
Bishops
Marquises/Marchionesses
Earls/Countesses
Viscounts/Viscountesses
Barons/Baronesses
Abbots/Deacons
Knights / Local Officials
Ladies-in-Waiting
Priests Monks
Squires
Pages
Messengers
Merchants/Shopkeepers
Tradesmen
Yeomen Farmers
Soldiers/Town Watch
Household Servants
Tenant Farmers
Shepherds/Herders
Beggars
Actors
Thieves/Pirates
Gypsies
Animals
Birds
Worms
Plants
Rocks
*See Utopia page 19, left column, where the narrator tells Raphael that he should become a counselor to “some great prince”, because “from the prince, as from a never failing spring, flows a stream of all that is good or evil over the whole nation.”
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