Book #49

The Utopia of Sir Thomas More

I thought, "Hey, let's go for something different. Something classic, instead of trendy; profound, instead of shallow; realistic, instead of fantasy." So I picked up Sir Thomas More's Utopia, one of those books I found at a library sale and bought because Cinderella liked it in Ever After. Just one of those random decisions for reading.

I'm glad I read it, but I wouldn't read it again. It was surprising how much of it was still applicable, 500 years after it was written -- the description of how sheep have destroyed England, for instance. He described how wool had become a valuable export, and so rich men had bought up arable land and turned it all into pasture for their massive flocks of sheep, and how now people not only didn't have enough food, because too much farmland had been turned into sheepland, but the people of England, the average peasants, could no longer afford wool for their own clothing because it was too valuable. And doesn't that sound like modern industry and the way corporations screw everybody over, and isn't that almost exactly what happened with agribusiness, corn, and ethanol.

I hadn't known what to expect going in, and so I skipped over the multiple introductory parts that focused on More's place in history and just went for the text itself. The first part is a discussion More has with a couple of people about why one of them, an experienced and wise old man named Raphael Hythloday (I like the name -- it means something like "Babbler" according to the endnotes), does not want to be a counselor to a prince. The basic reason is that he would be the sole voice supporting his ideas of what would be best for the country, and he would never be able to override the prince's other advisors, who would say the opposite of everything Hythloday said. In that part they talked about what was wrong with the world -- like the sheep -- and then the second part described the ideal country that Hythloday had visited: Utopia. Nowhere, in Greek.

I didn't actually think Utopia was all that, well, Utopian. They had all their property in common, which is fine as far as it goes, but they were all forced to be part of the society, and I don't like that. There was way too much Big Brother in it for me. They were too fond of fighting wars, too, which I don't see as Utopian; it was amusing, though, to see how More went against everything he knew in creating Utopia, where they have elected leaders instead of kings, where they see gold and silver as mere dross and trash, where they have carefully planned communities where everybody works for 6 hours a day and listens to a lecture in the morning before going to work -- I liked that one; very obviously the fantasy of a scholar surrounded by louts. The most interesting thing to me was that More, who apparently (I don't know the history, which would have made this more interesting, I'm sure) became a persecutor of heretics and eventually a Catholic martyr, in this book's ideal world, has a non-denominational religion: they agree that there is a deity (I did like that his supreme tolerance fell short of welcoming atheists, heh) but not what shape the deity has nor what the deity is like; their prayers and worship and such are carefully designed so as not to mock anyone's vision of that deity. All were welcome there.

That part sounded nice. And right after finishing this book, I got into another online debate that just angered and then depressed me. I guess I should have paid more attention to Hythloday, huh?