This is the first paragraph of the introduction written by Paul Turner that I found in my Penguin Classics copy of Thomas More’s Utopia -- and it’s as good a portal as any into this fairly short and fairly thought-provoking work.
Although, since it was written in 1516, I’m not sure how fair it is to say that it includes communist “propaganda.” It certainly contains arguments for a collectivist ordering of society, but since it well predates the Bolshevik Revolution, the Communist International, and the Red Scare, it’s not clear to me why it should be interpreted as “propaganda.” But that is apparently what both of Turner’s claimants want to do with this text -- claim it as either all good or all bad, depending on their religious or political motivation.
I guess I had a different reaction.
Satire Is Serious But Not Literal
Let’s start with the political. Generally speaking, Utopia is about an imaginary island republic that the narrator has recently visited, and which he argues is the most perfectly-ordered society ever devised by man. Like a lot of political satire, Utopia is probably best read not as the prescription it may appear to be, but rather as a foil against which the deficiencies of More’s current society can best be compared and illuminated. The longish summary that is offered near the very end of the work is a good example of this dynamic.
Well, that’s the most accurate account I can give you of the Utopian Republic. To my mind, it’s not only the best country in the world, but the only one that has any right to call itself a republic. Elsewhere, people are always talking about the public interest, but all they really care about is private property. In Utopia, where there’s no private property, people take their duty to the public seriously. And both attitudes are perfectly reasonable. In other ‘republics’ practically everyone knows that, if he doesn’t look out for himself, he’ll starve to death, however prosperous his country may be. He’s therefore compelled to give his own interests priority over those of the public; that is, of other people. But in Utopia, where everything’s under public ownership, no one has any fear of going short, as long as the public storehouses are full. Everyone gets a fair share, so there are never any poor men or beggars. Nobody owns anything, but everyone is rich -- for what greater wealth can there be than cheerfulness, peace of mind, and freedom from anxiety? Instead of being worried about his food supply, upset by the plaintive demands of his wife, afraid of poverty for his son, and baffled by the problem of finding a dowry for his daughter, the Utopian can feel absolutely sure that he, his wife, his children, his grandchildren, his great-grandchildren, his great-great-grandchildren, and as long a line of descendants as the proudest peer could wish to look forward to, will always have enough to eat and enough to make them happy. There’s also the further point that those who are too old to work are just as well provided for as those who are still working.
Now, will anyone venture to compare these fair arrangements in Utopia with the so-called justice of other countries? -- in which I’m damned if I can see the slightest trace of justice or fairness. For what sort of justice do you call this? People like aristocrats, goldsmiths, or money-lenders, who either do no work at all, or do work that’s really not essential, are rewarded for their laziness or their unnecessary activities by a splendid life of luxury. But labourers, coachmen, carpenters, and farm-hands, who never stop working like cart-horses, at jobs so essential that, if they did stop working, they’d bring any country to a standstill within twelve months -- what happens to them? They get so little to eat, and have such a wretched time, that they’d be almost better off if they were cart-horses. Then at least, they wouldn’t work quite such long hours, their food wouldn’t be very much worse, they’d enjoy it more, and they’d have no fears for the future. As it is, they’re not only ground down by unrewarding toil in the present, but also worried to death by the prospect of a poverty-stricken old age -- since their daily wages aren’t enough to support them for one day, let alone leave anything over to be saved up when they’re old.
See what More is doing here? Let’s propose something called Utopia -- an imaginary place where there is no private property and where everyone is happy -- and let’s use that as a foil to highlight the inequities of our current society. In this regard, More is only getting started.
Can you see any fairness or gratitude in a social system which lavishes such great rewards on so-called noblemen, goldsmiths, and people like that, who are either totally unproductive or merely employed in producing luxury goods or entertainment, but makes no such kind provision for farm-hands, coal-heavers, labourers, carters, or carpenters, without whom society couldn’t exist at all? And the climax of ingratitude comes when they’re old and ill and completely destitute. Having taken advantage of them throughout the best years of their lives, society now forgets all the sleepless hours they’ve spent in its service, and repays them for all the vital work they’ve done, by letting them die in misery. What’s more, the wretched earnings of the poor are daily whittled away by the rich, not only through private dishonesty, but through public legislation. As if it weren’t unjust enough already that the man who contributes most to society should get the least in return, they make it even worse, and then arrange for injustice to be legally described as justice.
In fact, when I consider any social system that prevails in the modern world, I can’t, so help me God, see it as anything but a conspiracy of the rich to advance their own interests under the pretext of organizing society. They think up all sorts of tricks and dodges, first for keeping safe their ill-gotten gains, and then for exploiting the poor by buying their labour as cheaply as possible. Once the rich have decided that these tricks and dodges shall be officially recognized by society -- which includes the poor as well as the rich -- they acquire the force of law. Thus an unscrupulous minority is led by its insatiable greed to monopolize what would have been enough to supply the needs of the whole population. And yet how much happier even these people would be in Utopia! There, with the simultaneous abolition of money and the passion for money, how many other social problems have been solved, how many crimes eradicated! For obviously the end of money means the end of all those types of criminal behaviour which daily punishments are powerless to check: fraud, theft, burglary, brawls, riots, disputes, rebellion, murder, treason, and black magic. And the moment the money goes, you can also say good-bye to fear, tension, anxiety, overwork, and sleepless nights. Why, even poverty itself, the one problem that has always seemed to need money for its solution, would promptly disappear if money ceased to exist.
Let me try to make this point clearer. Just think back to one of the years when the harvest was bad, and thousands of people died of starvation. Well, I bet if you’d inspected every rich man’s barn at the end of that lean period you’d have found enough corn to have saved all the lives that were lost through malnutrition and disease, and prevented anyone from suffering any ill effects whatever from the meanness of the weather and the soil. Everyone could so easily get enough to eat, if it weren’t for that blessed nuisance, money. There you have a brilliant invention which was designed to make food more readily available. Actually it’s the only thing that makes it unobtainable.
And this is the More whose Catholic admirers would want to claim was not a communist -- that all of this collectivism and abolition of money is just “moral allegory.” But More may have the last laugh on these folks, since his “allegory” is, of course, based not on the Communist Manifesto, but on his understanding of Scripture and the fallen nature of Man.
I’m sure that even the rich are well aware of all this, and realize how much better it would be to have everything one needed, than lots of things one didn’t need -- to be evacuated altogether from the danger area, than to dig oneself in behind a barricade of enormous wealth. And I’ve no doubt that either self-interest, or the authority of our Saviour Christ -- Who was far too wise not to know what was best for us, and far too kind to recommend anything else -- would have led the whole world to adopt the Utopian system long ago, if it weren’t for that beastly root of all evils, pride. Pride would refuse to set foot in paradise, if she thought there’d be no under-privileged classes there to gloat over and order about -- nobody whose misery could serve as a foil to her own happiness, or whose poverty she could make harder to bear, by flaunting her own riches. Pride, like a hellish serpent gliding through human hearts -- or shall we say, like a sucking-fish that clings to the ship of state? -- is always dragging us back, and obstructing our progress towards a better way of life.
But as this fault is too deeply ingrained in human nature to be easily eradicated, I’m glad that at least one country has managed to develop a system which I’d like to see universally adopted. The Utopian way of life provides not only the happiest basis for a civilized community, but also one which, in all human probability, will last forever. They’ve eliminated the root-causes of ambition, political conflict, and everything like that. There’s therefore no danger of internal dissension, the one thing that has destroyed so many impregnable towns. And as long as there’s unity and sound administration at home, no matter how envious neighboring kings may feel, they’ll never be able to shake, let alone shatter, the power of Utopia. They’ve tried to do so often in the past, but have always been beaten back.
A Jumbled Mess?
Another reason I think Utopia is a satiric foil rather than an actual prescription for a workable society is that there is, in fact, very little practical advice in the book on how to actually order and administer such a society. And what little practical advice there is is frankly a jumbled mess. And much of the mess, I believe, comes from a parochial dependence on God as the philosophical substrate of any well-ordered society.
There’s a section in Book Two where our narrator is describing the fundamental principles on which Utopian society is based, which he describes as founded on religion, specifically to supplant the operation of reason, which Utopians think is ill-equipped to identify true happiness.
The first principle is that every soul is immortal, and was created by a kind God, Who meant it to be happy. The second is that we shall be rewarded or punished in the next world for our good or bad behaviour in this one. Although these are religious principles, the Utopians find rational grounds for accepting them. For suppose you didn’t accept them? In that case, they say, any fool could tell you what you ought to do. You should go all out of your own pleasure, irrespective of right and wrong. You’d merely have to make sure that minor pleasures didn’t interfere with major ones, and avoid the type of pleasure that has painful after-effects. For what’s the sense of struggling to be virtuous, denying yourself the pleasant things of life, and deliberately making yourself uncomfortable, if there’s nothing you hope to gain by it? And what can you hope to gain by it, if you receive no compensation after death for a thoroughly unpleasant, that is, a thoroughly miserable life?
It still amazes me that even famous and revered philosophers make these kinds of rookie mistakes in their thinking. It’s almost like what they were told in church when they were six years old frames their entire viewpoint and they can’t even see the corner that they’re painting themselves into. What’s the point of being virtuous if you gain nothing from it? If you don’t receive a reward in the afterlife for all the misery you choose to suffer on earth? Really?
However, Nature also wants us to help one another enjoy life, for the very good reason that no human being has a monopoly on her affections. She’s equally anxious for the welfare of every member of the species. So of course she tells us to make quite sure that we don’t pursue our own interests at the expense of other people’s.
Well, there’s one reason, I suppose, to be virtuous even if you’re not rewarded for it in the afterlife. Helping other people be happy is a good in and of itself. How helpful that More brings this to our attention a few paragraphs after telling us that no such thing exists.
It’s wrong to deprive someone else of a pleasure so that you can enjoy one yourself, but to deprive yourself of a pleasure so that you can add to someone else’s enjoyment is an act of humanity by which you always gain more than you lose. For one thing, such benefits are usually repaid in kind. For another, the mere sense of having done somebody a kindness, and so earned his affection and good will, produces a spiritual satisfaction which far outweighs the loss of a physical one.
Ummm, yeah. That. All of that is true and good whether a God or an afterlife exists or not. It is one of those fundamental principles that transcends religion, but which, strangely, philosophers often think can only be derived from religion. In this twisted landscape, it is religion, and more importantly, certain kinds of religion, and not reason, that is seen as the more rational source of our ethics.
There are several different religions on the island, and indeed in each town. There are sun-worshippers, moon-worshippers, and worshippers of various other planets. There are people who regard some great or good man of the past not merely as a god, but as the supreme god. However, the vast majority take the much more sensible view that there is a single divine power, unknown, eternal, infinite, inexplicable, and quite beyond the grasp of the human mind, diffused throughout this universe of ours, not as a physician substance, but as an active force.
That’s the more sensible view? That the inexplicable exists? That there is a thing beyond the grasp of the human mind, and that is the thing to which we can confidently ascribe agency and motive?
On this point, indeed, all the different sects agree -- that there is one Supreme Being, Who is responsible for the creation and management of the universe, and they all use the same Utopian word to describe Him: Mythras. What they disagree about is, who Mythras is. Some say one thing, some another -- but everyone claims that his Supreme Being is identical with Nature, that tremendous power which is internationally acknowledged to be the sole cause of everything. However, people are gradually tending to drift away from all these inferior creeds, and to unite in adopting what seems to be the most reasonable religion. And doubtless the others would have died out long ago if it weren’t for the superstitious tendency to interpret any bad luck, when one’s thinking of changing one’s religion, not as coincidence, but as a judgement from heaven -- as though the discarded god were punishing one’s disloyalty.
There’s a lot to unpack here, but let’s stay focused on More’s use of the word reasonable. All of the sects -- the sun-worshippers, the moon-worshippers, etc. -- all call their god Mythras and all agree that Mythras is identical with Nature. The difference, evidently, is that some think Mythras is the sun, others think Him the moon, and others, the more “reasonable” ones, think that he is… he is… what, exactly? Just Nature, I guess. The most rational Utopians have evidently dispensed with all divine intermediaries and simply worship Nature itself. That, I suppose, could be considered reasonable or rational, depending on how much mysticism one embraces as part of that “religious” practice. Scientists, after all, “worship” Nature in the sense of seeking to understand that “God’s” secrets and then ordering their lives accordingly.
But such a step, out of mysticism and into scientific rationalism, is evidently a step too far. Utopia’s founder, King Utopos drew this critical line in the island’s sectarian sand.
So he left the choice of creed an open question, to be decided by the individual according to his own ideas -- except that he strictly and solemnly forbade his people to believe anything so incompatible with human dignity as the doctrine that the soul dies with the body, and the universe functions aimlessly, without any controlling providence. That’s why they feel so sure that there must be rewards and punishments after death. Anyone who thinks differently has, in their view, forfeited his right to be classed as a human being, by degrading his immortal soul to the level of an animal’s body. Still less do they regard him as a Utopian citizen. They say a person like that doesn’t really care a damn for the Utopian way of life -- only he’s too frightened to say so. For it stands to reason, if you’re not afraid of anything but prosecution, and have no hopes of anything after you’re dead, you’ll always be trying to evade or break the laws of your country, in order to gain your own private ends. So nobody who subscribes to this doctrine is allowed to receive any public honour, hold any public appointment, or work in any public service. In fact such people are generally regarded as utterly contemptible.
This is really where I started wondering -- this is a lark, right? Something More tossed off in an afternoon. Because this can’t possibly be treated as a work of serious philosophy. Can it? No, at best, it is satire, not philosophy, but things are so jumbled that it’s difficult to determine exactly what is being satirized.
They’re not punished in any way, though, for no one is held responsible for what he believes. Nor are they terrorized into concealing their views, because Utopians simply can’t stand hypocrisy, which they consider practically equivalent to fraud. Admittedly, it’s illegal for any such person to argue in defence of his beliefs, but that’s only in public. In private discussions with priests or other serious-minded characters, he’s not merely allowed but positively encouraged to do so, for everyone’s convinced that this type of delusion will eventually yield to reason.
In my final analysis, I’m going to say that this part of Utopia is not meant as satire, that it instead represents an honest reflection of More’s own beliefs about the primacy of God -- or at least, a belief in God -- in assessing not just all moral but also all rational action. On the political side, More may only be using communism as a satiric foil against the excesses of his own capitalistic society, but on the philosophical side, he seems incapable of using actual rationalism in the same way against his religion’s pre-existing Catholic framing.
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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
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