Thomas More (1516/2016) Utopia

​Great edition of Utopia—it contains an introduction by China Miéville and complementary essays by Ursula Le Guin. The latter was particularly revelatory. These essays are my introduction to Le Guin, and I found in them a polymathic thinker who traverses from Lao Tsu to Levi-Strauss in a single paragraph. In “A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be,” she thinks through the dominant Utopian fantasies of progress and hyper-rationality. This is a society driven by yang: “Bright, dry, clear, strong, firm, active, aggressive, lineal, progressive, creative, expanding, advancing, and hot” (p. 180). In its place, Le Guin attempts to chart new utopian paths; her process of thinking while doing so is revelatory.
 
It could be said that all works of literature and art operate in the subjunctive—they construct “as if” worlds. Even so, Utopia is a singular event and a model of emulation for its powerful critique of the present (More’s present) and how it opens up of new paths for the future. As Miéville writes, “[w]e can’t do without this book. We are all and have always been Thomas More’s children… That we must keep returning to the text, with whatever suspicion, is to honour it. It gave us a formulation, a concept, we needed” (p. 6). Through the “other”—Utopia and the Utopians—More critiques his society; there is an unstated, unextinguishable optimism in this project. In Utopia, instead of wealth and luxury-obsessed princes and elites who appropriate the wealth of the public for their own gain, there are magistrates and princes who take seriously their role to serve the public. Instead of More’s world, a world of gross inequality and suffering, Utopia is a post-scarcity society where everyone is equal and lives diligently and decently, allowing everyone to pursue their own interests and to pursue happiness through the pursuit of truth. More expands on other aspects of Utopian society by elaborating on their system of religion, commerce, family structure, etc. Through this demonstration it becomes evident that another world is possible—we who are hopeful are More’s children indeed.
 
Formally, Utopia seems to owe its debt to Plato. The treatise is written in the form of a dialogue. Raphael, the primary interlocuter, is a philosopher who had been to see Utopia. He is a wanderer whose wisdom distances him from political power and the favour of the princes of his day. (Socrates also talks about this in The Republic.) If we appropriate Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, Raphael is like the man who has left the cave and has seen the sun-lit surface-level world—a Republic operating based on reason—he returns to share what he has seen with those whose world is the play of shadows.
 
Utopia provides the compass towards better futures, but it is still a product of its time. There is an unabashed and uncritiqued colonial impulse in certain passages of the book. When faced with overpopulation, Utopians send their people over to the neighbouring continent to form a colony, with the expectation that the land’s original inhabitants will enculturate themselves in the Utopian mode of life. However, “if the natives refuse to conform themselves to their laws they drive them out of those bounds which they mark out for themselves, and use force if they resist, for they account it a very just cause of war for a nation to hinder others from possessing a part of that soil of which they make no use, but which is suffered to lie idle and uncultivated, since every man has, by the law of nature, a right to such a waste portion of the earth as is necessary for his subsistence” (p. 87). These Lockean justifications cast More’s critique of idleness (which I suppose is also a legacy of the Protestantism of his time) under a troubling light.  

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