FREE ESSAY ON THOMAS MORE: UTOPIA

THOMAS MORE: 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 Utopia is the sort of
complicated book that we should expect from so complicated a man. It is heavy with irony,
but then irony was the experience of life in the Sixteenth Century. Everywhere--in
church, government, society, and even scholarship--profession and practice stood
separated by an abyss.
The great difficulty of irony is that we cannot always be sure when the ironic writer or
speaker is being serious and when he is being comical. We find that difficulty in Utopia.
Edward Hall, the great chronicler of English history of More's time wrote, For
undoubtedly he beside his learning had a great wit, but it was so mingled with taunting
and mocking that it seemed to them that best knew him, that he thought nothing to be well
spoken except he had ministered some mock in the communication. (*)
In Utopia three characters converse, and reports of other conversations enter the story.
Thomas More appears as himself. Raphael Hythlodaeus 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. However, I shall devote most of my remarks to the second book or chapter in
More's work--the description of the island commonwealth somewhere in the New World. Since
the Utopians live according to the law of nature, they are not Christian. Indeed they
practice a form of religious toleration.
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.
More took the communism of Plato's republic or of the golden age supposed by Ovid and
later adapted by the Christian fathers.[7] But he kept the fallen human nature that
Augustine believed to be the curse of the Fall. He then created a literary carnival,
allowed himself the freedom of speculating on the sort of commonwealth would arise from a
juxtaposition of seemingly contrary ideas. No wonder that the little poem that introduces
the work, supposedly done by Mr. Windbag, the son of Raphael's sister, declares, 
Plato's Republic now I claim
To match, or beat at its own game.[8]
More's work aims to take into account a true and pessimistic view of human nature, one
quite different from Plato's Socratic optimism. If Utopia is truer, it is therefore
better. 
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
On the best state of a Republic and of the new island Utopia, a book truly golden, not
less salutary than festive. The key word is festiuus,[9] usually translated entertaining,
though, in the spirit of Bakhtin, I prefer festive. It is not revolution. Reading Utopia
makes us aware of how very far we will always be from its hopes. We can understand the
comment of J.W. Allen, the historian of Sixteenth-Century political thought, who called
it, the saddest of fairy tales. . . . an indictment of humanity almost as terrible as
Gulliver's Travels.[10]
But like Swift's Gulliver, More's Raphael entertains us just because he brings our
experience in the ordinary world up against an ideal that we cannot reach, yet one that
has about it a certain plausibility. Utopia is a mirror held up to nature, and almost
against our will, we see ourselves reflected in it. It is a carnival mirror, throwing
back at us distorted reflections, and yet we stand there, and we recognize ourselves in
the very distortions.
To read Utopia is to be jolted into asking ourselves this fateful question: What is the
relation between our possessions and our souls? Are the conspicuous illusions of wealth
injustices? What truth about ourselves resides in Raphael's passionate declaration
towards the end? 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.[11]
If a sterile metal like gold measures the worth of men and women, are the people who wear
chains of gold not indeed prisoners of illusion? And is it possible, in a zero sum world
where my gain is another's loss, that the people who sport such finery are not in fact
condemning legions of poor to roam the great highways as beggars--or else to be herded
together in the slums like cattle to be slaughtered in our great cities?
If we measure worth by possession, are we not driven by a peculiar and implacable logic
to put people to death for theft? Or if we do not kill them, are we not bound to make
psychological war on them, to scorn them, and to be sure that they suffer for everything
we give them? I believe that the answer to these questions in More's own mind was not
that we should create a communist society. But I do believe that part of the response
that More intended was to make us at least ask the questions, for to question society is
to see it, and we must see it before we can do anything to reform it.
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 squallor and misery, not solitary but (in Thomas Hobbes's famous phrase) nasty,
brutish, and short, Utopia would have seemed like paradise--at least for a while.
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.
I mentioned earlier J. W. Allen's likening of Utopia's view of human nature to that of
Swift's Gulliver's Travels. It is a To me it is rather like Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn
where the river carrying Huck and Jim along passes through a human jungle of evil where
the innocents on the raft must always be wary.
Dominic Baker Smith has pointed out that Utopia from the beginning was an artificial
construct. Some 1760 years before,[12] Utopus had dug a channel to separate Utopia from
the corrupting lands nearby. As the wise law-giver he imposed laws on people who could
not or would not create those laws themselves.[13] He is much like the prince in the
thought of More's contemporary Niccolo Machiavelli whom Machiavelli calls upon to unite
and pacify the warring Italian peninsula. Utopus did for Utopia what Machiavelli wanted a
prince to do for Italy. Yet the Utopian commonwealth, like the raft of Huck and Jim
floating apart in the serene river, is endangered whenever it touches the shores of the
real world.
The attention the Utopians give to military affairs is based on a sound practical
consideration: The world out there is not Utopia. A virtuous nation unarmed amid a world
of tigers goes quickly to its death. More startling, when we think of it, are the massive
walls the Utopians build around their towns on their island. Yes, these ways may be
primarily to ward off invasion from beyond the channel Utopus has dug to separate them.
But given the history of England and popular uprisings, including the Wat Tyler revolt of
1381 and the later revolt of the peasants of Cornwall mentioned in Utopia itself,[14] it
seems that one purpose of these walls may have been to protect Utopian cities from revolt
in Utopia itself--perhaps from all those slaves.
No locks bar Utopian doors--which open at a touch.[15] 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.[16]
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 neighborhood.
The Utopians make much of the household, but they give little place to the nuclear
family; they group people into households with not less than ten or more than sixteen
adults.[17] Each household is under the authority of the oldest male--unless he becomes
senile. Thirty households make a tightly organized community called in Paul Turner's
elegant translation a Sty.[18] At the sound of a horn, the thirty households gather
together for lunch and for supper, and although households can eat at home alone if they
want, it seems clear that the Utopians frown on the practice.[19] Says Raphael: 
You're quite at liberty to take food home from the market once the dining-halls have been
supplied, for everyone knows you wouldn't do it unless you had to. I mean, no one likes
eating at home, although there's no rule against it. For one thing, it's considered
rather bad form. For another, it seems silly to go to all the trouble of preparing an
inferior meal, when there's an absolutely delicious one waiting for you at the
dining-hall just down the street.
We wonder how husbands and wives could ever develop real intimacy under such a system.
Even if they choose to eat in the household, they share the table with a minimum of ten
other adults and possibly as many as sixteen. Given the primacy the Utopians give to men
throughout their commonwealth, it seems that they see nothing to be gained by a dining
arrangement where women might be able to have a private word with their husbands. We
presume that the only privacy a husband and wife have with each other is alone in their
bedroom at night, and that for the Utopians seems quite enough. 
More himself sets the tone for his view of family life by the introductory letter to
Peter Gilles that he attached to Utopia when it was published. He is explaining to Peter
why publication of his little book has been delayed. He has been busy at work. And
afterwards, he says: 
You see, when I come home, I've got to talk to my wife, have a chat with my children, and
discuss things with my servants. I count this as one of my commitments, because it's
absolutely necessary, if I'm not to be a stranger in my own home. Besides, one should
always try to be nice to the people one lives with, whether one has chosen their company
deliberately, or merely been thrown into it by chance or family relationship--that is, as
nice as one can without spoiling them, or turning servants into masters.[20]
It all sounds very, well, dutiful. Children are cared for, but they are treated like cogs
of the commonwealth. And why not in a nation where the individual is rigorously
subordinated to the needs of the group? Children usually follow the professions of their
parents, and when they chose another profession, they are adopted by another family
without apparently any pangs of regret at parting.[21] Again, why not? If everyone is
almost identical in Utopia, why not swap children around as one might swap Barbie Dolls?
In the same way, a family with too many children passes off the surplus to another family
who lacks them.[22] Friends of mine taken with the legendary example of More's household
tell me that of course parents would accompany the children moved to another dwelling
unit. Maybe so--but not one word of such accompaniment is to be found in the text. 
Indeed, the Utopians have many of the qualities of the early Christian fathers who saw
family, spouses, and children as secondary or even tertiary to the most important
obligation of the Christian male. That obligation was to serve God and the Catholic
Church. St. Augustine (I say again, the most important single influence on Thomas More's
mind) dismissed his concubine of fifteen years when he became betrothed to a rich young
woman, and in all his voluminous writing, he never tells us what her name was. His son by
that union, Adeodatus, had an intelligence that amazed his father, but when he died his
Augustine seemed little grieved.[23]
Jesus himself had said, No man is worthy of me who cares more for father or mother than
for me; no man is worthy of me who cares more for son or daughter.[24] And with regard to
conversations between husbands and wives, we should also recall St. Augustine. Why did
God create Eve to live with Adam? Augustine pondered the question. He mused that If it
was company and good conversation that Adam needed, it would have been much better
arranged to have two men together, as friends, not a man and a woman.[25] One might also
reflect that the Utopians were very much like the Stoics and the Epicureans of classical
times who believed we are most free and therefore most human when we tame that emotional
part of ourselves that forms attachments to other human beings. To a friend who had lost
a friend to death Seneca wrote: 
I am sorry to hear of your friend Flaccus's death. Still I would not have you grieve
unduly over it. I can scarcely venture to demand that you should not grieve at all--and
yet I am convinced that it is better that way.[26]
Utopia is a commonwealth where not only the individual life is held in check, but
individual emotions and affections are suppressed. Women are in a distinctly inferior
position in Utopia. Dominic Baker Smith, who has written the best recent book on the
Utopia, has commented that the position of women in the Utopian commonwealth was about
the same as it was in More's Europe.[27] 
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
labor that is imposed on everyone else. Women are among this privileged group.[28]
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.[29] 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 offenses.[30] 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.
And then there is the Utopian restriction on political discussion. It is a capital crime
to discuss such [political] questions anywhere except in the Council or the Assembly.[31]
In reading that almost casual sentence, we inevitably call up our own experience in the
twentieth century, those many totalitarian states infested with informers where people
live in terror of the secret police.
But maybe instead we should think of spectacular trials in our own time, such as the O.J.
Simpson trial now going on, where the jurors are enjoined from having any private
conversation with each other about the proceedings. Or perhaps we should think of Woodrow
Wilson's desire for open covenants openly arrived at in his Fourteen Points put forwards
as proposals to end World War I. It is clear that the Utopians are meant to have free
debate in their assemblies.[32] No political assembly of theirs is to be the rubber stamp
affairs that we have seen in our own time of so-called people's democracies and the cult
of personality. In the city of Aircastle or Amaurotum, as the Latin has it, every law
relating to the public good has to be debated at least three days.[33] Still, the rule
against private discussion of politics represents extreme distrust of the people, and in
that distrust Utopia and modern dictatorships share more than is sometimes supposed.
Again, I must say that Utopia is not intended to be a dictatorship. The commonwealth
itself is a federated republic. It has no king. In a commonwealth where individuality is
almost non-existent, no cult of personality is possible. No one in Utopia except the
eponymous founder Utopus is given a name. No individual stands out above the others.
Utopia is a commonwealth of anonymous masses. Raphael can relate the opinions of the
Utopians as if everyone on the island shares them. He quotes no one, for one
generalization fits all.
The fine leisure the Utopians can enjoy because of their six-hour working day is
carefully regulated. The pursuits the Utopians enjoy are primarily intellectual. And even
here we do not find specifically mentioned the solitary intellectual mulling that is for
some of us one of the chief joys of life. They seem to debate one another in the style of
the Platonic dialogues--as More and Raphael do in Book one. They go to public
lectures--though we wonder how the lecturer ever had occasion in this obsessively public
society to prepare something in private worth saying in public.
Raphael delivers to them a considerable library of Greek books. (Interestingly enough he
does not take them a Bible--typical of More's later reluctance to have the Bible freely
distributed among the common people.)[34] Raphael and his band of Europeans also teach
the Utopians how to make a printing press and how to manufacture paper.[35] Yet given
their distrust of the individual doing anything alone, I rather think the Utopians must
study these works by reading them aloud to one another and commenting on them much as
though they were in seminar together. Like Socrates in the Phaedrus, they may distrust
the written word separated from its communal and vocal associations.
The communism of the Utopia deserves another word to this generation that has seen this
once mighty ideology crumble to dust in most of the places where it once seemed imperial,
irresistible, and eternal. I've noted that the Utopians acted on the premise that to
eliminate poverty, the entire economic and social order had to be rebuilt from the ground
up. That was precisely the view of Karl Marx, but More and Marx came to radically
different conclusions about what the social order would become if it were rebuilt.
For Marx, as we all know, religion was the opiate of the people, and he wanted to get rid
of it. His golden age when the state had withered away would have no religious life and
no compulsion from above. Human nature would be reshaped, remade, re-formed, and rigorous
education during the dictatorship of the proletariat would teach us the virtues of
cooperation and selflessness.
Religious belief upheld the Utopian commonwealth. Every Utopian had to believe in God, in
the immortality of the soul, in future states of reward and punishment after death, and
in the Providential governance of the universe.[36] Those who do not hold to such
doctrines are not put to death.[37] But they are not 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.[38]
Utopian religion is useful to the commonwealth. No one is to be trusted who believes that
the soul lives on after the body dies.
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 really doesn't 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.[39]
There is a lot here to ponder, and I see some internal contradictions in these texts from
Utopia. On the one hand, Raphael the narrator does not establish any reasoned arguments
for believing in the religious views he gives to the Utopian. Somewhat like Aristotle and
Aquinas, they believe that the order of the universe supposes a creator.[40] But beyond
that inference, they do not go through elaborate logical proofs to establish their system
of ethics and religion.
They assume that their religion is most fitting to the dignity of human kind. They also
believe that religion is best for the state because otherwise they cannot imagine good
citizenship without faith in God and a belief in rewards and punishments after death.
Yet More knew that Lucian, whose epigrams he and Erasmus had translated, did not believe
in the immortality of the soul. He knew also that Democritus, Lucretius, Pliny and many
others shared this disbelief. The many others would have included Cicero, Seneca the
Younger, Aristotle, and Epicurus himself as well as legions of others in the classical
world.[41]
More's argument bears some resemblance to that of Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologiae
that immortality of the soul is a natural desire and thus must be true. We have, said
Thomas, a natural desire for food, and the fact that the desire exists is proof that food
exists. We have a natural desire for the immortality of the soul; the fact that the
desire exists proves that the soul is immortal.[42] Pico della Mirandola, a great
influence on More, thought that immortality and the free will of the soul were part of
the natural dignity of humankind.
Yet in the same year that More published the Utopia, Pietro Pomponazzi of Padua created
scandal in Italy by publishing his On the Immortality of the Soul with its argument that
reason could in no way prove the soul to be immortal--a view shared by Cardinal Cajetan,
Luther's great antagonist at Augsburg in 1518. Both Pomponazzi and Cardinal Cajetan said
they believed in the immortality of the soul not because reason could establish it but
because the church taught it.
Yet More in his reasonable Utopia seemingly could not bear to have the Utopians doubt
immortality--although some must have done so or the Utopians would not have laid on
penalties for disbelieving the doctrine. His motive is in part utilitarian: In his view,
a reasonable state must have a religion that enforces morality or else people would
commit sins in secret that would damage the state. Such a religion required a belief in
rewards and punishments after death.
Here is an essential point, an impenetrable wall between More and Marx--a wall raised by
St. Augstine. I have already alluded to it. The Utopians despite their reasonable and
virtuous state have no faith that human nature can be transformed into selfless virtue.
They know that individual wickedness, the superbia of St. Augustine, always couches at
the door, ready to devour any community, including their own. They also know that human
beings in a community cannot keep one another under surveillance all the time--although
their best to do just that. Says Raphael: 
You see how it is--wherever you are, you always have to work. There's never any excuse
for idleness. There are also no wine-taverns, no ale-houses, no brothels, no
opportunities for seduction, no secret meeting-places. Everyone has his eye on you, so
you're practically forced to get on with your job, and make some proper use of your spare
time.[43]
Given the Augustinian view of human nature in Utopia, we are not surprised that the
society has harsh penalties for those who do not conform. More's contemporary Machiavelli
posed this question in the same year that More wrote the Utopia: Is it better to be loved
or feared? It is good to be both loved and feared, said the great Florentine political
theorist, but if one has to make a choice between fear and love, it is better to be
feared. Utopia is a machine of state constructed to the most reasonable specifications.
But it is lubricated by fear. 
More posits the death penalty for two convictions of adultery, assuming that in a society
where the family is the chief pillar, anything that disrupts the family is of lethal
consequence to the state. And, as we have seen, he also requires the death penalty for
private discussion of political affairs. Those who sin grievously in Utopia are tried in
public and usually condemned to slavery. They are not usually put to death because the
immediate disappearance of the criminal is not as helpful example as the salutary fear
created by observing lifelong punishment. Those condemned slaves who rebel against their
servitude are put to death like wild beasts.[44]
All this represents a strange paradox. The individual is seen as a dangerous surd in
society, likely to spin out of control at any moment and inflict catastrophic damage on
the whole community unless the whole community keeps vigilant watch. The individual is
almost continuously subjected to scrutiny in every waking hour, but even so, some commit
crimes for which they are harshly punished to encourage the others to conform.
Yet the magistrates in Utopia are supposed to have an almost infallible selflessness.
Rule of each family clan is given to the oldest man. These men elect officers over them,
and those officers elect in turn other officers and a mayor to rule each city. Utopia has
no king, and indeed in the Latin text More wrote, Utopus himself is never called
king.[45]
More mistrusted kings, and he had reason; his experience with them was almost universally
bad. Born in the reign of Edward IV, he probably retained a childhood memory of Richard
III the usurper riding through the streets of London, and when Henry VII overcame Richard
at Bosworth Field, in More's later view it was only to exchange one tyrant for another.
More's son-in-law William Roper tells us that More opposed Henry VII in Parliament and
almost had to flee the country to avoid the king's wrath.[46] When Henry VII died, More
wrote rejoicing poems.[47] I surmise that the More of 1516 could read well enough the
character of King Henry VIII who would later send him to the block. And so he had every
reason to have no king in Utopia.
I might add that he never wanted to give too much authority to any single person, no
matter how exalted the office. He never exalted papal authority; he thought popes could
err; and he believed that the general council was superior to the pope and could depose a
pope for any reason that the council saw fit.
But was he wise to place such complete faith in the wisdom, the apparent infallibility of
patriarchal magistrates in Utopia? Is a nation naturally more moral than people taken as
individuals?
Reinhold Niebuhr addressed this issue in his book Moral Man and Immoral Society published
first in 1932. He argued cogently that people acting in masses are inevitably less moral
than individuals. I believe Niebuhr's thinking on this issue is sound. It is one of the
reasons why throughout their history, the American people have been continually angry
with their Congress.
The collapse of communism with its patriarchal and supposedly infallible magistrates is
sign enough that too much faith in assemblies claiming to represent the people is, well,
Utopian. I would say in addition that the spirit of hatred alive in our own country,
particularly after the last election, does not seem to me at least to indicate that a
political majority united under the flag of moral reform is likely to surmount the evils
that we see in individuals.
At the More Project at Yale where so many of us toiled so happily and for so long editing
More's work for publication, our great mentor Richard S. Sylvester used to have pinned up
a quotation from the English wit Max Beerbohm: 
Utopia? Excuse me. I thought it was hell.
But did More intend it to be a bad place? 
My late mentor and friend Richard S. Sylvester loved Thomas More. He could not bear the
thought that More could have created an ideal society with so many flaws that affronted
the liberal imagination. In an article published in 1958, he argued that More had
intended to cast Utopia as a dystopia, not a good place but a bad place, one where the
rule of reason had obliterated the gentler human virtues.[48]
You will be relieved to know that I do not intend to argue in detail against Sylvester's
position. I will make only two points against it. It does injustice to all the good
qualities that we find in Utopia, many of which I have mentioned already, including the
virtues of Utopian worship that I have not dwelled upon. If More intended his work to be
as ironic as Sylvester imagined it to be, the book was an utter failure, for no one took
it in that spirit for more than four centuries after More wrote it. My other point is
simply to say that reading Utopia as an intentionally bad place seems to me at least to
ignore entirely the carnival aspects of the work that I noted early in this lecture.
Let me close by making a point that I implied above. Utopia is part of Thomas More's
biography. It is his mirror as well as the mirror of his society. He was a driven man for
whom one of the worst sins was to waste time. This was a man who drove his two wives and
his children to education and piety with a relentless dedication. He wore a hair shirt
under his fine outer garments to mortify his flesh, and according to his son-in-law,
William Roper, he beat himself with whips for the same reason.[49] This was a man who
waged war with all his power against the incursion of Protestantism into England. He
wrote furiously and relentlessly that heretics should be burned at the stake; he rejoiced
and joked when some of them did perish in the judicial fires. His last great devotional
work, the De Tristitia Christi, radiates hatred towards the heretics, and that same
hatred was stamped on the tomb in Chelsea Old Church, a tomb he was destined not to
occupy.
This was a man of stern temperament, and his Utopia suits the rest of his life. Nothing
in Utopia is more like him than the Utopian law that anyone convicted twice of adultery
will suffer the penalty of death. He was a man who considered the monastery but decided,
as Erasmus said, to be a good husband rather than a bad priest. I have long maintained
that the commonwealth of Utopia has the look of a monastic compound where marriage is
allowed but strictly controlled so that conjugal relations relieve sexual needs without
creating any genuine bonds of intimacy between husbands and wives.
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.