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3.26 AVERAGE
3.26 AVERAGE
Thomas More, writing in the early 1500s, depicts a 'utopia' in which everyone lives in harmony, the few laws there are are followed and the populace work much less hard than in More's own England and still manage to provide in abundance for themselves. This all was to be expected, given that More's coinage 'utopia' has slipped into regular English to mean an ideal civilisation.
The superstructure to More's discussion of his perfect society is more unexpected: there is a neat framing narrative consisting of More's discussions with a well-travelled gentleman Raphael. After a brief introduction in which Raphael demonstrates his unusual views by arguing that death might be too severe a punishment for stealing, we are led on to his depiction of Utopia - an island nation that he deems to be the best governed of all the nations he has travelled to. The book finishes by returning to the framing story with a surprising concession by More himself that he must think about this nation of Utopia as "I cannot perfectly agree to everything [Raphael] has related".
These framing sections are the most engaging part of the book. I was slightly shocked at how progressive Raphael's (and you have to imagine More's) views were. In the early discussion of capital punishment, Raphael retells how he argued with a lawyer and a cardinal about the "dreadful punishments enacted against thieves, but it were much better to make such good provisions by which every man might be put in a method how to live, and so be preserved from the fatal necessity of stealing and of dying for it [life]". This seems to argue for a societal role in creating criminals which is surprising for something written 500 years ago. No doubt even more subversive is the following discussion of how unfair it is that "there is a great number of noblemen among you, that are themselves as idle as drones, that subsist on other men's labor ..." or that "noblemen ... either do nothing at all, or at best are employed in things that are of no use to the public", all highly critical comments about the prevailing social structures of the day.
In the book such comments are then developed in the communistic society of Utopia, but I find them much more interesting taken by themselves: Raphael is arguing about specific problems in Europe and their possible solutions, worthy topics for philosophical debate. The book, in my opinion, takes a turn for the worse when we arrive at the eponymous Utopia itself. This name itself appears to be a creation on the part of More himself - merging the Ancient Greek words for 'perfect place' and 'nowhere' in a brilliant, almost oxymoronic neologism. But creative lexicography aside, Utopia is drab and tedious.
Society is so well devised that everything runs like clockwork. Food is in abundance because no one shirks working on the land, so everyone only has to work six hours a day - echoing Marxian views centuries later on how technological progress would free mankind from the tyranny of work. There are very few of the worthless men Raphael pillories elsewhere. Rather, people engage in the craft they are best suited to, even to the extent that children are transferred from parents to other households where they can better learn their trade. At a surface level, there is a fair amount of freedom: people can change jobs; women are encouraged to fight if they wish to and no one is coerced to do anything except by social stigma (as opposed to the punitive measures of contemporary England).
There is even a modern-by-today's-standards system of voluntary euthanasia for those for whom life is too much of a burden, but those who do not go this route are provided for humanely. There is even provision of hospitals such that "if they had ever such a number of sick persons, they could lodge them conveniently, and at such a distance, that such of them as are sick of infectious diseases may be kept so far from the rest that there can be no danger of contagion". The hospitals are well stocked for the "ease and recovery" of patients. This sounds like sound planning advice for any society, particularly when read 504 years later in 2020.
Yet for all these genuinely unexpected innovations and proposed advances, there are such glaring issues as to make the perfect society seem anything but. First and foremost, the society just wouldn't work. It - as is typical of all such schemes - might work in a society of Thomas Mores but not of actual human individuals, who often do not act in the common good. Even Plato's Republic allowed for a few differences in person (the artisans, philosopher-kings, labourers) whereas seemingly everyone in More's paradise belong to a homogenous mass who all do just about everything.
Perhaps a more important problem than the fact More's Utopia utterly ignores actual human reality in its quest for some sort of ideal society, is that of the society it is attempting to forge. Would we want to live in Utopia? The bucolic world More paints is utterly drab and dull. People seem all to be content with their world and roles and not want to push forward or explore - either literally, as they don't seem to leave their island, or intellectually, as there does not seem to be much in the way of scientific, commercial or artistic creativity.
Your copious free time in More's utopia would be utterly devoid of entertainment or pursuits, while your time spent working would be within a narrow range of pursuits deemed worthwhile by the great man himself (farming and artisanal goods production in the main). An illustration of this banality is Raphael's depiction of a festival in Utopia: when praying to their conveniently quite Christian (though not Christian) God, we hear a prayer along the lines of: we think you are the one true God, but if not let us know and apologies. This I quite enjoyed - showing a rationale within religion unexpected for the time (though possibly only inserted to give More plausible deniability if challenged on the issue that his perfect world is not explicitly Christian). However, the very next sentence highlights just how dull life is even on an ostensibly enjoyable feast day: "When this prayer is ended, they all fall down again upon the ground, and after a little while they rise up, go home to dinner, and spend the rest of the day in diversion or military exercises". Oh goody: just try and stop me joining the commune.
A third criticism is inevitable given the time this book was written but fully deserves comment: More should be given credit for his deep critique of certain injustices - such as of the justice system of his day - and for relatively progressive views regarding women. But, inevitably, such progressiveness only goes so far: in describing how food is divided up fairly, we are told that "the dressing and cooking their meat, and the ordering their tables, belong only to the women". The hard-to-pin-down pronoun 'their' presumably refers to the men as head of the household. So women have only come so far in More's Utopia. Slavery is alive and well too, though at least slaves generally have some recourse to get out of their situation. Slaves are also drawn from the people themselves as the primary punishment in place of execution, so I suppose at least the institution isn't built on racial lines.
In the round, More presents some important criticisms of his own times. But the world he envisages (albeit tentatively through his mouthpiece Raphael) would collapse under the reality of human behaviour and would anyway be utterly dull due to the near total circumscription of free will. Lastly, by being suggested as an 'ideal' not a merely better society, it would not contain the seeds of its own improvement. Perhaps the lesser role of women could be solved in a society built on dynamism and invention, but More no doubt saw Utopia as the final word, the static answer to all humanity's problems. It would, therefore, not evolve and improve - which is just another nail in the coffin of the world More proposes. Actual communist societies that were attempted in the twentieth century act as a final rebuke of More: such experiments as the collectivisation of farming in Russia or the cultural revolution in China demonstrate the deep harm the necessarily-enforced attainment of utopia can wreak on the unfortunate inhabitants of these would-be paradises.
The superstructure to More's discussion of his perfect society is more unexpected: there is a neat framing narrative consisting of More's discussions with a well-travelled gentleman Raphael. After a brief introduction in which Raphael demonstrates his unusual views by arguing that death might be too severe a punishment for stealing, we are led on to his depiction of Utopia - an island nation that he deems to be the best governed of all the nations he has travelled to. The book finishes by returning to the framing story with a surprising concession by More himself that he must think about this nation of Utopia as "I cannot perfectly agree to everything [Raphael] has related".
These framing sections are the most engaging part of the book. I was slightly shocked at how progressive Raphael's (and you have to imagine More's) views were. In the early discussion of capital punishment, Raphael retells how he argued with a lawyer and a cardinal about the "dreadful punishments enacted against thieves, but it were much better to make such good provisions by which every man might be put in a method how to live, and so be preserved from the fatal necessity of stealing and of dying for it [life]". This seems to argue for a societal role in creating criminals which is surprising for something written 500 years ago. No doubt even more subversive is the following discussion of how unfair it is that "there is a great number of noblemen among you, that are themselves as idle as drones, that subsist on other men's labor ..." or that "noblemen ... either do nothing at all, or at best are employed in things that are of no use to the public", all highly critical comments about the prevailing social structures of the day.
In the book such comments are then developed in the communistic society of Utopia, but I find them much more interesting taken by themselves: Raphael is arguing about specific problems in Europe and their possible solutions, worthy topics for philosophical debate. The book, in my opinion, takes a turn for the worse when we arrive at the eponymous Utopia itself. This name itself appears to be a creation on the part of More himself - merging the Ancient Greek words for 'perfect place' and 'nowhere' in a brilliant, almost oxymoronic neologism. But creative lexicography aside, Utopia is drab and tedious.
Society is so well devised that everything runs like clockwork. Food is in abundance because no one shirks working on the land, so everyone only has to work six hours a day - echoing Marxian views centuries later on how technological progress would free mankind from the tyranny of work. There are very few of the worthless men Raphael pillories elsewhere. Rather, people engage in the craft they are best suited to, even to the extent that children are transferred from parents to other households where they can better learn their trade. At a surface level, there is a fair amount of freedom: people can change jobs; women are encouraged to fight if they wish to and no one is coerced to do anything except by social stigma (as opposed to the punitive measures of contemporary England).
There is even a modern-by-today's-standards system of voluntary euthanasia for those for whom life is too much of a burden, but those who do not go this route are provided for humanely. There is even provision of hospitals such that "if they had ever such a number of sick persons, they could lodge them conveniently, and at such a distance, that such of them as are sick of infectious diseases may be kept so far from the rest that there can be no danger of contagion". The hospitals are well stocked for the "ease and recovery" of patients. This sounds like sound planning advice for any society, particularly when read 504 years later in 2020.
Yet for all these genuinely unexpected innovations and proposed advances, there are such glaring issues as to make the perfect society seem anything but. First and foremost, the society just wouldn't work. It - as is typical of all such schemes - might work in a society of Thomas Mores but not of actual human individuals, who often do not act in the common good. Even Plato's Republic allowed for a few differences in person (the artisans, philosopher-kings, labourers) whereas seemingly everyone in More's paradise belong to a homogenous mass who all do just about everything.
Perhaps a more important problem than the fact More's Utopia utterly ignores actual human reality in its quest for some sort of ideal society, is that of the society it is attempting to forge. Would we want to live in Utopia? The bucolic world More paints is utterly drab and dull. People seem all to be content with their world and roles and not want to push forward or explore - either literally, as they don't seem to leave their island, or intellectually, as there does not seem to be much in the way of scientific, commercial or artistic creativity.
Your copious free time in More's utopia would be utterly devoid of entertainment or pursuits, while your time spent working would be within a narrow range of pursuits deemed worthwhile by the great man himself (farming and artisanal goods production in the main). An illustration of this banality is Raphael's depiction of a festival in Utopia: when praying to their conveniently quite Christian (though not Christian) God, we hear a prayer along the lines of: we think you are the one true God, but if not let us know and apologies. This I quite enjoyed - showing a rationale within religion unexpected for the time (though possibly only inserted to give More plausible deniability if challenged on the issue that his perfect world is not explicitly Christian). However, the very next sentence highlights just how dull life is even on an ostensibly enjoyable feast day: "When this prayer is ended, they all fall down again upon the ground, and after a little while they rise up, go home to dinner, and spend the rest of the day in diversion or military exercises". Oh goody: just try and stop me joining the commune.
A third criticism is inevitable given the time this book was written but fully deserves comment: More should be given credit for his deep critique of certain injustices - such as of the justice system of his day - and for relatively progressive views regarding women. But, inevitably, such progressiveness only goes so far: in describing how food is divided up fairly, we are told that "the dressing and cooking their meat, and the ordering their tables, belong only to the women". The hard-to-pin-down pronoun 'their' presumably refers to the men as head of the household. So women have only come so far in More's Utopia. Slavery is alive and well too, though at least slaves generally have some recourse to get out of their situation. Slaves are also drawn from the people themselves as the primary punishment in place of execution, so I suppose at least the institution isn't built on racial lines.
In the round, More presents some important criticisms of his own times. But the world he envisages (albeit tentatively through his mouthpiece Raphael) would collapse under the reality of human behaviour and would anyway be utterly dull due to the near total circumscription of free will. Lastly, by being suggested as an 'ideal' not a merely better society, it would not contain the seeds of its own improvement. Perhaps the lesser role of women could be solved in a society built on dynamism and invention, but More no doubt saw Utopia as the final word, the static answer to all humanity's problems. It would, therefore, not evolve and improve - which is just another nail in the coffin of the world More proposes. Actual communist societies that were attempted in the twentieth century act as a final rebuke of More: such experiments as the collectivisation of farming in Russia or the cultural revolution in China demonstrate the deep harm the necessarily-enforced attainment of utopia can wreak on the unfortunate inhabitants of these would-be paradises.
Today, More would be a minimalist and, most likely, a communist. Although his attempt at imagining a world free from materialism and, somehow, class divide is worthy of praise, his execution of the idea is less so. The society he depicts is paradoxical in many respects, patriarchy, hunting and slavery for example. Women's value solely resides in being obedient and modest, alongside 'being' a beautiful body; killing animals is an affront to God, who gave them life, yet eating them is not, as long as somebody else does the butchering; slavery is not accepted unless the enslaved is a convicted criminal. The optimal republic can only be so if every citizen benefits from its precepts; otherwise, one cannot regard issues such as the class divide as effectively overcome. Disappointingly, More's 'Utopia' is not quite the utopia.
For years I have been aware of the idea of Utopia and also that Thomas More has written to that title but had not realised that it was his invention.
I have thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. Having been introduced to the the Robert Bolt version of Thomas More and seen him brought to life by Paul Schofield, I have been fascinated with the man. The Bolt/Schofield version is no doubt one-sided. He lived in difficult and distant times and some of his actions and attitudes were disturbing.
This book is served by an excellent introduction which equipped me better to understand how More was using his characters to say things he couldn't say and supplementing the approach with humour. The translation was similarly enhanced by the notes.
What comes through is a man asking questions and challenging conventions. He ridicules many practices and endorses revolutionary new thinking. However for many of these points there is ambiguity for is it what he thinks or is it humour?
Also disquietingly (or perhaps prophetically) the Utopian ideal is undergirded by slavery and rigid control. Utopia has its cost in a fallen world and the cost does not fall fairly.
This has been an excellent experience with much to commend it and much to question.
I have thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. Having been introduced to the the Robert Bolt version of Thomas More and seen him brought to life by Paul Schofield, I have been fascinated with the man. The Bolt/Schofield version is no doubt one-sided. He lived in difficult and distant times and some of his actions and attitudes were disturbing.
This book is served by an excellent introduction which equipped me better to understand how More was using his characters to say things he couldn't say and supplementing the approach with humour. The translation was similarly enhanced by the notes.
What comes through is a man asking questions and challenging conventions. He ridicules many practices and endorses revolutionary new thinking. However for many of these points there is ambiguity for is it what he thinks or is it humour?
Also disquietingly (or perhaps prophetically) the Utopian ideal is undergirded by slavery and rigid control. Utopia has its cost in a fallen world and the cost does not fall fairly.
This has been an excellent experience with much to commend it and much to question.
I mainly wanted to read this because Inlove dystopian works and wanted to see the original utopian story. I knew I wouldn't like the society and that was true, but I figured this would be boring and barely readable. More isn't a novelist. I assumed the point would be buried under flowery and stilted language. But, this was actually pretty easy to read. I enjoyed it much more than I expected. I did in fact disagree with the ideal society, but was surprised to see more religious tolerance and less sexism than was typical for the time and that I expected from a devout Catholic known for persecuting Protestants. I appreciated that it was written in such a way that you're not sure if he actually wanted this type of society or believed it was possible.
challenging
informative
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
N/A
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
N/A
Diverse cast of characters:
N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
adventurous
informative
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Birinci bölümü ikinci bölümünden sonra yazılmıştır bundan dolayı eser daha sağlam bir yapıya bürünmüştür.İlk bölümde real sistem ve toplumsal ilişkileri yere çarpıp sonra ikinci bölümde alın size sistem ve toplumsal ilişki deyip 'ütopia'yı önümüze atmıştır..Ve okurken 'hadi oradan' deyip biraz ufkumuzu etkileyen bir baş yapıt olduğunu düşünüyorum.
İş bankası yayınları tavsiyemdir.Dili ve kitabın sonundaki önemli incelemeler açısından gayet faydalı olmuştur.
İş bankası yayınları tavsiyemdir.Dili ve kitabın sonundaki önemli incelemeler açısından gayet faydalı olmuştur.
inspiring
reflective
fast-paced
Yes I read this for a class. Yes I’m counting it.
adventurous
inspiring
reflective
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
N/A
Strong character development:
N/A
Loveable characters:
N/A
Diverse cast of characters:
N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus:
N/A