I found Thomas More's Utopia very interesting for several reasons. Firstly, most of his critiques of England at the time are still relevant today in their criticisms of property, the treatment of the poor and working class, the parasitical nature of the rich and ruling class and the ineffectiveness of using severe punishments as a means to stop crime. This is Illustrated in the two statements that I particularly liked: "no penalty on Earth will stop people from stealing, if its their only way of getting food."
And: "Instead of inflicting these horrible punishments, it would be far more to the point to provide everyone with some means of livelihood, so that nobody's under the frightful necessity of becoming first a thief and then a corpse."
The book is written in a style where More is having a conversation with a fictional character who is telling him about the political, economic and social system of the fictional land 'Utopia'. To me, this seems like a sort of loophole in which More was able to question his real life England and somehow get away with it (although maybe that didn't actually work, since he was later hanged for his ideas) I think it was also as a way perhaps for him to speak more from his conscience which probably contradicted his religious beliefs and actions.
While some of his ideas about the social system in Utopia seem like they might be progress even for our time, most of them are actually barbaric, fascist, totalitarian and inhumane by our standards. I think that there is a valuable lesson to be learned here and that is that More's vision of a perfect world is limited and corrupted by the brutality, ignorance and injustice of his own real life society. We should learn from this and use it to help us humbly admit that even our most utopian dreams in the present are corrupted by the influences of the system which produces us, such as capitalism, an imperialist government and other forms of hierarchy that we may even be blind to, unable to see them because we are so used to them. We can only hope that future generations will look back at us and our ideas of a perfect society, with disgust and sympathy for our ignorance.
One example of More's flawed idea of Utopia was that this place was supposedly a place where the social system worked so well that everyone was happy and freely chose to follow its just laws. And yet he repeatedly names slavery as the punishment for crime after crime. Supposedly everyone loves to work, and yet there is a large slave class which supports the society through their labor, doing things that or too hard or dirty for 'respectable' citizens. The society is also riddled with a complex system of family and community hierarchy in which no one is really equal, especially not the women. This shows the flaws of a mind which is the product of the 16th century environment. If people are so 'free', happy and in agreement as to the rationality of their social system, then why would that system need to enforce its many laws with threat of lifetime slavery? Why would this system depend on slaves for its productive work? Why would there need to be a stratified social system where everyone has to obey their 'betters' and women must submit to the whims of the husbands? These things are actually proof of a failed social system, I would argue. More had another interesting contradiction in Utopia. He claimed that in Utopia, there is no money and that everyone shares equally in the products of society, but this idea was obviously so extremely revolutionary at the time that his mind seemed incapable of conceiving it even when trying because he also goes on to say how even the poor are treated well in this situation of moneyless, communistic equality. So I wonder... if there is no money and everyone shares equally in the fruits of society, then how can there even be 'poor' people (never mind the slaves) who are treated well?
I actually did like the book and would recommend reading it for exactly the reasons I mentioned: it is a valuable although perhaps unintentional warning to all those of us who dream of a better world. That warning is that we are product of our culture, our socio-economic environment. Even our most egalitarian and Utopian dreams are products of a corrupt and unjust system. It is arrogant to think otherwise. We can only work towards a better world than we have, and never a Utopia.
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A small amendment to my review is based on a slight misunderstanding that I had the feeling people might get when reading what I wrote. I am not so much saying that people shouldn't dream big and aim for Utopia, but rather that they should take warning from the example of people like More and realize how LIMITED their dreams may be, unavoidably influenced by their current system. We should all strive to reach even farther "out off the box". This can only be done by first realizing that we are in one. A small example comes from something that a friend once said to me when I was telling him ideas about a world without money or war. He said "Oh God, if we could only get single-payer healthcare!!!" This to me was so sad to see someone's dreams so small and yet there is this kind of widespread tendency to limit our goals in an attempt to 'be realistic'. Has any innovation throughout history whether social, technological or artistic ever come from people limiting their dreams to be 'realistic'? No. They came from the very opposite. To reach farther than what was known or accepted at the time.
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