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.