This is an ideal society, we’re told by the enthusiastic Hythloday, and basically everything there is awesome. More and his friends then listen to a traveller called Raphael Hythloday talk about his visit to the New World (i.e., American) country of Utopia. Then again, maybe Utopia is actually the perfect text to inspire a movie about a pretty white girl marrying a rich, handsome prince, because as we all know, this is the greatest triumph over injustice that one can possibly imagine. There is also a long tirade about the way that society punishes criminals who are forced to steal in order to survive:įor if you suffer your people to be ill-educated, and their manners to be corrupted from their infancy, and then punish them for those crimes to which their first education disposed them, what else is to be concluded from this but that you first make thieves and then punish them?Īnd if these lines sound familiar to you, then you may have heard them coming from the mouth of Drew Barrymore in the Cinderella-inspired movie Ever After, which is not exactly the first place you’d expect a piece of political philosophy to come from. Essentially, they’re power-hungry buggers. More adds: “For most princes apply themselves more to affairs of war than to the useful arts of peace they are generally more set on acquiring new kingdoms, right or wrong, than on governing well those they possess”. If I were Henry I’d be inclined to take that personally. He writes: “everywhere one may hear of ravenous dogs and wolves, and cruel men-eaters, but it is not so easy to find states that are well and wisely governed”. In this first section, the author criticises the way that contemporary European societies function, complaining about the unequal distribution of wealth, and the dangers of obsession with money and power. Things have not changed much since the sixteenth century – like today, the topic quickly finds its way to the issue of How Bad The World Is, and How Much World Leaders Suck, and generally Seriously, People, We’re Gonna Be So Screwed. The book begins with the character ‘Thomas More’ meeting up with some friends in Flanders and sitting down for a good long chin-wag. That’s a rather bleak approach, but perhaps it’s only realistic. What this means is that inherent in the term itself is an understanding that perhaps this ideal society does not really exist at all. And while today ‘Utopia’ is the term used to describe an ideal society, it’s useful to note that it’s made up of two Greek words that together literally translate to ‘no-place’ (there’s a lot of Ancient Greek in Utopia, the text of which was originally written in Latin More was one of those people who took pity on all those embattled Classics students in universities across the world and decided to give them something new to write about after hundreds of years of ploughing over the same passages in Virgil over and over again). ( Image Source)īefore all this went down, though, More wrote Utopia. Don’t feel too bad for him – he did a bit of persecuting of Protestants in his day, so he was no saint. The Church made him a saint, because that’s basically their PR department’s strategy whenever somebody gets fired in a rather permanent way. But he was also a staunch Catholic and refused to support Henry when the king decided to break with the Pope and set up his own religion in order to divorce his wife (aren’t you glad social attitudes towards divorce aren’t quite so strict these days, world country that I shall not mention by name?), and Henry rewarded More’s loyalty by ordering him to be executed. Thomas More was a lawyer and rose to a high position within the court of Henry VIII, he of the six wives and remarkably short attention span (the two things are related, as you might have guessed). I’m sure I’m not the only person who feels like Thomas More’s 1516 work Utopia, which gave us the term and presented us with one of the earliest examples of a utopian text, is still remarkably relevant today. ‘Dystopia’ and ‘utopia’ are loaded terms, of course – one man’s ‘post-apocalyptic nuclear wasteland created by the greed of power-hungry and irresponsible capitalists and world leaders’ is another man’s ‘strategically-managed relocation solution with wonderful future prospects following the end of the nuclear winter’, although I’m not sure I’d really want to meet the person who thinks like that.Īmidst all this talk of a dystopic future, where greedy capitalists have succeeded in grinding down the poor and middle classes and filling the rising oceans with plastic and ring-pull cans, 2017 seems like a good time to revisit the origins of the terms Utopia, and consequently Dystopia. This book is #39 on my Classics Club list.Ģ017 has dawned with the words ‘dystopic future’ hovering on more than a few people’s lips.
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