Back to Utopia

While I was reading "Utopia", my mind, as it often does, drifted. (Not the "Pacific Rim" sort of drift, but rather the "hey, this sounds like this! There's food there in that place. I want food..." sort of deal.) However, unlike the desperate, hunger-driven drift that is my norm, my mind wound up drifting all the way to my sociology 101 class that I took first semester freshman year.

Even though I wound up skipping half of that class (I did not have time for useless Friday morning student-run-lectures, thank you!) I distinctly remember learning about "ideal places" that people create, and the internet's role in creating this sort of "utopias". There was an entire section on other lives people lead on the internet, and how platforms like Sims and SecondLife allow people to create places, people, and situations that they find ideal, and live vicariously through their fictional alter-ego.

This got me thinking about how Utopia, to us, is not necessarily the greatest place on Earth. It's really more of a dystopia, with slavery and women's rights, as well as a strange lack of will. But it's only a created place. Yes, there are elements of satire, but it's still an entire fictionalized universe. A historical AU of how England might go. Man, Thomas Moore would have loved the Sims.

The game is set up so that you can create your own little universe bubble, essentially, and create people with personalities and aspirations that you want them to have. The annoying part is taking care of all of your citizen's basic needs, but it turns out okay. There are a lot of hacks to make your SimWorld ultra-customizable, which is something that a lot of people really enjoy.

People live in their versions of paradise online, and often are subject to a lot of criticism because their ideal utopia does not line up with another person's... but that's the whole point.

Savage Civilization

The class discussion yesterday, was uncomfortable for me. It was not because of the topic, although the discussion of slavery and inequality is inherently uncomfortable because it is so fundamentally wrong, but because the criteria felt fuzzy. My problem was and continues to be in the subjective nature of the terms “civilized” and “savage”, and perhaps that was the point.(?)  Even the interweb is conflicted:

A lack of scary masks determine civilization?

Or is it simply the ability to manipulate?

We felt like before we could begin to categorize the characters of “Oroonoko” by level of civility, our group had to establish criteria for what exactly constituted each and what we arrived at was a level of organization and technological prowess –the more developed a country was, the more civilized its society. And while our definition worked, in a way, it prevented us from making the sliding scale of douchebaggery that we really wanted to. If we had categorized in terms of civility toward fellow humans, then I feel the native “Indians” and Britons would have swapped sides on the scale with the “Indians” taking the place for most civil and the Britons at the opposite end of the spectrum. But to minimize this, the author subtly suggests that the only reason the natives are so kind is because of their collective naiveté – they just don’t know any better or they would be just like “us”. This assertion is unsettling as it insinuates that the natural state of a civilized human is dishonest and cruel, and I’m just not buying it. Perhaps this was a ploy to soften the indignities presented to the reader by what would have been their own nationality, but it feels an awful lot like rationalization to me.

Yeah, there’s just no rationalizing this.

            I don’t think even after class that I’m any closer to reconciling my feelings on this and it bugs me – and I think that it should. Rereading the last few pages, and keeping in mind Jordan’s comments about how O’ is really the only character that evolves during the piece, I wonder if he isn’t meant to be the example of civilized man. Behn gives him dignity in death that is usually reserved for Stoic Philosophers who were portrayed as the perfection of humanity. Should the ability to recognize injustice and wrongs and to change because of it be the mark of civility?

 Post 4 of 5

Civilized or Savage???

Today's class really had me thinking about the ideals that define civilized and savage. Both have normal connotations, civilized seems to always have a "good" feeling when savage always has a "negative" one.  Those who are civilized are normally at the top of the pyramid while those who are savage are more like animals just surviving.
The actual definition from the Oxford English Dictionary are as follows:

Civilized: At an advanced stage of social and cultural development, usually marked by the existence of organized communities and an adherence to established conventions of behavior; highly developed; refined and sophisticated in manner or taste; educated, cultured.
Savage: That is in a state of nature, wild

Now, in order to get a feel of who is really savage and civilized in Oroonoko it takes a little thought with those definitions. Of course when I thought of savage, I thought of the African people in the story. They seemed like the most wild and lacked the "ideals" of a civilized nation. But then again, I thought of the Indians. Actually they are those most savage only because they are so obvious to the ideals, morals, corruption, and evil that always seems to come with those civilized. The Indians are indeed ones with nature. They don't sell their people for slaves in hope of gaining benefits in the end. The people don't even have a word for a lie. 
As for the Africans, I would then place them to be in second to most savage. Their lifestyle is one that is scary and far from something that would be considered civilized. This leaves the English to be the most civilized. Out of the three, yes, they are most civilized, but I feel some of their actions towards the natives and especially the Africans make them savage bullies. They use their whits and position on the hierarchy to take advantage of all those below them. The Africans only do what they do because they don't know any better nor could they comprehend another lifestyle. The English however do know, yet they still play dirty. On a connotation level, I would put the English and Africans most savage only because the two play so dirty in the slave trade. Even though the natives are so oblivious to outside culture, that lack of knowledge makes them more civilized. 

Gruesome Ending to a Tragic Tale

    It was hard for me to read the ending of Oroonoko. Being from the twenty-first century, it is hard for me to imagine people enslaving other human beings and treating them so poorly. It moved me emotionally and made me cringe while I was reading that, but because of that stirring of emotions, I could not seem to stop reading. I wonder if this was Behn's point all along. She wanted people to realize that slavery was going on in the world, and it was affecting families and even royalty of other cultures in a very real way.
     Knowing some about slavery and what all it entailed, I was not as shocked at the cruelty as I believe someone during Behn's time would be. Sure, there were prisoners of war and public executions, but slavery was not the norm. The way that Oroonoko was killed was worse than how animals were killed for food. To wrap ones mind around it is unthinkable, and I cannot imagine the other ways in which slaves were killed.
    To Behn's original audience and to readers today, the reality of slavery is revealed in a gruesome and emotionally stirring way. Behn makes one think about slavery in a way that slave owners would never wish people to know. Her bluntness and the way she elevates Oroonoko at the beginning, stirs empathy within the reader as Oroonoko comes to a tragic end.



Blog challenge: 4 of 5!