Utopia: Undoubtedly the Opposite Place I Admire

Am I the only one sincerely missing Book I of Utopia right now? Dr. MB really hit the nail on the head when she said Book II was all  about Utopia. Sixty pages full of tantalizing information about the glorious island. What more could a girl ask for?
As I was writing my pro/con list on Utopia, I found my cons to far outnumber my pros. Maybe that's because this island seems to be a place where people go to be transformed into a fully functioning part of a very insane society.
Of the few pros I gathered, I really enjoy that the people live in a way that allows everyone to be fed. No one goes hungry, which is a very lovely way of life. I also appreciate that there are "different forms of religion throughout the island" (More 84). Before I got to the religion section of the book, I assumed everyone practiced the same religion because everyone was also treated equally and that just made sense to me. However, I was happy to learn that people could practice a different religion if they wanted to.
Now, on to the bucket-full of cons I came across. THEY HAVE SLAVES. SLAVES. I don't care what crime someone committed, forcing them into slavery is kind of ridiculous. And the fact that some slaves were treated close to citizens and others were treated like the slaves they were just annoyed me more. They have people who live in Utopia more than happy to do the work that needs to be done. Do they really need slaves to get their work done?
I also hate that there is no privacy. The doors to the houses "open easily and swing shut automatically, letting anyone enter who wants to" (42). Oh, that sounds great. Let's have the whole neighborhood walk into my house while I'm sobbing uncontrollably because I detest the island I live on. Just perfect.
Speaking of houses, they change the houses every ten years.Of course, this is to make sure private property does not become a thing (42), but where is the sense of home? I know that Raphael later says that anywhere one goes in Utopia is their home, but I like having the knowledge that no matter what I'm doing, I'm always going to have a stable place to go to when I need it. How can you have that when you're forced to move so often?
I would also like to take a moment to express my disdain that women are taught "lighter crafts" because they are the "weaker sex" (45). While I appreciate not having to do heavy-lifting when men are around, I resent the fact that people think I'm not capable of it at all.* Typical sexist people in a typical sexist era.

 

www.singularitynyc.com 

 

Overall, I semi-enjoyed reading about Utopia. I started powering-down halfway through, but that might have more to do with going to sleep at one in the morning and waking up at seven. While Utopia definitely has its strong points, I would never want to live there. I enjoy being myself too much to live in a place that tries too hard to make everyone the same.

 

*I have very poor upper body strength, so men may have to do the heavy-lifting for me on every occasion. However, this does not diminish my point.

Utopia - Would You Live There?

After reading Book II of Utopia, I have to say that I feel extremely conflicted about the lifestyle of the Utopians. A lot of the society in which these people live in seems both good and bad, at least 'bad' by our standards today.

On the negative end of the stick, the concept of 'freedom' in Utopia seems skewed. Every citizen is supposed to toil in farm work at some point in their lives no matter what. No citizen can go outside their city borders without permission (and if they do leave without permission, then they're given severe punishment). Every citizen must abide by the same schedule day after day. Pre-marital intercourse is met with a banning of ever getting married. On top of all of that, there is literally no privacy at all.

However, there is a major positive to their society, one that we could benefit from even today. The entire livelihood of the Utopians centers around mutual nourishment. Everyone gives and everyone takes from each other in a constant back and forth. Food in surplus is given to towns in shortage, for example. Since there is no sense of 'ownership' in Utopia, everyone 'owns' everything and is given what they need to survive, and they in turn give back just as much.

I suppose that this is the one huge thing about Utopia that makes it such a paradise to us, the concept that man can survive off of his fellow man. It's an interesting philosophy, and it's what really makes Utopia what it is as an example of mutual benefit at the cost of not being able to claim ownership over anything material.

But is that kind of thing really worth it compared to how almost everything else seems restricted? I haven't even touched their use of slavery either.

How did you guys feel about the Utopian lifestyle? Honestly, I was just more and more unsettled the more that I read Book II. There are just so many little things that really makes the idea of it uncomfortable for me.

Raphael's Ideas Then and Now

Well, Utopia is quite the book. I found it to be very boring, and I barely made it through the reading of book 1 in time, but I thought that the ideas the book touched upon were interesting. Those were pretty much what kept me going throughout. I thought that what Raphael was talking about pertained with a lot of the many issues our society still faces today, especially with how convicts should be dealt with and private property.

It should be known that America has the highest prison population in the world, so I think that what Raphael says about how prisoners should be handled at the dinner with the cardinal and the lawyer is pretty relevant. Raphael states that the current system that they have for handling criminals isn't working. He suggests a bunch of different methods for punishing / rehabilitating criminals that he's learned from all of the different countries he's visited. One country's method that interested me were the Polylerites, who have their criminals repay their victims back and then are put to work for the rest of their lives on projects that help the community and the country as a whole; they can even be pardoned if they behave well enough. Whereas in this world many convicts get out of jail when their sentence is up and have virtually no choice but to live the life they were living before, in the land of the Polylerites criminals are turned into better people by doing something worthwhile.

Another issue that Raphael touches upon is private property. He states that having private property is a contradiction to everyone being "equal," since nothing is shared. He says that in Utopia there isn't public property.

I don't know if I can agree with Raphael on this one. I think that in today's world, there being no private property would be a disaster. There being no private property is a characteristic of a communist society if i'm not mistaken. Not to mention the fact that our world isn't peaceful enough for everything to be shared by everyone. I mean, the shitty way things are going now in this world maybe some change would be nice, but for now I can't really see it working the way Raphael describes Utopia. I, however, do think that our world still has a lot to learn from Thomas More. Do you agree with what Raphael is saying in Book 1? Do you think any of the countries he's visited ideas could work in this day and age?

Rape in the Middle Ages

(Trigger warning for rape, obviously.)

(Also warning that I’m totally not a historian and I could be getting everything horribly, horribly wrong in this post. Please forgive me, Dr. MB, if I’m butchering this subject terribly.)

So in this post and in the comments of that post, there was some discussion on how serious of a crime would rape have been in the Middle Ages. I said that I thought it would be a pretty serious crime but that I wasn't sure. So I decided to look it up, and unfortunately, it seems as though I was wrong.

There looks to be  lot of research that has been done on rape in the Middle Ages. just googling "rape in the middle ages" brings up numerous articles and books written on the subject.

I found this post during my search which summarizes the issue pretty well.

In the early Middle Ages, rape was considered theft (nice objectification and dehumanization of women’s bodies, huh?) Women were seen as lesser than men, and so there was not many instances of harsh punishment for rape. Rape was seen as a loss of a woman’s honor and not anything more than that.

Not all rapes were reported (as is still true today.) Rape was a crime that occurred in every social class.

Punishment of rape differed from different classes. Sometimes a man was justly punished with mutilation or death, but sometimes a man would not be punished as justly, often being let off with a mild sentence.

Women could even be imprisoned for the crime of falsely accusing someone. I’m assuming that false accusations occurred a very, very tiny percentage of the time, as it still true today and that women were being accused of false accusations simply for not having enough evidence against their rapist.

The article concludes with the statement that "patriarchal societies tend to 'sweep…under the carpet' instances of rape and sexual violence."

I was really disappointed to discover a lot of this information. For some reason, I assumed that the extreme emphasis on female virginity in this period (which is another sexist idea, by the way) would have made rape a severe crime.

Unfortunately, I guess I overestimated the goodness of men.

Chlorophyll? More like BOREophyll. (I can't be the only one who loves Billy Madison.)

Am I the only one sincerely missing Middle English right now? Utopia is so dense and it almost bored me to tears. I may be slightly dramatizing my experience with it, but I'm not far off. The footnotes alone made me want to Sharpie out all the little numbers and pretend they didn't exist.

memegenerator.net

 

However, I soldiered on and read all of Book I.

Perhaps I disliked it so much because Raphael did not speak of Utopia as much as I thought he would -- the name of the novel is Utopia. He spoke of places around Utopia and how they handled things, but not Utopia itself. Then again, he could have spoken of Utopia and I just didn't pick up on it because I was scratching my head the whole time.

The one part I did find interest in was Raphael's talk on how to handle thieves. I agree completely with him. My favorite quote of his was his explanation on why murder is not a sufficient punishment:

 

If theft carries the same penalty as murder, the thief will be encouraged to kill the victim whom otherwise he would have only robbed. When the punishment is the same, murder is safer, since one conceals both crimes by killing the witness. (22).

 

Makes perfect sense to me. Raphael seems like a very practical man (to me, at least), so I'm interested in seeing how he portrays Utopia itself. Hopefully Book II will redeem itself for me.

Dense but Foreboding

Utopia was a tough read in just how utterly dense that it was. With all of the footnotes splattering the bottoms of every page, I felt like I was reading a huge elaborate inside joke that would take a long, long while for me to totally understand.

But once I started to get into it, I saw that it really is easy to see just how much Utopia can apply to even our modern world today, especially when it comes to Raphael's teachings on punishment and government. Maybe that says something about our general ineptitude as a species to keep the masses in line, or maybe it just says how impossible that such a task really is in reality and execution.

That's why I'm immensely curious about what this 'Utopia' island is actually like that Raphael can't stop saying enough nice things about. Is it really as much of a paradise as he claims it to be? Or is there some kind of dark and cruel underlying factor that'll make the island altogether undesirable to any approaching outsider?

I'm being cynical again when it comes to these kinds of stories and books, but I'll just say that a far-fetched land like Utopia has to have a dark undertone to it, or at least that very one 'thing' that'll make the narrator (More himself) turn his head and question the island's validity.

Raphael is brilliant

            Utopia, is by far that hardest book we have had to read so far in class, at least in my opinion. I feel as though there are so many underlying messages and ideas beneath the text that I have not understood or unearthed yet. Even so, this is my favorite out of what we have read so far. I took a couple of philosophy classes last year and this book reminded me of a lot of our discussions on human nature and Plato, who is mentioned several times in Book I.

            One of my favorite parts to read about was closer to the beginning when Raphael is talking about Capital punishment. He was saying how the penalty for thieves is death but that it was too harsh a penalty for something as menial as stealing when society may sometimes force their hand. “These noblemen drag around with them a great train of idle servants, who have never learned any trade by which they could earn a living. As soon as their master dies, or they themselves fall ill, they are promptly turned outdoors…” (17) It struck me how much of the reading I spent internally agreeing with Raphael and thinking that his ideals on how society should work were beyond that of his time.