More Utopia Lecture 2 (2024) PDF

UTOPIA, BOOK II: VISIBILITY, PRODUCTIVITY, AND OUTSIDES OF UTOPIA METHOD: TRACKING THE POLITICS OF NATURE READING QUIZ, UTOPIA, BOOK 2 1. Which one of the following is allowed in Utopia? a) Lawyers b) Cosmetics c) Political campaigning d) Breastfeeding 2. What do Utopians mak...

UTOPIA, BOOK II: VISIBILITY, PRODUCTIVITY, AND OUTSIDES OF UTOPIA METHOD: TRACKING THE POLITICS OF NATURE READING QUIZ, UTOPIA, BOOK 2 1. Which one of the following is allowed in Utopia? a) Lawyers b) Cosmetics c) Political campaigning d) Breastfeeding 2. What do Utopians make out of gold? b) Chamber pots b) Dog collars c) Crowns for the tranibor d)Wedding rings 3. To which technology did Hythloday and his companions introduce the Utopians? c) the Sextant b) Printing & papermaking c) Surgery d) the Telescope 4. Which one of the following is a crime in Utopia? a) Divorce b) Euthanasia c) Adultery d) Breaking and Entering 5. Does Utopia have many laws, or few laws? 1. Which one of the following is allowed in Utopia? a) Lawyers b) Cosmetics c) Political campaigning d) Breastfeeding 2. What do Utopians make out of gold? b) Chamber pots b) Dog collars c) Crowns for the tranibor d)Wedding rings 3. To which technology did Hythloday and his companions introduce the Utopians? c) the Sextant b) Printing & papermaking c) Surgery d) the Telescope 4. Which one of the following is a crime in Utopia? a) Divorce b) Euthanasia c) Adultery d) Breaking and Entering 5. Does Utopia have many laws, or few? FEW  1. THE PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY OF UTOPIA (51- 53) - “new moon” shape - narrow, treacherous, hidden, guarded opening - encloses a vast, calm, open navigable bay: “allows ships to go from shore to shore in all directions, much to the advantage of the people” UTOPIA vis à vis the OUTSIDE  maximum closure, separation, hiddenness, invisibility, privacy, defense … vis à vis the INSIDE  maximum openness, connection, accessibility, visibility, publicity, vulnerability 54 nearly identical CITIES replicate the same INSULAR (i.e., island) structure: - surrounded by thick walls and moats - inside “the streets are laid out to facilitate traffic” / circulation; all houses front the street “the double doors, which open easily with a push of the hand and close again automatically, allow anyone to come in – so there is nothing private anywhere.” (57) Utopian LINES OF SIGHT / VISIBILITY/ MUTUAL SURVEILLANCE Amusing example: “Moreover, in choosing spouses they have a custom which seemed to us absolutely absurd … The bride, whether virgin or widow, is presented naked to the groom by a sober and respected matron, and the groom in turn is shown naked to the bride by some honorable man.” (97) CORE EXAMPLE: “So you see that nowhere is there any chance to be idle; there is no excuse for laziness, no wine taverns, no alehouses, no brothels, no occasion to be corrupted, no hideouts, no hangouts. With the eyes of everyone upon them, they have no choice but to do their customary work or to enjoy pastimes which are not dishonorable. Such behavior on the part of the people is bound to produce an abundance of everything. And when it is distributed equitably to everyone, it follows that no one can be reduced to poverty or forced to bed.” (73) Immediate, serious connection between: MUTUAL VISIBILITY - PRODUCTIVE LABOR – ABUNDANCE in Utopia THE UTOPIAN DAY / mathematics of social productivity (61- 61) 4am Wake 4-9am Free time for virtuous/intellectual Leisure (pre-dawn lectures, e.g.) 9-12 Work 12-1 Lunch 1-3 Rest 3-6pm Work 6-7pm Dinner 7-8pm Virtuous recreation (music, talk, boardgames) 8pm Bedtime “If only six hours are devoted to work, you might think that there would necessarily be some shortage of supplies … but [it] is even more than enough” (62) For consider the “large part of the population [that] in other countries live their lives in idleness” (62-63): An entire upper-class gender (women or men); priests, “all the rich,” esp. landlords and so-called “gentlemen and nobles,” their retainers and hangers-on, people making and selling luxury items (“futile and superfluous crafts”), beggars feigning disease/disability. “If they were all put to work … you can easily see how little time would be enough and more than enough time to produce all the goods required for human needs and conveniences—and LANDSCAPE of CONQUEST & MANUFACTURED ISOLATION (from “insula”/isola, island) “According to report, however … their land was once not surrounded by the ocean. But Utopus, who conquered the island and named it after himself … and who brought its crude and rustic mob to a level of culture and humanity beyond almost all other mortals, after he won the victory at his first assault, had a channel cut fifteen miles wide at the point where the land adjoined the continent, and thus caused the sea to flow all around the land.” (53)  Utopianism is not “native,” just as the land was not a natural island; both landscape and people are products of conquest, intensive re-shaping  Level of “culture and humanity” proportionate to degree of separation from “other mortals”  3 LIMINAL/BOUNDARY GROUPS: colonized people, merceneies, slaves 2. COLONIZATION & “NATIVES”: Agriculture and the Law of The Nature “AGRICULTURAL ARGUMENT” for But if it should happen that throughout the island the whole COLONIZATION mass of the population should swell inordinately, they sign up Native land is “left citizens from each city and send them as colonists to live under their own laws on the nearest part of the continent, over” (not owned b or used) b/c it is not wherever the natives have a lot of land left over and recognizably uncultivated; they adopt any natives who choose to live “cultivated” (like with them. Assenting willingly to the same style of life and native people) the same customs, the natives are easily assimilated, and that to the advantage of both groups. For by  Agricultural LABOR means of their institutions the Utopians make the land converts land into easily support both peoples, whereas before it property (the Fall) provided a meager and skimpy living for only one. The “LAW of NATURE” says natives who refuse to live under their laws are driven out of land belongs to those the territory the Utopians have marked off for their use; if who make it they resist, the Utopians make war against them. For they productive in this think it is quite just to wage war against someone who specific sense; peoples has land which he himself does not use, leaving it who do not can be fallow and unproductive, but denying its possession dIspossed and and use to someone else who has a right, by the law destroyed 3. HUMAN/SUBHUMAN and GENOCIDE: “THE ZAPOLETES” (p. 109) “These people live five hundred miles to the east of Utopia. Rough, rude, and fierce, they prefer to live in the forests and rugged mountains where they were brought up. They are a hardy people, able to endure heat, cold, and hard labor. They have no interest in agriculture, no acquaintance with refinements, no concern about their houses or clothes; they care only about their flocks. They live mostly from hunting and plundering. They are born only for warfare; they zealously seek opportunities to fight and when they find one they embrace it eagerly. They set out in great numbers and offer themselves cheaply to whoever needs soldiers. The only skill they have to live on is one that aims at death … They fight fiercely with complete loyalty for whoever pays them… Forgetting both kinship and friendship, they run each other through with violent hostility … for no other reason than that they were hired for a pittance by opposing princes.” And just as the utopians seek good men in order to use them, so 4. WORK OF DISTINCTION/PURIFICATION: THE SLAVE Passing mentions: “No country household has fewer than forty men and women, besides the two slaves bound to the land” (54) “the syphogrants … see to it that no one lounges around in idleness but rather that everyone practices his trade diligently, but not working from early morning till late at night, exhausted by constant labor like a beast of burden. For such grievous labor is fit only for slaves, and yet almost everywhere is the way workmen live, except in Utopia.” (61)  RHETORICAL/SOCIAL DIFFERENTIATION: Idleness – diligence – constant/grievous labor (the European nobility – the Utopian citizen – the European workman/slave/beast “Adjoining the marketplaces I mentioned are food markets to which vegetables, fruit, and bread are brought, and also fish and edible birds and beasts are conveyed from designated places outside the city where there is a stream to wash away refuse and offal. From here they bring the cattle which have been slaughtered and cleaned by the hands of bondsmen. For they do not allow their own citizens to become accustomed to butchering animals; they think that to do so gradually eliminates compassion, the finest feeling of human nature. They do not allow anything filthy or foul to be brought into the city, for air tainted by such rottenness might engender disease.” (68; next, discussion of the public hospitals outside the walls; see also reprise of butchery and hunting as “beneath the dignity of free men,” 87)  WORK OF MATERIAL+MORAL PURIFICATION ACROSS THE INSIDE-OUTSIDE BOUNDARY “In [the dining] halls, slaves perform all the chores which are somewhat heavy or dirty.” (69-70) DIRECT DISCUSSION: “Prisoners of war they do not consider slaves except those captured in wars they themselves have fought. The children of slaves and the slaves of foreign countries whom they have obtained are not kept in slavery. Their slaves are those who have committed a serious crime in Utopia or foreigners who have been condemned to death for committing some crime (and these are by far the larger number), for the Utopians acquire many of them, sometimes cheaply, more often gratis, and take them away. These kind of slaves they not only keep constantly at work but also in chains. Utopian slaves they treat more harshly since they consider them baser and deserving of more severe punishment because they had an extraordinary education… Another class of slaves is made up of poor, overworked drudges from other nations who choose of their own accord to be slaves among the Utopians. These they treat decently, except that they make them work a bit harder (since they are used to it), they are treated not much less kindly than the citizens.” (96; transition, once again, to care of the sick).” (95-96) 5. LAWS OF NATURE, “NATURAL BONDS”: Patriarchy, seniority, education/custom in place of formal law: o “They have very few laws, for very few laws suffice for persons trained as they are. o No international treaties: “What good is a treaty, they say, as if nature did not sufficiently bind one human being to another?” (103) o “the natural bond which unites us should replace treaties … [for] men are more adequately bound to one another by good will than by agreements, more strongly joined by their hearts than by their words.” (105) o “Husbands chastise their wives and parents their children” (99) o “[T]he oldest man, as I said, presides over a household. Wives serve their husbands and children their parents, and generally the younger serve the older” (67). o Places of Women and Children in Utopian Mealtime Labor and Seating Arrangements (70-71) NATURE, GOD, AND THE ETHICS OF HAPPINESS - The Utopians are “over-inclined” toward the “self-indulgent view” that “the most important part of human happiness consists of pleasure” (81) - An uneasy combination of “RENAISSANCE HUMANISM” (NATURALISM) and CHRISTIAN faith in the afterlife and the immortal soul - NATURE as the ARBITER BETWEEN true and false, normal and perverse, “unnatural” pleasures and desires: - ”for a great many things are not pleasurable by their very nature and are, in fact, for the most part bitter, but through the perverse enticement of evil desires, they are not only thought to be the greatest pleasures but are even included among the primary reasons for living.” (84) - { false pleasures: fine clothes, honors, precious stones, excess wealth, hoarding, gambling, hunting, falconry - FREEDOM/PLURALISM OF RELIGION, except Utopos “strictly forbade that anyone should sink so far below the dignity of human nature as to think that the soul dies with the body or that the world is ruled by mere chance and not by providence.” (119); “Anyone who thinks otherwise they do not even include in the category of human beings since he has degraded the lofty nature of his soul to the base level of a beast’s wretched body.” 5. MOTHER NATURE offers the CRITIQUE OF MONEY: o “I am afraid you will not believe what I say … for in general the more foreign something is tot the habits of the listeners, the harder it must be for them to believe it. But actually … they themselves have no use for money … in the meantime, they keep gold and silver (from which money is made) in a form that lets no one place more value on it than it deserves by its nature. And obviously it deserves far less than iron, without which mortals could no more live … than they could without fire or water, whereas nature gave to gold and silver no use which we could not easily do without; the folly of mankind gives them value because they are rare, but nature, on the other hand, like a kind and gracious mother, made the most useful elements openly available, like air, water, and earth, but she hid away what is vain and unprofitable in the most remote recesses” (75). THE FINAL SET-PIECE: FREEDOM FROM ANXIETY (the end of economic precarity) “I have described to you as accurately as I can the plan of their commonwealth, which I certainly consider to be not only the best but also the only kind worth of the name. For elsewhere they always talk about the public good but they are concerned with their own private welfare; here, where there is no private property, everyone works seriously for the public good. And for good reason in both places, for elsewhere is there anyone who does not know that unless he looks out for his own personal interest he will die of hunger, no matter how flourishing the commonwealth may be; therefore necessity causes him to think he should watch out for his own good, not that of others, that is of the people. On the other hand, here, where everything belongs to everyone, no one doubts that (as long as care is taken that the public storehouses are full) nothing whatever will be lacking to anyone for his own use … though no one has anything, all are rich.” (133) “For what greater wealth can there be than to be completely spared any anxiety and to live with a joyful and tranquil frame of mind, with no worries about making a living, not vexed by a wife’s complaints and demands, not fearing a son will end up in poverty, not concerned about a daughter’s dowry, but secure about the livelihood and happiness of himself and his own, his wife, children, grandchildren, great-granchildren, great-great- grandchildren, and however long a line of descendants noblemen presume they will have. Indeed those who worked before but are now disabled are no less provided for than those who are still working” (133). “Generally the most serious crimes are punished with servitude, which they consider no less grievous to the criminal and much more advantageous to the commonwealth than to execute wrongdoers … They do more good by their labor than by their death, and they offer a long-standing example to deter others from similar crimes. If slaves are rebellious and unruly, then they are finally slaughtered like wild beasts that cannot be restrained by bars or chains. But if they are patient, they are not left entirely without hope. If they are tamed by long suffering and show that they regret the sin more than the punishment, their servitude may be either mitigated or revoked, sometimes by the ruler’s prerogative, sometimes by popular vote” (100) 8. NATURE, SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY: o “When they investigate the secrets of nature using the resources of science, they not only experience wonderful pleasure from doing so but they also think they win the highest approbation from the creator and maker of the world. For they suppose that he, like other workmen, set up the marvelous mechanism of this world for mankind to view and contemplate (and men are the only creatures he made capable of doing so) and that therefore his fonder of a careful obsrever and meticulous admirer than he is of some lazy blockhead who ignores such a marvelous spectacle as if he were a mindless brute.” (94) o “They think the worship which pleases God is the contemplation of nature and the praise which springs from it.” (121) THEME OF HUMAN EXCEPTIONALISM: Which traits are claimed as essentially human? a) Above: pleasure in scientific contemplation of God’s creation b) Aesthetic pleasure; humans appreciate beauty: “Certainly the pleasures which are mediated by our ears, eyes, and noses and which nature assigned as proper and peculiar to the human race (for no other kind of creature admires the design and beauty of the world, or is moved by the beauty of fragrances except to distinguish kinds of food, or recognizes the harmonious or discordant intervals in sounds), these pleasures, I say, they cultivate as adding a certain enjoyable spice to their lives.” c) Cunning in Warfare: “For they boast that they have acted with courage and fortitude only when they have won the victory as no other creature but man is able to win it, that is, by the power of his wits.” (107) TRACKING THE “POLITICS OF NATURE” 1)What is the significance of the TOPOGRAPHY, GEOGRAPHY, and TERRAFORMATION of Utopia? 2)An extravagant detail … what’s up with the chickens? “They raise a huge number of chickens, and they have a marvelous method of doing it. The hens do not sit on the eggs. For the Utopians themselves tend a great number of eggs, keeping them alive and hatching them in constant warmth. As soon as chicks emerge from the shell, they recognize and follow human beings around as if they were their mothers.” (55) {One could also ask: what’s up with pre-marital nakedness ritual, priests in bird-feathered gowns, or euthanasia?} EVIDENCE OF INDIGENOUS ENCOUNTER (SCANTY) “UTOPIA” AS THE NAME FOR THE PLACELESS-NESS (INADMISSIBILITY) OF THE CONCEPT OF COMMUNAL OWNERSHIP IN THE DISCOURSE OF THOSE FOR WHOM PRIVATE PROPERTY IS AN ESTABLISHED FACT  “ABSURDITY” AS THE NAME FOR THAT “ODD” KIND OF SPEECH WHICH IS NOT JUST WRONG, BUT SO “ALIEN” AS TO BE UTTERLY INADMISSIBLE TO THE DEBATE. “WHEN RAPHAEL HAD ENDED HIS TALE, THERE OCCURRED TO ME QUITE A FEW INSTITUTIONS ESTABLISHED BY THE CUSTOMS AND LAWS WHICH SEEMED TO ME QUITE ABSURD, NOT ONLY IN THEIR WAY OF WAGING WAR, THEIR RELIGIOUS BELIEFS AND PRACTICES, AND OTHER INSTITUTIONS AS WELL, BUT ALSO (AND ABOVE ALL) IN THE VERY POINT WHICH IS THE PRINCIPLE FOUNDATION OF THEIR WHOLE SOCIAL STRUCTURE, NAMELY THEIR COMMON LIFE AND SUBSISTENCE WITH NO EXCHANGE OF MONEY. THAT ONE FACT ENTIRELY UNDERMINES ALL NOBILITY, MAGNIFICENCE, SPLENDOR, AND MAJESTY, WHICH ARE (IN THE POPULAR VIEW) THE TRUE UTOPIAN DETAIL. - Incubation of eggs (55) - Dinner / seating arrangements (70) - Euthanasia and suicide (96-97) - City/country relations (54) - Timber and forestry (92) - Beauty (91) - Disability and “deformity” (98, 100, 103) - The Scholar FINAL DISCUSSION QUESTION: Why is there slavery in Utopia? (begin on p. 95) THE QUESTION OF "FICTIONALITY” A “dilemma directed against my Utopia” by a (supposed) reader of the work: “if the story being is being presented as true, I find some things in it rather absurd; if it is a fiction, then I think that More’s usual good judgment is lacking on some points.” (p. 137) “I would at least have inserted some pointed hints which would have let the more learned discover what I was about. Thus even if I had done nothing more than assign to the ruler, river, city and island such names as would have informed learned readers that the island is nowhere, the city is a phantom, the river has no water, the ruler no people – which would not have been hard to do … for if I had not been forced by historical accuracy, I am not so stupid as to use those