He’s a real nowhere man
Sitting in his nowhere land
Making all his nowhere plans for nobody
Greetings, fellow travelers, and thank you for joining me on another voyage on the HMS Classic English Literature Podcast. Surely you recognized the opening verse from the Beatles’ 1965 jangle-pop gem “Nowhere Man.” While John Lennon has asserted that the lyric is autobiographical, processing the isolation and frustration that came with the intense chaos of Beatlemania, I think it’s also a nice starting point for today’s journey to Sir Thomas More’s island of Utopia.
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I’m calling this episode “Nowhere Land” because that’s what the title of Sir Thomas More’s Utopia actually means: in Greek, ou means no and topos means place. So Utopia is no place. There is a bit of a pun here, because eu in Greek means good, so it can also mean good place and that, of course, is the way most people think of a utopia today: an ideal place. But tuck the “idea” of no place, Nowhere Land, in the back of your mind. It’ll be useful.
So who is this Thomas More character? He’s probably best known as a close counselor, indeed the Lord Chancellor, to King Henry the 8th. He was knighted in 1521, executed in 1535, and canonized in 1935. He was a reluctant politician – with good reason, it turns out – but having tested a vocation to the clergy with a brace of stern Carthusian monks, he ultimately chose a career in law, politics, and diplomacy. On the strength of Utopia, he became the most famous Englishman in Europe, save for Henry himself and perhaps Cardinal Wolsey. More’s fortunes began to turn when Henry became obsessed with his “great matter” – the lack of a male heir which he blamed on his illicit marriage to his brother’s widow, Catherine of Aragon. More opposed Henry’s divorce/annulment from Catherine – resigned the Chancellorship over it, actually, but when Henry imposed the Oath of Supremacy – requiring all to recognize that Henry was head of state as well as the head of the church (thus dispensing with the Pope), the staunchly Catholic More could not agree and was beheaded for treason.
There’s a story that floats around, I think, about Sir Thomas’ last words. It goes that, as he mounted the scaffold to face the executioner, his foot slipped upon the steps and he stumbled briefly. A sympathetic woman in the crowd asked, “Do you need a hand up, Sir Thomas?” He replied, “No, but I shall need one coming down.”
Almost certainly a load of bovine biosolids, but a nice peep into the way More has seeped into our consciousnesses as a man of firm principle and great faith. But he is, as are we all, dear listeners, far more complex than a bit of consciousness-seepage, are we not? And his most famous work exhibits the complexity of its author.
More began writing the Latin Utopia during a 1515 embassy to Flanders. What is now Book 2 was actually the first written and it’s a monologue by a fella More calls Raphael Hythloday describing the island, people, culture, government, religion, and arts of Utopia, a place he visited for five years after being left on a voyage by Amerigo Vespucci. Yes, the guy who gave his name to America. Book 1, written afterwards, sets up the conversation between a projection of More himself, a friend named Peter Giles, and Hythloday. The book is printed in 1516 to great acclaim, goes through 5 editions in as many years (no small feat given the relative newness of the printing industry), gets translated into German in 1524, and finally into English in 1551. Isn’t that weird?
I’d like to follow More’s example, actually, and give the quick and dirty on Book 2 first, because, for our purposes, it’s rather the less interesting of the two. Hythloday runs down the various social and cultural conventions of the Utopian people. They, and the island they inhabit, are named for the ancient conqueror of the island, Utopus, the island having been previously named Abraxa (Greek for glorious savior). All Utopians must contribute to agricultural work of all types in addition to being trained in a particular craft, like masonry or smithing. One usually takes up the craft of one’s father, but allowances are made for adoption should one choose another skill. Utopians work only six hours per day, sleep eight hours, and play one hour. “Whatever interval is left . . . is allowed to the individual to use at his own discretion, not to abuse through debauchery or sloth.” Which seems a bit unfair, doesn’t it. A bit of debauched sloth is what I think most of us are in it for. The Utopians prefer to learn more skills, practice arts, or read good literature. Well, that seems fair enough.
Theirs is, unsurprisingly, a patriarchal social order based on the family unit. All property is held in common and the Utopians are famously scornful of precious metals. Hythloday reports that “they use gold and silver for making chamber-pots and all the lowliest containers everywhere in use. . . in addition, the chains and thick shackles that bind the slaves are forged out of the same metals.” We’ll be coming back to this later.
The government oversees all facets of Utopian life, including marriage (in which the prospective spouses must present themselves naked to each other in order to discover any “foul deformity that may lie hidden under those coverings.” Divorce is therefore nearly absent, unless brought on by “intolerably annoying character traits.” Indeed. Travel, health care, and euthanasia also fall within the government's purview. The business of war is just that, often a business. While Utopians train for it, they find it degrading and would rather melt down a few chamber pots for coin to pay mercenaries. They are monotheistic, believe in the immortality of the soul, and believe the best life is spent pursuing knowledge, wisdom, and undegrading forms of happiness.
Thus Hythloday describes a commonwealth he believes “not only the best, but also the only one which can deservedly claim the name of commonwealth for itself. . . . where nothing is private, they seriously conduct public business . . . where everything belongs to everyone.”
Utopias have a long history. At least as far back as Plato’s Republic in the 4th century BCE, which imagined a society administered by philosopher-kings, protected by guardians, and supported by producers, such as farmers and craftsmen. These tasks were assigned according to one’s natural talents. Property and family are communal and education aims at cultivating virtue and knowledge. The point is to eliminate individual greed, selfishness, and family loyalties, promoting a sense of unity and harmony within society.
We could consider the preaching of Jesus of Nazareth in the Gospel of St. Mark rather utopian. If we focus on the historical figure, rather than his later deification, we see an apocalyptic preacher who believed the “kingdom of God” was at hand. This kingdom was not a paradisal afterlife – this was an earthly kingdom established by God and administered by Jesus.
St. Augustine’s behemoth “The City of God” could, too, be seen as a utopian vision, contrasting the worldly City of Man with the transcendent City of God.
Sir Thomas More’s book draws on all of these ideas, and others, while adding a satirical dialogue style largely lifted from Lucius of Samosata in the 2nd century CE (perhaps his Menippus Goes to Hell), thereby introducing a new genre of English prose.
But it is quite difficult to determine More’s intentions with this new genre. Puns, irony, and satire abound, which complicate the earnestness which we may associate with recent utopian iterations. I’ve already mentioned the “no place / good place” pun. And our interlocutor’s name – Raphael Hythloday – draws on the Greek for “babbler.” Is this because he’s loquacious or nonsensical? Furthermore, More draws a portrait of an entirely rational – indeed, classical pagan – society, not only (perhaps not even) to present an exemplar but to explore the irrationality of his contemporary Europe.
Which introduces another complication: how does a courtier in what may be England’s nearest brush with absolute monarchy implicitly condemn the caprices of that monarch? And many historians and biographers point out the tension between More’s device of Utopian equality with his actual torturing and (in at least six cases) execution of religious dissenters and heretics. The character of More concludes the dialogue with these ambiguous words:
Meanwhile, while I cannot agree with everything that was said by the man, who is without doubt both extremely learned and quite experienced in human affairs, at the same time, I readily confess that there are very many things in the commonwealth of the Utopians, that I would wish for in our states rather than hope for.
Well, what are the “many things” that you wish for? More plays this rather cagily. How serious is he about the reform of Christendom along Hythoday’s rational scheme? We can readily dismiss any ideas of More as a radical reformer. I see him rather like William Langland, the author of Piers Plowman, or the author of the Second Shepherd's Play. More castigates the wealthy for enclosing common pastures and dispossessing farmers. He notes, in what I think is his voice in Hythloday’s mouth, that the poor must “actively starve unless they actively steal,” and then they are hanged for theft. He laments the veterans of the king’s wars who “sacrifice their limbs to the commonwealth or for the king and their disability prevents them” from working when they return. He criticizes monopolistic trade practices that artificially inflate the price of grain and wool.
But he is not a froth-mouthed leveller. More (again as Hythloday) proffers actual solutions. Longish quote:
make laws that those who have destroyed the farms and country towns reestablish them, or else let them be given to those who will restore them or who are willing to rebuild. Put limitations on the buying up of lands by the wealthy, and their virtual license to exercise a monopoly. Let fewer be supported in idleness, let agriculture be restored, let wool- making be resumed so there is an honest business whereby that idle crowd can exercise itself usefully: whether those whom poverty has made, thus far, into thieves, or those who now are vagabonds and unemployed servants, both types being, no doubt, the thieves of the future. To be sure: unless you remedy these evils, you will boast in vain about justice being exercised in the punishment of theft; it is a pretense of justice, rather than really just or useful. For when you allow people to be brought up in the worst way and their characters to be corrupted little by little, starting from their tender years— to be punished, of course! when as grown men they finally do those shameful deeds that from their youth they have raised a constant expectation of committing— what else is this, I ask, but you making them thieves and you, the same ones, punishing them?
More exhorts a rather conservative (as in “live up to our traditions”) reform, not a revolution. So Utopia contrasts the rationally ordered state of Book 2 with the contemporary Europe of monarchs bent on self-aggrandizement. At the same time, More tackles the very humanist dilemma: Is political or patriotic service better than the pursuit of philosophical wisdom?
Perhaps, at this point, a brief digression is in order. What is humanism, as used here? Renaissance humanism was a cultural movement that placed a renewed emphasis on human values, capabilities, and achievements as iIt sought to reconcile human interests with religious beliefs and classical knowledge.Humanists drew inspiration from ancient Greek and Roman literature, philosophy, and art. They sought to revive and study classical texts, which they believed contained valuable insights into human nature and the world – especially as regards the power of human reason emphasizing personal development, education, and the cultivation of talents and skills. This necessitated a reevaluation of worldly pursuits and advocating for the importance of worldly knowledge and achievements. Education should nurture critical thinking, moral values, and practical skills. Humanists actively engaged in political and civic life, advising rulers and contributing to the administration of city-states.
This thumbnail renders Hythloday’s Utopia a humanist paradise. So why More’s ambivalence?
Well, here’s my thought. Let me try to tie some various strands of this episode together. First, note the centrality of the self in More’s quandaries: monarchs seeking self-glorification and humanists debating public service or private study. I’ve banged on a bit about the emergence of a conscious self, the thinking I, as a hallmark of Europe’s shift from the medieval to the early modern zeitgeist. But note that Utopian society rigidly polices the self – not to the extent of Plato’s Republic – but we’ve already seen the clear scheduling for work, sleep, and play. Crafts are usually inherited and family is subservient to occupation. Everyone wears the same color clothes. The size of towns and households are limited. Family size would be, I imagine, if not for the fact that “the number of children cannot, of course, be pre-established.” Women are “placed” with their husbands’ families. Citizens are “appointed to settle” areas that become underpopulated.
The Utopians see idleness and dissolution as the great vices – everything must be oriented toward the greatest production for the good of the community. In this sense, Utopia is not a society, it is a state. It is an apparatus to rationally order the lives of otherwise willful individuals.
Which leads me to the other strand: the absence of a moneyed economy and private property. Hythloday declares, “wherever there is private property, wherever everybody measures everything with money, there it can hardly ever happen that a commonwealth will be governed justly or prosperously.” And then, citing Plato’s similar admonition in the Republic:
That most prudent man easily foresaw that there could be only one way to public well- being: by decreeing the equality of possessions— which I do not think could ever be observed when individuals have private ownership. . . . I am fully persuaded that goods cannot be distributed in an equitable or just way, or that anything can turn out well in human affairs unless ownership is completely abolished
Well, well, well. A forceful enough rationalization, and one that has legs, right? We’ve no shortage of utopian communities since More’s time that made the same case: from millenarian sects like the Shakers to mid-nineteenth century Fourier-associationist inspired cooperatives to the “back to the land” hippie communes of the late-20 century. John Lennon’s “Imagine,” which now claims the status of a secular hymn, famously includes the lines “Imagine no possessions, I wonder if you can, no need for greed or hunger, a brotherhood of man.” Quite rich coming from a quite rich man composing on his white Steinway at his Tittenhurst Park estate in Ascot.
The denial of these two ideas – the self and private property – is the crucial foundation upon which an ideally rational state can be erected. Because, as economic animals, we often express our selfhood through our accumulation of property. We are what we have – this is certainly the logic of the capitalist system, but what Marx and other anti-capitalist thinkers recognize is the way by which property constructs an identity. We buy and own to confirm a sense of accomplishment, to acquire prestige and status, to perform authenticity, and, through the juxtaposition of personally selected but otherwise unrelated items, to assert our uniqueness. And this uniqueness is destabilizing: as critic Terry Eagleton has noted: “private property undermines public responsibility.” Remember how the Utopians make their slave-shackles out of silver and gold? That’s what that’s about: as they see it, personal wealth is a burden, a binding. But we can see that ironically, too.
And what about the fact of Utopian slavery? Seems that, if you're a slave, this isn’t an ideal set of circumstances. Which points to the great question hanging over all utopian visions, real and fictional: ideal for whom and to what ends? Maybe the supposedly wealthless and thereby putatively classless community tries to skirt the issue of inequality by its socioeconomic proscriptions, but captives of war and criminals, while not bought and sold, are nonetheless ontologically and morally subordinate.
Which leads to something that I think about often when I read utopian or dystopian fiction: is inequality necessary for social stasis and stability? Even in an ideal state, someone has to clean toilets and collect garbage. Without remuneration, who would volunteer? Who would do the lowly, gross grunt work lacking a personal incentive? Do the women who are forced to serve at Utopian feast feel equal? Do the slaves? Of course not.
And if we grant that difficulty, the distinction between utopia and dystopian society becomes one of perspective, not of degree. Maybe the trick is not necessarily to alter the conditions of a given state or society, but to alter the perceptions of those who live within it. Convince people of their proper place. Education has great power here to reconcile people to the conditions of their existence. Religion, too. Opiate of the masses. These are – you ready for it? – “the nowhere plans for nobody” of nowhereland.
And so it seems that all utopias, including the one described by Hythloday, rest on some form of absolutism, which is necessary to suppress self and property – or at least to centrally administer them. A utopia has to be a static state – its primary function must be to perpetuate its own existing equilibrium. Hythloday says,
since pride is too firmly fixed in humans to be plucked out easily, I rejoice that this form of commonwealth, which I would gladly wish for all, has at least been the good fortune of the Utopians to have, who have followed the institutions of life by which they have not only most successfully laid the foundations of a commonwealth, but also, as far as human conjecture can foresee, one that will last forever. For, because they have thoroughly removed the roots of factionalism along with all the other vices of ambition, they are not threatened by the danger of being worn out from domestic discord, the one thing that has ruined the outstandingly well- protected prosperity of many cities. But if harmony is preserved at home, and the institutions are sound, the envy of all the neighboring rulers combined (which have all too often made the attempt before, though always beaten back) could not shake or disturb that power.
I think maybe that’s where More’s ambivalence and irony come in. Remember, he is a devout Catholic – he dies, as he said, “the King’s good servant, but God’s first.” A deep Catholic worldview rests on not only an individual's acceptance of God’s divine grace, but also a conscious working for good in the world – in short, a faith in perfectibility without perfection. More’s worldview must be dynamic, not static. So he agrees with Hythloday that “pride does not measure prosperity by her own advantages, but by the disadvantages of others,” but he fears that in such a state “all nobility, magnificence, splendor, majesty are profoundly overthrown— the true (according to public opinion) glories and ornaments of a commonwealth.” Unless he’s being ironic here, too.