Utopia (Penguin Classics)

This audiobook has a great, smooth narration that lets me enjoy the authors ideas while commuting. Very nice recording. The ideas in the book seem mildly terrifying especially since I'm an introvert. Life has been regulated to be public. So all meals are at a public location and women are mandated to take their turns preparing the public meals (sounds like a truly horrific slavery). Any man may enter into any man's house and the houses are rotated by lottery.What this perfect world lacks is privacy. Children of families that are naturally more abundant than others are "reassigned" to families who are unable to produce children. Do the parents have any say in this matter?Like so many of the books which purported to prescribe a perfect world for us, the perfection of this world is it's horror. As so many decisions have been mandated, it appears that individual freedom to chose - even to keep one's one child - or to NOT participate in the public evening meal every night (how exhausting) - are not optional. It reminds me a bit of the 1800s laws in the US mandating church attendance. What if I don't want to eat dinner tonight? What if I decide I'm just gonna order pizza and have a beer and watch the Spurs? Apparently that is not allowed in the perfect society of the 1500s.This kind of novel is nonetheless valuable because in attempting to create a perfect world, it allows readers to really think about what IS perfect. Is the chaos of democracy better? Democracy has its chronic indecision and inability to move smartly forward because of the laborious and time consuming process of getting Congress or the public to agree on a concept. Yes, I have to say, I much prefer the raging American debates about abortion and gay rights to the no one lacks for anything world of Thomas More where none consider diamonds or gold interesting because they aren't useful, but iron is valued because it can be used. All cups are made from pottery; all cloth is the same color as the original material. Everyone wears the same clothes and works on their free time to improve their minds. Actually, Star Trek, the Next Generation, is a pretty close imitation of the ideas in this book, but at least in ST, you can have a private cup of tea alone in your room and you can do something privately that may not improve your mind.

This is a very readable translation (the original having, of course, been written in Latin) and far more comprehensible than the original English version (Robinson, 1551). Everyone who considers himself a scholar should be familiar with it and I am sorry to say that I did not do so until writing a paper on euthanasia, a topic which More addresses in this little book. A very good friend of mine and admirer of Sir Thomas believes that the active euthanasia practiced in Utopia was not meant as serious advocacy by its author (presumably other aspects of Utopian society, most famous being its communist socio-economic structure, are also not truly advocated).The translator of this edition, in a short appendix, argues that More did indeed support the idea of communism and I must agree that, on the whole, the book must reflect the author's thinking, if nothing else than by Occam's Law of Economy - the simplest answer, that he truly desired such a society, being most likely correct. In addition, there are little insights into what must be More's exasperation with his own life- for example, requiring toddlers to keep silent and having women in the common dining room sit so they have easy exit (to handle the nausea of pregnancy). Surely this also indicates More's sincerity. It should be remembered that the thinking of our heroes evolves, as does ours, over time. Martin Luther's theology did not mature for ten years after the posting of the 95 Theses - see Lowell Green's book on this. And that was the event and year that made all the difference - 1517, immediately after Utopia appeared. Then the humanists were compelled to determine their sources of truth. For More, this was the magesterium. For a humanist like Melanchthon, as for Jesus Himself, it was the Word. The More of 1516, who supported euthanasia and religious tolerance, was not the Lord Chancellor, who, I think, would not and did not support many of these things - for good and for ill.