Читать книгу Utopia - Sir Thomas More, Thomas More, William Roper - Страница 14

Many of the earliest responses to Utopia passed over the paradoxical aspects of the text and took what More said at face value. Some of his contemporaries took More's game playing literally. One reader was said to have been so excited by More's description of Utopia that he asked to be sent there in the capacity of Bishop. Even those who did not believe that Utopia was a real place often assumed that More earnestly sought to describe a perfect commonwealth that could be used as a criticism of existing societies and as a means for reforming them.

Later commentators were more sensitive to the various layers of the text, which made More's intentions and real views harder to pin down. One way of dismissing the seriousness of More's social vision has been to identify the views of the real More with the firmest denials of Raphael's arguments by the fictional More. A particularly influential interpretation of Utopia from Raymond Chambers in the 1930s downplays its radical content: More's tale is in fact an allegorical lament for the old medieval world of piety and communal life and a rejection of the new one of commerce and individual striving. In this view, More drew on his experience at the Charterhouse to imagine Utopia as a spiritual idyll in the form of an expanded monastery. This place of piety was created by pagans ignorant of Christ and the Bible who, through the exercise of natural reason, created a religion similar to Christianity. Utopia then stands as a criticism of Christian Europe, which has degenerated into corruption and impiety and falls far short of the virtue achieved by the non‐Christian Utopians. By this view, More is one of the last great medieval Catholics, a conservative trying to hold back the tide of modernity.

From the nineteenth century, More began to be seen as an early communist, and Raphael as voicing More's true conscience. After the Russian Revolution, Lenin had an obelisk erected in Moscow which celebrated thinkers who promoted the liberation of humankind. Alongside the names of Marx and Engels was that of Thomas More. Socialist and communist thought sets out a path of history from feudalism to capitalism. Contradictions within capitalism blow that system apart, making way for socialism. Socialist champions of More such as Karl Kautsky in the late nineteenth century saw much of this in Utopia: the condemnation by Raphael of enclosure is of a piece with Marx's account of the accumulation and dispossession that drive the creation of the capitalist economy. Wealth falls into the hands of a few and creates a landless poor that endures great suffering. When Raphael attacks the harsh punishment of thieves, he voices an important socialist principle: that people's choices are limited by the material conditions that they find themselves in. Their lives, and therefore their actions, can be elevated by improving those conditions.

Yet socialism grew out of a critique of the smoky factory capitalism of the nineteenth century, which pitted a mass proletariat against large capitalists. This was far from the England of More's time, which still retained remnants of a feudal economy. Utopia had a handicraft economy quite different to the industrial one which socialists considered to be the foundation of a future socialist system. Both capitalism and socialism pursue by different means the end of satisfying growing human wants. Utopia, on the other hand, is a disciplined society of ascetics which aims at the restriction of desire. Gains in the efficiency of production are used not to give people more goods or mindless leisure but to allow them more time for study and self‐improvement.

Although the content and context of modern socialism are different from those of Utopia, More's book shines a light on the negative impacts of the money economy. In championing a communal way of life, it does anticipate the social vision of later socialism. The view of Utopia as an elegy for medieval Catholicism has been challenged, but even if we prefer to view More as a forward‐looking radical rather than a backward‐looking conservative, it reminds us in our secular times not to ignore the religious context of More's work. More revered the monastic way of life when it was carried out with proper discipline, and this is reflected in the high‐minded lives of the Utopians.

But Utopia is much more than a monastery writ large: it is a nation with a government, with families in which children are born and raised, and with armies that go to war when they have to. Our final glimpse of the Utopians comes at the end of Book Two when we see them at prayer in their temple. They thank God for placing them in a happy commonwealth, but ask that if their society falls short of perfection, God will show them their error. They promise to try out any new social arrangements that will take them closer to perfection. In their prayer they show the willingness of true radicals, socialist or otherwise, to boldly throw off the past and to discard unprofitable traditions in favour of better ways of life.

More recent interpretations such as those of Elizabeth McCutcheon and Dominic Baker‐Smith have emphasized the paradoxical nature of Utopia. Anticipating postmodern concerns with multiple perspectives and the subjectivity of truth, Utopia's irony and its play of opposing voices are perhaps its point. More's linguistic ploys unmoor the reader from commonplace social beliefs so that unorthodox ideas can be introduced and explored. Far from proposing a complete utopian blueprint, More tells his story of the good society through a set of shifting perspectives so as to lay bare the promises and pitfalls of the utopian quest. This is arguably the best context within which to deal with the question of who the real More was and with the potentially confounding aspects of Utopian life. Perhaps the real More, himself a complex and highly paradoxical man, is both the fictional More and Raphael.

Utopianism is a dynamic, experimental,and never‐ending method of social inquiry, not one in which perfection can easily be defined and implemented. This sense that the search for utopia has to be an open‐ended pursuit that must balance different perspectives is hinted at when Raphael has completed his description of Utopia. The fictional More says that much of what Raphael described ‘seemed very absurd’. As Raphael appears to be tired from talking, instead of arguing with him further, More leads him into supper, expressing hope for further opportunities for discussion.

Utopia closes on a note of equivocation from More: ‘I cannot perfectly agree to everything he has related. However, there are many things in the commonwealth of Utopia that I rather wish, than hope, to see followed in our governments.’