Dear All:

As the semester is coming to a close, I am writing with some important reminders and deadlines so nothing gets lost in the busy final exam season.

•       The last day by which you need to submit revisions of assignments (formal essays and writing on the blog) in a single email is Wednesday, May 17th by midnight.  This is a firm deadline (and the official date of our final as it is offered by the College.) We agreed that the in-class final will be substituted by a writing portfolio (i.e., revisions of all writing that requires revision on the blog and formal essays)  Revised Essays must be submitted as attachments to an email and sent to: [email protected]

If you revise your writing on the blog, please let me know which posts.

You should have three blog-posts in total and around 6 comments on the writing of your peers

I will reply to each submission and confirm receipt.  If you don’t hear from me within 12 hours, please write back.  Baruch faculty email accounts are going through a massive migration to M365, so please keep an eye out for my reply to your email.

•       The deadline for revisions of your writing on the blog is also Wednesday, May 17th by midnight.

•       Please know that I am available to meet with you on Zoom, or in person, to discuss any questions you might have or go over assignments you may need assistance with between now and May 17^th.

•       Also, do submit missing assignments, even if they’re late.

•       Finally, I offer here the questions to the two blog posts and a link to the two formal essays you had to complete:

             

I wish you all a successful final exam period and an easy end-of the-semester.  It was a real privilege participating in discussions with you and appreciating you fresh perspectives on the literature.  Thank you for your investment in the class, your dedication to your/our progress, and the incredible generosity and sensitivity you expressed toward your peers’ writing.  Your contributions—written and oral—made this class a far richer and more enjoyable experience than I had anticipated. 

I look forward to seeing you all in class tomorrow and next Monday.

With appreciation and warmest wishes,
Christina Christoforatou

The aspect of the utopia that I find most interesting is lack of free will and choice. The utopia has a way of covering up individuality and choice.

On a purely visual level, the utopia looks identical “Once you’ve seen one of them [towns] you’ve seen them all, for they’re as nearly identical as local conditions will permit,” and has identical cultures in the various towns. On a more individual level, the utopia gives the illusion that a person has a choice, for example, in career. A child normally follows on their parents’ trade, however they may chose a trade that appears more to them but “you can practice whichever you prefer, unless the other one is more essential to the public..” There is very little choice is which trade the child must actually follow.
Many actions that seem to be choices are out under limits, such as traveling. “Life you want to visit a friend in some other town, or would simply like to see the town itself. You can easily get permission to go there, unless you’re urgently needed at home.” The utopia is under many rules, which makes society function, but I question at what point would the citizens of Utopia stop agreeing with the laws.
It’s a simple example of collective action problems. When there are a small number of people, it is easy to agree on laws and customs like the utopia has. But, when more people are involved, it’s harder to satisfy and organize everyone. This is similar to direct democracy, and how it works best in small groups. At some point, the population would teach a level where members of the society would rebel and break away from the utopia.
The closest parallel to a utopia could be Amish Society, with their strict set of rules, strong customs, and values. Although many of the children to decide to keep living the Amish lifestyle, a number of them do leave the Amish society. I would think the same would happen within the Utopia. I also would think that once the Utopia reaches a high enough population comparable to other large nations like France, Great Britain, and the US, it would be face a series of revolutions.

The portrayal of human nature seemed to be a stumbling block for many people during our discussion. Incredulity towards the idea that the Utopians not only fall in line with the exhaustive legal mandates that keep their nation run smoothly, but prefer them and take pride in them, seemed to be the bulk of many complaints. However, I think More’s portrayal of human nature as a relational construct that changes in different historico-politico-economic-cultural conditions is not where he gets into trouble. The more egregious thing in my opinion is that all the things that come to influence our lives and societies are reduced to the law, and all problems in the conditional fields of relations mentioned above can be righted with a wise man at his drafting table codifying the human condition into an orderly list of stimulatory proclamations. This cocktail of armchair philosophy and uber-humanism, is really what the West is all about.

However, I do believe a place like Utopia could exist given exactly the right conditions, namely cultural ones, and I think  its wrong to say they are portrayed as ‘perfect people,’ when there is explicit mention of rebellious types being forced into slavery or exile.How many hours a day do we gaze upon glowing rectangles? Televisions, computers, smart phones, movie screens, cash registers, iPods, iPads, reading tablets, et cetera ad infinitum. We spend 4 hours, 6 hours, 8 hours, not only looking but looking happily and missing this glowing frame for our chosen information when it abdicates its place before our face. The prominence of this behavior has been around for maybe 10 or 20 years at most, and is completely absent from the rest of human existence. How having assigned seating for a whole town looks impossible next to this feat, I will never understand.

In sum, More’s fault is not in his observation of human nature as malleable but in his deification of the juridical and its institutions. This deification consists not only in giving to the legal, the grounding or meaning-giving power to a society, but also in presupposing that the forces that allowed for such a system of laws to come into being are not dynamic enough to make it irrelevant or ineffective.

What I found to be most confusing to me was that the people of Utopia thought it wisest to seek out pleasure. I saw  three main ideas of pleasure that the Utopians believe in, but there are probably more. Firstly, since there is no reward for seeking out pain, pleasure should be sought out as far as the law allows it. Secondly the Utopians believe in sacrificing one’s own pleasure for the sake of someone else’s pleasure in the name of their religion, since they believe that it will be rewarded later on. What this reward will be is a mystery, but my guess would be greater pleasure. Thirdly and most importantly they try their hardest to seek pleasure that is good and honest. For example, “forbidden things” might be considered pleasurable, but they are not because they have some bitterness to them, like hunting. Good and honest pleasures are ones that are pleasurable on their own.

The pleasures that are good and honest are called true pleasures. They are divided into two groups, bodily and mental. The mental pleasures are  “knowledge, and in that delight which the contemplation of truth carries with it; to which they add the joyful reflections on a well-spent life, and the assured hopes of a future happiness.” The bodily pleasures are also divided into two groups. They are the those that alleviate, like eating and drinking and those that are secretly pleasurable, like music and most importantly health and freedom from pain.

I thought that many of these ideas about pleasure were contradictory to how the rest of Utopian society is set up. Since, in Utopia  you can take as much as you want in the marketplace, wouldn’t all these pleasure seeking people take as much as they want. It is also contradictory to the way the family structure is set up, to keep the young people quiet and the youngest absolutely silent. This seems to me a way to free themselves from fear of the unknown or undesirable thoughts, rather than the pursuit of true knowledge, which can actually be quite dangerous.

It does seem though that More might be trying to speak more about the excesses and inequality of pleasure dynamics in Europe at the time. The Utopian form of pleasure seeking is moderate compared to the extremes of aristocracy and court of the More’s time, but it is also extremely better than the inability for the European peasants to seek even the basic pleasures that the Utopians have.

It is also hard for me to think that all pleasure is derived from goodness, since most people in our society find pleasure out of things that aren’t really all that good for themselves or others. Human nature is such that we would need a completely different kind of nature for Raphael’s version to be true. If we took pleasure only from the things that the Utopians think is pleasurable we would have evolved to a higher form of being, without are base instincts and sentiments we share. This is probably what More wants, even if he doesn’t know it, that is, a better human, not a better society. Therefore the Utopians must be a different species then we are. Furthermore humans are pleasure seeking, but we seek pleasure more towards the actions and thoughts of Oscar Wilde’s fictional character Dorian Gray, whose hedonism would shock and repulse, even the most understanding of the Utopians.

-Matt M.

Slavery in Utopia is a “peculiar institution,” though not quite in the way it was in the American South. Slaves in Utopia were either war prisoners, felons (including adulterers!), death row prisoners, or refugees, and Hythloday seems to support this system of slavery because it’s better that someone should perform hard labor than that they should die. Slaves could be released for good behavior and character reform, and their children would not be slaves. In many senses, this slavery is meant as an ethical liberating force, which is extremely ironic (though More would be well before his time to realize such sensibilities.)
“Could it work (or be adapted to work) in a 21st-century society?” I think a look at our prison system and its privatization demonstrates that it certainly is being done in our current society. However, I think it’s extremely socially dysfunctional in a world with currency and other forms of systemic oppression, particularly racism, classism, and sexism (prison being one of the many ways in which patriarchy hurts men, too.) Perhaps it could work in an artificial world without social history but that is not the world we or anyone else lives in. The more that people and resources are commodified, the more oppression that will exist.
I also think Utopian ideas about marriage and divorce very much relate to their system of slavery in that it deals with nonconsensual relationships of ownership, and that breaking the laws related to marriage leads to slavery or banishment from the institution of marriage. We like to joke about the “ball and chain” but the amount of emotional and mental trauma caused by the way we structure romantic relationships is far from funny. I was hoping that Utopia would provide a polyamorous, communal take on romance, but instead, it reified mutually oppressive power structures.

~ Ari Himber

Throughout Book 2, we are continually presented with Utopia as a place of sameness. Whether it’s in maintaining a consistency across household size or structuring the day so all are doing the same thing, there isn’t much differentiation. Perhaps this is most obvious in the fact that all wear the same clothes, the only variance being with gender and marriage status.

The thought of uniformity in clothing isn’t all that absurd (it is visible to a certain extent in our world today, eek), but in our case (and imagined others), the clothes are made by someone else. That is not the case in Utopia, as what I found most interesting is the fact that each family is responsible for making their own clothing.   Now typically when we think of something as handmade, we attribute with it a certain amount of uniqueness; there is a creator and there is a finished product, and at some point between the two, there is a certain je ne sais quoi transferred. And that’s not to mention the personal touches that are often added by the maker. But, as as know, personal and unique are very much individualistic terms that have no place in this fantasy world.

To us perhaps, handcrafted goods should speak on a personal level about the maker in some way. And I very much do think they do too here, only what is being said isn’t quite good, rather its a confirmation of the willful homogeneity accepted by the people of Utopia.

-peter d’antonio

“Agriculture is that which is so universally understood among them that no person, either man or woman, is ignorant of it; they are instructed in it from their childhood, partly by what they learn at school, and partly by practice, they being led out often into the fields about the town, where they not only see others at work but are likewise exercised in it themselves.  Besides agriculture, which is so common to them all, every man has some peculiar trade to which he applies himself; such as the manufacture of wool or flax, masonry, smith’s work, or carpenter’s work; for there is no sort of trade that is in great esteem among them.”

Living in New York City, it is probably safe to assume that an agronomic lifestyle is simply a foreign concept to the extent where we can only brag expertise in it by saying “I have read about this.”  However, despite the lack of practical experience in reaping what you sew, I can’t help but wonder whether the idea of having a citizen universally disciplined in the art of tilling a living is such a bad idea. After all, who wouldn’t want sustainable growth as the crux of proper economic development?

Sustainable growth is undoubtedly a contemporary issue that can be found in endless debates that concern both the domestic and international realm. But my primary concern is not to repeat the controversial issues of green growth (whatever that means) and how OECD states need to pool its resources to save our dying world, but rather to reflect upon the paradigm of our educational system that persistently emphasizes the need to specialize and run right into the rat race without giving any thought to its effect on the goal for a self-sufficient yet satisfactory career. According to Hythloday, a peculiar trade is definitely not something to be frowned upon, and in fact almost inevitable seeing how sophisticated our own economic system is becoming. But what should be the common core curriculum? Should it be a basic yet watered down literature course shoved down the throats of the Freshmen body, or something more?

J.Chung

An aspect of Utopian society that I find particularly interesting and wise is the rule within Utopian government that the council is never to debate a topic on the same day that it is first proposed, “… so men may not rashly, and in the heat of discourse, engage themselves too soon, which might bias them so much, that instead of consulting the good of the public, they might rather study to support their first opinions…”

Our narrator appears to be partial to this idea, as it protects members of Utopian government from allowing emotional response to get the best of them, while simultaneously protecting the people from an excessively rash government. Naturally situations arise wherein a government must act (times of war, emergencies, etc.) but for the most part, I believe debate is critical in government decision-making. Good debate results in bringing the ultimate decision into the center, avoiding extremes that the citizenry might not find palpable. This idea has certainly been incorporated into contemporary society, and frankly it’s something I try to mimic in my own life. It reminds me a lot of the idea that one should not send an email when they’re angry, as one is not in the proper state of mind to craft an appropriate response. People make mistakes in the heat of the moment. To protect the people, government leaders must be protected from their own humanity.

– EG

The island of ‘Utopia’ described by Raphael Hythloday in Thomas More’s Utopia has many features that are sure to arouse incredulity in the mind of a millennial living in a democratic society. For example, despite Hythloday’s emphasis on how the magistrates and the prince are chosen by popular vote and subject to impeachment for abuse of power, it is clear that the people of Utopia live under an authoritarian regime, given how everyone is obligated to live an open life that can easily be monitored in order to ensure that he/she is being “productive.” Non-conformity is not option on this island of uniform cities. This absurd society is not possible without its geographical isolation. 

The island of Utopia was named after Utopus, the man who conquered and subjugated a small population and physically separated them from the main continent. To create Utopia, the newly subjugated citizens had to literally carve their island away from the mainland. The result was a crescent shaped island that could only approached by sea and that too, over treacherous waters that only the inhabitants knew how to navigate safely.

Hythloday finds this geographical isolation to be an excellent strategy on the part of Utopus. It aids in the defense of the island since strange or enemy ships can easily be prevented from reaching the island by manipulating the landmarks which allow safe navigation.

I found it noteworthy that this isolation seemed to be the necessary first condition before Utopia could be established. This seems to be a common theme in theories of Utopia. Perhaps the rationale would be that outside influences would corrupt the citizens leading them away from the wise rules which make their land utopian.

I do think it is possible to implement this in the 21st century, even in this age of globalization and the internet. North Korea is a clear example of an attempt by an authoritarian ruler to isolate his people from all outside influences. However, it is unclear whether a system such as this could be sustained permanently – North Korea certainly does not seem destined for sustainability.  Further, this is clearly not advisable. Restricting the exchange of goods, ideas and people between nations prevents progress in the long run. Isolation is also a precursor for the establishment tyrannical governments, thereby defeating the purpose of establishing the Utopia.

-Abhinaya

Toilets in Utopia are made of gold and silver so that the Utopians will learn to view the rare metals held so preciously in other countries as just ordinary objects that deserve no coveting. And when / if the need should arise for them to sell their gold to others in exchange for a foreign army or commodities during time of war, the Utopians will be able to part with them without the feeling of loss.

I feel like More chose the most incredulous of circumstances to portray the Utopians’ value system. Chamber-pots made of gold, prisoners’ shackles made of silver … it’s impossible to imagine this without finding it absolutely ridiculous and far-fetched. I suppose that’s the idea of Utopia. But this part made me laugh out loud. More was surely pulling his peers’ legs.

Also, I enjoyed the anecdote about the visit from the flamboyant ambassadors of a distant country. I’m surprised they didn’t nick a chamber pot or two when they left.