This is the 500th anniversary of Utopia.
The word was created as the name of a fictional land from a book written in 1516 by Sir Thomas More. In the book, More recounts conversations with a man who has visited Utopia—a beautiful island off the coast of the then distant and exotic America.
Utopia is a land without private property. Everyone is supplied with a home, while goods and food are kept in common warehouses and distributed by request. Everyone in Utopia—both men and women—gets a diverse education in everything from philosophy and politics to metalworking and woodcraft. Both men and women take turns working at different jobs, and while everyone is required to work, no one works at an assigned task for more than six hours a day.
If you can’t work because of age or illness, you still have your needs met, just the same as anyone else. If you need medical care, you get it. If you’re miserable, and in pain, and what you want is only for it to end, euthanasia is also available.
There are no locks on the doors in Utopia, mostly because there’s little incentive to steal. If you want something, you ask for it. Everyone wears the same grade of clothing. Everyone has the same size of house. Gold and jewelry are reserved for items like chamber pots, where it is used to mock the whole idea of wealth.
There is no penal code in Utopia. No fixed set of crimes or punishments. Causing someone harm is clearly a crime, but incidents are dealt with on a case-by-case basis. There are no standard punishments, and certainly no mandatory sentences.
A variety of religions are found on Utopia, and all are tolerated—though atheists are looked on with suspicion (some things never change). None of these religions is the official state religion, and no one is required to participate in any religious affiliation to gain status. Utopia is also open to new religions and always interested in new philosophies. People can move between religions freely. Priests of all religions are allowed to marry, and all religions can sanction marriages. No-fault divorce is also a feature of Utopian life ... which is a bit ironic, considering More’s ultimate fate.
There’s a king in Utopia, but that title is deceptive. Democratically elected representatives form a 200-member body which then appoints the king. Those representatives do most of the actual governing. If the king starts to act too much like … a king, he can be removed. Laws are kept to a minimum, and those laws that exist are made as simple as possible so that there is no need for lawyers. Everyone represents themselves in any legal matter. Oh, and anyone caught campaigning for office is disqualified from holding any office.
Utopia does not war with other societies. It makes trade deals. It even forms alliances and will send assistance to allies under attack. But even then these arrangements are informal, because Utopia swears no oaths and signs no treaties.
Both men and women fight side by side in the Utopian military, and units are often composed of friends and families. They are not pacifists, but when fighting they work to capture enemies rather than kill them where possible. Utopia does not war over territory, or trade goods, or try to extract revenge for past wrongs. It has a standard solution to any nation that declares war on Utopia—it offers a large bounty for anyone who can deliver the ruler of the nation that started the war.
So far Utopia sounds like ... utopia. And honestly, when you consider the social and economic conditions of More’s time, it’s fairly astonishing. This is especially true when you realize that in 1516, Thomas More was both an important judge and a Privy Councillor to King Henry VIII. Creating a place without private property, rank, religious requirements, martial bullying, or legal complexities is an exceptional accomplishment for a man who was deeply invested in a culture where all these things were de rigueur.
But More’s Utopia is not without it’s 16th century peculiarities.
There’s slavery in Utopia. That sounds shocking, but like the kingship, it’s mostly not quite what it sounds like. Slaves were limited to those people captured in battle and people guilty of serious crimes. You can think of it as more as “public service” than traditional slavery, and it is the preferred way of dealing with crime. Slaves are adorned in gold, including thick gold chains and gold collars, both to mark them out and to reinforce the association of wealth and disfavor. Slaves could be released when they showed that they were contrite and regretful for their crimes.
There are really only a couple of areas where Utopia’s time stamp really shines through.
First, there are also slaves who were purchased from areas outside Utopia. That’s exactly what is sounds like, and while these slaves could also be released, it doesn’t make the idea one whit less repulsive.
And then there’s the sex stuff. In Utopia, adultery is a serious crime. Adulterers can be tossed into slavery for life, and if that doesn’t stop them, repeat adultery comes with a death sentence.
Premartial sex is also a crime. Women have to be at least 18 to marry, men have to be 22. Anyone engaging in sex before marriage is subject to a lifetime of required abstinence. Break that vow, and it’s slavery or death. What the Utopians think of sexual practices not of the one man, one woman variety, we don’t know. We can bet it’s not good.
There’s also an odd set of regulations in Utopia having to do with travel. Travel in and out of the country is regulated, but even within Utopia people need a kind of internal passport that sets the areas where they are allowed to go. It’s a “papers, please” mentality that’s definitely grating. Being found outside your designated area without your proper papers is a crime.
There is, quite deliberately, no privacy in Utopia. Privacy is not regarded as a right. Wanting to spend time alone, or even with a small group of friends, is frowned on. Utopia wants to provide little opportunity to foment unrest or plot against the state.
And despite what at first appears to be a surprisingly modern attitude toward women, there are still strict requirements that they perform all the household tasks, confess any “sins” to their husbands, and in general leave the politics and religion to the men (though a few widows did participate in both).
Five years after writing Utopia, Thomas More was knighted. The year after that, he became Speaker of the House of Commons. In 1529, More because Lord Chancellor of England. If you’ve ever seen either the play or the film of A Man for All Seasons, you have a pretty good idea what comes next. More, a devout Catholic, broke with Henry over the Church of England and Henry’s divorce. By 1532 he was out of office, by 1534 he was in the Tower of London. In 1535, he was beheaded.
More is venerated as a saint for his resistance to Henry. However, the neat piety of his story is more than a little undermined by the number of people who were executed for heresy in the brief time More was Lord Chancellor, and by the agents he sent after protestant leaders who tried to escape him by fleeing to the continent. Utopia might abide freedom of religion and divorce. Thomas More did not.
More himself admitted that his Utopia was not his own feelings toward the subjects presented, or even intended as a completely coherent set of policies. It was more a group of talking points. What would it be like without private property? How would a society run without a central religion? How can a non-aggressive nation defend itself?
If the answers he came up with were little more than mental exercises and restatements of ideas that went at least as far back at Plato, then it’s still a good one for the most part. There’s a reason why Utopia came to mean utopia. Why More’s “no place” (ou topos) became to be seen as an example of perfection.
And now … surprise! All of this is prelude.
Here’s the task I’m setting for myself, and for you, if you’ll come along. Five hundred years after More’s Utopia, I want to reclaim both the word and the idea. Over the intervening centuries, we’ve allowed the idea of utopia to become not just ideal, but idealistic. Unrealistic. Unattainable. It’s time to walk that back.
You know why there are so many more dystopian novels than there are utopian? Because dystopia is easy. It’s every day. Thinking of the worst comes naturally to us. Imagining utopia … that’s hard work. It’s also work that’s been put off for way too long.
Right this very moment, we are engaged in an election season that pits not just left against right, but threatens the whole concept of progress. If we are for progress, if we are progressive, then where are we progressing to? What’s the target? Where is our destination? How do we find Utopia?
So I’m beginning a project. It has three parts, not one of which is simple.
First, I want to define Utopia. A Utopia for today—the best shot that we can make at laying out the design for a perfect society. By that I don’t mean flying cars and replicators. I mean a society that exists in post-scarcity conditions. One where people can find challenges but not necessarily hardship. Where economics offer opportunity, without requiring oppression.
Second, I want to create a path to Utopia. If there is something we should be working toward … how do we get there? If the ideal society is classless, what steps do we need to take to remove class? If the ideal society requires reducing inequality, what’s the first step to shrinking that gulf?
And finally, I want to start pressing these goals, both in personal politics and on the politicians I support. Because if we don’t have a vision of utopia in mind, the alternative is always some version of what we’ve seen before.
To accomplish this, I’m giving myself a strict deadline: the rest of my life. Or 500 years. You know … whichever comes first.