Middles (6)—Utopia

Click here for an introduction to Round and Square's theme of "Middles."

[a] Island of Utopia  RF

Imaginative ethnography. That's the concept I wish to explore in today's (and many future) posts. What does it look like when we describe the details of life and work of a people who never existed? Why would we pursue something like that? The fact is, that this is quite common in the world of letters, and deserves a deeper look. Many such descriptions occur in worlds we otherwise know as novels or short stories. I would like, at least, to examine this idea through a somewhat wider lens than that of fiction.

There are few better places to start than Sir Thomas More's Utopia. I read it many years ago (many times) as part of my Fundamentals Examination at the Committee on Social Thought, and reread it often. I found then—and am even more annoyed by it now—that the vast majority of authors tend to treat the book as a political and moral tract. For those of you who know the text, that might not seem like something worth arguing. It is very much a political and moral argument, after all.

My concern will be familiar to readers of Round and Square, though. I would include it in my vast list of readings intended to complicate the history of anthropology. You see, I find "imaginative ethnography" everywhere in the Western literary tradition. I find it in other traditions, too, and will discuss those as time goes on. It might suffice to say something along the lines of "well, that's how fiction works," and stop "overthinking" the rest.

Nope. I can't accept that. Most readers have missed the profoundly anthropological strains in writings from Homer to Faulkner—a tendency to get carried away by fascination with the details of life as lived. As always, I am not saying that anthropologists have never considered such matters. Far from it. I can thank some of my own teachers over the years for attuning me to at least the general issue. Anthropologists tend to be a smart bunch, and it is not as though these matters have never occurred to them.

[b] Round-square anthropology  RF

The problem, as I have stated many times before in four months of Round and Square posts, is that the history of anthropology tends to be taught in rather too narrow ways for my tastes. I want to put up a big tent and consider that there is something "anthropological" in our very ways of looking at the world—that it is both a specialized discipline with a short history and a way of seeing that is wrapped up in everything we do and have ever done. Both, at the same time. It is the latter point (we are all anthropologists) that I will continue to explore in these posts on Round and Square.

For today, though, just read through a section from the "middle" of More's Utopia. You will quickly see the "political" and "moral" message, of course. It is not as though I am denying that dimension of the text. You will probably also note a kind of sixteenth century quaintness in the argument that anyone who has lived in (or studied) the twentieth century (or, as my wife said, read Dostoevsky) will find baffling. Greed, ambition, hatred—all ironed out. I get it.

Curb your tendency—if you are like most of us—to let the political and moral dominate, and turn your gaze instead toward the way he is describing a society and the way that it operates. When I was finally able to do that myself, I could not get over how much the rhetoric of Utopia shares with anthropological accounts of early, "simpler," societies—from archaeological discoveries to Marshall Sahlins's Stone Age Economics. 

Thomas More
Utopia (1516)

Their Occupations 

Agriculture is the one occupation at which everyone works, men and women alike, with no exceptions. They are trained in it from childhood, partly in the schools where they learn theory and partly through field trips to nearby farms, which make something like a game of practical instruction. On these trips they not only watch the work being done, but frequently pitch in and get a workout doing the jobs themselves.

[c] Still More Utopia  RF

Besides farm work (which, as I said, everybody performs), each person is taught a particular trade of his own, such as wool-working, linen-making, masonry, metal-work, or carpentry. There is no other craft that is practiced by any considerable number of them. Throughout the island people wear, and down through the centuries they have always worn, the same style of clothing, except for the distinction of the sexes, and between married and unmarried persons. Their clothing is attractive, does not hamper bodily movement, and serves for warm as well as cold weather; what is more, each household can make its own.

Every person (and this includes women as well as men) learns a second trade, besides agriculture. As the weaker sex, women practice the lighter crafts such as working in wool or linen; the heavier crafts are assigned to the men. As a rule, the son is trained to his father's craft, for which most feel a natural inclination. But if anyone is attracted to another occupation, he is transferred by adoption into a family practicing the trade he prefers. When anyone makes such a change, both his father and the authorities make sure that he is assigned to a grave and responsible householder. After a man has learned one trade, if he wants to learn another, he gets the same permission. When he has learned both, he pursues whichever he likes better, unless the city needs one more than the other.

The chief and almost the only business of the syphogrants is to manage matters so that no one sits around in idleness, and assure that everyone works hard at his trade. But no one has to exhaust himself with endless toil from early morning to late at night, as if he were a beast of burden. Such wretchedness, really worse than slavery, is the common lot of workmen in all countries, except Utopia. Of the day's twenty-four hours, the Utopians devote only six to work. They work three hours before noon, when they go to dinner. After dinner they rest for a couple of hours, then go to work for another three hours. Then they have supper, and at eight o'clock (counting the first hour after noon as one), they go to bed and sleep eight hours.

[d] Utopian work  RF

The other hours of the day, when they are not working, eating, or sleeping, are left to each man's individual discretion, provided he does not waste them in roistering or sloth, but uses them busily in some occupation that pleases him. Generally these periods are devoted to intellectual activity. For they have an established custom of giving public lectures before daybreak; attendance at these lectures is required only of those who have been specially chosen to devote themselves to learning, but a great many other people, both men and women, choose voluntarily to attend. But if anyone would rather devote his spare time to his trade, as many do who don't care for the intellectual life, this is not discouraged; in fact, such persons are commended as especially useful to the commonwealth.

After supper, they devote an hour to recreation, in their gardens when the weather is fine, or during winter weather in the common halls where they have their meals. There they either play music or amuse themselves with conversation. They know nothing about gambling with dice, or other such foolish and ruinous games. They do play two games not unlike our own chess. One is a battle of numbers, in which one number captures another, yet readily combines against the virtues; then, what vices oppose what virtues, how they try to assault them openly or undermine them in secret; how the virtues can break the vices or turn their purposes to good; and finally, by what means one side or the other gains victory.

But in all this, you may get a wrong impression, if we don't go back and consider one point more carefully. Because they allot only six hours to work, you might think the necessities of life would be in scant supply. This is far from the case. Their working hours are ample to provide not only enough but more than enough of the necessities and even the conveniences of life. You will easily appreciate this if you consider how large a part of the population in other countries exists without doing any work at all...[1]

[1] Thomas More, Utopia [Translated and edited by Robert M. Adams] (New York: W.W. Norton & Company), 1975, 40-42.

Bibliography
More, Thomas. Utopia [Translated and edited by Robert M. Adams]. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1975.