Recovering Utopia

What a week this has been.

I don’t feel like writing – not this blog, not anything else.  So it’s more than okay if you don’t feel like reading.

But maybe if I make myself hit this gentlest of deadlines – writing a weekly blog post for an intellectual community that has become my professional home and the one enduring institutional affiliation in my otherwise peripatetic academic life – maybe, I say, if I hit this deadline that is less an obligation than an honor, then I can find some sustainable rhythm of writing through the apparently imminent collapse of the republic.

Today I’m going to pick up on my “Readings in Western Culture” series, a series which has been stalled for months now for the stupidest of reasons:  I have misplaced my copy of Utopia.

I know I have it, I know I have seen it “recently” (where “recently” means something like “since I came out of my post-dissertational fog”), but I’ll be damned if I can find it on the downstairs bookshelves, the upstairs bookshelves, or in the boxed-up books.

A couple of months ago I said to myself, “This is ridiculous.  Quit looking for the damn book and just order another copy.” But I never got around to that. Instead, I decided to join the 21^stcentury, got myself a Kindle that was on some super-special promo deal (it was $50), and proceeded to download a free copy of Utopiato my new electronic reading device.

I read two pages before I remembered that I really hate reading books electronically, and that was the end of that.

So much for engaging with the text of Utopia in this post.

But, honestly, how much engagement with a text on that reading list, that “Stanford Canon,” was ever really necessary?  Not a lot, to be honest.  I clearly remember one of the speakers during Freshman Orientation say, and I quote, “The real purpose of the Western Culture program is to make sure you have just enough knowledge to hold your own in conversation at a cocktail party.” It was a laugh line, of course – but it was also true.  Maybe not expressive of all of the intentions of those who shaped the curriculum, but true enough in a way. (For academics at cocktail parties as a model for good Cold War citizenship, see Jamie Cohen-Cole’s The Open Mind.)

Though I have returned with gladness to many of the texts on that reading list, I haven’t read Utopiain thirty years.  But here’s what I would say about it at a cocktail party.

As I have suggested before, for European thinkers, the existence of “the New World” was something of an epistemic shock – it exploded their current understandings of the world and their place within it.  It unleashed a flurry of speculation, a consideration of possibilities. Or, really, maybe it was just the notion of possibilityitself:  things might be different than we think, things could be different than they are.  We could imagine – just for the sake of speculation – a different social order

Those are dangerous ideas to entertain and explore if you are the subject of a monarch who is fond of beheading his enemies.  That’s not why More got the axe, of course; he was the King’s good servant, but God’s good servant first.  He died rather than renounce the Catholic Church (or, simply, the Church, since a monarch-headed “Church of England” was an impossibility for More).

Those ideas – things might be different than we think; things could be different than they are; let’s imagine what a differently ordered society might look like – are dangerous in lots of times and places.  Indeed, that’s the throughline in the Stanford reading list, easy enough to see in retrospect, though not at all emphasized in my track, which was focused on these texts’ status as Great Books.  In the fall we read Plato’s Republic, in the winter we read More’s Utopoiaand Machiavelli’s The Prince, and in the spring we read Marx and John Stuart Mill.  Dangerous, dangerous ideas in all those books, dangerous thinkers writing them.  Dangerous times.

Those ideas – things might be different than we think; things could be different than they are – lie at the core of historical inquiry too.  Historians do not turn to the texts or the archives assuming we will discover that everything was exactly as we expected it to be or have always thought it to be.  If we thought that to be the case, why would we bother?  Instead, we are hoping to learn something we did not know, to discover something that changes how we understand the way things have come to be as they are, and perhaps to find in the past some paths of possibility to a different future than the one we think is on the horizon.

We are a dangerous discipline.

I guess that’s something I would say about More’s Utopia if it came up at a cocktail party.

But I’d probably segue pretty quickly to referencing A Man for All Seasons– the “devil and the law” speech certainly.  But, these days, I’d also recall the trial scene in which More (played by the brilliant Paul Scofield) rebukes young Richard Rich for selling out.  I’ve queued the clip below to begin at the crucial point of that dialog (at 3:15):

For that you were willing to lie?  That is the purchase price of your integrity?  That’s the question this pivotal scene poses to everyone – to academics and politicians and judges and would-be kings.  As the republic totters, we are learning how everyone answers this question, including ourselves.  We are learning that some people who say they believe in something like divine justice probably really don’t think there are going to be any consequences for them in the hereafter, if they believe in a hereafter at all.  Or did we know that already?  Perhaps we knew it all along but they did not.

I am reminded here of the brilliant words of another servant of Henry VIII, Sir Thomas Wyatt, who met the same fate as More:

Stand whoso list upon the slipper top
Of court’s estates, and let me here rejoice;
And use me quiet without let or stop,
Unknown in court, that hath such brackish joys:
In hidden place, so let my days forth pass,
That when my years be done, withouten noise,
I may die agèd after the common trace,
For him death gripeth right hard by the crope
That is much known of other; and of himself alas,
Doth die unknown, dazed with dreadful face.

But who fears what comes after death? Who believes in divine judgment any more – or even “the judgment of history,” our secular substitute? Nobody seems to care.  We live in disenchanted days, for which there is no hereafter.  There is only the here and now: that is the creed of a world that worships power alone and fears death itself above all else.

Same old world, the Preacher might say.  But, historically speaking, that is not the world of Utopia– not the world of the man who wrote it, at any rate.  I am not suggesting Thomas More’s world was a better one than ours.  But it was different, for it was a world in which even the powerful — some of them, anyhow — shared the assumption that some day God would judge them.

The key insight – or the key problem – of James T. Kloppenberg’s magnificent Toward Democracy is this:  if democracy was laid upon a foundation of explicitly religious, if not exclusively Christian ethics, what happens to democracy in a disenchanted world?

I guess we’re finding out.  But invoking “the judgment of history” — again, our secular substitute for the judgment of God — is not gonna work for those who don’t believe in any cause greater than their own self-preservation in the here and now.

More’s Utopia was written to a world that feared a God; A Man for All Seasons was written for an age of secular liberalism, where we can look to no higher bar of justice than the one we ourselves have erected and sustained.  That is this world; that is my world.  The play was written to call forth courage in a world where men and women who hope for nothing beyond death are nevertheless unafraid of it and will live accordingly, choosing justice over safety, choosing integrity over acclaim.  It is an idealist’s manifesto, but those who have ears to hear can hear it.

But remember:  there is a difference between one’s integrity and one’s reputation for integrity.  We all know people who have sacrificed the substance to preserve the shadow.  Worse than that, when they look in the mirror, they know themselves. They are above all men most miserable.

That’s pretty weighty conversation for a cocktail party, I guess.  But I’ll be damned if I’m going to read Utopia on a Kindle just so I can write a blog post.

Not after a week like this one.