Roadside haiku! Putting a fresh twist on an old tradition, John Morse uses poetry as social commentary. For more on roadside haiku, check out Morse's web page here. Read more!

Summertime and the livin’ is easy. Bye everyone! I leave you with this year’s Grizzly@Adams Super Summer Classic: George and Ira Gershwin’s lullaby “Summertime,” from Porgy and Bess. To hear Billie Holiday sing this standard, click here. Ella Fitzgerald also has a fine version of the song. Amy Winehouse’s version is not quite in the same league, but still worth a listen. For an acid-rock version, try this one from Jim Morrison and the Doors. And for the 1959 film version, click here.

“Your daddy’s rich and your ma is good lookin.’” Now that’s poetry.

Previous Super Summer Classics include “Summersong” by the Decemberists and “Hot Fun in the Summertime” by Sly and the Family Stone. Read more!

Senior Seminar. Here are your final exam questions, everyone — right after the jump. Remember, the exam is 10-11:50 a.m. Thursday, May 7. Feel free to contact me if you have questions about the questions.

Sarah Joslin: You have written that “in a utopia…it’s absolutely necessary for one’s free will to be absolutely authentic, not some synthetic illusion pulled over the eyes by a manipulative government — this would indeed be an anti-utopia. Censorship lands smack in the middle of this conflict. It’s necessary for individuals to have free range for expression and development of identity, but it’s also necessary that these individuals don’t stomp all over their neighbors in the effort.”

So say we all. But censorship is not only a matter of what one is allowed to express; it’s also a matter of what is allowed to hear and read. And children in particular are typically prevented from hearing and reading a great deal, and this censorship exists precisely in order to limit the child’s free will. The most obvious example of this sort of thing is what we politely call a “religious upbringing.” I’ve never known of a religious parent going out of their way to expose their child to ideas that would undercut that child’s faith. Paradoxically (or nonsensically, or hypocritically), the parent wants the child to “freely” choose the faith even as the parent prevents the child from weighing the arguments against the faith or experiencing the potential spiritual joys of some other faith. In this sense I would say that every parent and every school and every church is a censor of the first order.

Would you agree? If not, why not? If so, is such censorship a problem? If it is a problem, what should we do about it?

Anthony Guerrero: You argue in one of your comments that “the degree in which Plato proposes censorship is disgusting, and would have the Founding Fathers rolling in their graves.” I agree. Plato’s Republic is not in any sense a liberal democracy. The Republic might well be a valuable exercise in philosophy, but as a blueprint for an actual society it can only be read as a dystopia.

My question concerns the nation we have today. Please think about the Constitution as it exists right now. Suppose that we do not change it a bit, and that we continue to abide by it faithfully. That is, we continue to have a First Amendment, a Fourth Amendment, etc., and our government actually does respect the rights guaranteed by them, and we continue to elect our representatives and senators and presidents as we do today, and so on. Is it possible that under those conditions the United States might turn into a dystopia? Explain.

Gregg Porter: In one of your comments you compared “Socrates’ idea of the ideal state” to what sounds very much like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World: “Once the process of extra-uterine fetal development is perfected, society might indeed be able to raise legions of anonymously-parented children for its military, workforce, and general needs. All that without having to be pestered with troublesome emotional bonding….”

Sure. It’s easy enough to name some of the things we don’t want to use biotechnology for. It’s equally easy to name some of the things we do want to use it for (say, to cure cancer). What’s not so easy is to develop a set of bioethical guidelines to help us distinguish good from bad uses of biotechnology more generally. Not so easy — but that’s exactly what I want you to do for the final. Enjoy.

Lacie Paulson: You’ve written that “Socrates’s idea is anti-utopian,” in no small part because “[t]he women have no choice in who they marry.” Of course, marriage practices vary considerably from culture to culture, and to see how that might matter to our understanding of utopia, here’s what I want you to do. First, familiarize yourself with the myth of Shangri-La, one of the West’s most popular images of utopia. (Wikipedia describes Shangri-La as “a mystical, harmonious valley, gently guided from a lamasery, enclosed in the western end of the Kunlun Mountains” and as “synonymous with any earthly paradise but particularly a mythical Himalayan utopia — a permanently happy land, isolated from the outside world”).

Next, look into the actual marriage and family structure of the real Himalayan kingdom of Tibet, starting here. Describe Tibetan polyandry to the class in some detail, then address the question of whether such marriage practices are intrinsically inimical to human happiness, and then compare and contrast Tibet to The Republic.

Rob Warden: My question for you is easy to ask but (I hope) not so easy to answer. Do you think transhumanism would lead inevitably to dystopia? Why or why not?

Sheth LaRue: You note in one of your comments that “eugenicism is still occurring today, maybe not as blatantly as it once was, but still occurring nonetheless. A quick search will find a number of dating websites for ‘perfect’ genes - although now it’s more about brains than brawn. There are even sites where you are judged before you can join…. Was Socrates all that insane in suggesting genetics be used as a starting point for choosing a mate?” At your suggestion I checked out BeautifulPeople.com and was suitably appalled — and jealous. But why are we appalled with this sort of thing? Is there really anything wrong — ethically, morally, religiously — with people systematically seeking out what they consider the most attractive mate possible? Isn’t BeautifulPeople.com right when it says that “it may not be politically correct, but it’s honest”? Finally, would a ChristianBeautifulPeople.com be possible without being an oxymoron? Why or why not?

Beth Tantanella: After commenting on the utopian family structure proposed in The Republic, you note rather archly that Socrates “is just thinking about the good of the community” and ask, “What is wrong with that?” Well, what is wrong with that? More specifically, what’s the best way to balance the good of the individual against the good of the community? If you haven’t done so already, please read Ursula Le Guin’s utopian story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” and come to class prepared to summarize it and explain its significance in the utopian tradition.

Ashley Pacheco: In one of your comments you insisted that for a utopia to be a utopia it must be utopian for “all society.” At least for us today that makes sense: true utopia cannot rest upon an exploitative social hierarchy. The society must be ideal for all its members. But what if a society were to achieve that ideal not by accommodating everyone but simply by getting rid of those it doesn’t want? What if Hitler had succeeded in making Germany into his planned judenfrei utopia — I mean, what if post-Holocaust Germany really were utopian, at least in its own eyes, but only because there were no Jews left there for it to oppress? Or what if Israel were to succeed in creating its ideal Jewish state by excluding all the Palestinians? Getting rid of the “others” with whom part of a society is in conflict obviously simplifies the task of achieving utopian perfection.

I trust we can see the problem with predicating utopia on ethnic cleansing. But isn’t that in a sense what Charlotte Perkins Gilman does in Herland — create a feminist utopia by getting rid of all the men? Sure, it’s not as if the Herlanders killed the men themselves, or even wanted to. The men are eliminated by other, fully acceptable means, but the result is the same: a society free to perfect itself because it no longer has to deal with a “troublesome” element.

How can Gilman be defended against the charge that she takes too easy a way out, creating her utopian society by means of what might be called “gender cleansing”? Read more!

Senior Seminar. The concluding chapter of We gives us a chilling description of the interrogation of I-330 and other suspected members of the Mephi. Here’s the key passage:

In the evening of that day I sat at one table with Him, with the Benefactor (for the first time) in the famous Gas Room. They brought in that woman. In my presence she was supposed to give her testimony. This woman stubbornly said nothing and was smiling. I noticed that she had sharp and very white teeth and that this was beautiful.

Then they led her under the Bell Jar. Her face became very white and since her eyes were dark and big, this was very beautiful. When they started to pump air out from under the Bell Jar, she threw back her head, half-closed her eyes, and squeezed her lips — this reminded me of something. She was looking at me, strongly gripping the armrests of the chair and looking, until her eyes closed completely. Then they dragged her out, quickly brought her back to her senses with the help of electrodes, and then put her back under the Bell Jar. They repeated this three times and she still didn’t say a word. Others, who had been brought in together with this woman, turned out to be more honorable: many of them started to talk after the first time.

This description is not particularly graphic. What makes it so powerful? I would argue that its horror is deepened by the matter-of-fact tone in which it is described, which is to say, by the failure of the recently lobotomized narrator to recognize it for the torture that it is and to be revolted by it.

OK. You all know what an America-hating knee-jerk liberal I am, and you probably recognize the photo above as one taken at Abu Ghraib prison, so you can probably guess where I’m going with this. What horrifies and disgusts me most about my own country’s barbaric treatment of “enemy combatants” is not so much that it happened in the first place. It’s the ongoing strenuous refusal of so many influential Americans to acknowledge torture as torture — and beyond that the lack of outrage among Americans generally.

That waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation techniques” in fact constitute torture has been acknowledged by everyone from the International Red Cross to Republican Senator John McCain (see here), yet any number of influential talking heads still refuse to acknowledge that truth (see here). But so far only a few low-ranking soldiers (like Charles Graner and Lynddie England) have been prosecuted for torture. The high-ranking officials who authorized torture in the first place are still at large. One of the most important of these people, John Yoo, is now a law professor. Another, Jay Bybee, is a federal judge. As for Dick Cheney and George W. Bush — I’m not holding my breath. As Bob Dylan once reminded us, “All the criminals in their coats and their ties / are free to drink martinis and watch the sun rise.”

Here let me quote the key concept from the work of David and Nanelle Barash, who define dystopia as the denial of a biologically-based human nature:

In justifying this nightmare society [of 1984], Winston’s torturer, O’Brien, explains: “You are imagining that there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us. But we create human nature. Men are infinitely malleable.” Fortunately, O’Brien...is wrong.

Well, is there “something called human nature” which is intrinsically outraged by what we do? Or has that something been hammered out of us? Is O’Brien right or wrong?

If we think of “the soul” in We as a kind of shorthand for all that makes us uniquely human — imagination, love — then is Zamyatin suggesting in the passage above that part of being human is the ability to recognize and be revolted by torture? If so, should we say that America has lost its soul?

I’ll give you my answer to this question after you’ve all replied.

P.S. For a recent essay likening torture at Guantanamo Bay to that in Nineteen Eighty Four, take a look at Scott Horton’s “Revealing the Secrets in Room 101.” Read more!

Senior Seminar. I’d like for you to keep Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1921) in mind as we continue our screening and analysis of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927). Lang’s film is not an adaptation of Zamyatin’s novel, yet it seems to me to give visual expression to many of the novel’s dystopian ideas. Would you agree? If so, can you give examples?

In the illustration above, just for fun, I’ve juxtaposed Lang’s New Tower of Babel shot with a still depicting Blade Runner’s dystopian, film-noir vision of Los Angeles in the year 2019. Read more!

Senior Seminar. At the same time that Herland is busily defamiliarizing sexism and the patriarchy it is also steadily developing the characters of its three male traveler-protagonists. You don’t always see a lot of character development in the utopian genre. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Jeff Margrave and Vandyck Jennings are fully developed or “round” characters, but Herland certainly does more with them than Utopia does with Raphael Hythloday or Looking Backward with Julian West.

Is there something intrinsic to the feminist dystopia that demands, or at least encourages, greater character development? More generally, does Herland suggest any ways in which a feminist utopia’s focus on gender revises the very form of the utopia? Or does the focus on gender never get beyond mere content? Read more!

Senior Seminar. Despite Edward Bellamy’s bland prose, Looking Backward was a runaway bestseller. (In fact it was the third-best-selling book in 19th-century America. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, of course, was number one.) And despite its high kumbaya index it was taken quite seriously and prompted the birth of “Bellamy Clubs” devoted to promoting its brand of socialism.

While it can be argued that Bellamy fundamentally misunderstood capitalism, a few of the economic ideas in Looking Backward have taken root (in the form, for example, of consumer cooperatives like REI and warehouse stores like Costco). But most economists today would probably just laugh at Bellamy’s insistence on the necessity of central government economic planning:

In your day the production and distribution of commodities being without concert or organization, there was no means of knowing just what demand there was for any class of products, or what was the rate of supply. Therefore, any enterprise by a private capitalist was always a doubtful experiment. The projector having no general view of the field of industry and consumption, such as our government has, could never be sure either what the people wanted, or what arrangements other capitalists were making to supply them. (140)

Actually, a free-enterprise system “without concert or organization” does have a “means of knowing” about supply and demand. Marketing departments do a great job of figuring out “what the people want,” and advertising actually creates wants where none existed before. And the profit motive (as Marx was fully aware) provides a tremendous incentive for capitalists to diligently seek out and exploit weaknesses in the existing production and distribution of goods. (There are no comparable incentives for government planners.) Less efficient businesses get destroyed by more efficient ones, leading to the continuous improvement of the economic system overall.

Yes, argue the free-marketeers, this system is unstable and in many ways wasteful, but on balance the gains in efficiency far outweigh the losses of what is sometimes called capitalism’s “creative destruction” (which refers to the way old practices are continually destroyed as new ones are continually created — or, as Marx put it, the way “all that is solid melts into air”).

Part of what Bellamy seems not to understand is the general idea of spontaneous order, in which highly organized systems emerge on their own without any actual agent doing the organization — systems whose organization is in fact far beyond the planning capabilities of any agent. (Think of the evolution of ecosystems — who could possibly design one from scratch?) As the philosopher Friedrich Hayek pointed out, capitalism is such a system and thus works best when left to operate on its own. (Needless to say, Hayek is one of the key figures in modern conservativism.)

Here’s another passage I want to call to your attention but can’t think of any clever paragraph transition for:

Now nothing about your age is, at first sight, more astounding to a man of modern times than the fact that men engaged in the same industry, instead of fraternizing as comrades and co-laborers to a common end, should have regarded each other as rivals and enemies to be throttled and overthrown…. Your contemporaries, with their mutual throat-cutting, knew very well what they were at. The producers of the nineteenth century were not, like ours, working together for the maintenance of the community, but each solely for his own maintenance at the expense of the community. If, in working to this end, he at the same time increased the aggregate wealth, that was merely incidental. It was just as feasible and as common to increase one’s private hoard by practices injurious to the general welfare. One’s worst enemies were necessarily those of his own trade, for, under your plan of making private profit the motive of production, a scarcity of the article he produced was what each particular producer desired. It was for his interest that no more of it should be produced than he himself could produce. To secure this consummation as far as circumstances permitted, by killing off and discouraging those engaged in his line of industry, was his constant effort. When he had killed off all he could, his policy was to combine with those he could not kill, and convert their mutual warfare into a warfare upon the public at large by cornering the market, as I believe you used to call it, and putting up prices to the highest point people would stand before going without the goods. The day dream of the nineteenth century producer was to gain absolute control of the supply of some necessity of life, so that he might keep the public at the verge of starvation, and always command famine prices for what he supplied. (140-141)

The modern free-market economist would agree with Bellamy that, when private greed leads to greater “aggregate wealth,” such a result is “merely incidental.” But so what? The question is not whether capitalism’s contribution to the aggregate wealth is intentional or incidental, but whether it is greater than socialism’s contribution. On this point, at least, history has not been kind to Bellamy.

On the other hand, Bellamy’s criticism of monopolies was spot-on in the 1880s and still rings true today. We still have antitrust laws designed to prevent the creation of monopolies. And we still generally insist that certain “necessit[ies] of life,” such as drinking water, be produced and distributed in common rather than by private enterprise.

Of the many responses (both pro and con) to Looking Backard, perhaps the best, at least from a purely literary perspective, was News from Nowhere by British socialist William Morris.

Edward Bellamy had a cousin named Francis Bellamy, who was a Christian socialist and who wrote the Pledge of Allegiance in 1892. Now for your questions: Which economic system is most consistent with Christian values? Are things like economic efficiency and aggregate wealth creation relevant in answering such a question? Read more!

Senior Seminar. Among many other things, The Communist Manifesto portrays capitalism as dystopian. Consider, for example, this description — not at all inaccurate for the time — of how

the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and, consequently, all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him…. Masses of labourers, crowded into the factory, are organized like soldiers. As privates of the industrial army they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants. Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois State; they are hourly and daily enslaved by the machine, by the overlooker, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself. The more openly this despotism proclaims gain to be its end and aim, the more petty, the more hateful and the more embittering it is. (61-62)

Then there’s the effect of capitalism on the proletarian family, or rather

the practical absence of the family among the proletarians…. The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parent and child, becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of Modern Industry, all family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labour. (71-72)

This point is driven home in our edition by the footnote about an 1833 law permitting children aged 9-13 to be worked 48 hours per week and those 13-18 to be worked 69 hours per week.

Here are some questions: Are workers today “enslaved to the machine”? If so, how? In what ways are families and education nowadays degraded by capitalism? More generally, what are some of the ways capitalism today provokes the “uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions,” so that “[a]ll that is solid melts into air, [and] all that is holy is profaned”?

Do you think that capitalism has found a way around what Karl Marx considered the inevitable result of capitalism’s “uncertainty and agitation,” namely, that “man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life”? Is there any future for communism? Read more!

Senior Seminar. Now that you’ve all read the “Book of the Machines” chapters in Erewhon, I’d like you to move from Samuel Butler’s 19th-century fantasies to some 21st-century realities, such as the Slugbot and the EcoBot — predatory robots that capture and consume food from their environment, digest it, and turn it into the energy they need to continue operating. According to the Slugbot’s creators, the goal is greater autonomy for the machines:

Most mobile robots are not truly autonomous; most operate in simplified environments. Almost all non-industrial robots still require a helping hand from humans, e.g. battery charging, the odd push if they get stuck, obstacles that are suited to their sensors, etc. The notable exceptions are smart missiles, satellites and torpedoes which carry enough fuel and computational resources to successfully complete their missions. However, we are interested in building robots which will be self-sufficient in terms of decision making and energy — robots which can be left unsupervised to organize their work and nourishment.

The work on energy autonomy in robots is an on-going process. The initial stage looked at the problems faced by a robot predator. It is not only the energy transformation process but the necessary behavior of the robot which we wish to study. This is an important point — the two processes are tightly interlinked. In this case the robot “hunted” slugs. The collected slugs would be fermented to produce biogas in a separate off-board digester unit. The gas would then be passed through methane fuel cell to generate electricity. The electricity would be stored in batteries and could be downloaded to a “hungry” robot. We are currently working on the employment of a different type of “digester” — the microbial fuel cell (MFC). In this type of cell microbes are employed in a special container with a semi-permeable membrane to extract electrons from the nutrient (such as carrot peelings) and pass them onto an electrode. In this way a form of “biological battery” can be made.

The EcoBot II eats flies instead of slugs. What do you suppose Butler might have made of all this? And what about Erewhon’s form — does “The Book of the Machines” make the book quasi-dystopian?

Speaking of dystopia, do you see anything potentially dystopian about the possibility that job interviews might routinely include brain scans? According to a recent post at one of my favorite blogs, Next Nature,

MRI scans for candidates in top jobs such as bank directors could soon become part of the job-application package, says Erasmus University researcher Prof Willem Verbeke of Rotterdam. He’s confident brain scans will replace job interviews within 5 years.

Prof. Verbeke heads the department of neuro-economics, (NSIM), at Erasmus University in Rotterdam. He predicts in an interview with Good Morning Netherlands radio station that employers demanding compulsory brain scans from their job applicants will soon become the most normal thing in the world – in fact within five years’ time.

Read the whole thing here.

Update: Let me recap some highlights from class today. The philosophical status of artificial life depends on how we define “life.”We could approach the question by isolating a set of attributes that all life necessarily possesses qua life, and then asking whether these defining attributes could also be possessed by a human-built machine.

Here’s one plausible list of the attributes all life necessarily possesses qua life:

1. Perception and response (living organisms sense and respond to things going on in their environment).

2. Metabolism (living organisms capture part of their environment and turn it into energy).

3. Reproduction (living organisms produce copies of themselves, and the copies are themselves capable of reproduction).

Machines are already quite capable of 1. and 2. The real question concerns reproduction. It’s possible to imagine that at some point in the future artificially intelligent robots might be capable of building replicas of themselves. But Samuel Butler offers a more subtle approach to the problem of machine reproduction. Machines reproduce themselves with our help, as part of a symbiotic relationship. If that kind of reproduction does not count as satisfying criterion 3. above, then what are we to make of the flowering plant that cannot reproduce without the help of the bumble bee? If the plant’s symbiotic dependence on the bee does not disqualify it from “life,” then on what grounds can we rule out the possibility of machine life?

Miscellaneous Note 1: The Very Smart MIT Scientist who believes we’ll be able to upload human consciousness into a computer is Ray Kurzweil. The (IMHO) Even Smarter MIT Scientists who revolutionized robotics are Rodney Brooks and Cynthia Breazeal (check out the bit about her “social robots” here).

Miscellaneous Note 2: You might want to watch the “birth of technology” clip from 2001: A Space Odyssey. You can find it here. Read more!

Senior Seminar. As I mentioned in class, I think Samuel Butler’s treatment of religion in Erewhon makes for pretty thin satiric gruel and might as well have been left out of the book altogether. I think he gets a lot more mileage out of the “Birth Formulae” and “World of the Unborn” chapters. As is so often the case — especially in the brilliant “Book of the Machines” chapters — Butler manages to be both satirical and prescient at the same time. In this passage, for instance, Butler prefigures a key element in the political philosopher John Rawls’ influential theory of “justice as fairness”:

First, [the unborn] must take a potion which will destroy their memory and sense of identity; they must go into the world helpless, and without a will of their own; they must draw lots for their dispositions before they go, and take them, such as they are, for better or worse — neither are they to be allowed any choice in the matter of the body which they so much desire; they are simply allotted by chance, and without appeal, to two people whom it is their business to find and pester until they adopt them. Who these are to be, whether rich or poor, kind or unkind, healthy or diseased, there is no knowing; they have, in fact, to entrust themselves for many years to the care of those for whose good constitution and good sense they have no sort of guarantee.

As part of his theory of justice, Rawls concocted a now-famous thought-experiment which asks us to imagine ourselves being born into the world from an Original Position, in which we view our future condition behind a “veil of ignorance” that prevents us from knowing whether we’ll be white, black, or brown, male or female, gay or straight, etc. It is from this original position that we should create the social contract under which we all should live.

Your question: what do you see as some of the philosophical implications of Butler’s parody in these chapters? Does Butler’s treatment of Erewhonian beliefs about the unborn help us figure out whether the book is an anti-utopia? Read more!

Senior Seminar. By now you should be far enough into Samuel Butler’s Erewhon to know “that illness of any sort was considered in Erewhon to be highly criminal and immoral.” At the same time, actions that seem more properly to be criminal or immoral are treated by the Erewhonians as illnesses.

Ha ha ha — that Erewhon sure is a wacky place! But are we any better? Can you provide examples of ways that our own culture confuses criminality and illness? Read more!

Senior Seminar. Probably the most notable aspect of Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis is its depiction of Solomon’s House, the scientific organization whose goal is “the knowledge of causes and secret motions of things…to the effecting of all things possible” (370).

Think about that. The effecting of all things possible.

“Effecting” here means something like “causing to happen” or “bringing about.” Perhaps Bacon was writing a bit carelessly and we shouldn’t read too much into this phrase, but read literally, especially from our own perspective, isn’t it both prescient and chilling?

The effecting of all things possible.

Not bringing about all things desirable, but bringing about all things possible.

Why dig up body parts from the graveyard, stitch them together into a body, and bring that body to life? Why strap a mountain lion down to a table and try to surgically transform it into a human being? Not because we should, but because we can.

Then again, perhaps Bacon wasn’t writing carelessly. Perhaps he understood perfectly well the implications of the relentless, value-less effecting of all things possible, in which case maybe we should read New Atlantis as an anti-utopia rather than a utopia, a warning about rather than a model for the future.

Anyway, here are some questions: What does New Atlantis have in common with Utopia? How do the practices of Solomon’s House compare to those of the institution of modern science? In what ways does Bacon seem particularly prescient? Read more!

Senior Seminar. Scholars have long debated the relationship between the values and practices of the Utopians and those of Utopia’s author, Thomas More. Ditto for the degree to which More agrees with his character, Raphael Hythloday — and also the degree to which the real More agrees with the More who narrates the book’s beginning and conclusion. Let’s look at what More-the-narrator has to say when Hythloday has finished describing the Utopians:

[M]any things occurred to me, both concerning the manners and laws of that people, that seemed very absurd, as well in their way of making war, as in their notions of religion and divine matters; together with several other particulars, but chiefly what seemed the foundation of all the rest, their living in common, without the use of money, by which all nobility, magnificence, splendor, and majesty, which, according to the common opinion, are the true ornaments of a nation, would be quite taken away.

More-the-narrator objects most strongly to Utopia’s “foundation,” that is, its communism (“living in common, without the use of money”). Is this also the position of the real More? Maybe, but I think probably not. Note the reason More-the-narrator gives for repudiating Utopian communism: it would do away with the nobility and splendor that glorify nations — not according to his opinion but according to the common opinion. I doubt the real Thomas More would accept the common opinion as a valid reason for believing anything. If he really opposed Utopian communism, one would think he would not have given his narrator such a lame reason for doing so.

More-the-narrator ends the story in a state of ambivalence:

[T]hough it must be confessed that [Hythloday] is both a very learned man, and a person who has obtained a great knowledge of the world, 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.

Noteworthy here, in addition to the fact that More-the-narrator declines to get into any more specifics, is the fact that More-the-author has chosen to end on a positive rather than a negative note. It’s a question of how he structures his ambivalence. He doesn’t say Even though X is good Y is bad. He says Even though Y is bad, X is good. What this means, if anything, I’m not sure.

Maybe what’s most important, however, is the part of the ending I’ve so far left out, the part that comes between the two quotes above:

[S]ince I perceived that Raphael was weary, and was not sure whether he could easily bear contradiction, remembering that he had taken notice of some who seemed to think they were bound in honor to support the credit of their own wisdom, by finding out something to censure in all other men’s inventions, besides their own; I only commended their constitution, and the account he had given of it in general; and so taking him by the hand, carried him to supper, and told him I would find out some other time for examining this subject more particularly, and for discoursing more copiously upon it; and indeed I shall be glad to embrace an opportunity of doing it.

More could have ended Utopia without this material. He could have said simply that Hythloday yawned and stopped talking, and that he (More-the-narrator) disagreed with some parts of the discourse and agreed with others. How does the inclusion of the extra details affect our understanding of the book? Read more!

Senior Seminar. There is so much of interest in Utopia I hardly know where to begin, folks. Let’s talk about happiness. When Raphael Hythloday describes the Utopians’ philosophy he notes that the “principal question is in what thing, be it one or more, the felicity of man consisteth.” That is, what makes us happy? This is not an easy question to answer, nor is it a trivial one. It is central to our understanding of our own nation’s political philosophy (think of how the Declaration of Independence stresses the “pursuit of happiness”), and I would think it central also to any conception of utopia. After all, it can’t be utopia if people aren’t happy there — can it?

Well, I don’t know. Maybe happiness is irrelevant to utopia. Maybe the key ingredient, the defining criterion, is not happiness but rather (as it was for Plato) justice or virtue. Or maybe it’s something else entirely. In Brave New World, remember, the denizens of the World State are all happy, at least in some superficial sense, and yet, in the standard interpretation of that novel, they lack something crucial to their humanity. That “something” includes things like frustration, anxiety, and suffering — things we don’t traditionally associate at all with happiness. So maybe we should say, not that utopia is a place where we can be completely happy, but a place where we can be fully human.

Anyway, Hythloday says that on the question of happiness the Utopians “seem almost too much given and inclined to the opinion of them which defend pleasure, wherein they determine either all or the chiefest part of man’s felicity to rest.” That is, happiness (i.e., “felicity”) is a matter of pleasure. This suggests that the Utopians are not so much followers of Plato as of Epicurus, who taught that the moral categories of good and evil are based on the body sensations of pleasure and pain. From this follows the specific form of hedonism known as Epicurianism.

So, are any of you hedonists? (The philosophy is not as selfish as it sounds, BTW.) How would you define happiness? How does happiness relate to justice, to virtue, to religion? Read more!

Senior Seminar. In Utopia, setting the stage for a contrast with the good government and wise laws of Utopia, Book I gives examples of poorly organized governments and bad laws. Prominent among them is the law specifying the death penalty for thieves. Raphael Hythloday argues against this law, and underlying his argument is the assumption that crime is at least partly a matter of social organization rather than personal morality. As he puts it, instead of attempting to prevent theft by means of harsh punishments, “much rather provision should have been made, that there were some means whereby [destitute people] might get their living, so that no man should be driven to this extreme necessity, first to steal and then to die.” His thinking here seems to be what today we would call sociological. Is the same true of Hythloday’s other arguments and observations in Book I? Read more!

Senior Seminar. The Republic covers a lot of philosophical, political, and cultural-critical ground. As a work of philosophy, it explores the nature of justice and propounds the famous theory of Forms. As a work of political analysis, it compares and contrasts various forms of government (timocracy, oligarchy, democracy and tyranny). And as a work of cultural criticism it explores the social effects of the arts (especially literature and music).

Today I want to point out that The Republic uses a device that today is called the thought experiment, (for example, the story of Gyges’ ring and the allegory of the cave). The thought experiment continues to be used by philosophers to this day — most notably, I would say, by John Rawls, whose notions of the original position and the veil of ignorance are key to his influential book, A Theory of Justice (1971). The thought experiment also happens to be crucial to the genres of utopia, dystopia, and science fiction. (Actually, thought experiments have long been used not only in philosophy and literature but also in physics, mathematics, biology, and computer science — think, for example, of Zeno’s paradox and Schrödinger's cat.)

Your job today is to ransack your vast knowledge of literature and film and come up with some other examples of thought experiments. Read more!

Senior Seminar. Let’s talk about some of the juicier parts of Book V of The Republic. Among other things, Socrates says that in his ideal state “the wives of our guardians are to be common” — that is, the women are to be shared among the men. Monogamy is out, to be replaced by a sort of state-controlled promiscuity designed to promote a eugenicist agenda. And that’s not all. The guardians’ “children are to be common” as well, so that “no parent is to know his own child, nor any child his parent” (124).

How do you like those for family values? And it just gets worse. The rulers are supposed to “invent some ingenious kind of lots” to make it appear as if women are being matched up with men at random, even though the process is actually being controlled by the rulers in such a way as to match the strongest and smartest men to the strongest and smartest women. That way, when the less worthy men find themselves always hooking up with the less worthy women, they’ll blame their bad luck instead of the rulers (127).

This lottery system will only be used for women aged 20-40 and men aged 25-55. After that, the guardians will be allowed “to range at will,” provided that any women who wind up getting pregnant while thus, um, ranging are under “strict orders” to get an abortion (128).

What else? Socrates also argues against individual privacy (129) and for the participation of children in war (134) and…but you get the picture. And all this is on top of Socrates’ argument in favor of censorship.

Remember, Socrates is describing the ideal state in which he believes true justice is to be found.

Okay. We’re reading The Republic to understand its influence on utopian and dystopian literature and film. What do you think so far? Does it strike you as a better blueprint for a utopia, a dystopia, or an anti-utopia?

Is Socrates insane? Read more!

Senior Seminar. By now you should have read through Book IV of Plato’s Republic. Among other things, you should have noticed that, while The Republic is a work of philosophy (many consider it the work of philosophy) it is not structured mechanically as a series of conclusions drawn logically from a set of initial premises. Instead it is structured as a story, which has the advantage not only of making the argument more engaging but of letting us see how it emerges from the give-and-take of Socratic dialogue.

Also, like any good story, The Republic features strongly drawn characters (such as the calm and occasionally bemused Socrates and the hotheaded Thrasymachus). It also includes summaries of other stories (such as that of Gyges’ ring) and alludes frequently to the poetry of Homer and Hesiod. All considered, a very literary piece of philosophizing.

As for the philosophizing itself, Socrates quickly gets to the question of defining justice (5), but not until well into Book II does he begin to address the question of most interest to us as aspiring critics of utopia: the construction of the ideal state (40).

According to Socrates, war does not appear until the denizens of the state find themselves dissatisfied with the necessities of life and begin to pursue luxury, at which point war becomes “inevitable” (45) — a rather depressing thought, given our own society’s addiction to luxury.

A bit later Socrates gets to a question of particular importance: “How do justice and injustice grow up in states?” (48). Part of the answer, he argues, is through the teaching of impious literature. When children hear a story in which a god acts irresponsibly, he says, they will tend to act irresponsibly themselves; therefore, one of the first orders of business in constructing the ideal state is “to establish a censorship of the writers of fiction, and let the censors receive any tale of fiction which is good, and reject the bad; and we will desire mothers and nurses to tell their children the authorized ones only” (49).

Freedom of speech? None of that namby-pamby liberalism for Socrates!

So, is Socrates right that the pursuit of justice requires censorship? Or were America’s Founding Fathers — who like Socrates were trying to draw up rules for an ideal state — right to insist that censorship is inimical to justice? Read more!

Senior Seminar. We’re starting our tour of utopia not in Athens but in Jerusalem, with three excerpts from the Bible. First is the six-day creation account (which those of you who took Bible as Lit will recall is attributed to the rather late Priestly source); next is the story of Adam and Eve (which comes later in the Bible but is attributed to the earlier Jahwist source); last are a few snippets from the Book of Isaiah.

What if anything is utopian about these early works? (I know we haven’t finished defining utopia yet, but give this question a shot anyway.) Read more!