Utopia and the Danger of “Sticking to the Text”

 The classical revival movement in education has reintroduced the study of the great books of Western civilization to curricula. I know of very few modern causes that are more worthy. However, without naming names, I know of far too many great books programs that seem to be under the impression that it’s indoctrination to teach students anything about the books but the books themselves. I’ve heard various defenses of this “stick to the texts” policy, but one particularly common argument is, “We need to teach students how to think, not what to think.” While there are many different methods by which one might critique this view, its flaws become most evident when we see how it can lead to gross misunderstanding.

 Sir Thomas More, the 16^th-century English lawyer and Catholic saint, is known for being beheaded for his refusal to compromise his religious views. He is also known for writing a fictional account of an imaginary nation–the titular Utopia. The book details a republic in which all property is shared, all criminals—even those who have committed trivial crimes—are enslaved, the dying are euthanized, husbands and wives view each other’s bodies before marriage, men and women fight together on the battlefield, divorce is permitted for any reason, and all religious opinions are considered equal.

 Naturally, this means that Thomas More was a “proto communist” who believed that nothing could be better for the flagging Europe of the Renaissance than the kind of sensible nation he proposes in Utopia.

This opinion is no joke. Not only did the progressive William Morris, who published one of the first modern editions of Utopia, call Thomas a medieval communist in his foreword to the work, but Lenin of the Soviet Union himself supported the decision to inscribe Thomas’s name ninth on an obelisk that listed the Western thinkers who had inspired the Bolsheviks. Countless others have echoed this sentiment, praising More as a radical proto communist.

 Now, anyone who knows the first thing about Sir Thomas knows that this cannot be the case. Thomas More was no democrat or egalitarian. He spent his life in service to and died professing loyalty to the same English monarch who ordered his death. As a devout Catholic, he would have been a staunch opponent of assisted suicide—a practice that orthodox Christians have always opposed. Furthermore, if Thomas More was a supporter of unrestricted divorce, why did he give up his post and—arguably—his life in order to avoid being present at Henry VIII’s wedding to his mistress Ann Boleyn? Lastly, Thomas More notably praised the burning of multiple people he considered heretics. That hardly seems to be in accord with the relativistic tolerance of Utopia.

So, perhaps all of Thomas More’s actions in life were all a sham, and he actually meant to be communist all along—but that hardly seems reasonable. I think, rather, the communists who adopted him read his book without bothering to do an ounce of research on who he was—like so many great books curricula do today.

  If we want to understand the true nature of Utopia, we need to look at both the author and the manners of the time period. Thomas More, a canonized Catholic saint, could never have actually believed that the nightmarish “Utopia” he describes was a real solution to human societal problems. More likely he was writing a work of speculative fiction laced with satire–akin to Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Looking at his historical context, this only makes sense, as the nearest notable contemporary work to Utopia is Erasmus’s Praise of Folly, another work of satire which coincidentally features a long dedication by the author to Sir Thomas More himself.

Now, of course not all works can be so easily misread. Every work is not a satirical analysis of the problems of a particular time and place. But any book can be misread to some extent or another if one does not understand the author’s beliefs, cultural situation, and intention.

  “Just stick to the text” sounds nice. It feels like the perfect remedy for a culture in which dogmatic, thought-discouraging education is mainstream. But when we start reading texts despite being woefully ignorant of their context, we’ve taken a good thing too far. “How to think not what to think” might be a good general rule, but a teacher who expects his students to think well about something about which they have no context is like a swimming instructor pushing kids off the deep end and expecting them to know the butterfly stroke. We don’t want to indoctrinate our students, but when we leave them ignorant, we leave them vulnerable to the same fundamental misunderstandings that wreaked havoc on the reputation of Thomas More.