Utopia by Thomas More

So, having bailed out of a day-long meditation session that smelled remarkably like a cult brainwashing session, I came home and spent the wet and wind-blasted afternoon finishing Utopia. This is a book erudite people refer to all the time. Not being particularly erudite, I hadn’t read it but I’m about to begin an on-line literature course based on the English country house and Utopia is the first book we’re studying. It’s short, just 128 pages, and detailed and I’ve been reading it in bursts. ‘I can have no other notion of all the other governments that I see or know, than that they are a conspiracy of the rich, who on pretence of managing the public only pursue their private ends, and devise all the ways and arts they can find out; first, that they may, without danger, preserve all that they have so ill acquired, and then that they may engage the poor to toil and labour for them at as low rates as possible, and oppress them as much as they please. And if they can but prevail to get these considered as the representative of the whole people, then they are accounted laws.’ ‘Now if in such a court, made up of persons who envy all others, and only admire themselves, a person should but propose anything that he had either read in history or observed in his travels, the rest would think that the reputation of their wisdom would sink, and that their interest would be much depressed, if they could not run it down…’ if better things are proposed they cover themselves obstinately with this excuse of reverence to past times.’ My father used to say that the one thing humankind had never done was to learn from history. So here is someone in the 16th century describing the malaise of modern life. This book is frightening because nothing has changed.