Alright, so we’ve agreed More’s Utopia is not exactly the Eutopia we’d been hoping for, but his philosophy still certainly shares some common ground with many democratic-socialist tenets that I hold in high regard.  For instance, I was really impressed with his analogy in Book I about the greedy shepherds buying and enclosing all of the country’s land for pasture.  When he says, “Thus one greedy, insatiable glutton, a frightful plague to his native country, may enclose a thousand acres of land within a single hedge” (19), I felt chilling parallels with not only this current administration but also the with our country’s current oligarchic trends.  It strongly echoes the platforms of progressive left politicians like Bernie Sanders and Keith Ellison who say that all of our country’s wealth has accumulated with the top 1% of the 1%.  More even correctly assumes the social aftermath of such greed, citing violence, protest, and mass incarceration as its direct consequences.  I was particularly impressed with his solution to said incarceration: education!  Instead of perpetuating violence through capital punishment, why not reform prisoners so they can teach others not to do wrong?  More could certainly have given Bernie a run for his money as the progressive candidate in last spring’s primaries.

But… there is a darker side to More’s philosophy as we discussed in class today–namely misogynist cultural expectations.  Women are only allowed to do domestic tasks and they have to confess their sins to their husbands once a month?  One would think that such binary-infused thinking wouldn’t even be compatible with the rest of More’s aggressively egalitarian ideas.  But then again, egalitarianism is all relative to the period in which one grows up.  It certainly doesn’t justify More’s gendered ideology, but it does put everything in perspective.  Perhaps we wouldn’t be comfortable with the egalitarianism of 2200; it’s easy to think “Oh, I’m for all things progressive,” but that’s before you fully consider what “progressive” can truly entail.