Utopia. Thomas More

      If you know from where to set sail, with a friendly pilot offering expertise, it should not take you too long to reach Utopia.

      Since the first woman or man first yearned for a better place, dreamers have dreamed them at the tops of mountains and cradled in hidden valleys, above clouds and deep under the earth – but above all they have imagined them on islands. The island utopia has been a standard since antique times: Eusebius’s Panchaea and Iambulus’s Islands of the Sun; Henry Neville’s Isle of Pines, and Antangil, from the 1616 novel of that name; Bacon’s Bensalem; Robert Paltock’s Nosmnbdsgrutt, from Peter Wilkins; Huxley’s Pala; Austin Tappan Wright’s Islandia; and countless more. And in the centre of that great archipelago of dissent and hope, one place, one name, looms largest.

      This island, this book, is the paradigm. ‘More’s Utopia’, in the words of the scholar Roland Greene, ‘is perhaps the text that establishes insularity as an early modern vantage [and] introduces a way of thinking that is properly called utopian’, defined by ‘a multifarious phenomenon which I will call island logic’.

      But, to repeat, it is not a long voyage to get there. Citizens of More’s Utopia ‘keep up the art of navigation’, pass back and forth on various tasks, trading surpluses of ‘corn, honey, wool, flax, wood, wax, tallow, leather, and cattle … to other nations’. Only the thinnest stretch of ocean separates Utopia from the mainland. For somewhere so famously and constitutively nowhere, this no-place Utopia is very close to the shore.

      And there’s a more startling surprise with regard to its island-ness, a fact of which not nearly enough is generally made:

      [T]his was no island at first, but a part of the continent. Utopus, that conquered it … brought the rude and uncivilised inhabitants into … good government … Having soon subdued them, he designed to separate them from the continent, and to bring the sea quite round them. To accomplish this he ordered a deep channel to be dug … and that the natives might not think he treated them like slaves, he not only forced the inhabitants, but also his own soldiers, to labour in carrying it on. As he set a vast number of men to work, he, beyond all men’s expectations, brought it to a speedy conclusion. And his neighbours, who at first laughed at the folly of the undertaking, no sooner saw it brought to perfection than they were struck with admiration and terror.

      This most famous example of the island utopia, the ideal-type itself, is not by nature an island at all. The fifteen miles of water that keep it apart from the main body politic are not there by God’s will, but by the sweat of native people, among others, digging at an invading conqueror’s command. The splendid – utopian – isolation is part of the violent imperial spoils.

      The classic reactionary attack on the utopian impulse is that it is, precisely, no place, impossibly distant. But, disavowed and right there, in More’s foundation myth of the dream polity is a very different unease: that, wrought by brutality, coerced from above, it is all too close.

      There could be no one better suited to frame More’s foundational text than that great dissident utopian and dissident-utopian thinker, Ursula K. Le Guin. In her words from ‘Utopiyin, Utopiyang’, which follows More’s text in this book, ‘Every utopia since Utopia’ – at least – ‘has also been, clearly or obscurely, actually or possibly, in the author’s or in the readers’ judgement, both a good place and a bad one. Every eutopia contains a dystopia, every dystopia contains a eutopia.’

      These contradictions thrive in single heads as easily as between them, and in the texts those heads produce. The interminable debates about what More ‘really’ meant miss this obvious fact, and are thus of as much use as any other discussion of ‘actual’ artistic or political ‘intent’