I ended up enjoying Thomas More’s Utopia much more than I thought I would. Whenever reading these different accounts/attempts/ideas about living a better life I tend to look past the laws and rules of the different societies. Whether someone deserves to get the tip of their ear cut off for stealing or their hand chopped off, I do not feel I have the right to make that decision, nor does anybody else. So instead of breaking down all of their dumb little laws and saying which ones I agree with, I just wrote down some of their ideas on life (provided by Hythloday), ideas which seem more like common sense to me, but are surprisingly overlooked by far too many people in the present day, and I’m sure back then as well.
Although I do not really agree that laws should exist for anybody to follow, if you are going to have laws, they need to be based on solid foundation, this foundation is society’s outlook on life. The laws are meant to serve a purpose and are the most superficial aspect of a community. If everybody lived their life by premises which these laws are created in order to serve, then the laws would not need to exist in the first place. Of course the premises or ideas about life are very subjective, which is my main reason why I think that people who do not see things the same way should not have to live their life restricted by laws which serve ideas they do not agree with. If a society thinks that something should be patched up by creating a law to “fix” those who would choose to do otherwise, it would be much more effective to get those people to change their way of thinking to prevent the temptation of doing “wrong” things in the first place. This thought is put forward on page 65, “A wise man would rather escape sickness altogether than have a good cure for it.” I’m sure that people know this would be the more appropriate thing to do, but they believe that changing the thinking of others is just not a feasible task, a statement with which I would probably agree with. Man’s lack of the ability to think critically is what is holding us back from achieving a more uniform base of thought, and therefore the need to patch things up with laws.
If we start our discussion of utopia at the most superficial, subjective layer, the laws, then we will wind up getting nowhere other than circles of disagreement. This is why I feel it is very necessary to start off at the basic meaning of life, one which we can try to formulate as an objective one, and work our way up. This way we will not get into confusing arguments which have no clear basis, everything will build upon itself. I think Thomas More did a relatively good job with this. My favorite quotes from Utopia that I think addressed the meaning of life are these:
P. 61“Your mind draws more joy from recalling the affection and good will of those whom you have benefitted than your body would have drawn pleasure from the things you gave up.”
P. 61“And so they conclude . . . that all our actions and the virtues exercised within them look toward pleasure and happiness as their ultimate end.”
P. 64“Health is the greatest pleasure of all.”
“Health is the basis and foundation of all the pleasures.”
Ok, so I think health is a pretty objective way of looking at the world, I find that it is a pretty easy subject to discuss which shouldn’t bring about too much objection. Maybe we can all agree that without good health (death looming), everything else is just pretty pointless.
Focusing on health as one of our primary concerns seems to make the issue of women being allowed to fight in wars that shouldn’t exist anyway pretty insignificant. I just think that preventing heart disease and cancer in men and women is more important than who does the dishes and sweeps.
So these days with all of our new medical technology we’re always looking for that next big cure! So all we need to do is donate millions (billions? trillions?) of dollars to spur on that cancer research. If somebody writes a nice big check . . . what a saint! That person is just so kind!!! And all those football players wearing pink all over their jerseys . . . that is just some good stuff!! No doubt about it, that’s going to bring cancer to an end REAL quick. Oh yeah, “save the ta-ta’s!” I cannot even begin to explain how corny, lame, and embarrassing those bumper stickers are.
Sorry for that little rant. But instead of sitting on your computer and ordering a new bumper sticker, maybe people could go jog for a half hour. Or instead of donating money to cancer research, maybe people could buy healthier food and prevent cancer in the first place.
Whoever organizes all these breast cancer awareness events are not heroes at all. If they spent all that time explaining to people a little physics so that they could comprehend the biomechanics of the human body, and why an inch and a half thick pillow strapped to the bottom of our feet does nothing but inhibit our ability to run naturally and pain free-if the spent their time explaining the relationship of shoes to injury, injury to lack of exercise, and lack of exercise to cancer, THEN I’d give them a little more credit. But no, they just want to dress football players up in cute pink ribbons . . . unbelievable.
People are just so lost and scared. They are scared to believe that a billion dollar company like Nike or Adidas has not made one person a better athlete. They have not enabled one person to run injury free, but instead caused people to get knee replacements, hip replacements, and bunion surgery.
I just want to help people, and allow them to see that there are very small changes people could make that would drastically improve their lives. I understand that I could write twenty blog posts like this and I probably would have no noticeable impact on people’s life views, but that is OK-I’m not too worried about it.
One more thing about More’s Utopia, I enjoyed the quote “They are very fond of fools; they think it contemptible to insult them.” I just thought that that was hilarious. I also think that people should humble themselves every morning when they wake up, and remind themselves that they are no better than anyone else in any way that really matters.
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