Book 2: Electric Boogaloo

Book 2 is chock full of how Utopia orders itself (I could care less about how big the island is) , and I will attempt to go over the different aspects presented in this chapter.

Uniformity: This is something that appears in multiple instances is the book, many facets of Utopian culture lack any sort of individual variation, with everyone wearing the same clothes (with married/nonmarried being the only distinction), uniform seating arrangements, even uniform family sizes going so far as to move children from town to town in order to achieve a form of equilibrium.

Opinion: wow, just a heads up for the rest of this post, I liked Utopian in book 1 but book 2 really irked me and this was one of the main reasons. I got the image of an ant colony when I tried to picture Utopia, a place where the individual is merely a cog in the machine of the state, blech. I don't care how ideal and smooth-running a society is, if I loose many individuality, I would never be worth living there.

Rural/Urban rotation: Utopian citizen take turns rotating people out to farms in year and two year interval with the farmers there a year teaching the people who just arrived how to farm so they could teach the next group to arrive from the city, releasing the veteran farmers to return to urban dwellings.

Opinion: Other than the fact that this is "mandatory" I think it's a decent idea, keeps experienced people in charge of food production while simultaneously allow them to a respite and culture-ization in the cities, given that Utopian philosophy involves harmony and logic and think this is a fitting approach for them.

Crafts and Leaders: Everyone in Utopia is expected to take up a craft, apprenticing with a family known for that tread, although there are some gender tendencies, people are generally free to develop skills as the choose. Elected from each family, and from groups of families, and from groups of groups of families are official that form a type of representative government that operates on both a national and local level.

Opinion: The freedom to develop crafts is nice but the restrictions on your schedule is a little extreme; The system the Utopian have developed would only work there as only the Utopian are brimming with so much civic virtue as to not complain or resist having one's entire day so rigidly structured. The government: if I were to image the representative system that would be devised by British man of Thomas More's era, I would not even approach the needless complexity as the Utopian system, only the British currency system equals the headache that is the Utopian administrative structure.

Traveling: You need government approval to travel.

Opinion: No

Pleasure/Virtue theory: Too vast to summarize effectively, but in a word: austere. The Utopian view pleasure as something that should be held in check by a individuals dedication to virtuous acts, with sacrificing one's pleasure for the benefit of the collective as one of the most virtuous of deeds.

Opinion: Well, given that I've been reading the Fountainhead, and I agree with Rand's philosophy I find this to be a little contrite. I can help but think of Utopian as a commune one step away from a group of chaste monks, and most likely very annoying to be around.

Thus we conclude my summary of the material in book two so far, now I'm going to go watch living with the Mek, a society I actually like (minus the whole penis-gourd thing...)

Book 1

'Kay, hopefully I this shows up correctly and I don't get put under my space investigation again.

The content of book one was fairly sparse in regards to Utopia actual policies for governing its society, but I managed to distill the main ideas of book 1

Idea: punishment of thieves: In Utopia, instead of thieves being killed (as is the custom in England) they are instead put to work on public work projects and given much leniency, as well as an opportunity to learn from their previous errors.

Opinion: I think this is an excellent idea, from a purely pragmatic perspective, a dead thief is no use to anyone, but an enslaved thief can at least be used to benefit the society he stole from. Punishment scaled to the crime in general is also a better policy option as I agree with the notion that death penalties for crimes only encourage lesser criminal to go for broke commit more heinous crimes than they normally would, simply because the punishment is the same.

Idea: King’s Wealth: A king should only be allowed to have so much gold in his coffers at a time, promoting the circulation of money serving as a check on corruption and graff.

Opinion: Another good idea, money is the root of all evil and all that, history does not shed a favorable light on large sums of money in the hands of an administration and this policy helps to shift the focus of the monarch from his own decadence to the welfare of his people.

Idea: War=Bad: Fairly simple idea; princes needs lots of money to wage war (the above idea prevents war by the way) and must there fore take advantage of his citizenry, allowing crops to spoil, lives to be lost, livestock to die, all at the expense of acquiring new territory that will most likely reject this new ruler anyways (these princes clearly have not read Machiavelli), a lose-lose situation.

Opinion: If the above tone wasn’t enough of a hint, yes, I think war is bad for the above reasons, not much else is really necessary to say…

That wraps up the policy stuff in book one, it seems the bulk of Utopian socitiy is contained in book 2, time shall tell...