Joanne Paul: belief

Transcript context

…The high degree of surveillance in this Utopia, is that intended as a good thing or a cautionary note, or we’re supposed to be ambivalent about it? Utopia is really interesting because, of course, it’s the first book to use that word, utopia. It’s not necessarily the first utopia. We can point to some others, but it’s the first in that genre to use that name. We’re so used now to dystopias undermining the very concept of utopia. We live in a post-enlightenment liberal world where individual rights, individuality is so important to us that we can’t look at a utopia like More’s without seeing the darker elements of it. I don’t think most of those dark elements that we see today were intended by More. I think that there are some that we can point to. I think the Utopian’s attitude to war, their attitude to slavery, we could definitely question. In terms of surveillance and in terms of individuality, those were not things that More was that concerned with. I think that comes out of a much more post-enlightenment and indeed post-20th century perspective that we really hone in on those. If anything, More was really troubled by the concept of individuality. He saw pride in that, the sin of pride. Utopia in many ways is about forgetting, letting go of what is private, what is ours, what can be demarcated as ours, and instead emphasizing the public and what can be shared. That’s why there is no private property in Utopia. Why is the story told through the third-party narration of Raphael? There’s even multiple layers of narrative between More and Raphael, right?…

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