Utopia Essay, Research Paper

Someone said,”Human beings are the animals who create utopia.” If men lived in a world where circumstances were very vitiated, they would need to accept the impossibility of meaning in secular life. In the early Sixteen-century, More’s Utopia was published and struck his generation. As a humanist, a politician and also a socialist, Thomas More felt deeply distreesed of the sickness of his society. He knew the fact that people couldn’t be happy or peaceful under this circumstance: sloth, greed, poverty, and corruptions of politics and even the whole soceity. Thus, the best way of appreciating Utopia should be understanding More’s life and times first. The main thought of Utopia or the purpose of this book is pursuing happiness but not individual ones. Utopians are more concerned about the commonwealth than about the individual. ……..in Utopia, where everything belongs to everybody,………no man are poor, no man are beggars, and though no man owns everything, everyone is rich. This may be the most important feature of Utopia, the embryonic form of communism. However, as modern men in the Twentieth-century, we don’t think it’s a pratical theory. In Utopia, More assumed everyone as the same educated, virtual, moralized…and etc. In this way, we surely affirm its possibility, whereas it’s just a hypothsis. Acturally, huamn beings are so complicated and emotional that they can’t be identical as robots obeying all the rules all the time. Take today’s communistic countries for example, non of them can be regarded as a wealthy country. We know the problem is that they ignored the human natural; through proper competitons, men will, on the contary, work harder for themselves and at the same time for the soceity addtionally. After all, it’s the repays both mentally and physically, such as encouragement, achievement, wealth, and happiness. An American scholar said, “Utopians were the pursuer of happiness, they thought that the virtue is following the rules of the natural–the pleasure of life.” That is doing one’s best to improve the happiness of everyone. How respectable a theory. However, we can’t help but wonder if it’s pratical. Most critics of Utopia have spent so much time trying to prove either that communism works or that More was not a communist. Here, I just want to say that Utopia belongs to its age, but it does not mean that it’s the less epoch making.

Creating such a commonwealth is not simply a matter of aggregating all the desirable features one can think of. It may have overelaborate formalities to control and order the citizens the way of living. For instance, Utopians’ attitudes toward sexual relatinship are curious. Fornication incurs extremely severe punishment. Offenders are usually forbidden to marry at all so that a transgression at the age of seventeen would entail a lifetime of punishment. In order to maintain the institution of marriage (family is the basic unit in their social structure), they set severe punishment to fit the offenders. We can say that marriage does not fit readily into Utopia and has to be forced in by violence. They seemed pursuing the peace and happiness on the one hand, whereas they may fetter themselves at the same time unconsciously. Because of Utopia, More is well-known through the whole world, and affect several systems of later ages. He put his rich experiences of laws, politics, and humanism into his Utopia. Almost every aspect of it needs detailed rather than abstract attentions. Utopia may also be regarded as a silent criticize toward the older societies of Europe then: burden by wars, fierce economic rivalry, and feudal hierarchy. We can’t figure out what is the real meaning of “utopia” in More’s mind. Is it a unpractical one, a soon practical one, or just a chitchat? Public security in today’s Taiwan is getting worse and worse. Everything can be the source of the problem. It’s about already three-hundred years from More’s Utopia, and haven’t we known what is a good society till now? We felt pity that More’s imagined Utopia has not been realized, and we want to ask God when there will be a real peace, happy world.