Defects in Perfection: More and Borges’ Utopian Paradox

Thomas More’s Utopia explores the concept of an ideal society – a topic of discourse that continues back to classical philosophy, with Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Politics. Unlike his classical counterparts, More’s exploration of Utopia reveals a paradoxical side to idealist society. In the fictionalised discussion between More, Peter Giles and a traveller called Hythloday, Utopia is presented as an egalitarian society with peculiar authoritarian undertones.

Utopian citizens are granted a short six hour work day so as to minimise the exploitation of labour. And yet, underneath the facade of liberty, this Utopian workday requires that “free time not be wasted in roistering or sloth, but used properly in some chosen occupation” (p.52 More). The Utopian day is sectioned rigidly into activity permitted by the state. Could it be that the cost of existing in a perfect world is the loss of freedom and expressive humanity?

Jorge Luis Borges’ short story Utopia of a Tired Man, a time traveller born in 1897 finds himself in a Utopian world several hundred years in the future. He meets a man called Someone who, like More’s Hythloday, tells of the societal structure of Utopia. Facts no longer matter to Utopians, who are instead taught the skill of “doubt and the art of forgetting” (p.66, Borges). Birth is controlled and simultaneous suicide is being collectively considered. Borges’ world, which openly references More’s, is presented in a marvelously transient way; the characters’ abrupt conversations and emotionless responses to each other evoke a sense of despair and loss in the ‘perfect world.’ The reader floats between interactions without thorough attention to intermediate moments, as if large sections of the narrative have been blotted out. The tale ends with Someone dismantling his entire house and leaving to a crematorium to end his long Utopian life. Borges paints Utopia as an ethereal and somewhat uncanny place. 

What I observe in both Borges and More’s Utopias is a complex, almost dialectical relationship between perfection and humanity; the creation of an ideal state relies on authoritarian control and results in the sterilisation of human qualities (Human qualities, in this context, refers to the plethora of human activity that engages with expression and unpredictability, from art and friendship to emotional outbreaks and intuition). Such a clinical system is bound to a standard higher than human condition warrants, begging the question of whether perfection and humanity are simply incompatible.

The homogeneity of personality and neutralisation of human character in Utopia surely flaws the entire project. How can a sterile world be preferable over a world of mixed good and evil? How can a world without entropy be a world at all? Thus, Utopia is either imperfect by its inclusion of chaotic humanity or imperfect by the oppression of chaotic humanity. To this end, the Utopian state is paradoxically self-destructing: it is by no accident that More chose the Greek words ‘ou’ (not) and ‘topos’ (place) to denote the perfect state trapped in its own project of perfection, never to be realised. 

References:

More et al., 2002. Thomas More : Utopia / edited by George M. Logan and Robert M. Adams. Rev., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Borges, Jorge Luis: The Book of Sand. Penguin Books Ltd, Middlesex, England. 1979