Peace Vs. Freedom

Kevin O’Connor
Rumination # 6
April 18, 2011
Peace vs. Freedom
Sir Thomas More has provided his audience with a discourse plagued with binaries, where the reader is presented with two contradictory sides to humanity. The title itself when defined can be construed as an unobtainable ideal, a concept that More seems to agree with. Yet it is the author’s intention to present a fantasized construction of a perfect society, in an attempt to mediate the dichotomy of personal freedom and social obligation. For More, the two concepts can never coincide with one another, forcing the reader to recognize the tradeoffs when one direction is preferred over another. The narrative constructed, through which Raphael goes to live amongst the natives of Utopia, serves the purpose of creating an objective look into a world where personal freedom is compromised in favor of peaceful cohabitation. It is through Raphael’s eyes that More is able to create a cost-benefit analysis, where Raphael’s observations determine the effectiveness of a collective society.
A particular point of interest in the narrative is the characterization of the natives, who at first glance seem to live entirely peaceful lives. There’s an important distinction that must be made between the citizens themselves, and the slaves they keep in their homes. The role of the slave is to carry out the duties the citizen feels outside of their decency. It is the function of the slave to deal with the uglier sides of life, sparing the citizen any such indecency. In doing so, the slave is able to insure that the idealistic qualities of the citizen remain intact. The act of slaughtering animals for the consumption of the societal whole is deemed unclean and even sadistic, the act itself bearing a heavy weight on the individual involved. Yet citizens willingly sacrifice these slaves, whom they have determined to be criminals or foreigners, so that their idealized selves may be preserved. It is through this act that the loss of freedom is first realized, freedom removed from the slaves in order to preserve the peaceful lives of citizens.
The citizens themselves appear to be better off, yet through the goals of the collective these individuals have become desensitized to the world around them. Their relationships with the slaves seem to be devoid of the compassion they strive for in their own lives, as they willingly assign the duty of slaughtering livestock to their slaves. The society rules that its citizens are permitted to perform euthanasia, but in doing so it has created a state where individuals are spared the pain of death. But pain functions as a central part to the human experience, euthanasia cheating the citizens of what it means to feel completely human. The banning of premarital sex is similar to euthanasia, in that it has cut off the citizen from feeling any sort of valid emotion. The citizens are described as if they were comatose, their desire for peace having deprived them of the range of emotions synonymous with the human condition.