one. They go to public lectures--though we wonder how the lecturer ever had occasion in this obsessively public society to prepare something in private worth saying in public.Raphael delivers to them a considerable library of Greek books. (Interestingly enough he does not take them a Bible--typical of More's later reluctance to have the Bible freely distributed among the common people.)[34] Raphael and his band of Europeans also teach the Utopians how to make a printing press and how to manufacture paper.[35] Yet given their distrust of the individual doing anything alone, I rather think the Utopians must study these works by reading them aloud to one another and commenting on them much as though they were in seminar together. Like Socrates in the Phaedrus, they may distrust the written word separated from its communal and vocal associations.The communism of the Utopia deserves another word to this generation that has seen this once mighty ideology crumble to dust in most of the places where it once seemed imperial, irresistible, and eternal. I've noted that the Utopians acted on the premise that to eliminate poverty, the entire economic and social order had to be rebuilt from the ground up. That was precisely the view of Karl Marx, but More and Marx came to radically different conclusions about what the social order would become if it were rebuilt.For Marx, as we all know, religion was the opiate of the people, and he wanted to get rid of it. His golden age when the state had withered away would have no religious life and no compulsion from above. Human nature would be reshaped, remade, re-formed, and rigorous education during the "dictatorship of the proletariat" would teach us the virtues of cooperation and selflessness.Religious belief upheld the Utopian commonwealth. Every Utopian had to believe in God, in the immortality of the soul, in future states of reward and punishment after death, and in the Providential governance of the u...
