g," though, in the spirit of Bakhtin, I prefer "festive." It is not revolution. Reading Utopia makes us aware of how very far we will always be from its hopes. We can understand the comment of J.W. Allen, the historian of Sixteenth-Century political thought, who called it, "the saddest of fairy tales. . . . an indictment of humanity almost as terrible as Gulliver's Travels."[10]But like Swift's Gulliver, More's Raphael entertains us just because he brings our experience in the ordinary world up against an ideal that we cannot reach, yet one that has about it a certain plausibility. Utopia is a mirror held up to nature, and almost against our will, we see ourselves reflected in it. It is a carnival mirror, throwing back at us distorted reflections, and yet we stand there, and we recognize ourselves in the very distortions.To read Utopia is to be jolted into asking ourselves this fateful question: "What is the relation between our possessions and our souls?" Are the conspicuous illusions of wealth injustices? What truth about ourselves resides in Raphael's passionate declaration towards the end? "In fact, when I consider any social system that prevails in the modern world, I can't, so help me God, see it as anything but a conspiracy of the rich to advance their own interests under the pretext of organizing society."[11]If a sterile metal like gold measures the worth of men and women, are the people who wear chains of gold not indeed prisoners of illusion? And is it possible, in a zero sum world where my gain is another's loss, that the people who sport such finery are not in fact condemning legions of poor to roam the great highways as beggars--or else to be herded together in the slums like cattle to be slaughtered in our great cities?If we measure worth by possession, are we not driven by a peculiar and implacable logic to put people to death for theft? Or if we do not kill them, are we not bound to make psychological war on them, to sc...
