orn them, and to be sure that they suffer for everything we give them? I believe that the answer to these questions in More's own mind was not that we should create a communist society. But I do believe that part of the response that More intended was to make us at least ask the questions, for to question society is to see it, and we must see it before we can do anything to reform it.The six-hour working day in Utopia also represents an eternal check against the tendency of an acquisitive society to turn human beings into beasts of burden to be worked as if they had no claim over themselves. Set over against the misery of peasants depicted in the vision of Piers the Plowman or against the child labor of early industrial America or the sweatshops of modern Asia, the Utopian limitation on labor is a way of saying that life is an end in itself and not merely an instrument to be used for someone else.It is perhaps also a rebuke to those of us for whom work and life come to be identical so that to pile up wealth or reputation makes us neglect spouses, children, friends, community, and that secret part of ourselves nourished by the willingness to take time to measure our souls by something other than what we produce.The sanitation of the Utopian cities is exemplary. The Utopians value cleanliness, and they believe that the sick should be cared for by the state. The Utopians care for children. Education is open to all. They like music, and in an age that stank in Europe, the Utopians like nice smells. To average English people of the Sixteenth Century--living in squallor and misery, not solitary but (in Thomas Hobbes's famous phrase) nasty, brutish, and short, Utopia would have seemed like paradise--at least for a while.But to middle-class people like ourselves, our messy and fragmented society looks good in comparison to Utopia. Here More's Augustinian conception of sinful humankind becomes burdensome to the soul, for in the Utopian commonwea...
