Zack Willis SLAMS the utopian genre! Click HERE to see what he says!

            I think that this post will focus less on Herland, and more on the Utopian genre as a whole, as I’m starting to notice certain patterns that have been developing and honestly I’m beginning to become a little detached.

            I’ll start by saying I’ve read Unveiling a Parallel before. We had to read it for Dr. Kolmerten’s seminar class, and it was by no means a bad novel, nor is Herland, but I’m beginning to see that so many of these Utopian reads lack subtlety and that feels like an issue to me. In my paper, I praised the conversational tone of Utopia, saying that it enables the reader to feel included in the conversation with Raphael Hythloday, and allows More to act as an interlocutor to help the reader explain the concepts he is putting forth. Basically, by having Utopia focus less on plot, More can put forth more ideas about what he thinks a utopian society should be. Because it’s one of the first of its kind, Utopia is an interesting read. However, if the entire genre were exactly like Utopia, it would wear out its welcome with the tired formula of “here’s a conversation between two people where the one guy explains everything and the other guy just kinda listens.”

            So what does expansion on the genre look like? I would say that Herland and Unveiling a Parallel are natural progressions from where Utopia started. Both novels are deeply preachy in the points they want to put forward, but also try to disguise it with some semblance of a plot. Herein lies my problem with these texts: the plot is secondary to the point. In some cases, and what is certainly the case here, this happens because the author wants the point to be first and foremost. It needs to be in your face and you need no chance to forget it. But as a reader, I personally am not a fan of having themes shoved in my face. I like to think a little. I won’t deny at all that these novels still certainly have things to dig through. Clearly this is true; otherwise our classes would be much shorter. However, I prefer novels like Brave New World or 1984, in which we understand the world the story is set in, but the plot comes first. We care about the characters, and because we care about them, we want to discover more about the world they live in so we can understand their motivations. Of course, these novels tend to lean more dystopian.

            So there’s my question. Can the utopian genre have an entertaining plot without the society going to hell? I think it’s possible, but the lack of conflict is certainly a hurdle. Recently I read The Time Machine by H.G. Wells, which was a sort of sci-fi utopian novel about a man who travels to the distant future and discovers a utopian society, and while he kinda explains their customs and how things work, the bulk of the conflict is about his struggle to find his time machine and return to the past. I think Wells certainly did it right. It was entertaining and while the main character certainly jacked things up a little bit (i.e. setting a forest on fire), nothing indicated that the society itself was doomed.

            I don’t disagree with what I wrote in my paper. Utopia has a conversational tone, and that works for it. I think that style would work for any utopian writing. However, the genre would become oversaturated quickly. Because of this, I think utopian novels need to dig just a little deeper on plot.

War! What is it good for? Makin lots of money.

So in British Literature I don’t think we touched on this much, but Book II of Utopia’s section on warfare includes something particularly interesting that I’ll dwell on a little bit in this blog post.

“As soon as war is declared, therefore, they have their secret agents simultaneously post many placards, each marked with their official seal, in the most conspicuous places throughout the enemy territory. In these proclamations they promise immense rewards to anyone who will kill the enemy’s king. They offer smaller but still very substantial sums for killing any of a list of other individuals whom they name.” (79)

                The Utopians aren’t giant fans of war. They don’t really see it as honorable, and I think that’s pretty cool. Thinking about our current day society, war feels like a constant thing that we’re always involved in. We’ve grown up in war (called “conflicts” or whatever), and we’re basically just used to it. Our soldiers are called heroes and, sure, putting your life on the line is definitely heroic, I’ll agree to that, but should we glorify it as much as we do?

                Back to the quote, since I never touched on it to begin with, it’s interesting to me that this is the option the Utopians go with. It seems sneaky, using secret agents, and yet, it’s… not? Like, they’re putting signs in obvious places saying “kill the king.” How often would that seriously work? I can understand wanting rewards, but that’s a pretty big task. Not to mention, in our current society, you could kill the leader but I really don’t think it would change too much. You would have to simultaneously knock out all of those “other individuals” along with the leader in order to actually end anything. It’s an interesting idea for sure, but I don’t think it would actually work.

                Outside of that, they also try to turn the enemy forces against each other with promises of rewards and personal safety to anyone who “turns against their comrades” (79), which, again, is a really strange tactic. I love that their war techniques are totally underhanded though. They don’t see war as honorable at all, and because of that, they fight wars in the sneakiest, most underhanded ways. As long as it’s resolved, that seems to be all that matters.

                The Utopians really seem to think they can just buy out anyone. From the Zapoletes, who they buy to fight for them, to the various reward posters they put up, they seem convinced that anyone outside of Utopia can be bought out pretty easily. I guess this is proven to work, if Utopia is known to have a track record, but I can’t see it working at all in our society. People can be bought out, for sure, but you’d have to pay someone a hell of a lot to assassinate their leader, and even then most people wouldn’t do it. In the end it’s an interesting idea, but I don’t consider it plausible at all in any kind of modernized society.

Ultimate Supreme Final St. Augustine!!!!

Well Dr. MB you were not kidding at all when you said St. Augustine was tough. Honestly, you don’t want to know the difficulty I had staying awake while reading this. And while Sparknotes helped with a summary as you said, The City of God really feels like a book that’s difficult to summarize. So, nice try Sparknotes. However, despite my inability to stay conscious while reading Augustine’s work, I was able to make it through a sizeable amount of the required reading and found some interesting points.

“Our Final Good is that for which other things are to be desired, while it is itself to be desired for its own sake” (Book XIX, Chapter 1). This is an example of one of St. Augustine’s lines that sounds important. That, as well as the definition of “Final Evil” that follows it, seems like a point worth deciphering, as Augustine’s diction is so dense and twisted that each sentence feels like a riddle. So what is Augustine talking about with all of these goods and evils? He refers to the philosophers that “engaged in a great deal of complicated debate” (Book XIX, Chapter 1) about this topic, and how it relates to happiness, and seems to believe that he has the correct answer in the form of these “supreme” goods and evils.

By chapter four, Augustine has come up with Ultimate Goods/Evils, Supreme Goods/Evils, and Final Goods/Evils and I feel like I’m in the Marvel Universe with all these adjectives. Is there any difference between these adjectives? I have yet to figure out if they’re all the same. Regardless, how does this equate to the idea of utopia? Surely the person who can “achieve true happiness” – if such a thing is even possible – would be able to fit well into a utopian society, right? That’s probably up for debate.

Lastly, I think it’s strange that St. Augustine just kind of starts attacking the Stoics in chapter four, calling them arrogant and insolent. I took a class last semester on the Stoics and their philosophies deal heavily with the idea of one’s sphere of influence and how we should understand what is up to us and what isn’t. Namely, we have no control over anything except the way we react to things. If I’m reading this correctly (and there is a large chance that I am not), Augustine seems to believe that all the Stoics really do is kill themselves. I mean he’s not wrong… but he’s kind of an asshole about it. Frankly, I think using the Stoic philosophy would be the most logical way to go about creating a utopian society. They focus more on controlling one’s emotions and recognizing what things are worth being upset about, if any. I think if a society of people could maintain the type of discipline required to live the Stoic lifestyle, things like greed and jealousy would be non-issues. However, they may have a motivation issue when the answer to everything is basically always, “It doesn’t matter, we’re gonna die anyway.” Oh well!

Coming live from Hood College, a post about why college shouldn't be necessary.

While I still think that less bureaucracy would be a great step towards improving our quality of life, I really couldn’t think of any way to make this work at all. So instead, I’m going to home in a little more on not making college mandatory (Yes it’s not actually mandatory, but it may as well be) because I feel like that is something that we could realistically accomplish, though it would be a group effort.

College used to be the place to go for the minority of people who really wanted higher education. Those who wanted to be lawyers, doctors, or simply valued knowledge above other things went to college. For the majority, they had no use for college, and that made absolute sense. Do you really need college to work in a factory or cubicle? Probably not. However, as time went on, more colleges began to appear and eventually it became engrained in society that we have to go to college to get a good job because we will be competing with other people who have college degrees. But still, why do you need a college education if all you are doing is filling out an Excel spreadsheet? As of now, college is attended by basically everyone, despite the fact that most students can’t afford it and are in terrible debt paying for a degree that they couldn’t give two shits about. Right now, college is an extension of high school.

So how can we improve? In order to do this we would have to totally change employer’s minds about the value of a degree. People with college degrees should not be looking for jobs in retail or jobs where it simply isn’t required, and employers should understand when the job they’re hiring for isn’t something that requires a degree. Right now, high schools are all about setting people up for college. Every step of the way you’re encouraged to think about where you want to go and what you want to do. The tests like the SAT and AP exams are mandatory to get you to a good college. As a fix, maybe the SAT and AP exams should only be available to those students with great grades and an intention to go on to higher education.

There are plenty of things that need to be changed in order to fix the mindset that college is mandatory. Most importantly, the amount of schools should be drastically decreased, and those schools that are still left should have a far lower acceptance rate. If less people are getting into college, then hopefully people will realize that going to college just isn’t as important and employers will begin to relax their hiring policies.

This was super disorganized I think, but my main point is that college should not be thought of as mandatory, and if we can get less people feeling like they are forced to go, maybe we can go back to the days when only those who wanted to be there would be in college.