Hythloday and The Drug Trade

In many ways, I find Book One's diagnosis of the problem far more fascinating than Book Two's prescription for it. In the various ills outlined in Raphael Hythloday's perhaps exaggerated (but then again perhaps not exaggerated?) screed on England's ills, one can find many parallels with contemporary America--and even not-so-contemporary America.

For instance, Hythloday's extended speech on England's thievery procedures links up uncannily with America's current drug trade problems. Hythloday describes a people without much to live for, newly-minted vagabonds for whom the two options are stealing or starving. It brings to mind the conventional picture of inner-city and low-income America: filled with people forced to deal drugs on the corner in order to support their families (or even just themselves).

England's penalty for theft, according to Hythloday's account, was execution. To Hythloday this is a prime example of the punishment being far greater than the crime; he suggests turning thieves into easily identifiable forced laborers (part of their ear gets cut off, and they are required to wear a certain garment). And while no one in their right mind would suggest that convicted drug dealers should become, essentially, slaves, many have argued that the current penalties for drug trafficking are excessively harsh--think of all the prisons out there populated just as much by drug dealers as by rapists, murderers, etc. These people, past and present, are forced into their present circumstances as a result of dire poverty and the prospect of starvation, and then punished for taking what can seem like the only way out.

More's suggestion to Hythloday--that he perhaps lower his outrage meter, accept that certain things are inevitable, and try in his own small way to make the world a better place--sounds, in this context, both surprisingly modern and a lot like the way our best politicians go about introducing their ideas. (All this is enough to make me want to learn about political philosophy, which I've never really had an interest in.)

Hythloday's description of the vagabonds kicked off their land and forced to fend for themselves without any useful skills also brings to mind the condition of post-Civil War, Reconstruction-era slaves. Obviously these are different scenarios, in that the emancipation of slaves was an objectively good thing, but there are still parallels: suddenly large swaths of unskilled laborers are without their homes, wandering in search of some sort of steady income. That Utopia goes on to address these problems, and provide (maybe a bit too radical for my if-I'm-being-totally-honest politically disengaged/unconscious self but nonetheless) SOLUTIONS and examples re: these problems, is just one of many reasons (the other being the parchment thing Prof. Calhoun discussed in his lecture) that this text has survived as long as it has.

Hariot as Poor Reporter

Insofar as one could actually exist, the ideal reporter might be described as: objective, unbiased, and without agenda (and, you know, smart and good at writing). In the blog-era, though--when your news outlet of choice can be as partisan (and as poorly edited) as you'd like--this kind of reporting is increasingly rare, often relegated to the wasteland of the "literary essay." (I'm going to go ahead and be your typical college kid by saying: David Foster Wallace does this best, for me.)

Don't let the polemical blogophobes mislead you, though--this habit of skewing the facts is far from unique to this Internet Age. Look not further than this week's reading for some prime examples. "Hariot's Report on Virginia" paints an almost comically subjective portrait of the natives, one that island-bound Englishmen (and women) were heartily digesting as truth. Hariot does his best to de-fang the natives, describing them as hopelessly child-like and fractured, without even the capability to unite and fight potential colonizers. (Rather, they're endlessly impressed by and receptive to European visitors.) He gives a long, highly condescending description of their religion, noting that "it be far from the truth." (940) (Imagine reading that in the New Yorker.)

What the actual "truth" is is hard to suss out; the objective, factual tone of the piece reads like an excerpt from Gulliver's Travels (which, if I'm not mistaken, is a parody of this kind of "Truthful" travel writing). The Norton Anthology provides a valuable lens to view the piece through: they say the account was "intended to promote colonization" (939)--not, in other words, to provide a fair and balanced view of a new world. Whatever downsides there may be (and I'm not an expert in this field, but based on the "Wider World" intro I can at least posit death at sea and foreign diseases) to colonization are entirely downplayed.

It brings to mind the photography of Thomas Eakins, who in the late 19th century used his camera to show Easterners what Yosemite Valley in California was like. By artfully blocking and manipulating his images, he created in the public mind an image of Yosemite that was barren, pristine, and devoid of any natives. By omitting certain details and amplifying certain others, he motivated people to colonize the West, the same way that Hariot motivates people to colonize Virgina.

Hariot's view of the natives--as emotion-and-spirit-nourished primitives--contributed to the popular notion of the Native American, one that would persist well into the early 20th century (see: early Cubist painting, which looked to get in touch with the un-rational world that Hariot describes here). Eerily enough, he expresses no serious remorse about the disease his people wrought on the natives,
treating it as yet another piece of ethnology. One wishes they had the natives side of the story.