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.