A Different Perspective on Sir Thomas More

Obelisque_alexanderNext year is the quincentennial of the publication of Thomas More’s Utopia, and celebrations of the book and its author have already begun. More, of course, is a darling of Western culture and politics. He was canonized and is considered the patron saint of politicians and statesmen. Essayist C.K. Chesterton said that More may be “the greatest historical character in English history.”

It therefore comes as a bit of a surprise to learn that More also has a following on the political left. None other than Marx and Engels praised More’s thinking, and Lenin honored him by listing his name on a monument erected in Moscow’s Aleksandrovsky Gardens.

More’s description of an ideal society in Utopia is what leads to the leftist lionizing. His society has no private property, state ownership of the means of production, and extensive welfare programs for the poor and elderly. Because of these public policies, More seems to some to be a “proto-Communist.”

None of these policies are even remotely possible in the contemporary U.S., and the collapse of actual Communist regimes of the late-twentieth century is well-documented. However, More deserves credit for reflecting on what type of socioeconomic structure might produce what type of consciousness. More thought that the population of his utopian society would avoid alienation and adopt a genuinely social worldview rather than a greedy, self-interested individualism.

More was a dreamer. Yet his variety of dialectical materialism remains appealing 500 years after he teased it out – in Latin no less!

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Narrative and Social Control

copslogoIn recent decades, awareness of narrative and of stories in general has increased in many fields and academic disciplines, law included.  However, it is nevertheless surprising to see that even law enforcement specialists in the Justice Department have developed an appreciation of the workings and importance of narrative.

This heightened sensitivity surfaced in the recent Justice Department report on police conduct in Ferguson, Missouri following the shooting of Michael Brown.  Issued by the Department’s “Community Oriented Policing Services” office, the report outlines no fewer than 113 lessons that police in Missouri and elsewhere might learn from developments during the seventeen days following Brown’s death and funeral.

Much of the report is predictable.  It criticizes such police tactics as the use of dogs, tear gas, and so-called “overwatching.”  With the latter, police use rifle sights to survey a crowd from positions on top of police vehicles.  Overall, the report warns that “militarization” of a volatile situation will probably make things worse.

Toward the end of the report, its authors turn to what they label “lost narrative.”  In their opinion, Missouri law enforcement was too slow to provide information about the shooting of Brown and thereby created an opening for alternative representations of the incident.  Supporters of Brown and his family seized the opportunity and offered an alternative narrative, one conveyed largely but not completely through the social media and one stressing that “Black Lives Matter.”

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The Rule of Law in the United States

US Supreme CourtThe highly regarded World Justice Project, an independent organization in Washington, D.C. that promotes the rule of law, has used 47 indicators organized around nine themes to generate a so-called “Rule of Law Index.” Using this Index, the World Justice Project then ranked 99 of the world’s nations according to the extent to which the rule of law was truly operative in those nations’ daily life. The United States ranked nineteenth.

This ranking is surely respectable. Americans could conceivably be pleased the United States compares so well to nations such as Zimbabwe, Afghanistan, and Venezuela, which do in fact appear at the bottom of the World Justice Project’s ranking. But at the same time Americans could be disappointed that the top four nations are, in order, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland. What’s more, other nations with a common law heritage such as Australia, Canada, and New Zealand also rank higher than the United States.

The ranking is especially surprising given familiar American boasting that their nation lives by the rule of law rather than by the rule of men and that their nation is exceptional in this regard. A belief in the rule of law, in my opinion, has been a central tenet of American ideology since the earliest decades of the Republic. However, all ideological tenets should be subject to vigorous critique, lest they be used for political purposes.

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