Lecture: Science, faith and superstition in Utopia

 

Last Tuesday, February 20, I had the honour of giving a lecture in the lecture series of the Science, Faith and Superstition seminar series, hosted by the University of Belgrade. My lecture highlighted various continuities in the way that medieval and early modern texts about ideal societies or exotic locations were imagined or formulated. The lecture was recorded, so I'm pleased to share it with all of you.  

Science, faith and superstition in Utopia

The violence of Peter Wilkins - violence and Utopia in an eighteenth-century novel

For years I have been fascinated with Utopian fiction, i.e., stores that depict ideal societies, usually serving as a form of contemporary social commentary. In what we might call self-labelled Utopian fiction – that is fiction directly or indirectly inspired by Thomas More’s novel Utopia and thereby written after its publication in 1516 – the key recognisable elements of such societies are often well developed and used in a variety of different ways. However, similar forms of social commentary through imaginary places are found in abundance prior to More’s novel, and to fully understand the genre of Utopian fiction and its many complex components, it is often necessary to cast a very broad chronological net to see how the invention of, or reflections on, non-existent places function within a given discourse. I am currently dedicating some time to this kind of literature, and I hope to be able to develop my thoughts on various subjects pertaining to Utopian societies in the coming months.

Recently, I finished reading one such Utopian novel, published in 1751, namely The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins by Robert Paltock. The novel describes the eponymous protagonist’s journey from England to Africa and onwards to a land far to the south, in which he encounters a country of winged humans. Through his familiarity with metal and firearms – above all cannons salvaged from the ship on which he arrived – Peter Wilkins aids the king of the flying people to quell a rebellion and once more unite the vast kingdom. Desirous to spread Christianity and abolish slavery, Wilkins reforms the society of the kingdom, and continues to extend the territory of the king right to the very edge of the continent (which is the hypothesised southern land which was not yet documented by 1751). The novel is a troubling mix of imperialism, evangelism and abolitionism which really captures the complexities of eighteenth-century discourse, and provides an interesting and worthwhile read.

For my current purposes, my main interest in The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins is the function of violence in the making and sustaining of the Utopian society. The aspect of violence is an integral part of many Utopian stories, and violence serves different functions in how the ideal society is understood. In some cases, an ideal society is marked by the absence of violence, in other cases the ideal society is brought about through violence, and in yet other cases the ideal society is sustained by violence. Not infrequently, violence serves both a creating and a maintaining function in a Utopia. (I have written on the role of violence in Utopian societies in this blogpost.)

The case of The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins is somewhat peculiar, because it belongs to a particular sub-genre of the Utopian story that combines elements of the Robinsonade. In other words, the plot of the novel revolves around one – sometimes more – individuals shipwrecked and cast ashore in a strange and unknown country, whose society is in many ways radically different from their own. Such stories differ from the general plot of Thomas More’s Utopia, in which the reader receives a travelogue from a traveller who has arrived at the ideal society and then left it without any trouble or hindrance. The style of the travelogue renders the story more descriptive, and the polemical edge of this description is perhaps sharper in other, more adventure-like stories.

Perhaps the most significant aspect of Utopian stories that employ elements of the Robinsonade is that like Robison Crusoe his island, so the protagonists of these stories often employ their technological knowledge and/or political precepts from their native countries to transform Utopia. In some such cases, the Utopia in question might be an ideal society that is destroyed by the application of the protagonist’s programme, perhaps most famously in Ludvig Holberg’s Niels Klim’s Undeground Travels. In other Robinsonade-cum-Utopian stories, it is the protagonist who creates the ideal society by transforming the Utopia – the no-place or imagined place – in accordance with their principles and their ambitions. The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins belongs to the latter category.

Peter Wilkins becomes acquainted with a society where the people are noble, industrious, clever, and have obtained a high-level intricate society of complex rituals, traditions and administration. Yet their primary technology is stone, they are a slave society, and their form of religion consists of what the Anglican Peter Wilkins deems idolatry. By the end of Peter’s time in this country – Normnbdsgrsutt [sic!] – the society remains a kingdom, but all slaves are now free, its territories are vastly extended, they have colonised previously uninhabited areas, taken up the use of metal, and adopted a version of their religion that does not contain idol-worship. This transformation comes through battles against rebellious subjects and through the conquest of a country of slave-holders. At the heart of this transformation is Peter Wilkins’ use of cannons and pistols, against which the pike-wielding armies of flying men stand no chance.

The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins provides an interesting and disturbing example of how envisioned ideal societies are heavily intertwined with the use of violence. The grand reforms of Normnbdsgrsutt and other neighbouring kingdoms are first of all made possible through violent means. Even if, as in this case, the violence is a response to extraneous violence, this response is not the end. Instead, Peter Wilkins goes further in his ambitions and takes advantage of the newly-established peace to control resources and initiate the production of metalwork. While the fabrication of armament is not mentioned as one of the pursuits of this metalwork, the cannons and pistols brought by Peter Wilkins would provide suitable models for copying should the flying people so desire. There is perhaps a hint of regret about this possibility in an aside comment in which the protagonists darkly questions whether his efforts of civilising have been all that positive.

The role of violence in The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins is a curious reminder that ideal societies are not necessarily brought about or sustained through ideal means, and that a potential for rot exists at the heart of most, if not all, of these Utopias. Robert Paltock’s novel is an importance case study in this regard, because it combines violence used to obtain goals with which few would not sympathise – the abolition of slavery – with violence used to extend territory and evangelise. Moreover, the possible future fabrication of firearms and cannons lurks as a devouring shadow at the edges of this transformed society, notwithstanding a prophecy of prosperity for 1500 years.

The violence in The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins forces us to grapple with the following question: how ideal are our visions of ideal society? Moreover, how do we avoid violence? How do we prevent the rot of violence at the heart of reforms and transformations? These questions are especially important due to the polemic function of Utopian stories. They are meant as social commentary, as a way to help us recognise errors in our own society and help us envision ways to deal with those errors. The question is whether we recognise those of our solutions that carry the rot within them, or whether we employ those faulty solutions only to end up with faulty replacements. 

A small token of solidarity with Ukraine in the heart of Oslo

 
Today I was standing outside the National theatre in Oslo, waiting for two friends who are visiting this weekend. I was very pleased to notice that someone had draped a sash in the colours of the Ukrainian flag across the statue of one of the most beloved and important actors in Norwegian history, Per Aabel (1902-99). The statue is located in the area between the theatre and the metro station, and it is an easily noticeable sight for those who walk through this part of the city. Aabel is here shown in his role as Jean de France, the title character of one of Ludvig Holberg's comedies, and in this sense the expression of solidarity with Ukraine is displayed on an object that encapsulates centuries of Norwegian theatre history. 

Such displays of solidarity are found throughout Oslo, and I aim to present a selection of some of them in a future blogpost. But this case acquired a more specific importance to me, which is why I have decided to treat it in a separate post. 

As I was waiting, I sat down on a stone plinth next to the statue and started reading, sometimes moving out of the way when I noticed that people were taking pictures of the statue and its Ukrainian sash. A group of foreigners addressed me, asking about the statue and the building, and followed up with a few other questions about the city, making me an impromptu tour guide. When I had pointed them in the direction of the royal residence, they thanked me and as they were leaving they told me they were refugees from Ukraine. I welcomed them to the country and waved goodbye. Later on, I came to notice that there were several other small groups of people in the city who also appeared to be Ukrainian refugees.  

The brief encounter with the group of Ukrainians made me very thankful to whomever placed the sash on the statue of Per Aabel, which is easy to notice and placed in a central thoroughfare. As the Russian invasion of Ukraine continues and the sheer human misery is increasing every day, it is often easy to get the feeling that various displays of solidarity are pointless and unimportant. The wearing of Ukrainian colours or placing the Ukrainian flag on screens or posters might seem like worthless exercises done more for the sake of those who display these symbols than those who are affected by the war. But for the group of Ukrainians I chanced to meet, I got the sense that this tiny token of solidarity, of knowledge about the situation, served as a form of welcome to people who are uprooted from their homes and forced to shelter in a foreign country. Such displays of solidarity are of course not enough in order to help the situation improving, but they are not unimportant. 

Whose Utopia is it anyway? – some brief reflections on the inherent vice of the ideal society

Screenshot from the Disney short Plutopia (1951), presumably showing the country's coat of arms

For several years I have been fascinated with the various forms of Utopian societies and how they have been imagined by writers through the centuries. As a general rule, I hold that a Utopian narrative is interesting mainly for what it can reveal about its author, and not so much for what it can offer for the sundry societal ills of our own time. Indeed, the majority of the Utopian societies I have read about are practically dictatorships where one person’s preferences and pet peeves have a disproportionate impact on people of different tastes and views. Such an impact becomes all the more problematic in those cases where the Utopian society in question is described in minute detail, something which inevitably makes the whole narrative a catalogue of the author’s obsessions and blind spots. In most cases, these blind spots highlight that the creators of these Utopian societies predominantly are not women – with some notable exceptions such as Margaret Cavendish – and so there are several problems affecting mainly or only women that are either not dealt with or that are dealt with immensely poorly. For instance, I do not recall having read any Utopian narrative that addresses problems such as domestic violence or rape, or admit to the possibility that such crimes might occur in any given society. This is just one of the elements which show to what extent Utopian narratives are predominantly about the critique and lampooning of a select bundle of issues, and not a literary genre that can provide much practical guidance. It is also one of the elements which suggest that an author of a Utopian narrative very rarely ought to be in a position of power. Quite the opposite, I argue that one way to keep people away from power would be to ask them to describe their own idea of a Utopian society, and then have the atrocious ones disbarred from any future participation in the government.

Title woodcut from a sixteenth-century edition of Thomas More's Utopia

Courtesy of Wikimedia

It is both impractical, unrealistic and, to be frank, completely undesirable to make use of Utopian narratives as wholesale guidebooks to how a society should be organised, above all because of how the faulty ideas of the creators tend to bleed into the very structures and foundations of these imagined perfect societies. As an example, Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) relies on slave labour, and even though these are criminals and soldiers from other countries taken prisoners in war, the very existence of a slave class shows that even the prototype of all later Utopias has something very rotten at its core. Granted, More does say at the end of his book that he does not agree with all aspects of Utopian society, but I find little reason to think that the use of slave labour is one of those aspects.

Another example can be found in Tommaso Campanella’s City of the Sun (1602), where the Utopian state practices extensive eugenics and consequently does not operate with the concept of love and infatuation. It therefore is of little use that both More and Campanella criticise very severe problems of the respective societies in which they themselves lived, because they have allowed other types of problems to be an integral part of their imagined ideal societies. In other words, Utopian narratives can provide excellent vehicles for identifying individual societal problems and even identify the main causes, but because these narratives are the products of individual authors it is no wonder that the Utopias usually fall short of providing any real solutions. Hence the question in the title of this blogpost: Whose Utopia is it anyway?   

Utopias are not always political, however, and often the name Utopia takes on the meaning of a kind of paradisiacal society where it is the sensual rather than the logical which serves as the linchpin. Such imaginary societies predate the publication of More’s Utopia by centuries, and they are an important part of medieval satirical culture. One of the most famous of these societies is the Land of Cockaigne, where everything is made of food and the very raison d’etre appears to be gastronomical excess. Then there is the land of Cornucopia mentioned in Boccaccio’s Decameron (c.1353) (day 8, third story), which can count among its distinctive geological features a mountain made of parmesan cheese. Stories such as these are often interpreted as a kind of earthly counterpart to Paradise, where it is the stomach rather than the soul which is rewarded, but they can also be employed to lampoon the base and myopic desires of those who are more concerned with earthly gain than spiritual gain, and are unable to see beyond the diameter of their own stomachs. An example of this is the island of Narragonia, situated just beyond Spain, which is the destination of the eponymous vessel in Sebastian Brant’s Ship of Fools (1494).

Enter Plutopia

Screenshot from the Disney short Plutopia (1951)

These two different types of societies – the political Utopia and the sensual paradise – are often overlapping or mixed together in modern popular culture, where the name Utopia can easily be used as a shorthand for a paradise not in Heaven. One such case from the twentieth century is the Disney short Plutopia from 1951, as seen in the illustration above, and it was this cartoon that prompted me to reflect on the inherent vice of ideal societies, namely that– with few exceptions such as Potu in Ludvig Holberg’s Niels Klim’s Journey Under Ground (1741) – they rarely benefit every individual and rarely function without the suffering of others. While the cartoon is not, and does not set out to be, a political commentary, it nonetheless serves as an example of this fundamental flaw of Utopias where the well-being of some depends on others paying a significant price for that well-being.  

The cartoon relies on the paradisiacal connotations of Utopia, rather than the social connotations. In other words, the name of More’s ideal society is here used as a shorthand for a land devoid of trouble and problems. This is demonstrated very clearly throughout the cartoon, as Mickey and Pluto travel to Camp Utopia, the sportman’s paradise. Already here we see that this particular kind of paradise necessitates the potential suffering of others – a trait mainly of the political Utopia – while we also see that the focus is on the gastronomical pleasures of the sensual paradise of medieval literature. When Mickey and Pluto arrive, Pluto picks a fight with a cat, but when the cabin rules dictate that Pluto be kept on a leash and given a muzzle, the cat enacts his revenge by eating the dog’s food and sleeping in his place. This leads Pluto to wander off into his dreams, in which he is brought to Plutopia, and although the cartoon does not at all suggest it, I consider this to serve, in effect, as a subversion of the medieval dream vision whereby the heavenly Paradise has been accessed. This, I suspect, is an occupational injury that comes with being a medievalist.

Welcome to Camp Utopia

Screenshot from the Disney short Plutopia (1951)

Plutopia is a dog’s sensual paradise, symbolised by the plethora of fire hydrants and bones, and because it is a paradise serving the needs and desires of dogs, it also contains a cat servant, who in this case happens to be the cat who ate Pluto’s food at Camp Utopia. This feline fellow is excessively servile, and demands to be bitten as punishment for tripping and losing a delicious bowl of cream. Although Pluto at first hesitates, he soon becomes accepting of this punishment, because in return for these bites the cat gives him food in overabundance, feeding him by the bedside in exchange for a painful nibble on the tail. Eventually, Pluto wakes up, Mickey finds the two animals sleeping together on the porch, and so he remarks that this is truly is a Utopia, with a nod to the image of Paradise as a place where the lamb and the lion, sworn enemies, lie down together.

A dog's paradise

Screenshot from the Disney short Plutopia (1951)

We've struck bones!

Screenshot from the Disney short Plutopia (1951)

Screenshot from the Disney short Plutopia (1951)

Screenshot from the Disney short Plutopia (1951)

The royal hall of Plutopia

Screenshot from the Disney short Plutopia (1951)

What fascinates me about this cartoon is precisely how it manages – despite not even trying to do so – to showcase one of the most important faults in any ideal society, the existence of potentially violently exacted hierarchies. The nature of such hierarchies differs from case to case, and the sadistic demarcation line between the classes is rarely, if ever, a feature of Utopian societies – rather, they appear in dystopian fantasies of forgotten and debauched civilisations. However, Pluto’s punishment of the cat for his own gastronomical benefits – which is hardly a punishment since nothing is actually being punished – does serve as a reminder that ideal societies tend to be impossible not only because of how radically they reimagine reality, but also, and primarily, because they are ideal societies to a minority of one, i.e. their creator. This inherent vice is something shared by most Utopias, whether they are imagined as a critical mirror of sixteenth-century England or just the vengeful dreams of a hungry dog.

A second or third breakfast in bed

Screenshot from the Disney short Plutopia (1951)

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Het Luilekkerland (1567), Alte Pinakothek, München

Courtesy of Wikimedia

That Catholic Round World - flat earth as counter-medievalism

JESPER BAILIFF: Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, let us talk of something else. That is some disturbed nonsense, it can make you Catholic in the head
- Ludvig Holberg, Erasmus Montanus (Act 3, Scene 2) (my translation)

Ludvig Holberg, c.1747 by Johan Roselius
Courtesy of this website

One of the most pernicious myths about the Middle Ages remains the idea that medieval people held the earth to be flat. This myth was perhaps most famously propagated in a 19th-century novel about Columbus, where the belief in a flat earth was deployed as a foil to enhance Columbus' intrepid greatness as an explorer and trailblazer. The belief in the medieval belief in a flat earth has stuck resiliently to the collective consciousness, and even today it lingers more strongly than medievalists would like to think.

It is difficult to pinpoint the exact origin of the flat earth myth. In a previous blogpost I offered a possible source for the idea that this was a medieval conviction, but the trajectory is difficult to map. However, in this blogpost, I want to present a very curious case from the 18th century, in which the idea that the earth is flat is presented as a firmly Protestant idea, and in which the idea of a round earth is frowningly labelled Catholic (and as such practically medieval), and also Atheist. (The tendency to conflate Atheism and Catholicism in Protestant countries reaches back to the 16th century.) The case in question is fictional, as it comes from the comedy Erasmus Montanus, written by the Norwegian playwright Ludvig Holberg in 1722-23. However, despite the fictionality of the story, the way the roundness of the earth is treated is a funny and unusual affair, and one that I as a medievalist find very pleasing. The translations of the quotes from Danish are all mine.

Scene from Erasmus Montanus
Wilhelm Marstrand (1810-73)
Courtesy of this website

The plot of the comedy is the homecoming of Rasmus Berg who has been studying in Copenhagen and there taken the Latinised name Erasmus Montanus. Upon his return, he starts exercising his prowess as a debater and both proves and disproves that his mother is a stone. It all goes wrong when he claims that the earth is round, because his fellow villagers can all see that the earth is "as flat as a pancake", and to claim otherwise is "disturbed nonsense" which "can make one Catholic in the head" (act 3, scene 2). It is further remarked that to believe in a round earth "is nothing else than turn all religion on the head and lead people away from faith. A heathen can not preach worse" (act 3, scene 4). By defending his words and beliefs for the glory of philosophy, Erasmus Montanus antagonises his father-in-law-to-be and various other persons of note. When Erasmus tries to prove the roundness of the earth by various scientific observations, he is met with scorn bred from common sense, and the bailiff comments that Erasmus "is quite close to become an Atheist" (act 3, scene 5). The debate enrages his father-in-law-to-be so much that he ends the bethrotal between his daughter and Erasmus on the grounds that his family has always been good Christian people. In the end Erasmus is tricked into enrolment in the army by a local lieutenant, and to escape from this predicament he rescinds his opinions and professes loudly and desperately that the earth "is as flat as a pancake".

Erasmus Montanus disputing with a local parson
Wilhelm Marstrand, 1843
Courtesy of this website

In 1722 when Holberg wrote Erasmus Montanus, Denmark had been Protestant for almost two centuries. It is therefore difficult to tell whether Catholicism was still seen as something of the old order, something of the very distant past, or something whose presence in Denmark was seen as newfangled and novel. Traditionally in Protestant countries around this period, Catholicism is seen as a vestige of an old world, an ancient superstition, an echo from a dark age. This view is made very clear, for instance, in John Milton's Paradise Lost, where the fallen Adam witnesses the future history of mankind up to the point of salvation and the second coming. We can't tell whether this was also how Holberg's fictional farmers, bailiffs and lieutenants would have seen things, and therefore we don't know whether the round earth is considered an ancient superstition, or a newfangled invention of the universities. Nonetheless, it is interesting to see a feature so widely regarded as belonging to the Catholic Middle Ages as the flat earth presented as a Protestant tenet, and as such counter-medieval (although of course Holberg himself does not suggest this). It is a useful reference for people who still believe that men and women in the Middle Ages held the world to be flat as a pancake.

The steadfastness of Erasmus Montanus
Wilhelm Marstrand, before 1869
Courtesy of this website