Five hundred years ago, Thomas More wrote a book entitled Utopia. In a lecture I delivered at the Ateneo de Manila last month, I used that book to reflect on contemporary events in our country.
Superficially speaking, Duterte’s Philippines, at least in its treatment of human rights and the role of law, is not very far from Thomas More’s Utopia. In More’s world, lawyers are actually prohibited and citizens are assumed to know exactly what the law is, what right and wrong is, and are expected to comply with all the rules laid down by the state. In More’s Utopia, punishment is a certainty for those who transgress the law. In More’s imaginary world, the justice system is always fair and so human rights is not an issue. Its respect is assumed. Unfortunately, both the assumptions of an educated citizenry and an excellent justice system do not hold for our country.
Written 500 years ago, More’s work has left a lasting impact on subsequent political thought and literature. It may be half a millennium old, but utopia’s contemporaneity cannot be denied. Tyrants, reformers, radicals, revolutionists often take their bearings on the utopian philosophy.
There are, for example, similarities between More’s Utopia and the classless society promised by Karl Marx. Indeed, the Utopians “wear the same sort of clothes without any other distinction, except what is necessary to distinguish the two sexes, and the married and unmarried.” They share their material possessions and work for the common good, it is more akin to the structure subsisting in a monastic life rather than the society designed by Marx which stems from a highly stratified economic environment.
More’s Utopia, while similar to Marx’s dictum: “To everyone according to his needs—from everyone according to his abilities,” however departs from the Marxian concept insofar as concerns the driving forces behind the two ideas. More fantasized of a people untainted by malice; where people are selflessly devoted to preserving well-structured and orderly institutions. On the other hand, the Marxian communism is premised on an inherently dysfunctional society where two opposing forces, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, who are in perpetual contradiction against the other. As Friedrich Engels clarified: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” And order is not possible unless the working class prevails over the capitalists or the bourgeoisie.
Fr. James Schall, in an essay entitled “The Right to Happiness,” argues: “So we do not have a right to be happy. The assumption that we do lies behind the utopian turmoil of our times. The attempt to guarantee our right to be happy invariably leads to economic bankruptcy and societal coercion. By misunderstanding happiness and its gift-response condition, we impose on the political order a mission it cannot fulfill. We undermine that limited temporal happiness we might achieve if we are virtuous, prudent, and sensible in this finite world.”
What was frightening for me during the Marcos, Aquino and now in the Duterte eras is that there are people, true believers who actually believe that people should be hunted down, diminished, mocked, and in the case of Marcos and Duterte killed for the greater cause. What is sad is behind the veneer of wonderful or passionate slogans like “new society,” “daang matuwid” and “I hate drugs” is politics in the most ugly sense of the word. In similar ways, the attacks against Vice President Binay and Senator Grace Poe, arguably pursued with mixed motivations of national interest and support for a specific candidate, fall under this category of no-holds-barred, scorched-earth politics is also because of this. Never mind to the damage caused to the persons and their families, and in the case of Poe, never mind the collateral damage to foundlings and global Filipinos.
How do we respond to Duterte’s Philippines? Unfortunately, the book Utopia does not give us good answers to this question. Sadly, utopian literature frequently justifies human rights violations in the name of achieving a better, more perfect society. Therein lies the danger and the tragedy that is unfolding in Duterte’s Philippines. It is not a perfect world; government makes mistakes, including terrible ones. A disregard for human rights, substantive and procedural, makes those mistakes permanent, irreversible through extrajudicial killings and the imposition of the death penalty. In the real, not utopian, world of Thomas More, this danger and tragedy also unfolded in the fate that befell him.
Thomas More was not a perfect man; both his personal and public life were stained with personal flaws, including pride. He was and too harsh on and too judgmental of others. But at the most important moment of his life, More stood steadfast in his principles and conscience. That is why Robert Bolt honors the saint with his play “A Man for All Season. In one of the most memorable scenes from the movie adaptation of Bolt’s play, More tells his daughter: “When a man takes an oath, he’s holding his own self in his own hands like water, and if he opens his fingers then, he needn’t hope to find himself again.”
We do not honor Thomas More as the patron saint of lawyers and public servants because of his authorship of Utopia. We look up to More because he defied what is wrong and did what is right, even to the point of death. We must do the same today, hopefully without dying, of course. In real life, More lived the life of his fictional characters when he defied the king by refusing to sign the Oath of Supremacy, which gave the king more power than the pope. And for this he paid with his life and was declared a saint by the Catholic Church. By his defiance to do what he perceived as an evil act, he was rewarded his utopia to be raised in the altar and be with his Father in heaven for all eternity.
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