Grant Costello

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Idle Men: Priests, Other Freeloaders and Their Burden on Society

More blames societies lack of sustainability on a number of topics, but one of his main focuses is "idle men." There are a number of these characters that he makes note of which included priests, women, beggars and others. The problem with some of these vagrants is not the diseases or other things that they blame, but it is that they are not contributing to society in any meaningful way. There is a clear reason why these men are spoken about so harshly. That is because in a Utopian society being lazy not only hurts the individual, but it hurts the whole community as well. For More, the farmers are not farming for their own personal gain, in fact it is quite the opposite. The farmers are responsible for the food supply therefore it is their responsibility to farm well. This in itself is quite a sustainable idea. If there is no for-profit farming then there is less incentive to maximize crop meaning that they deplete the soil or pollute the fields.

The method More presents for farming sheep is also more sustainable. Sure in the current system of the time there were many sheep; more than enough to clothe the population. However, they were owned by a select few group of rich men that kept the price of wool high. More points this conundrum out that there is enough, yet the poor couldn't afford to buy any. One would think this a bad business decision keeping a large portion of the population, but that just shows the unsustainable nature of large for profit business. I think this example is also poignant because the shepherds are not the ones making the big profits. The owners of the sheep add no real value to society, but they reap the largest share of the rewards. Many of More's observations have modern day correlations. The number one similarity in my opinion between the two time periods is the idea that there are more than enough resources to sustain the population, but that requires people to act non-selfishly, which is against the very nature that helped us evolve and thrive.

• More, Thomas. “Utopia.” In Three Early Modern Utopias, ed. Susan Bruce. NY: Oxford UP, 2008. 23.