A dilemma from 1516 that feels strangely relevant today and within my own head: "...there is another philosophy of a more civil kind, which knows the stage it should act on, adapts itself accordingly in the play it has in hand and plays the part appropriately and with decorum. This is the one you should adopt. Otherwise, when a play of Plautus is being acted, and the servants are trifling among themselves, if you come on stage dressed like a philosopher and recite the passage from Octavia where Seneca disputes with Nero, would it not have been better to act a dumb show than be reciting inappropriate lines to make it a tragicomedy? For you would ruin and destroy the present play if you mixed in alien matter, even if the lines you brought were better. Whatever play is in hand, act it to the best of your ability, and do not wreck the whole of it because you remember another that is wittier." "It is exactly the same in a state and the consultations of kings. If erroneous beliefs cannot be plucked out by the root and all, if you cannot heal long established evils to your satisfaction, you must not therefore desert the state and abandon ship in a storm, because you cannot check the winds. Nor should you force upon people strange and unaccustomed discourses which you know will have no weight with them in their opposite beliefs. But you should try to strive obliquely to settle everything as best you may, and what you cannot turn to good, you should make as little evil as possible. For it is not possible for everything to be good unless all men are good, and I do not expect that will come about for many years." "The result of this course," he said, "would be to make me as mad as the people whose insanity I am trying to cure. For I want to speak the truth, this is what I must say. But whether it is appropriate for a philosopher to lie, I do not know. It certainly is not for me. Yet although my conversation might perhaps be unpleasant and annoy them, I do not see why it ought to be outrageously strange." -Utopia by Sir Thomas More, 1516
Posted on: Wed, 31 Jul 2013 14:04:33 +0000
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