Spanish Utopian

Thomas More’s Magician by Toby Green.

This strange book is a mixture of carefully researched biography and allegorical fiction. It tells the story of Vasco de Quiroga, a Spaniard sent to Mexico in 1532, eleven years after Cortez’s brutal conquest. He was a member of the second ‘Audencia’ who, as I understand it, were there in a Catholic, Judicial and Governmental role. Quiroga was appalled by the behaviour of his fellow Spaniards and the way they treated the indigenous people, the Indians, as virtual slaves, setting them to work on their estates or down mines in dreadful conditions. Heavily influenced by Thomas More’s recently published book on Utopia, Quiroga used all his money to set up Hospitals combined with farming communities where the Indians could come to find refuge and God. They were required to work either six hours a day or three days a week on the farms, or producing clothing, handicrafts, musical instruments and the like. In exchange for this they received food, clothing and shelter. The Indians adapted readily to this kind of life as it was not dissimilar to their past ways, only the god had changed. Needless to say Quiroga had to fight many battles with his fellow Spaniards who were extremely resentful at the loss of their slave labour to Vasco. A measure of his success, however is that the communities survived for another 300 years after his death.

Interspersed with this biography chapters cut to the here and now and a fantasy version of the authors struggles with the research, the need for a Utopian vision today and how and what that might be. Drawing on his experiences whilst travelling in Spain and the Mexico of today when researching the book and examining them from a green perspective he comes up with some rather sobering concepts. Two quotes from the book will suffice to give the flavour.
“Why must God be like a person, while the sacred essence of life is all encompassing? Sublimating humanity at the expense of its fellow species could cost us the Earth.” Quoted from the Purepecha Indians, the predominant peoples at Quiroga’s second and most successful community at Santa Fe de la Laguna.
“…..this attitude to the environment was that it was not an end in itself but a means to an end: Wealth. And in seeing the environment as entirely utilitarian rather than sacred, the Europeans were implementing categories of thought that were fundamentally incompatible with ecology.” The author Toby Green tracing a mindset towards the world, from its roots in Platonic thought to the problems of the present day.