IT might be regrettable that one of the worst of the gangster financed legal outfits around today is named after the lawyer and one time Lord High Chancellor under the young Henry VIII Thomas More, the guy whose head Henry had chopped off after he wouldn't agree to approve of his divorce and remarriage and, also Henry making himself the head of the Church in England. Though it might be fitting, in a perverse way. It was inevitable that More would be a cannon saint of Roman Catholicism (I suspect he isn't one in the Anglican church) because he is considered a martyr to the hierarchical organization of the Roman Catholic Church in the time of the Reformation. Henry had, as well, been such a bulwark to the hierarchy before he decided he wanted to dump his wife and marry his mistress, that's how the Brit monarchs got the title "Defender of the Faith" for themselves, I believe, ironically, a title conferred by the Pope before Henry let his genitals rule him.
It is, in a way, fitting that a legal outfit supported by millionaires and billionaires and dedicated to protecting and enhancing their oligarchic governance of the United States is named after Thomas More because, as can be seen as his position before Henry cut his head off, he was in thick as thieves with the gangsters who ran England at the time. The Tudors were among the most blood thristy, violent and greedy of European monarchs of that time and among the worst in the history of England and, as More was also the author of one of the most exigent of critiques of that, Utopia, he fully knew what he was a part of, even if he was less corrupt than most of those who held that royal office.* Once, before Henry was set on cutting his head off, when he still had royal favor, someone flattered More by saying how much the king loved him. He prophetically quipped that if his head would get Henry a castle in France his head would have to go, so he understood just how things stood.
More was part of the very system of violence that, even during his time in office, was beginning a period of bloody violence which was characteristic of the rule of the Tudors. You don't hold worldy power in any system other than, possibly, egalitarian democracy, without being a party to some level of gangsterism. That goes for when Popes acted as worldly kings, too. (Look at some members of the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops who support Trump if you want contemporary examples of that.) He was a part of it. So it's no wonder that an allegedly Catholic legal outfit who are engaged in a similar effort on behalf of the gangsters and thugs who are bent on ruling against equality, against democracy and for their own ever grasping enrichment would take his name to name their club of gangster lawyers. The man who never lost an opportunity to use the saint making industry to get himself camera time, John Paul II, heaven help us, unable to make him a saint again made him the patron of politicians and statesmen. He'd already been considered the patron of lawyers, not that I've noticed that had an enhancement to the morality of that profession.
Thomas More's intellectual significance is founded largely on his Utopia but on his other writings. He was an important figure in the humanist movement, the revival of classical learning based in Greeks and Romans of the classical period, In one of his sermons, given during a service, I believe for the Second Sunday in Advent at Duke University, Walter Bureggemann aptly and poetically contrasted the Greek-Latin contribution of logical orderliness, academia as a temple of that and also in the language and form of memos and legalism which govern our public affairs with the alternative of poetic thought with the goal of justice and common good and common wealth that is the great contribution of the Jewish Scriptures.
I haven't relistened to it so I don't remember if he noted that the Greek-Latin system was all about the manipulation of resources to optimize their exploitation - people being as easily considered a resource to such thinking without violating any of its forms or practices or schedules - not to mention animals and other living beings- or if that's what came to me as I listened to him. Whereas the passage from Isaiah he talks about, the one borrowed by Christians to talk about the utopia on God's Holy Mountain where all the dangerous carnivores are vegans, all the snakes have no venom (I'd guess they are vegans then, also) and a little child would lead them. He did contrast that vision of leadership by a child with the serious adult stuff deriving from Plato and Aristotle and as modified, extended and detailed by the subsequent history of Western thought, into science and onward, all expressed in the language of briefs and memos and not in poetry. The business of eat or be eaten in the present world making a virtue of violence and ruthless pursuit of more for us and less or nothing for others, eat or be eaten being pointless in the innocent sufficiency contained in Isaiah's vision of the peaceable kingdom.
I'm sure he didn't note that the ideology of natural selection was, in fact, the exact opposite aspiration to that of Isaiah's apocalypse instead of Hobbsian all against all. I'm sure it is considered the adult thing to do to manfully (and wouldn't you just know, the ones coming up with it that sex roles would enter into it) face the reality that takes no chance on being wrong about that regime of violence instead of taking a chance that Isaiah's vision is the goal of the universe.
That such a view of life also favors those with more strength, more power, more wealth (and so more strength and power, I doubt Sheldon Adelson in his prime could take even me in hand to hand combat) should suprise no one. And, also, the greedy cowards that serve them, in politics, in the law, in academic scribblage and babblage, and even worse in "journalism," that more than merely accounts for its enforcement as the required ideological view of life.
But I don't care if you do consider me a childish, foolish idiot for preferring the Jewish Scriptures and the Christian ones over the pagan line of thought. If I'm wrong, I'd rather perish than persist in that hell. If they're wrong,they merely prolong the period in which human beings and life on Earth persists in the evil system they favor. Am I supposed to let them calling me a fool and a child bother me? That's what appears to be the great, inhibiting fear of those who are stuck in a cowardly posture of servile acquiescence to gangster rule at the hands of soft-handed lawyers who could probably never cope in the most peaceful agrarian paradise.
I have pointed out that when he read Thomas Malthus, well before Darwin invented natural selection, that the English radical William Cobbett, mocking the Anglican Parson Malthus's desire that the poor of England being left to starve like animals according to what he imagined to be the "law of nature" that if the poor were really left to "the law of nature" they'd strip the rich of their wealth within a day. Such academic servants of that system seldom really think hard about the consequences of what they wish for.
*So says the old movie which I'd guess is the sum total of what most of those who think they know anything about Thomas More really "know" about him, certainly the members of that club of gangster lawyers who use his name.
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