Humanism and Technology

Abstract

Being a creation based on Christian Humanism, Utopia went through several changes, many of which are already present in More’s narrative. Bacon’s New Atlantis brought one of the first radical transformations about. The closed, agrarian, and immutable Utopian island opened itself to the world and promoted change through controlled scientific research. However much of what More conceived was maintained: New Atlantis is still an island lost somewhere in the middle of the ocean, protecting its privacy and secrecy, evolving through the inclusion of selected external information, but avoiding exchanged. In Miguel Real’s O Último Europeu 2284 [The Last European 2284] the narrative starts in part of the European continent, with diffused borders, but unquestionably defined as a perfect utopian society, technological and scientifically advanced, and actively engaged in providing its citizens with the necessary otium, in the sense of the Greek word skole, meaning intellectual activity. After the destruction of this utopian and pacifist Europe, there is the creation of a new one, in the almost desert island of Pico, in the Azores. Once again, this utopia is crashed, and what endures as hope for future generations is a handwritten manuscript describing the two shattered future Utopias. The thread to explore in the paper is that of how humanism evolved through the last 500 years, taking these three paradigmatic literary utopias as base stones.