Thomas More published his book UTOPIA  in 1516 when the hottest “new media” was the printing press. UTOPIA was a bestseller because readers thought it was real news – an island newly discovered in the New World by a Portuguese mariner on one of Amerigo Vespucci’s expeditions.

This mammoth hoax was contrived by two pals over a weekend while Thomas More was visiting his friend Desiderius Erasmus, who wrote In Praise of Folly five years earlier (1511). Erasmus convinced Thomas More that his ideas about social reform would be less likely to get him beheaded if couched in a story told by someone else, the mysterious (fictitious) Portuguese mariner Raphael Hythloday, whose name is a mash-up. Raphael comes from the Bible (Hebrew) and refers to one of the archangels, God’s closest confidantes and messengers. Hythloday sources to Greek words meaning “expert in nonsense.”

There was a method in Thomas More’s madness, which is strikingly relevant today, on the 500th anniversary of the publication of that clever little book. Thomas More aimed for the title of his book, UTOPIA, to become a new word in the English language, a hybrid of opposites: insight and foolishness. His mariner is a messenger with wisdom to advise those in power. But hidden in his name Hythloday is the fact that his mariner is a hoax. Thomas More, contrived with Erasmus to use a tension already existing between the Christian world and the pagan (Greek) world. Hythloday was a precursor for C.P. Snow’s Two Cultures, embodying two seemingly irreconcilable world-views.