Some modest observations

At first glance, Jonathan Swift seems to be out of place in the Age of Reason. Here’s a guy, after all, who’s writing about a man who travels to a far-away land where he discovers a race of intelligent, talking horses, and who advocates alleviating the problem of poverty in Ireland by having the poor sell their babies for food. Not entirely reasonable. I mentioned the other day that this is an era that prizes moderation and is suspicious of too much imagination: Swift seems to fail on both counts.

It’s important to remember, however, that cultures that prize reason and moderation are intensely sensitive to their opposites. If logic and moderation are the human qualities that are most prized in a society, then people in that society will be eager to point out examples of extremism and foolishness and make examples of them. Thus, the Age of Reason is also the Age of Satire.

Definitions of “satire” are here. Note that satires can be classified as either Juvenalian or Horatian, depending on their tone.

The section of Gulliver’s Travels that was assigned also follows the conventions of a utopia. "Utopia" literally means “no place”; it’s the title of a book by Thomas More, published in 1516, that describes a remote society in a distant land whose citizens follow a rational, collectivist lifestyle that in many ways seems superior to the way Europeans live. Such a place existed only in More’s imagination, of course, but it’s important to remember it’s written during a time of great exploration, when explorers were traveling the world finding all sorts of new lands and peoples and civilizations. In a way, Gulliver’s Travels follows in the tradition of many books written by explorers who went off in search of new worlds. Given the wonders that were described in these travel narratives, a story about a civilization of brainy horses doesn’t seem so far-fetched.

Like most utopias, this section of Gulliver’s Travels gives us both positive examples of characteristics we should approve of and negative examples of characteristics we should abhor. In the Houyhnhnms, we have a picture of an entirely rational, benevolent society, disgraced by no irrational actions or attachments. Gulliver states, “As these noble Houyhnhnms are endowed by Nature with a general disposition to all virtues, and have no conceptions or ideas of what is evil in a rational creature; so their grand maxim is to cultivate reason, and to be wholly governed by it” (Norton 465). The Yahoos, by contrast, are lazy, greedy, filthy, smelly, and completely irrational: “They are cunning, malicious, treacherous, and revengeful. They are strong and hardy, but of a cowardly spirit, and by consequence insolent, abject, and cruel” (Norton 464).

It’s clear, too, that like most utopias, Gulliver’s Travels is as much about the deficiencies of the writer’s society as it is about the benefits of the imaginary, utopian society. Note the many passages where Gulliver attempts to explain the follies of European behavior to his Houyhnhnm master, who is so rational that he doesn’t even understand the concept of a lie (Norton 448). Most of pages 451-59 present Swift’s satirical jabs at European society: religion, war, royalty, and trade. For example, the sentence, “In order to feed the luxury and intemperance of the males, and the vanity of the females, we sent away the greatest part of our necessary things to other countries, from whence in return we brought the materials of diseases, folly, and vice, to spend among ourselves” (Norton 456) obviously takes aim at European values and lifestyles. And when Gulliver explains the simple pleasures of his life with the Houyhnhnms, he immediately begins to make comparisons with the horrors of life in England: “I wanted no fence against fraud or oppression: here was no physician to destroy my body, nor lawyer to ruin my fortune; no informer to watch my words and actions, or forge accusations against me for hire”(471); it goes on and on. See? Satire.

It would be a mistake, though, I think, to see Swift as offering up Houyhnhnm society as a model that all his readers should follow. Many readers have pointed out that Houyhnhnm society is cold—the citizens don’t even have a special feeling for their own children—and boring. We also have to take into consideration what happens to Gulliver at the end of the book: he returns to his home but has been so converted to Houyhnhnm ways that he is repulsed by the presence of his own wife and children and prefers to spend most of his time in the stable with the horses. Forgive me, but that doesn’t sound entirely reasonable.

It makes more sense to me to see Swift as satirizing both the irrationality of the Yahoos and the hyper-rationality of the Houyhnhnms. If one of the values of the Enlightenment is moderation, then that would apply to rationality as well: a moderate human being would seem to be composed of a balance of emotion and reason rather than being entirely emotional or entirely rational.

In A Modest Proposal, Swift takes aim at some of the same targets, but his satire is sharper and even more horrific. In this case, he’s writing about the situation in Ireland: there’s a virtual epidemic of poverty, and the Irish people have few prospects for making their lives better. Most of the land in Ireland is owned by English landlords, which means all of the rent money goes out of the Irish economy, and the English government has for decades been passing laws and tariffs that hobble Irish trade in order to give English businesses a greater advantage. As dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, Swift wrote many essays and gave many sermons protesting the oppression of the Irish people; in A Modest Proposal he approaches the matter satirically, taking on the persona of someone whose plan to end Irish poverty involves using Irish babies for food.

One of the factors that makes A Modest Proposal successful is that it isn’t immediately apparent that this is satire. Scholars have found that the first sentence or two of the essay is lifted from one of Swift’s essays or sermons lamenting the problems in Ireland: A Modest Proposal softens the reader up by starting off in a serious way, and only gradually revealing that the “modest” proposal involves widespread cannibalism.

The chief target of Swift’s satire is, of course, the English, who are metaphorically “devouring” the Irish with their economic policies and practices. Swift takes the metaphor and makes it literal—given their practices, the English might as well eat Irish babies.

He also seems to be aiming at least some of the satire at the Enlightenment infatuation with rationality. One of the reasons we aren’t suspicious of the speaker in A Modest Proposal (a number of critics refer to him as “The Modest Proposer”) is that he seems so logical. Notice how he begins crunching numbers on page 484 (“The number of souls in this kingdom being usually reckoned one million and a half, of these I calculate there may be about two hundred thousand couple whose wives are breeders, from which number I subtract thirty thousand couple, who are able to maintain their own children”). Mathematically and economically, he seems very sound; nevertheless, his proposal is completely insane. He knows a great deal about economic value, but he seems to know nothing about the inherent value of a human being, values that can’t be measured economically.

We can see some of Swift’s mask slip away in the second paragraph on page 488, where he makes a long list of proposals that might actually work, such as placing taxes on absentee landlords or developing a sense of Irish patriotism throughout the land. I also read Swift’s own fury in the passage on 489: “I desire those politicians who dislike my overture, and may perhaps be so bold as to attempt an answer, that they will first ask the parents of these mortals, whether they would not at this day think it a great happiness to have been sold for food at a year old, in the manner I prescribe, and thereby have avoided such a perpetual scene of misfortunes as they have since gone through, by the oppression of landlords, the impossibility of paying rent without money or trade, the want of common sustenance, with neither house nor clothes to cover them from the inclemencies of weather, and the most inevitable prospect of entailing the like, or greater miseries, upon their breed for ever.”

For discussion:

- At what points in the essay does The Modest Proposer reveal his true values? At various points in the essay he purports to be modest and opposed to cruelty—how does Swift undercut these assertions?

- Rereading A Modest Proposal, one can find a number of hints that the speaker is not as kind and benevolent as he appears to be even before he begins to talk about eating children. What are some of the clues that The Modest Proposer is not who he seems to be?

- Swift has been accused of being a misanthropist, somebody who hates humanity. Based on the selections we’ve read, do you believe this to be true? Why or why not?