A Critique of Reason: Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift

While many may think of Swift's magnificent octopus as a mere children's adventure tale, it is, in fact, one of the darkest and most troubling satires in the English language.  Written as the Enlightenment began asserting rationality as the measure of all things, Gulliver's Travels questions the very premises of western culture themselves.  

Link to Gulliver's Travels: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17157/17157-h/17157-h.htm

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Transcript

Hello, and welcome to the Classic English Literature Podcast.  This show takes a historical survey of English literature from the first arrival of the Anglo-Saxons in the fifth century to, I hope, the twentieth century.  We’ll see – this show’s a lot of work and I’m not a young man.  But right now, we’ve been visiting the early 18th century – the Georgian period, or the Augustan Age.  Worst grade I ever got on an essay was in grad school, studying for my PhD.  The class was on 18th century popular literature and in my essay’s introduction, I referred to the period as the Augustan Age (which, at the critical theory-soaked time, was considered terribly retrograde and gauche, too “dead pale male”).  Anyway, the only comment the professor left on the paper was an underline of the offending phrase, accompanied by a marginal note that read simply “ugh”!  At the bottom, a very disappointing grade.

And so it goes.  Today, we’re going to look at one of the monuments of 18th century writing.  Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels may be the most widely known novel from the period, with the possible exception of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.  There have been dozens, if not hundreds, of adaptations: radio dramas, television miniseries, and, of course, film, from Georges Méliès' in 1902 to Jack Black’s in 2010.  The word “lilliputian” has entered the language to such an extent that Google Doc’s spell check doesn’t flag it.  

Most people who are familiar with it, though, are usually only familiar with one, maybe two, parts of a much larger story – and a much deeper philosophical project.  We’ll get into all that in today’s little chinwag.  Before we kick off, please take a moment to click the “like,” “follow,” and "subscribe" button.  Give a 5-star rating: it’s all about data these days, and if the show’s to go on, you got to keep the algorithm happy.  Thanks very much!

I mentioned that word “lilliputian” a moment ago.  If you’re not familiar, it means something tiny or insignificant.  The word comes from the first of four parts of Swift’s novel.  Lilliput is a country where the people are only about six inches tall, and all the rest of their world proportionately scaled.  This is the setting that most folks know when asked about Gulliver’s Travels.  They know that Gulliver was a sailor, he was in a shipwreck, and washed up on the shore of Lilliput unconscious.  When he woke up, he found that he’d been tied down with Lilliputian cables and stakes.  That’s the image that’s really survived in the popular imagination.  But, as I said, there are three other parts to the novel.  So, before we accompany Lemuel Gulliver on his voyages to strange lands, we need to get our bearings.

That Lilliputian image makes folks think of a children’s book—tiny people, giant people, maybe a cartoon version they saw when they were young. Swift anticipated this misapprehension. In fact, part of the joke is that the book pretends to be a harmless travel narrative, when in reality it’s one of the angriest, most unsettling satires in English literature.

Swift published Gulliver’s Travels in 1726, during a period of intense political, religious, and intellectual conflict in Britain. This is the early Enlightenment—an age that prides itself on reason, progress, science, and political stability. Swift distrusts all of that. Or rather, he distrusts how smugly people talk about it.

Swift was deeply involved in politics. He had strong Tory sympathies, and he despised what he saw as the hypocrisy and moral emptiness of Whig politicians. He was also an Anglican clergyman who believed that religious conflict had become petty, cruel, and self-serving.  We’ve touched upon this in our previous episode.  If you recall that, you know Gulliver’s Travels is not written by a man who thinks the world is getting better.

Now, one thing to be very clear about: this is satire, and Swift practices a very particular kind of satire. This is not gentle irony. This is not playful humor. I think at some time in the distant past I distinguished between Horatian and Juvenalian satire, the former being playful and the latter more biting.  Swift is Juvenalian, even when he appears Horatian.  He uses exaggeration, inversion, and discomfort as weapons. He wants you to laugh—and then realize you’re laughing at yourself.

Our avatar is Gulliver himself.

At the beginning of the book, Gulliver seems like a perfectly reasonable narrator. He’s educated, practical, polite, observant. He believes in good government, scientific inquiry, and human improvement. In other words, he believes in the Enlightenment ideal of the rational man.

But here’s the key point that will matter for everything we read: Gulliver is not a stable narrator. Over the course of the four voyages, his judgment changes. His pride grows. His perspective warps. By the end of the book, the question is no longer “What is Swift satirizing?” but “What has happened to Gulliver?”

Each voyage strips away another comforting illusion about humanity.

• In Lilliput, Swift mocks politics and ideological conflict.
  
  
  
• In Brobdingnag, he exposes the moral ugliness of European civilization.
  
  
  
• In Laputa and the other third-voyage lands, he attacks abstract reason and useless innovation.
  
  
  
• And in the land of the Houyhnhnms, he pushes reason so far that it becomes inhuman.
  
  
  

So when you read, resist the temptation to read the voyages as isolated adventures. Think of them instead as a moral progression—or degeneration, rather. Gulliver doesn’t simply observe these societies; he is changed by them. And by the end, Swift forces us into a deeply uncomfortable position: if Gulliver is right, humanity is disgusting. But if Gulliver is wrong, then reason itself may be dangerous.

That tension—between satire and sincerity, between critique and cruelty—is what makes Gulliver’s Travels endure.

Like Defoe with Robinson Crusoe, Swift presents Lemuel Gulliver as both speaker and author of the book.  We are only given four paragraphs of autobiography before the main adventure begins, but we can piece more together from information gleaned elsewhere in the account.  First, a word about this man’s name.  Lemuel is a Hebrew name that means “belonging to God” or “devoted to God” or some such admirable translation.  Of course, we get the name from the Bible, Book of Proverbs actually, in which Lemuel is a wise and moral king.  Good man.  Now, the surname Gulliver probably comes from the Old French for a glutton or greedhead.  We get a few comments in the text like “almost famished with hunger” to belabor the point.  So, in christening this character thus, Swift juxtaposes these two meanings: piety and selfishness.  Of course, the surname also rather sounds like “gullible,” meaning easily fooled, so all of this is at the base of Swift’s satire.

Our man Gulliver, he tells us, comes from Nottinghamshire and was born about 1661.  He studies for three years at Cambridge, does a four year apprenticeship with a London surgeon, then pops over to Leiden for more education.  He’s travelled a good deal: the eastern Mediterranean, the Indies (both the east and west varieties), and presumably made it to Niagara Falls at one point.  He does get married to one Mary Burton (whether they honeymooned at the Falls is left to speculation).

The voyages with which the book concerns itself probably take place between the years 1699 and 1715, with this account being produced in the years following.  So Gulliver shipwrecks and washes up on the shores of Lilliput, as have before mentioned, where he

attempted to rise, but was not able to stir. I found my arms and legs were strongly fastened on each side to the ground; and my hair, which was long and thick, tied down in the same manner. I heard a confused noise about me, but in the posture I lay, could see nothing except the sky. In a little time, I felt something alive moving on my left leg, which advancing gently forward, came almost up to my chin; when bending my eyes downward as much as I could, I perceived it to be a human creature not six inches high, with a bow and arrow in his hands, and a quiver at his back. 

The famous scene.  A page or so in.  Before we even realize it, we are deep within the net of the story.  Swift establishes differences in scale as a satirical tool. From here, he is hoisted into a giant gurney fashioned by the Lilliputians and taken to Mildendo, the capital city, and meets the emperor and empress.  By the way, most critics reckon that Swift, in his description of the Emperor – 

His features are strong and masculine, with an Austrian lip and arched nose, his complexion olive, his countenance erect, his body and limbs well proportioned, all his motions graceful, and his deportment majestic –

as an ironic description of the first Hanoverian monarch George I, who, as public report has it, was a rather gross and ugly man.  

Be that as it may, Gulliver requests his freedom, but the Emperor declines, though Gulliver’s captivity will be as liberal as possible.  He explores Mildendo (very carefully and after the inhabitants have had sufficient warning).  He consumes enormous quantities of food and drink, which the government fears will ruin the country.  In an interview with the principal secretary, Gulliver learns of the virulent partisanism that roils Lilliputian politics:

for about seventy moons past there have been two struggling parties in this empire, under the names of Tramecksan and Slamecksan, from the high and low heels of their shoes, by which they distinguish themselves. It is alleged, indeed, that the high heels are most agreeable to our ancient constitution; but, however this be, his majesty has determined to make use only of low heels in the administration of the government, and all offices in the gift of the crown . . . .The animosities between these two parties run so high, that they will neither eat, nor drink, nor talk with each other. 

So, here’s where the satirical use of scale becomes really obvious: these small people are divided by small things: the height of one’s heels.  This tracks with Swift’s contemporary political strife between High Church Tories and Low Church Whigs, and the implication is that their disputes are as trivial and miniscule as those of the beshod Lilliputians.

Swift frequently makes allusions to personalities and events from his own time that are lost by the modern casual reader.  For instance, Gulliver’s begging for liberty has been read as analogous to Ireland’s relationship with England.  Gulliver’s turning out his pockets for inspection seems to point to an investigation of Swift by a Whig  committee of secrecy.  Flimnap, the Lilliputian treasurer, is a type for Sir Robert Walpole, the Whig head of government, and so on and so forth.  The grand scale of English political maneuvering gets, well, cut down to size.  

We also learn of the great struggle between Lilliput and its rival kingdom Blefuscu.  For three years, the two kingdoms have been at war over which end of a breakfast egg one should break: on the big end, as had been traditional, or on the small end, as is now required.  We are told that “eleven thousand persons have, at several times, suffered death rather than submit to break their eggs at the smaller end.”  In this war, an emperor has lost his life, and another his crown.  As a means of ending the bloodshed and turmoil, a verse from their holy book was proffered.  The verse reads: “All true believers shall break their eggs at the convenient end,” which, of course, solves nothing.  Swift is outlining the whole Catholic-Protestant rivalry that had stirred England for the previous two centuries, but even mocks the “every man to his own conscience” pseudo-solution, and prefers the authority of a monarch to determine religious practice.

Anyway, while all of this is quite fascinating for the history buff and close reader, Gulliver’s Travels does not require an intimate knowledge of English political and religious history to be enjoyable, nor to impart a satiric point about human folly and vanity.  Of course, loyal listeners to this podcast do have a fair working knowledge of English history, so all of these allusions are quite obvious to them.  

The Lilliputian legal system punishes fraud more harshly than theft and its bureaucracy is run by people who were good at skipping rope rather than adept at government.  In Gulliver’s first voyage, we see a world (theirs and ours) in which pettiness masquerades as principle and vanity corrupts rationality.  I probably need not say that Gulliver leaves this land feeling rather superior, morally speaking.

While the Lilliput adventure is the most well-known, some folks are not unfamiliar with the fact that Gulliver’s second voyage finds him in the land of Brobdingnag.  Little sidebar here.  While throughout the text, Gulliver refers to the land as Brobdingnag and its inhabitants as Brobdingnagian, in a preface to the 1727 edition, Gulliver insists that the printer has misspelled the correct term, which he says is Brobdingrag.  This may be Swift’s little joke on the vicissitudes of publishing.  I’m going to ignore Gulliver’s carping and stick with the traditional name.

Because, of course, Brobdingnagian has entered the language – especially that of particularly annoying intellectual poseurs such as your gentle host – to mean huge or colossal.  Brobdingnag inverts the scale Gulliver discovered in Lilliput.  Here, he is only 1/12 the size of the inhabitants, so they’re like 60-70 feet tall.  He’s taken by a farmer and is, at first, kind of the farmer’s daughter’s pet.  She calls Gulliver “Grildrig” (Gulliver offers an entirely fictitious etymology for the name) and he calls her Glumdalclitch, meaning “little nurse” in Brobdingnagian.

But despite her kindness to him, Gulliver finds the Brobdingnagians physically repulsive.  Not that they are deformed in any way – he admits they are a comely race at a distance – but up close, because of their huge size, he can see every pore, every gross imperfection.  He describes the exposed breast of the farmer's wife:

I must confess no object ever disgusted me so much as the sight of her monstrous breast, which I cannot tell what to compare with, so as to give the curious reader an idea of its bulk, shape, and colour. It stood prominent six feet, and could not be less than sixteen in circumference. The nipple was about half the bigness of my head, and the hue both of that and the dug, so varied with spots, pimples, and freckles, that nothing could appear more nauseous.

The magnified physicality of the Brobdingnagians disgusts Gulliver.  They are creatures of sweat, excretion.  He realizes that this is the way he appeared to the Lilliputians.  Then, a thought strikes him:

This made me reflect upon the fair skins of our English ladies, who appear so beautiful to us, only because they are of our own size, and their defects not to be seen but through a magnifying glass; where we find by experiment that the smoothest and whitest skins look rough, and coarse, and ill-coloured.

Beauty, elegance, sophistication are, at best, perspectival and at worst, nonexistent.  This is the first inkling we get of Gulliver’s (and, by extension, Swift’s) nascent misanthropy.

Word spreads that the farmer has got a strange little creature and, curiosity leading to cupidity, the farmer decides to make a bundle charging admission to see the tiny homunculus perform.  Gulliver describes his exhausting humiliation:

I was placed upon a table in the largest room of the inn, which might be near three hundred feet square. . . . I walked about on the table as the girl commanded; she asked me questions, as far as she knew my understanding of the language reached, and I answered them as loud as I could. I turned about several times to the company, paid my humble respects, said they were welcome, and used some other speeches I had been taught. I took up a thimble filled with liquor, which Glumdalclitch had given me for a cup, and drank their health, I drew out my hanger, and flourished with it after the manner of fencers in England. My nurse gave me a part of a straw, which I exercised as a pike, having learnt the art in my youth. I was that day shown to twelve sets of company, and as often forced to act over again the same fopperies, till I was half dead with weariness and vexation.

So now, Gulliver is physically insignificant and powerless, and at the whim of his masters.  He is a pet, a slave, and a freak.  He is eventually purchased by the Queen, and when the King sees her new poppet, he assumes that Gulliver is some cunning clockwork animatron.  But upon thorough examination by three great scholars, who all “agreed that I could not be produced according to the regular laws of nature,” and posit that he might an embryo, an abortion, definitely not a dwarf.  They conclude he is “lusus naturae”: one of Nature’s little hiccups: a freak.  Oh.  But the king accepts that he is a rational being (for those who know the story, this is a bit of ironic foreshadowing).

Maybe the most well-known scene of the Brodingnag adventure is Gulliver’s interview with the king.  Gulliver takes great pride in discoursing upon “my own beloved country, of our trade and wars by sea and land, of our schisms in religion, and parties in the state.”  The king, however, draws quite different conclusions about the quality of European society:

he observed "how contemptible a thing was human grandeur, which could be mimicked by such diminutive insects as I: and yet," says he, "I dare engage these creatures have their titles and distinctions of honour; they contrive little nests and burrows, that they call houses and cities; they make a figure in dress and equipage; they love, they fight, they dispute, they cheat, they betray!" 

In a later conversation, since Gulliver had been getting rather miffed at his nation being abused, the king lays it plain:

But by what I have gathered from your own relation, and the answers I have with much pains wrung and extorted from you, I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.

I think the misanthropy we glimpsed earlier in Gulliver grows after this.  He left Lilliput feeling rather smug and superior to those petty people, but Brobdingnag reveals his own pettiness.  Not only that, but the things we glory in – the acquisition of wealth, the victory of arms, the things we regard as connoting success and strength – are revealed as worse than nothing, as theft, betrayal, and dishonor.  Not a rousing endorsement of humanism.

The third voyage is probably the least recognized by the general public.  Gulliver has put to sea once again, but his ship is overtaken by pirates and he is set adrift.  Just when he decides the end is nigh, a huge floating island passes above him in the sky and, by way of rescue, the islanders haul Gulliver up.

Our narrator has found himself on the floating isle of Laputa.  Whereas the first two voyages use differences in size and scale to reveal human folly, the third voyage emphasizes disconnection, and in two ways.  Literally, the island of Laputa, on which lives the royal court and the intelligentsia, is disconnected from the kingdom of which it is the head.  That “head,” metaphorically speaking, is completely detached from any intellectual reality.  The Laputans are obsessed with music and mathematics.  Their heads only tilt to one side (leaving them ignorant of what else exists on the other side), their eyes point in different directions.  Sensory reality is almost impossible for them to perceive, sort of.  They are so bound up in abstract speculations that they must hire servants to bop them in the mouth and ears to remind them to speak and listen to others.  Gulliver comments that these people were the only ones who were “altogether unmoved by the sight of my foreign habit and countenance.”

Swift targets the Royal Society and great scientists like Sir Isaac Newton in this part of the novel.  He had always deplored the abstract rationalism of certain kinds of science, just as he abhorred the “occult causes” proposed by Scholastic philosophers like St. Thomas Aquinas.  It’s not that Swift is anti-science or anti-reason.  No, he’s very much for them, provided that they are alloyed with wisdom and pragmatism.  They must do something to improve the conditions of life.  He likes applied science, not pure science.

Laputans cannot apply their knowledge to anything.  Guliiver speaks of being measured for a suit of clothes:

Those to whom the king had entrusted me, observing how ill I was clad, ordered a tailor to come next morning, and take measure for a suit of clothes. This operator did his office after a different manner from those of his trade in Europe. He first took my altitude by a quadrant, and then, with a rule and compasses, described the dimensions and outlines of my whole body, all which he entered upon paper; and in six days brought my clothes very ill made, and quite out of shape.

So, the tailor uses instruments of astronomy and navigation to get chest and inseam measurements.  Surprisingly, the suit doesn’t fit.  The same thing happens with their architecture: their “contempt. . . . for practical geometry” renders homes with walls that bevil and have not a single right angle in them.  They allow their astronomers to opine on political science, evidently believing that one science is as good as another.  Gulliver ascribes this to “a very common infirmity of human nature, inclining us to be more curious and conceited in matters where we have least concern, and for which we are least adapted either by study or nature.”  

That makes me think of all the times reporters – like at a sporting event or a red carpet gala – solicit the opinions of basketball players and actors on the state of the economy or on a matter of foreign relations.  I’m not saying “shut up and play” – people of whatever occupation are entitled to their viewpoints – I just don’t understand why we go to an athlete for guidance on a world in crisis.

Anyway.

The Academy of Lagado – which is the metropolis – pursues all manner of scientific innovation.  Can we generate sunlight from cucumbers?  Can we turn feces back into food?  Breed naked sheep!  Weave clothes from cobwebs!  Ah!  Here at last is technological application!

Gulliver describes one invention at the Academy that I think rather prescient for us in the 21st century.  In one large room, a professor has built a giant frame, twenty foot square, with students stationed around it.  The surface of the frame is covered cubes of wood linked together by slender wires.  On each surface of the cubes appear the words of the Laputan language.  When the students pull the wires, the cubes rotate, and cumulatively produce nonsensical sentences.  Whenever a fragment of something construable turns up, other students promptly take it down on paper.  The Academy possesses tomes of scientific writing produced thusly.

Sounds to me a lot like chatbots – isn’t it a bother to do all the research, thinking, and writing yourself?  Just use a large-language model.  It might not make any sense, but it looks exactly the same on paper.  That’s where we live, in a world of blithe techno-optimism.  We forever innovate for innovation’s sake.  How different, really, is one iPhone from the one that preceded it?  Bigger, clearer screens have not seemed to make TV shows or movies correspondingly better.  Will blockchain economies alleviate poverty?  Was the hydrogen bomb worth the technology?  It’s the presence of intelligence and the absence of wisdom.  Just cuz we can don’t mean we oughtta.  

That kind of shortsightedness pops up again when Gulliver hears about the struldbruggs, who are immortal.  Very rarely, a child will be born with a mark upon its forehead, indicating that it will never die.  When Gulliver hears of them, he is ecstatic:

Happy nation, where every child hath at least a chance for being immortal!  Happy people, who enjoy so many living examples of ancient virtue and have masters ready to instruct them in the wisdom of all former ages!  But happiest beyond all comparison are those excellent struldbrugs themselves who, being born exempt from that universal calamity of human nature, have their minds free and disengaged, without the weight and depression of spirits caused by the continual apprehension of death.

The gentleman with whom Gulliver spoke received such effusions with “a sort of a smile, which usually ariseth from pity to the ignorant.”  Of course, Gulliver has entirely misunderstood the curse of immortality: its never-ending old age, its weakness of body and mind, its lack of sensory pleasure, its grief at the passing of loved ones, its loneliness and bitterness.  Dementia is the only escape from the tragedy of immortality that can be wished for.  Gulliver admits that, once again, he has been foolish and placed value on the wrong things, or misapprehended a reality.  He had believed that, if he were immortal, he could “prevent that continual degeneracy of human nature.”  Alas.  

Incidentally, during this interlude on the struldbruggs, Gulliver uses the term “human nature” in two different, but sadly complementary, ways.  One, he uses it to mean death, “the universal calamity of human nature” – but, as we’ve seen throughout the book, the universal calamity of human nature also names their folly and moral degeneracy.  

Gulliver reaches peak misanthropy in his final voyage.

The final part of the book, recounting his travel to the land of the Houyhnhnms and the Yahoos, is really the most philosophically complex.  It’s essential to remain aware that Swift is a sui generis ironist and that Gulliver is an increasingly unreliable narrator.

At the start of this adventure, Gulliver is captain of his ship, but is cast ashore after his crew is corrupted and mutinies.  In this land, he first encounters the race of Yahoos, whose

shape was very singular and deformed, which a little discomposed me. . . . Their heads and breasts were covered with a thick hair, some frizzled, and others lank; they had beards like goats, and a long ridge of hair down their backs, and the fore parts of their legs and feet; but the rest of their bodies was bare, so that I might see their skins, which were of a brown buff colour. They had no tails, nor any hair at all on their buttocks, except about the anus, which, I presume, nature had placed there to defend them as they sat on the ground, for this posture they used, as well as lying down, and often stood on their hind feet. They climbed high trees as nimbly as a squirrel, for they had strong extended claws before and behind, terminating in sharp points, and hooked.

Gulliver finds these singularly savage beasts – the most hateful he has ever encountered.  Then, two horses approach him and seem to discuss him with each other:

in a very formal manner, they gently struck each other's right hoof before, neighing several times by turns, and varying the sound, which seemed to be almost articulate. They went some paces off, as if it were to confer together, walking side by side, backward and forward, like persons deliberating upon some affair of weight, but often turning their eyes towards me, as it were to watch that I might not escape. I was amazed to see such actions and behaviour in brute beasts; and concluded with myself, that if the inhabitants of this country were endued with a proportionable degree of reason, they must needs be the wisest people upon earth. 

These, of course, are the Houyhnhnms, the masters of this land (their name is meant to mimic the neighing of a horse).  Gulliver assumes them to be beasts of burden, albeit of a very well-trained sort, and concludes that the human trainers must be that much more advanced.  He is, of course, woefully wrong.  He begins to make out the word “Yahoo” in their conversation, and eventually realizes they take him to be one of the odious creatures.  Which he is.  Just with clothes.  And a hygiene regimen.  Kinda.

But Gulliver bristles at the description, we get one of the least self-aware lines of the novel: “although there were few greater lovers of mankind at that time than myself, yet I confess I never saw any sensitive being so detestable on all accounts.”  Hmmm.  Doesn’t exactly sound like Martin Luther King or Gandhi.  He’s genuinely horrified at what he sees as the essence of humanity:

My horror and astonishment are not to be described, when I observed in this abominable animal, a perfect human figure: the face of it indeed was flat and broad, the nose depressed, the lips large, and the mouth wide; but these differences are common to all savage nations, where the lineaments of the countenance are distorted, by the natives suffering their infants to lie grovelling on the earth, or by carrying them on their backs, nuzzling with their face against the mothers' shoulders. The fore-feet of the Yahoo differed from my hands in nothing else but the length of the nails, the coarseness and brownness of the palms, and the hairiness on the backs.

It is this disgust as the bestiality of humanity (which we saw earlier in his examination of the Brodingnagians) that drives him to really an abasing devotion to the Houyhnhnms, whom he reveres as the apotheosis of reason, truth, and beauty.  They have no concept of the lie, of untruthfulness – what they call “the thing which is not.” Gulliver meditates upon the dishonesty and perfidy of humankind and is morally disgusted.

His frequent interviews with his Houyhnhnm master further convince him of human degradation.  The master teaches that Yahoos, including Gulliver, are only capable of increasing and indulging their vices.  He “convinced me of a thousand faults in myself,” says Gulliver.

I can’t help but think of the Stockholm Syndrome phenomenon, in which an abused person begins to develop positive feelings toward the abuser.  That may sound outrageous to some listeners, because the Houyhnhnms seem to stand for the triumph of the Enlightenment worldview.  They seem to be the standard by which the failures of all the other societies Gulliver visits are measured.

But hang on, Sloopy.  Read over the conversations between Gulliver and his master.  Actually, note that Gulliver always calls the Houyhnhnm “master.”  Much of what the master says is outright racist and makes use of tropes that would persist in the so-called “race science” of the following century and the justifications for imperialism and manifest destiny.  The Yahoos are naturally vicious, naturally stupid, naturally brutal, naturally more physical and embodied (as opposed to the Houyhnhnms’ cerebralness).  And, in fact, there is a caste hierarchy among the Houyhnhnms:

the white, the sorrel, and the iron-grey, were not so exactly shaped as the bay, the dapple-grey, and the black; nor born with equal talents of mind, or a capacity to improve them; and therefore continued always in the condition of servants, without ever aspiring to match out of their own race, which in that country would be reckoned monstrous and unnatural.

And they have taken the human practice of horse-breeding (which is, of course, a form of eugenics by another name) and applied to their marriage customs:

In their marriages, they are exactly careful to choose such colours as will not make any disagreeable mixture in the breed. Strength is chiefly valued in the male, and comeliness in the female; not upon the account of love, but to preserve the race from degenerating; for where a female happens to excel in strength, a consort is chosen, with regard to comeliness.

Sounds rational, right, if you want to produce desired outcomes.  But it’s the same bloodless rationality we saw in “A Modest Proposal,” one that completely disregards the emotional or spiritual faculties.  Indeed, may deny their very existence.  And this is part and parcel of that horror of lying, of saying that which is not.  Sure, there may be no dishonesty, but neither can there be imagination or creativity or empathy.  Art is a lie that tells us the truth.  Novels and plays and paintings and symphonies are things which are not.

Gulliver is eventually banished by the Houyhnhnms and makes his way back to England.  But his detestation of humanity is complete.  But when he returns to his wife and family, “the sight of them filled me only with hatred, disgust, and contempt.”  The realization that he is the progenitor of yet more Yahoos strikes him with “the utmost shame, confusion, and horror.”  When his wife touches him, he faints dead away for over an hour.  Finally, he buys two horses and spends most of his time in the stable, for the horses “understand me tolerably well.”

Gulliver is utterly mad.  He becomes an animal in fleeing his animal nature.  He struggles to form any human bond.  He is entirely misanthropic.

By the end of Swift’s great novel, we see the satire turning inward.  Many scholars see Gulliver’s hatred of humankind as an expression of Swift’s own misanthropy.  I’m not so sure about that.  I mean, yes, Gulliver becomes a victim of his own moral absolutism.  He is small-p puritanical.  Swift, though, I don’t see as so extreme.  His is a great disappointment and discomfort with humanity, and it does express itself in moments of rage, but I think to see him projected completely in Gulliver does a disservice to Swift’s complexity.

If we step back and look at Gulliver’s Travels as a whole, one thing becomes clear very quickly: this is not a book that moves toward wisdom, balance, or enlightenment. It moves toward estrangement.

In Lilliput, Gulliver still feels like a sensible observer. He notices absurdity, but he assumes that human systems can be fixed if only people behaved more rationally. The satire is sharp, but it’s familiar. We recognize political pettiness, ideological nonsense, and power games—and we feel safely above them.

In Brobdingnag, that confidence starts to crack. When Gulliver explains European politics and warfare to the King, he expects admiration. Instead, he’s met with moral revulsion. For the first time, Gulliver begins to suspect that what he took for civilization might actually be barbarism dressed up in ceremony.

By the third voyage, Swift’s target shifts. The problem is no longer politics alone—it’s the human worship of reason itself. Laputa and Lagado show us intelligence without judgment, innovation without purpose, and learning without humanity. These people aren’t evil; they’re worse. They’re useless.

And then we arrive at the Houyhnhnms, where Swift stops pulling punches entirely.

Here, reason appears perfected—and humanity disappears. The Houyhnhnms are rational, orderly, honest, and utterly incapable of compassion. Gulliver embraces them so completely that he learns to hate his own species. And this is the moment where the book becomes genuinely disturbing, because Swift does not clearly step in to correct him.

Instead, Swift leaves us with a final image: a man who has learned to despise his family, his neighbors, and himself in the name of moral purity.  And then we remember – this is the man who has been narrating the entire novel for us – he was there at the beginning, that everyman, that John Doe: the same man who lives in the stables because he despises his Yahoo family.

So what, finally, is Swift saying?  Is he arguing that humans are irredeemable Yahoos?
Or is he warning us about what happens when we demand impossible moral perfection?
Is reason our salvation—or just another idol?  These questions, incidentally, pick at the very root of the satiric project, right?  Satire is supposed to “inform to reform” – is such a project futile, then?

Swift never resolves these questions, and that’s deliberate. Gulliver’s Travels is not a guidebook. It’s a provocation. Swift doesn’t want us to admire Gulliver by the end—he wants us to be uneasy about him, and about ourselves.

If there’s a moral here, it may be this: human beings are flawed, ridiculous, violent, and vain—but rejecting humanity entirely is its own kind of madness. Between Yahoo and Houyhnhnm, Swift leaves us suspended and uncomfortable.

So that’ll do it for today.  I hope you’ve enjoyed your time here.  Please take a moment to leave a 5 star rating on your listening platform – that helps alert new listeners to the good times we have here.  You can offer a little financial contribution, if you’re so moved.  It’ll help with the expenses of putting out the show.  There are a couple of options in the show notes: Support the Show and Buy Me a Coffee.  It’d really help and I’d be so grateful.  Thanks for listening and for all your kindness.  Cheers!