Gulliver's Travels

Jonathan Swift

3 ideas

1. Scale shift turns grandeur into pettiness

   Seen from far above, human politics looks trivial. The Lilliputians fight wars over which end of an egg to crack, and their courtiers win office by rope-dancing. Seen from far below, the human body looks grotesque, since Brobdingnagian skin shows every pore and blemish, and the giant king judges Gulliver's proud account of England to describe 'the most pernicious race of little odious vermin.' Changing the observer's size relative to the thing observed removes the flattering proportion we rely on to take our own affairs and bodies seriously.

2. Gulliver among the Houyhnhnms and Yahoos

   In Book IV, Gulliver reaches a land ruled by the Houyhnhnms, rational and passionless horses who keep the Yahoos as livestock. The Yahoos are filthy, greedy, quarrelsome humanoid beasts, and Gulliver slowly realizes that he is one of them. After his master hears his account of European war, law, and money, the Houyhnhnm assembly expels him as a dangerous Yahoo with reason. Gulliver comes home unable to bear his own family's smell and spends his days talking to horses in his stable.

3. Reason without practical sense produces ruin

   At the Grand Academy of Lagado, projectors try to extract sunbeams from cucumbers and to build houses from the roof down. The Laputans are so absorbed in mathematics and music that they need servants to flap bladders at them to get their attention, while the land below lies barren. Swift argues that speculative learning cut off from use and common experience is not a lesser good but an active harm, because it consumes resources and displaces working traditional methods.

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