LBST 302: Lecture on Swift
April 3, 1996
Copyright, Ian Johnston, Malaspina University-College, 1996

(Note that these pages are lecture notes only.  Some of them form
the basis for a lecture delivered in LBST 302 on April 3, 1996.
This is a slightly edited version of a lecture delivered in March
1994)

A. Introduction

In this lecture I wish to focus on two different things by way of
an introduction to Gulliver's Travels at the end of our first two
semesters of Liberal Studies.  Firstly, I would like to offer
something of a quick summary and synthesis of two or three of the
major issues we have considered in the past year by way of
highlighting the importance of the seventeenth-century literature
we have been dealing with lately.

Then, secondly, I want, by way of an introduction to Swift, to
adopt the approach that he is reacting against the rapidly
developing modernity of much of the seventeenth-century
thought--his satire is a cry of protest in the name of an older
tradition, one reaching back to Socrates, Plato, and St. Paul.
And yet, Swift, as a product of the new forces, is aware that we
cannot simply return to medieval or Greek times and pretend that
Newton never existed.

In short, I want eventually to lead us to the fairly obvious
point that Gulliver's Travels, one of the greatest works of
protest against modernity ever written, is no exercise in
nostalgia but a call to shape the rapidly growing power of
European culture in accordance with some old insights.  His great
fear is that, in the eagerness to follow the direction indicated
by Hobbes and Descartes, among others, which begins with an
energetic and optimistic debunking and rejection of tradition and
the enthronement of new rationality, we may be throwing out the
baby with the bathwater.

At the same time, I will maintain, Swift knows deep down that his
cause is lost.  Fuelling the pessimism and the anger of his
satire is, I think, a sense that the moral position he wishes to
defend is already being overrun.  Still, he's going to have his
say.

However, before discussing Swift, I want to offer a quick
retrospective.  In doing this, I'm going to be offering many very
large unsubstantiated generalizations, skating often on very thin
ice, but if I can keep moving quickly, the surface may sustain
me, and the questions and comments at the end can point out all
the flaws.

To give us a line through the retrospective and up to Swift, I
wish to concentrate upon a moral issue: the question of virtue.
And in order to make this issue as clear as I can, I would like
to pose two central questions in order quickly to survey some of
the answers to them we have considered:

  a.      What is the good life for me?
  b. How can we clearly and justly settle any disputes between
     us?

These are the fundamental questions of personal and public
morality or, in a word, of justice, and in looking at some of the
ways the writers we have read have sought to deal with them, I
can, I hope, achieve two things: provide a useful retrospective
synthesis and offer an insight into what Gulliver's Travels is
centrally about.

B. The Nature of Greek Virtue

The Greek answer to that questions I have just posed anchored
itself on a very interesting, influential, and sometime puzzling
concept: the idea of virtue.  Questions of right and wrong--in
the individual and in society--were to be dealt with by an appeal
to the character of the individuals making the decisions.

We began, way back in September, wrestling in Homer with a very
Greek notion of the good life--in which the concept of virtue
holds a central place.  Simply put, the Greek concept of virtue
maintains that the good or evil of life is bound up with a
person's character and the way that character is linked to
particular actions in particular situations, measured against the
full potential development of one's full humanity (one's human
telos).

The fully virtuous character seeks above all to be excellent.
His or her life is characterised by an energetic self-affirmation
to be the best that one can be.  And characters who achieve such
excellence are recognized and accepted as the natural leaders of
their society--Odysseus, Oedipus, Agamemnon.

The individual and the society guided by a concept of virtue in
this sense have an straightforward way to resolve their moral
difficulties--given a puzzling choice one looks to the way in
which the fully virtuous person would act.  Excellence in the
actions of those recognized as the best in the society sets the
moral standard for the individual and the community.  So the way
we resolve our difficulties is to look to the standard
exemplified by the most virtuous members of the community,
usually its publicly recognized leaders.

Socrates and Plato are, in this respect, quite consistent with
their older Greek traditions.  They give to questions of
character a distinctly inward turn, but virtue for both is
central to the good life for the individual and for the
community.  What makes Plato and Plato's Socrates revolutionary
is their attempt to redefine virtue in terms of intellectual
striving, to replace the multifaceted concept of virtue in, say,
Homer, where excellence involved a host of different external
activities supported by the traditions of the community, with the
pursuit of and attainment of a particular form of inner
knowledge.

I have no wish here to smooth over the obvious differences
between Plato's and Homer's conceptions of virtue, but I am more
interested at this point in the similarities.  In both, the
notion of virtue is aristocratic and exclusive--relatively few
people in the community are capable of attaining full virtue.
There are many possible degrees of excellence.  But the
responsibility for educating us in virtue and adjudicating our
differences lies squarely with the most virtuous.  Therefore, it
is appropriate in the best-functioning community that the most
excellent have the power and the glory and the less excellent
obey.  For this concept of virtue also involves the ability to
recognize those more excellent than ourselves and to adjust our
behaviour willingly in accordance with those differences.

Aristotle offers essentially the same vision--apparently much
less rigorous than the vision in Plato's Republic--but still
based on a hierarchy of excellence.  The community is held
together by the constant striving for the excellence natural to
human beings and by its attainment in those who become the
leaders.  Since they are virtuous, they will have the characters
suited to lead--their intelligence, emotions, motives, and
physical attributes, summed up in the concept of practical wisdom
(phronesis), will have been properly socialized into the best
behaviour at all times in many complex different situations.

C. Virtue in The Old and New Testaments

In the selections of the Old Testament we met apparently quite a
different conception of the moral life, one guided above all by
clear rules handed down by God and guarded as the authority on
all moral questions, individual and communal.  Here virtue (in
the Greek sense) is not the operative principle; rather faith and
obedience are.  We resolve our disputes by an appeal to the rules
and to the interpretation of the rules, which are binding on all.

There is no hierarchy of excellence here--only two classes of
people--the faithful and obedient, on the one hand, and the
sinners and pagans on the other.  To be a member of the faithful,
among God's chosen people, is to be equally blessed along with
everyone else.  At the heart of the OT conception of the good
life for the individual and the community is a radical equality
of all believers.

The leaders are those who have a direct insight into God's
rules--either because they have a prophetic connection to God and
have seen Him face to face or because they are specially
chosen--for reasons known only to God--to interpret the will of
God.  Their own particular virtue (in the Greek sense) is not the
issue.  They have been specially chosen for reasons which have
nothing in particular to do with their virtue (in the Greek
sense): the act of being chosen confers virtue upon them.

And in the New Testament, this same radically egalitarian element
is strong.  To be a good Christian requires very little in the
way of traditional Greek virtue (either Homeric or Socratic).
The tax gatherer, the prostitute, the Centurion, the wealthy
landowner, the widow, and the fisherman are all equally members
of Christ's community of believers, provided only that they take
up the challenge and follow Christ's message.

From one perspective this, too, is a defense of the life anchored
on virtue: human beings have a characteristic function to fulfil
in order to attain the good life, and central to that function is
the education of the character in the truths embodied in the
nature of things and summed up by the three Cardinal Virtues,
faith, hope, and charity, and exemplified in the highest role
model: the life of Jesus Christ.

The most influential modern philosopher defending the concept of
virtue as a guide to the moral life has summed up an important
linking similarity between the Greek and the Biblical tradition
as follows:

     The NT's account of the virtues, even if it differs as much
     as it does in content from Aristotle's--Aristotle would
     certainly not have admired Jesus Christ and he would have
     been horrified by Saint Paul--does have the same logical and
     conceptual structure as Aristotle's account.  A virtue is,
     as with Aristotle, a quality the exercise of which leads to
     the achievement of the human telos.  The good for man is of
     course a supernatural and not only a natural good, but
     supernature redeems and completes nature.  Moreover the
     relationship of virtues as means to the end which is human
     incorporation in the divine kingdom of the age to come is
     internal and not external, just as it is in Aristotle.
     (MacIntyre, After Virtue)

D. The Medieval Christian Tradition

The early Christian tradition, as it developed in the first five
centuries after the death of Jesus was, from one perspective, an
fruitful and sometimes very uneasy synthesis of these two
traditions.  Given the similarities MacIntyre mentions above, it
is easy to see why the synthesis could be made--but there were
tensions within the merging of Greek thinking and Biblical creeds
in early Christian thinking.

One aspect of this tension came out in the debates about what
exactly Christianity should be, and what sort of demands it
should make on the virtue of the believer.  The Early Christian
community, especially once the persecutions started, was faced
with an urgent problem on this question of Christian virtue: the
Greek or the Biblical tradition.  Simply put, it focused on the
question whether the Christian community should be, as the
Biblical tradition in many eyes appeared to demand, a spiritual
all star team--a radically equal band of true believers, with no
admittance for those whose faith had wavered, or should the
Christian community be a spiritual hospital, with room for all
grades of Christian virtue--from saint to repentant sinner--and
with a hierarchy of virtue within the Christian world and
authority given to those of specially demonstrated virtue to
educate, cure, exhort, provide role models, and, if necessary, to
punish.

We see the ambiguity of this inheritance manifesting itself in
the writings of St. Paul, who can, on the one hand, urge the
Romans, as a community of Christian equals, to work out their
problems together and communally and, on the other hand, invoke
his own special virtue, qualitatively better than theirs because
of his conversion experience, as a reason why they should follow
his advice and example, and see in him an authority figure.

This ambiguity, it is interesting to note, may be one of the main
reasons why St. Paul is a constant reference point for those who
wish to insist upon the authority of the Church (like St.
Augustine) and for those who wish to challenge the authority of
the Church (like Martin Luther).

The resolution of the questions arising from the Greek and
Biblical traditions of virtue was not easy, and it took the
lifework and genius of St. Augustine, among others, to sort out
the answer.  But essentially, as the Church developed into a
powerful social institution, the Christian view of the good life
for the individual and the community fused the two traditions.

On the one hand, all Christians were spiritually equal, equally
bound to the seven Christian virtues (the three Theological
Virtues of faith, hope, and charity, and the Four Cardinal
Virtues of prudence, temperance, fortitude, and justice), and
equally subject to God's judgement.  On the other hand, the
Church existed as a complex hierarchy of spiritual authority,
with those at the top responsible for guiding the spiritual life
of those beneath.  Doctrinally Christians might be equal, but
ecclesiastically there were clear differences between the parson,
the bishop, the devout farmer, and the king.  Salvation was an
equal concern for everyone; but extra ecclesia nulla salvatio (no
salvation outside the Church).

The central issue for the Christian was still, however, virtue.
When we read Hildegard's poetry, we saw how she looks at nature
as a constant manifestation of the work of God and, therefore, as
a constant reminder to all believers of their central purpose on
earth.  Her poems are not simply a celebration of God's
handiwork; they are also, and more importantly, a call to virtue.

And the duality in the Christian view of virtue is evident in
Chaucer and Dante.  From one point of view, Chaucer's Ploughman
and Parson, although very humble on the social scale, are ideal
Christians--their virtue is independent of their station in life,
their physical appearance, their worldly goods, and their fame.
The are ideal figures, on par with the socially far more
important knight, and what Chaucer celebrates in each one of them
is the full attainment of Christian virtue.  Christian Saints,
after all could come from any station in life.  On the other
hand, in Dante's Christian vision, there is a clear hierarchy of
virtue: the more important the ecclesiastical officer, the more
serious the offence and the punishment and the greater the
spiritual glory for full virtue.

This combination of the Greek and the Biblical views of virtue
proved to be immensely useful and effective.  For it linked all
members of the Christian community as spiritual equals in a
manner distinctly egalitarian, while at the same time authorizing
a strictly organized hierarchy within the Church and thus
justifying a structure of authority in spiritual matters and in
the host of secular concerns which arose from them.

Note the central metaphor of the guests arriving at the Great
Supper (in Luke 14:

     Then the master of the house, being angry said to his
     servant, Go out quickly into the streets and lanes of the
     city, and bring in hither the poor, and the maimed, and the
     halt, and the blind.
     And the servant said, Lord, it is done as thou hast
     commanded, and yet there is room.
     And the lord said unto the servant, Go out into the highways
     and hedges, and compel them to come in, that my house may be
     filled.

As guests all ranks were all equal, but there were people with
authority to compel those to come in.  Outside the equal feast
there was no salvation.

Thus, the member of the Christian community was bound together
with those authorities over him, recognizing that the same
spiritual rules applied to all of them (including those in
authority), while at the same time the leaders had a clear
mandate to carry out all the tasks necessary for the complex
organization of social life.

The union was not, however, without its strains.  And throughout
the Middle Ages there were sporadic but very serious challenges,
often in the name of a more spiritually pure and committed sense
of Christian virtue.  In other words, the radically egalitarian
nature of Biblical Christianity (the moral all star team) kept
reasserting itself in the face of an increasingly powerful and
influential Church establishment.  Sometimes the Church could
respond to the challenge by incorporating it (e.g., the mendicant
orders); at other times the Church responded with force.  So by
and large the union of the Greek tradition and the Biblical
tradition held.  And Aristotle's Ethics could remain a popular
handbook for virtue among people who considered themselves
thoroughly Christian.

E. The Uses and Abuses of the Medieval View of Virtue

After reading Machiavelli and Hobbes, it's easy to be somewhat
cynical about this view of individual and communal virtue--the
notion that the natural purpose of human life is to strive for a
standard of spiritual excellence--given what they say about the
innately corrupt nature of human beings.  And there is no
shortage of examples of corrupt popes, bishops, and prelates to
gratify the cynic.  But, in fact, the Medieval concept of virtue,
for all the lapses, worked remarkably well for hundreds of years.

For many popes and bishops and Catholic kings took their
Christian responsibilities very seriously indeed--and for a
believer the stakes were very high--the fate of one's eternal
soul hung in the balance: one's virtue was up for judgement.  So
the notion of justice as a matter of virtue in the characters of
those in authority was by no means ineffective.

This was, it needs to be stressed, not simply a narrow matter of
personal morality.  The concept of virtue required just decisions
in a host of economic and judicial matters.  Bishops, cardinals,
popes, and kings had to deliberate about the just price and the
fair wage, the appropriateness of interest, the proper division
of territories, and a host of secular matters.  In all of these
among the true Christians, the central issue was this: What was
the appropriately Christian way to behave?  What behaviour was
compatible with the highest standards of Christian virtue?

By way of impressing this point upon you--that the Medieval
Christian notion of virtue was indeed a serious principle and
not, as Machiavelli suggests, always simply a convenient
cover--I'd like briefly to mention one of the most extraordinary
events in the history of Western expansion, an event little known
nowadays perhaps, but one which had important effects lasting
right down to the present day.

The example concerns the decision of Charles V of Spain, at the
time Europe's most powerful and wealthiest monarch, who was
becoming fabulously rich with all the gold being shipped home
from the New World, to call a halt to all Spanish expansion until
such time as the philosophers and theologians could determine
"the manner in which conquests should be carried on . . . justly
and with security of conscience," that is, whether his permission
and encouragement of such expansion was compatible with his
Christian virtue.

There is no reason here to question Charles's sincerity.  He was
an intensely devout man, concerned about the state of his own
virtue, and he was profoundly disturbed by what was going on in
the name of the Spanish monarch in the New World.  So he summoned
from all over Europe the best scholars and held a long debate on
the question.  In that debate in August 1550, Bartolome de Las
Casas presented a case on behalf of the natives of South America,
550 pages of closely argued Latin prose, taking five days out in
the hot sun to present his case that the Spanish had no right to
take anything from the natives.

As a result of that debate, a significant attempt was made to
guide the Spanish treatment of the New World inhabitants in
accordance with moral principles, a process which, however
questionable we may now find them and however ineffective they
might have been in many instances, did, in fact, help to preserve
some of the essential features of the Amerindian cultures (the
language, for instance), in a way that never happened in North
America, where venture capitalists, as products of the new age,
had considerably less interest in their own virtue than did
Charles V.

I mention this example simply to stress that, whatever we may
think about it, the curious combination of Aristotle's Ethics,
the New Testament, and a derivative neo-Platonic notion of virtue
did provide for hundreds of years a workable framework for
dealing with the two questions I raised at the start of this
lecture.

Of course, as we all know, eventually that workable synthesis
came apart.  I referred briefly to this in the lecture on Hobbes
I gave a couple of weeks ago.  And the major cause of that is
clear enough: there was not enough virtue on display.  In other
words, those in authority became much less concerned about their
consciences than Charles V was, and like King Lear lost the sense
of their own personal responsibility as excellent people to carry
out just actions.

There seems little doubt that the great source of the dissolution
of traditional virtue was money: once Europe started, during the
Renaissance, to become rich from eastern trade and New World
gold, the concept of virtue in the ruler as the mainstay of
Church authority began to crumble.

We can already see in Chaucer and Dante the emphatic links
between money and sin.  And when we read Machiavelli we come to
understand just where an enormous amount of this new money was
going: into mercenary armies to conquer adjacent territories.
Machiavelli, as we argued about, recommended that the ruler thus
junk the traditional concept of virtue (except as a convenient PR
facade) and concentrate on power at all costs.  In virtu there is
no virtue.  Whether one agrees or not that Machiavelli's advice
is useful or disastrous, his call for an end to the traditional
concept of virtue (and his numerous examples of what many of the
rulers in Italy were, in fact, doing) is an eloquent reminder of
just how that Medieval Christian ideal was falling apart.

(In Hobbes, of course, the notion of virtue has almost
disappeared completely.  The Commonwealth he sets up does not
require its citizens to be virtuous in any traditional manner, so
long as they are obedient to the will of the sovereign: one's
character was essentially irrelevant; what matters is obedience
to the law)

F. The Need for a New Order

I have already referred, in the earlier lecture on Hobbes, to the
ways in which the destruction of the traditional medieval
community was linked to the final split of Catholic Europe into a
number of rival doctrinal camps.  And it's clear that one major
victim of this loss of a commonly held spiritual authority was
the concept of virtue.  With competing role models, no agreed
upon interpretative authority, a babble of conflicting voices,
and clashing of competing armies, the community stability
essential to the notion of virtue disappeared.  Thus, the old
idea of human life having a traditional spiritual purpose in
accordance with which we could organize our understanding of
ourselves and our moral duties began gradually to lose its grip.
For the shared agreement about what that goal might be and how
best we might reach it was gone.  And with it went--very slowly
but inexorably--the most important way human beings had organized
their moral understanding of themselves and their communities for
over a thousand years: the idea of virtue.

It's difficult for us to understand just how seriously
dislocating this experience was--one of the most profound
spiritual and social crises in the history of western Europe.
All of a sudden there were competing authorities, each one
announcing a different agenda, commanding a different allegiance,
redefining or urging us to abandon virtue.  The conflicts
separated communities, families, couples--and the stakes were the
highest possible: the future of one's immortal soul.

Of course, the conflict had important political, economic, and
national dimensions, and it is important to acknowledge these,
but one should never merely subsume the conflict under one of
these rubrics--the spiritual conflict was also very real.  No
longer was there any certain assurance about what defined the
good life for me or about what were the appropriate ways to sort
out our difficulties--doctrinal, economic, social, and personal.
So profound was the distress, that there was a widespread feeling
at the start of the seventeenth century that the world must be
coming to an end.

In this context we can understand something of the moral
imperative under the interest in the new science as a source of
order.  The situation is not unlike that we discussed when we
came to Plato's writings right after dealing with the horrifying
vision of Euripides's Bacchae.  And it is no accident that many
of the seventeenth-century thinkers and their eighteenth-century
followers (like Hobbes and Rousseau) saw themselves as the
spiritual heirs of Plato, seeking a new certainty in the realm of
mathematics to deal with the rampant scepticism, atheism, and
power grabbing all around them.

But this comparison with Plato needs to be treated with great
care.  It is true that, in some respects, the rise of seventeenth-
century science marks the first beginnings of an energetic
revival of Plato's project--the quest for certainty through
mathematics and through a repudiation of traditional authorities.
But we need to be careful here for a number of reasons:

  a. Plato's concern, at least in the early dialogues (including
     the Republic) is directed first and foremost by a moral
     concern--a need to know about the Good.  A certain form of
     education will foster that, but turning our attention to the
     study and mastery of nature is emphatically not part of the
     project.  Socrates is quite firm on this point: education
     for virtue is the plan, with contemplation of the ideal as
     the goal.  He is not interested in applying dialectic to a
     study of the natural world for the sake of power.

  b. Stated another way, Plato's main interest is on what
     Aristotle later calls final causes--moral questions about
     the Good.  What is true virtue, how do we come to understand
     it, how do we encourage virtue in the citizens and the
     rulers?  The seventeenth-century scientist-philosophers were
     overwhelmingly concerned, as their first priority, with
     efficient causes.  Let us study the mechanism, find out how
     it works, how to control and manipulate it.

     It's true that many of them, especially in England, hoped
     that through the study of efficient causes we would finally
     come to understand moral questions.  As Bacon expressed it,
     the chain of efficient causes would eventually lead us to
     the throne of God.  And Newton also emphatically states that
     the modern science will provide insight into final causes
     (as did Boyle).

     Descartes, of course, was not convinced on this point.
     There was no way in which human rationality and
     experimentation were ever going to reach an understanding of
     God's purposes.  On the other hand, Descartes's firm
     optimism about the powers of the enquiring mind held open
     the hope that we could achieve some certainty on moral
     questions, without direct recourse to the Divine Will.

What's important to get out of this brief consideration of the
new science is its extraordinarily optimistic and confident
agenda: there could, indeed, be a basis for a new shared
understanding of all questions of immediate importance.  All we
needed to do was apply the human intellect to the natural world
in a manner available to anyone and with a proper method and
accurate experiments, we could find the appropriate answers to
our two questions.

In the literature of seventeenth century, there is no shortage of
statements about this optimistic project.  But for me the key one
has always been what Galileo says in a brief exchange between
Simplicio (the spokesman for the orthodox traditionalists) and
Salvati (the spokesman for Galileo) in the Dialogues Concerning
the Two World Systems:

          Simp.       But if Aristotle is to be abandoned, whom
          shall we have for a guide in philosophy?  Suppose you
          name some author.
          Salv.       We need guides in forests and in unknown
          lands, but on plains and in open places only the blind
          need guides.  It is better for such people to stay at
          home, but anyone with eyes in his head and his wits
          about him could serve as a guide for them.

The unabashed confidence that all is available to us if we will
but look about us, together with the peremptory dismissal of that
very important question, indicates as well as anything else the
vigorous optimism that human beings will be more than equal to
the task of applying mathematics to the world, if they will just
set aside their respect for a tradition which is holding them
back and get on with the job.

Besides, they knew, as did everyone else, that there was no
turning back.  They were onto something; they saw it as a rich
alternative to a tradition which had failed them; and, with the
publication of Newton's Principia in 1667, almost universally
accepted as the definitive answer to a question no one had been
able to resolve before, they had the proof that they were on the
right track.

G.  The Great Tory Satirists: Pope, Swift, Johnson

But this quickly rising faith in a new science did not go
unopposed--and not simply by Church authorities worried about
their own power or the literal truth of scripture (although they
did voice vigorous objections).  The new science raised serious
doubts in the minds of those moralists who did not share the
optimistic assumptions of the new natural scientists, because for
them it threatened the key concept of virtue.

And so there was a Conservative reaction.  In England this
reaction is linked to three of the greatest writers in English
literature: Alexander Pope, a Roman Catholic, Samuel Johnson, an
orthodox Anglican, and by Jonathan Swift, an Anglican cleric.  In
addition to their religious beliefs, all three were very well
versed in the classics, and derived much of their inspiration
from classical Roman (especially Stoic) traditions.  In a word,
they were great Christian humanists.  These three, among others,
set their sights against the modern trends.  Their favourite
weapon was satire, and their mood generally pessimistic.

What were they objecting to?  And what did they want?  Simply
put, they did not buy into the great hopes of the new theoretical
science and rational philosophy, that it would contribute to the
moral improvement of human beings.  On the contrary, they saw it
as a very dangerous reassertion of pride--a perilous confidence
in the powers of human reasoning, which quite undermined the
single most important point of traditional faith, the strong
sense of human beings as limited fallen creatures, mired in
ignorance.

So they saw the surge in confidence at the start of the
eighteenth century--the increasing wealth, the energetic trade
and colonization, the amazing scientific discoveries, the
proliferation of capitalist projects, this enormously exuberant
and to them largely secular preoccupation--as taking people's
minds away from the most important moral imperative: their own
virtue.

At the same time, these Tory satirists were no advocates of a
return to sixteenth-century religion. For they were as aware as
anyone of what goes on in a religious civil war.  So they direct
their satires also at those who are urging a more "irrational"
approach to religion: the enthusiastic preachers (like the
Methodists, the Baptists, and other non-conforming protestants).
they want, in other words, to carve a course between what they
say as the extreme irrationality of the new religions and the
excessive rationality of the new natural philosophy.

And thus, to simply matters considerably, the Tory moralists set
their sights primarily on three main targets:

  a. those who in a passionate zeal for their version of the
     truth of religion based their message on an appeal to
     people's feelings (especially the "enthusiastic"
     protestants);

  b. the growing commercialism of life, with its emphasis on
     fashion, leisure, money, licentiousness, greed; increasingly
     this money was not dependent upon land or the community--it
     was a speculative wealth of the urban middle class, the
     product of venture capitalism, which they saw as corrupting;

  c. the new rationalism in philosophy and natural philosophy,
     especially the fierce logic of someone like Descartes,
     divorcing his intellectual explorations from traditions and
     experience and setting up the authority of his own rational
     enquiries over everything else, insisting that the world
     answer his mathematically based understanding of it; they
     distrusted, too, its enormously optimistic confidence that
     human problems were capable of human solutions through the
     application of appropriate methods.  Thus they were openly
     hostile to the growing hopes of theoretical and experimental
     science.

What these added up to was a fierce hostility to a changing
attitude toward the nature of human beings--the growing notion
that human beings could "progress," could become different by
overcoming all problems, including those inherent in their own
natures, and could eventually become "happy."  They were deeply
suspicious of any philosophy which made easy generalizations
about the nature of human beings and which then constructed a
theory of knowledge or of society on such a rational
understanding.  For them human beings were much more enigmatic
and ultimately dangerous than such easy rational generalizations
suggested.  Human life, they argued, should be lived on the basis
of one's personal interactions and on the accumulated experience
of such interactions, not in service to some idealized
theoretical picture of human beings.

For these Tory satirists the new natural philosophy was a
dangerous assertion of human pride--an illusion based upon the
rejection of the traditional wisdom and to them a naive faith in
the possibilities of acquiring metaphysical certainty.  This for
them was a recipe for disaster.  Human beings were not on this
earth to be knowledgeable, happy, and powerful, but rather to be
as morally virtuous as possible: that was their central and most
difficult challenge as human beings, the quest for spiritual
excellence.  And the new thinking was threatening this old
Socratic insight.  As Monk writes (talking of Swift):

     Why was Swift inimical to these tendencies--all of which are
     familiar aspects of our world today?  Very simply, I think,
     because he was a Christian and a humanist.  As a Christian
     he believed that man's fallen nature could never transcend
     its own limitations and so fulfil the hopes of that
     optimistic age; as a humanist he was concerned for the
     preservation of those moral and spiritual qualities which
     distinguish men from beasts and for the health and
     continuity of fruitful tradition in church, state, and the
     sphere of the mind.  As both Christian and humanist, he knew
     that men must be better than they are and that, though our
     institutions can never be perfect, they need not be corrupt.
     the "savage indignation" which motivates all of Swift's
     satires arises from his anger at the difference between what
     men are and what they might be if they only would rise to
     the full height of their humanity.

Thus, they attacked the notions central to the modern scientific
enterprise in defense of a particular vision of Christianity--a
moderate and reasonable faith, which held to the need for
traditional authorities, an acceptance of scripture but without
nitpicking doctrinal disputes, and a strong sense of the
limitations of the human understanding.  They wanted, above all,
that people--regardless of their particular version of religion
and interpretations of scripture--should never forget they were
fallen creatures in need of spiritual guidance and sustenance,
and that the traditional virtues--faith, hope, and charity--and
the traditional institutions whose job it was to insist upon such
virtues (bishops and kings) were more important than some future
discoveries or powers over nature.

     Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
     The proper study of mankind is Man.
     Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,
     A being darkly wise, and rudely great:
     With too much knowledge for the skeptic side,
     With too much weakness for the Stoic's pride,
     He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest,
     In doubt to deem himself a god, or beast;
     In doubt his mind or body to prefer,
     Born but to die, and reasoning but to err;
     Alike in ignorance, his reason such,
     Whether he things too little, or too much:
     Chaos of thought and passion, all confused;
     Still by himself abused, or disabused;
                                        Created half to rise, and
                                        half to fall;
     Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;
     Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled"
     The glory, jest, an riddle of the world!
                                             (Alexander Pope,
                         Essay on Man, II, 1-18)

To understand their position, we can consider two key terms in
the arguments: nature and reason. The enthusiastic religions had
no use for the second term, and they competed endlessly about the
true nature of human beings.  Because they were hopelessly
divided over the interpretation of scripture and what that
indicated about human beings, they had no shared vision of the
good life for the individual or of the political and
ecclesiastical consequences of that view.

The new natural philosophers had a mechanical conception of
nature, and a mathematically based conception of reason.  They
varied considerably on their view of human nature (from the
possible atheism of Hobbes, to the dualism of Descartes, to the
mystical protestantism of Newton, to the more or less orthodox
Anglicanism of Boyle).  But the reason they appealed to was, as
we have seen, in Galileo, Newton, Descartes, and Hobbes, the
reasoning best exemplified in mathematics, especially geometry.
And this, they insisted, would be the best method to pursue in
dealing with questions arising out of all nature, including human
nature.

The Tory satirists saw reason differently.  For them it was more
a matter of reasonableness.  Human beings needed reason to
control and guide and repress the passions, but the reason they
adhered to was something much more like common sense prudence
than deductive logic.  Reason included a sturdy sense of the
limits of rationality, with no false confidence, and they never
tired of reminding their readers that such confidence was
misplaced and that human beings and societies who placed their
faith in such rationality would suffer dire moral consequences.
Hence, they were no admirers of the sort of reasoning exemplified
in Descartes--the intense rational speculation about ultimate
questions.

Nature for them revealed a natural order, which was reflected in
the political and ecclesiastical structures of the state (hence
their conservative political stance and their admiration for
traditional literatures, traditional communal structures,
especially that of Rome).  As such, virtue for them was still an
operative principle, and the state of one's soul the primary
concern.  No enthusiastic religion or rational philosophy was
going to replace the old verities.  In this life, scientific
projects to improve the lot of the poor were going to be no
replacement for traditional charity.  For the attainment of
happiness was a dangerous illusion.  In the words of Imlac,
Johnson's Abyssinian thinker:

     In enumerating the particular comforts of life, we shall
     find many advantages on the side of the Europeans.  They
     cure wounds and diseases with which we languish and perish.
     We suffer inclemencies of weather which they can obviate.
     they have engines for the despatch of many laborious works,
     which we must perform by manual industry.  There is such
     communication between distant places that one friend can
     hardly be said to be absent from another.  Their policy
     removes all public inconveniences; they have roads cut
     through their mountains, and bridges laid upon their rivers.
     And, if we descend to the privacies of life, their
     habitations are more commodious, and their possessions are
     more secure . . . The Europeans . . . are less unhappy than
     we, but they are not happy. Human life is everywhere a state
     in which much is to be endured, and little to be enjoyed.
     (Johnson, Rasselas, Chapter XI)

The distrust of projects to improve happiness comes out
particularly clearly in Book III of Gulliver's Travels, when
Swift satirizes the application of the modern project to
agriculture.  In many respects, Swift's satire is weakest in Book
III because he is attacking the new way of thinking on its
strongest territory.  But he had a real cause in looking at what
the scientific projectors were doing in agriculture, which was
the first arena in which the new thinking was vigorously applied
to the communal life.

For the application of new scientific procedures to agriculture
with a view to making production more efficient was well under
way in Swift's time, and the social dislocations it caused were
very serious.  I alluded to this in the lecture on Hobbes.
Simply put, it involved something we are still wrestling with:
the creation of large agricultural units in order to gain the
advantages of economies of scale.  This meant driving the
peasants off the common land, enclosing it, and turning the
production over to more efficient private interests, now able to
deal with large-scale farming.

In the long run this did produce a much more efficient
agriculture--and England was the pioneer--but the total upheaval
and destruction of many traditional communities was the price
(unlike France, where the enclosure movement did not have the
same effect; we are still thus dealing with the problems of the
small scale farmer in France).  So in the short term, the time in
which Swift is writing, the social distress was acute, as
thousands of subsistence-level farmers were driven off the land
they needed to support themselves, in order to permit large
landowners to revolutionize agricultural production in a modern
scientific manner.  Swift correctly saw this measure as a vital
blow at the moral life, because it struck at the heart of what
kept the traditional communities vital.

Like many of the new seventeenth-century thinkers, these Tory
satirists were suspicious of language, especially of the extreme
metaphorical uses of it to inflame opinions (as we have seen in
Hobbes).  But they wanted to control the excesses in the
understanding of traditional ideas rather than to jettison that
tradition and put language on a new footing entirely.  So we see
in Gulliver's Travels, one of the points about Lilliput and about
the land of the horses which Gulliver most admires, is their
attitude towards words and the uses of words in literature.

One way to appreciate these points is to check the adjectives of
commendation and approbation.  For these writers the highest
praise one would render an adult would be to call him or her
sensible--guided by a nice appreciation for experience, adjusting
their understanding of things and their feelings about things
according to a robust sense of how the world actually worked
according to our sense experience of it, without being taken in
by delusions about religion, money, grandly rational theoretical
structures, or one's own importance.

By contrast, words like imaginative, extravagant, enthusiastic,
or fond indicated disapproval--an excess of feeling or ideas
divorced from the perceived realities of the world.  When Swift,
for example, says of the horses in Book IV, that they are not
fond of their children, he is indicating an essential feature of
their rationality--they do not let excess devotion to their
offspring impair their sturdy good sense about the world.  AT the
same time, of course, they do not let their aptitude for
mathematics delude them into thinking that that form of reason is
the proper basis for understanding the natural world.

H. Gulliver's Travels

Swift's Gulliver's Travels is without question the most famous
prose work to emerge from this Tory Satiric tradition.  It is the
strongest, funniest, and yet in some ways most despairing cry for
a halt to the trends initiated by seventeenth-century philosophy.
It is the best evidence we can read to remind us that the rise of
the new rationality did not occur unopposed.

Before looking at how Swift deals with his resistance, however, I
want to talk a bit about the basic techniques Swift uses to
structure his satire.  For Gulliver's Travels is not just a great
work of moral argument; it is also a wonderful satire, and
whatever one thinks of Swift's moral position, it is generally
difficulty not to acknowledge his supreme skill as a satirist.

1. Some Observations on Swift's Satiric Technique

If the main purpose of any satire is to invite the reader to
laugh at a particular human vice or folly, in order to invite us
to consider an important moral alternative, then the chief task
facing the satirist is to present the target in such a way that
we find constant delight in the wit, humour, and surprises
awaiting us.

So to appreciate just why some satires work and others do not,
one should look carefully at how the satirist sets up the target
and delivers his judgement upon it in such a way as to sustain
our interest.  In other words, the essence of good satire is not
the complexity in the moral message coming across, but in the
skilful style with which the writer seeks to demolish his target.

When we discussed Aristophanes, I suggested there that one main
ingredient in satire is distortion or exaggeration--an invitation
to see something very familiar, perhaps even something we
ourselves do--in such a way that it becomes simultaneously
ridiculous (or even disgusting) and yet funny, comical--something
no reasonable person would engage in.

Now, the first important question to ask of any satirist is how
he or she achieves the necessary comic distortion which
transforms the familiar into the ridiculous.  And Swift's main
technique for achieving this--and a wonderful technique for
satire--is the basic plot of science fiction: the voyage by an
average civilized human being into unknown territory and his
return back home.

This apparently simple plot immediately opens up all sorts of
satiric possibilities, because it enables the writer constantly
to  play off three different perspectives in order give the
reader a comic sense of what is very familiar.  It can do this in
the following ways:

  a. If the strange new country is recognizably similar to the
     reader's own culture, then comic distortions in the new
     world enable the writer to satirize the familiar in a host
     of different ways, providing, in effect, a cartoon style
     view of the reader's own world.

  b. If the strange new country is some sort of utopia--a
     perfectly realized vision of the ideals often proclaimed but
     generally violated in the reader's own world--then the
     satirist can manipulate the discrepancy between the ideal
     new world of the fiction and the corrupt world of the reader
     to illustrate repeatedly just how empty the pretensions to
     goodness really are in the reader's world.

  c. But the key to this technique is generally the use of the
     traveller, the figure who is, in effect, the reader's
     contemporary and fellow countryman.  How that figure reacts
     to the New World can be a constant source of amusement and
     pointed satiric comment, because, in effect, this figure
     represents the contact between the normal world of the
     reader and the strange New World of either caricatured
     ridiculousness or utopian perfection.

We can see Swift moving back and forth between the first two
techniques, and this can create some confusion.  For example, in
much of Book I, Lilliput is clearly a comic distortion of life in
Europe.  The sections on the public rewards of leaping and
creeping or the endless disputes about whether one should eat
one's eggs by breaking them at the bigger or the smaller end or
the absurdity of the royal proclamations are obvious and funny
distortions of the court life, the pompous pretentiousness of
officials, and the religious disputes familiar to Swift's
readers.

At the same time, however, there are passages where he holds up
the laws of Lilliput as some form of utopian ideal, in order to
demonstrate just how much better they understand true
reasonableness than do the Europeans.  In Book II he does the
same: for most of the time the people of Brobdingnag are again
caricatured distorted Europeans, but clearly the King of
Brobdingnag is an ideal figure.

This shift in perspective on the New World is at times confusing.
Swift is, in effect, manipulating the fictional world to suit his
immediate satirical purposes.  It's easy enough to see what he's
doing, but it does, in some sense, violate our built-up
expectations.  Just how are we supposed to take Lilliput and
Brobdingnag--as a distorted Europe or as a utopia or what?  This
lack of a consistent independent reality to the fictional world
which he has created is one of the main reasons why Gulliver's
Travels is not considered a one of the first novels (since one of
the requirements of a novel, it is maintained, is a consistent
attitude towards the fictional reality one has created: one
cannot simply manipulate it at will to prove a didactic point).

In Book IV, Swift deals more consistently with this ambiguity in
the New World by dividing it into two groups: the satirized
Europeans, the Yahoos, and the ideally reasonable creatures, the
horses.  So here there is less of a sense of shifting purpose at
work.  That may help to account, in part, for the great power of
the Fourth Voyage.

Now, the genius of Swift's satire in Gulliver's Travels realizes
itself in a second feature--the way he organizes the New World in
order to make it a constantly fertile source of satiric humour.
His main insight, in the first two books, has the simplicity of
genius.  He simply changes the perspective on human conduct: in
Book I Gulliver is a normal human being visiting a recognizably
European society, but he is twelve times bigger than anyone else.
In the second the technique is the same, but now he is twelve
times smaller.

With this altered perspective, Swift can now manipulate
Gulliver's reactions to the changing circumstances in order to
underscore his satiric points in a very humorous way.  For
instance, it's clear that the main satiric target in Book I is
the pride Europeans take in public ceremonies, titles, court
preferment, and all sorts of celebrations of their power and
magnificence.  So there's an obvious silliness to the obsession
with these matters when the figures are only six inches high.

But what makes this preoccupation with ceremony all the sillier
is Gulliver's reaction to it.  He, as a good European, takes it
quite seriously.  He's truly impressed with the king's
magnificence, with his proclamation that he's the most powerful
monarch in the world, and he takes great delight in being given
the title of a Nardac.

The satiric point here, of course, is not on the Lilliputians
(although they are obviously caricatured Europeans) but on
Gulliver's enthusiastic participation in their silliness.  For
example, when he's accused of having an affair with the cabinet
minister's wife, he does not scoff at the biological
ridiculousness of that accusation; he defends himself with his
new title: I couldn't have done that; after all, I'm a Nardac.

Similarly in Book II, in which the main target shifts to the
Europeans' preoccupation with physical beauty, the chief sources
of satiric humour are the gross exaggerations of the human body
seen magnified twelve times but also Gulliver's reactions to it.

2.  The Character of Gulliver

And this brings me to a key point in following Gulliver's
Travels, namely the importance of Gulliver himself.  He is our
contact throughout the four voyages, and at the end he is
completely different from the person he was at the start.  So
it's particularly important that we get a handle on who he is,
what happens to him, why it happens, and how we are supposed to
understand that.  The single most important thing Swift has to
say in Gulliver's Travels concerns the changes which take place
in the narrator.

Now, to get the satiric point of the changes in Gulliver across,
Swift has to be careful not to give the reader an easy escape,
for Swift understood very well that readers who see themselves
satirized will always look for some way of neutralizing or
deflecting the satire away from them.  Satire, Swift observed, is
a mirror in which people see everyone else's face but their own.
So it's important for us to take careful stock of Gulliver, to
assess just how reliable a person he is, so that we can fully
understand the nature of his transformation.

At the start of the first voyage, Swift takes a few pages to
establish for us that Gulliver is, in some ways, a very typical
European.  He is middle aged, well educated, sensible (in the
best sense of the term), with no extravagantly romantic notions.
He is a careful observer, scrupulous about looking after his
family, and fully conversant with the importance of conducting
his affairs prudently.  There is nothing extraordinary about him.
He's been around, and he's not a person to be easily rattled.

This is important to grasp, because in effect Swift is removing
from us any possibility of ascribing the transformation which
takes place in Gulliver to any quirks of his character.  He is
not an unbalanced, erratic, private, or imaginative person.  On
the contrary, he is about as typically sensible and reasonable a
narrator as one could wish.  And he fully supports the culture
which has produced him.

That's why, in the first two books, we can see why he would
naturally fall in with the Europeanness of the new world.  He has
never reflected at all on the rightness or wrongness of the given
order of things, so he naturally supports the authority of the
king, the ceremonies of the court, and the "fairness" of the
justice system.

Only when he himself is sentenced to be blinded do we begin to
sense that Gulliver is learning something.  Circumstances are
forcing him to think about, not just his own safety, but
something much bigger: the justice of the proceedings.  He is, in
other words, beginning to develop a critical awareness of the
limitations of the values of Lilliput and, beyond that, of the
way in which the Europeans reflect those same values.

These initial critical insights are temporary only, and when he
returns, he is quickly reconciled to European life.  But in the
second voyage the critical awareness returns, especially in
relation to the physical grossness of the giant Brobdingnagians.
The altered perspective leads him to reflect upon the way in
which Europeans have become obsessed with physical beauty,
especially with the feminine body, when, from a different
perspective, it is comically gross and even nauseating.

However, this growing sense of a critical awareness in Book II
does not lead Gulliver seriously to question his European values,
and so he is prepared to defend the sorry history of Europe in
the face of the King of Brobdingnag's scorn.

     . . . I cannot but conclude the bulk of your native to be
     the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature
     ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.  (2.6)

But that powerful indictment of European life--which is so close
to the conclusion of Book IV--Gulliver is not yet ready for.  His
typical European consciousness is still too full of complacent
self congratulation to accept this form of criticism, so he
dismisses it with a snide remark about the limited understanding
of the King of Brobdingnag (reinforced by his rejection of the
use of gunpowder).

Yet, it's clear that something is happening to Gulliver, because
upon his return home after the second voyage, it takes him some
time to readjust to European life.  This is quite comical, but
the point is important: in his strange new land, his perceptions
are changing.  At this point it is simply a matter of the
physical proportions of the people, but Swift is setting up the
reader for the conclusions of the book, when the transformation
of Gulliver is going to involve a total alternative of his moral
perspectives, so that he is no longer able to return to the calm,
unreflective, typical European that he was when he started.

3.  The Fourth Voyage

I'm moving directly to the fourth voyage, because in a sense it
is the logical continuation of the Second Voyage (the Third
Voyage was written later), and most of the serious arguments
about Swift's satire focus on this part of the book.

In the fourth voyage, Gulliver's transformation becomes complete,
and when he returns he can no longer participate in European
society--not even with his friends and family--as he could
before.  It's as if Swift is saying that Gulliver has discovered
something that makes social life in the normal sense
insupportable, so that he would sooner construct his own life
among his domestic horses than return to a normal family life.

And the key interpretative questions thus arises: How are we to
deal with this conclusion to the story?  On the face of it, the
conclusion seems an unacceptably harsh condemnation of European
humanity.  Their Yahoo-like nature makes dealing with them
impossible, and thus the reasonable thing to do is to turn away
from them.  Is this not ultimately a violently misanthropic
gesture, and therefore something we must turn away from?

Dealing with this question is one of the great battle grounds in
the interpretation of English literature (like dealing with
Hamlet or Paradise Lost).  In order to clarify the issues, I'd
like to review some of the positions and then suggest some of the
things we need to consider in charting a way through the
difficulties.  I should add that I do have my own view of what is
the most comprehensible interpretation (and I will add that), but
I don't want anyone to think that this is not fiercely contested
interpretative territory.

  a. The first reaction to the end of the Fourth Voyage is to
     acknowledge that Swift indeed wants us to understand and
     sympathize with Gulliver's actions.  The main satiric point
     of Gulliver's final actions was to ridicule the Europeans'
     pretensions to rationality; Gulliver's response is an
     exaggerated but still understandable way of underlining the
     point that, if we could come to understand true rationality,
     as Gulliver has done through his experience with the horses,
     and if we could have our eyes opened as to what we are
     really like underneath all our fine illusions about
     ourselves, as Gulliver's eyes have been opened by his
     experience of the Yahoos, then we, too, would turn away,
     and, rather like the person who has finally made it out of
     Plato's cave, want to spend our time in contemplation of the
     beauty and truth of reason and not be distracted by the
     foolish pride of those gazing at the cave wall.

     This interpretation was common among Swift's contemporaries
     and in the nineteenth century.  However, many who saw this
     in the satire simply dismissed it as a harsh but finally
     erroneous vision; they  believed that  the promises of the
     new science were, in fact, being realized, that progress was
     possible, and that Swift was simply wrong, out of touch with
     the perfectibility of human nature and human social
     institutions, that he was simply a grumpy, pessimistic,
     conservative Christian.  Thus, the book was simply a
     conservative complaining about an emerging new truth.

     In addition, of course, the book had too many naughty words,
     and therefore should not be read by people concerned for
     politeness in literature.  So those who wanted to believe in
     a less fiercely limited view of human nature had an easy
     excuse to denigrate Swift as a writer worth reading.
     Progress is on schedule for all Swift's negative vision.

     Now this reaction is interesting because it does at least
     acknowledge that Swift had a serious purpose and that in the
     transformation of Gulliver he made that purpose explicit.
     Gulliver is, indeed, Swift's spokesman until the very end.
     The dismissal of the book, therefore, does not involve a
     denial of the full satiric intention.  It does acknowledge
     the point of what Swift is doing.  However, it claims that
     that is the wrong point.  Swift's satire is clear, but his
     understanding of human nature and morality is wrong.

  2. A second reaction is to equate Swift with Gulliver--to
     claim, as with the first reaction, that Swift intends us to
     take Gulliver's transformation seriously.  Swift, however,
     is mad, mentally unbalanced, notoriously neurotic, and
     therefore we do not need to attend seriously to the ending
     of the book, unless we happen to be interested in clinical
     manifestations in literature of various mental aberrations.

     Enter, from stage left, the psychoanalytic view of Swift,
     which quite neutralizes the satire by an appeal to various
     disorders.  Here's a sample:

     Ferenczi (1926): "From the psychoanalytic standpoint one
     would describe [Swift's] neurotic behaviour as an inhibition
     of normal potency, with a lack of courage in relation to
     women of good character and perhaps with a lasting
     aggressive tendency towards women of a lower type.  This
     insight into Swift's life surely justifies us who come after
     him in treating the phantasies in Gulliver's Travels exactly
     as we do the free associations of neurotic patients in
     analysis, especially when interpreting their dreams."

     Karpman (1942): "It is submitted on the basis of such a
     study of Gulliver's Travels that Swift was a neurotic who
     exhibited psychosexual infantilism, with a particular
     showing of coprophilia, associated with misogeny,
     misanthropy, mysophilia, and mysophobia."

     Greenacre (1955): "One gets the impression that the anal
     fixation was intense and binding, and the genital demands so
     impaired or limited at best that there was total retreat
     from genital sexuality in his early adult life, probably
     beginning with the unhappy relationship with Jane Waring,
     the first of the goddesses. . . .  The common symbolism of
     the man in the boat as the clitoris suggests the
     identification with the female phallus though to be
     characteristic of the male transvestite. . . Swift showed
     marked anal characteristics [his extreme immaculateness,
     secretiveness, intense ambition, pleasure in less obvious
     dirt (e.g., satire), stubborn vengefulness in righteous
     causes] which indicate clearly that early control of the
     excretory function was achieved under great stress and
     perhaps too early."

     And so on and so on.  One is tempted to have some fun with
     this line of criticism (e.g., What about Two Years Before
     the Mast, Moby Dick, Three Men in a Boat, Captain
     Hornblower), but what such an approach does to Gulliver's
     Travels is important.  It replaces the moral seriousness of
     the satiric message with a clinical study of the deranged
     author.  Thus, we do not have to attend seriously to any
     moral position at stake here.

   3.     A third reaction, common in the twentieth century,
     quite rehabilitates Swift from this sort of criticism by
     claiming that, at the end of the Fourth Voyage, we are not
     meant to see Gulliver's actions as the natural rational
     outcome of what he has been through, because Gulliver
     himself has here become the target of the satire.  Gulliver,
     in other words, no longer speaks for the author.  What he
     does is, in effect, an overreaction, and Swift wants us to
     understand that as such.  His treatment of the Portuguese
     captain and his family are clear indications that Gulliver
     has gone overboard in his admiration for the horses and his
     dislike of the Yahoos, and that we are to see in his conduct
     a warning of sorts.

     This approach to the Fourth Voyage, one should note, helps
     to maintain the claim that Swift was an intelligent writer,
     fully in command of his medium, and that we do not have to
     deal with the disturbing effects of the satire by writing
     them off as the ravings of an anally maladjusted neurotic,
     obsessed with the cramping in his sphincter.  We simply have
     to understand that Swift's satiric intentions at the end of
     the Fourth Voyage are not as harsh as they appear to be.
     What this approach does to the power of Swift's satire,
     however, is a question that needs to be carefully
     considered.  How consistent is this view of the ending with
     the general tenor of the rest of the satire in Book IV and
     in the other Books?

Now debating these options might be an interesting seminar
exercise.  But however they are resolved, I would like to offer
some things that one should bear in mind.

  1. The transformation of Gulliver starts, as I observed, in
     Book I and becomes considerably stronger in Book II.  That
     transformation involves a growing critical awareness of the
     extent to which pride rules human actions.  At the start
     Gulliver gives no sign of ever having thought about such
     matters.  He's a patriotic, unreflective European
     professional.  The insights come intermittently and do not
     last.  But to some extent, the transformation of Gulliver at
     the end of the fourth voyage can be seen as a logical
     outcome of the trend that has started before.  So, however
     we evaluate the end of the fourth voyage, we need to measure
     that interpretation against the rest of the book.

     This might be connected with the growing seriousness of the
     initial situation that gets Gulliver into the New World: in
     Book I it's a shipwreck; in Book II, he's abandoned; in Book
     III, it's pirates; and in Book IV, it's a mutiny (and we all
     remember from reading Dante that a mutiny, a revolt against
     established authority, is the greatest crime).

  2. Gulliver's transformation in Book IV has two motives: his
     sudden awareness of the Yahoo-like nature of European human
     beings, including himself, and, equally important, his
     sudden discovery about what true reasonableness really means
     (in the lives of the horses).  So in estimating how one
     should assess his final state, one needs to bear in mind
     that it's not just a turning away from European family and
     social life; it is also a turning towards what he is now
     fully in love with, a contemplation of the truth.

  3. One's judgement on what Gulliver has gone through does not
     depend upon our having to decide whether it would be
     rational or not for us to follow suit, abandon our families,
     and set up home in the nearest stable.  That is not what
     Swift is saying.  He's offering us a vision--a comic and
     satiric but nonetheless morally serious vision--of what
     would happen to a typical European (like us) if we had, like
     Gulliver, come to a full understanding through experience
     both of ourselves and of true reasonableness (which we like
     to think we possess).

     The basic idea here is derived, quite clearly, from Plato's
     Allegory of the Cave.  Gulliver has made it out of the cave,
     and having seen the sun, he's not about to pretend that
     looking at shadows on the wall is the right way to live.
     What is happening to him is, in fact, just what Plato says
     will happen to the person who returns: he is treated as
     insane because normal people (that's us) simply cannot grasp
     what he now understands.

     (It's interesting, incidentally, to note just how popular
     this sort of ending is in satiric stories with a similar
     intent: the endings of, for example, Heart of Darkness and
     Catch 22, are remarkably similar.  The central character,
     once a recognizably typical representative of his culture,
     has gone through a transformation which leads him to reject
     that culture in a way that his contemporaries do not
     understand: Marlow takes to the sea for the rest of his
     life; Yossarian sets out in a rubber raft for Scandinavia).

  4. One needs also to recognize that it's no serious criticism
     of Swift's moral position to observe that the life of the
     horses is not all that attractive, that to us it seems
     boring.  That's part of Swift's point.  We, as readers, are
     Yahoos, irrational creatures and, beyond that, incapable for
     the most part of even understanding and responding to the
     attractions of such reasonable behaviour.  For Swift's major
     point here is not that we should try to emulate the horses,
     for that's impossible, but rather that we should stop
     pretending that we are equivalent to them.  We are not by
     nature reasonable creatures, and it is the height of folly
     and pride to assert that we are.  We have to start our moral
     awareness with the acceptance of that truth, and our
     dissatisfaction with the life of the horses is not an
     indication that they are wrong so much as that we are
     unreasonable.  We describe ourselves in terms appropriate to
     the horses, but we characteristically behave more like
     Yahoos.  That is the source of the pride which Swift wishes
     to attack.

  5. Finally, it's important to recognize that our last contact
     with Gulliver indicates quite clearly that what bothers him
     about human beings is not what they are but what they
     pretend to be.  He would be much happier about living among
     human beings again, and is starting to do so, but everything
     would be much easier for him if their characteristic pride
     did not always get in the way:

               My reconcilement to the Yahoo kind in general
          might not be so difficult, if they would be content
          with those vices and follies only which nature hath
          entitled them to.  I am not in the least provoked by
          the sight of a lawyer, a pickpocket, a colonel, a fool,
          a lord, a gamester, a politician, a whoremonger, a
          physician, an evidence, a suborner, an attorney, a
          traitor, or the like: this is all according to the due
          course of things.  But when I behold a lump of
          deformity, and diseases both in body and mind, smitten
          with pride, it immediately breaks all the measures of
          my patience; neither shall I be ever able to comprehend
          how such an animal and such a vice could tally
          together.  The wise and virtuous Houyhnhnms, who abound
          in all excellencies that can adorn a rational creature,
          have no name for this vice in their language, which
          hath no terms to express anything that is evil, except
          those whereby they describe the detestable qualities of
          their Yahoos, among which they were not able to
          distinguish this of pride, for want of thoroughly
          understanding human nature, as it showeth itself in
          other countries, where that animal presides.  But I,
          who had more experience, could plainly observe some
          rudiments of it in the Yahoos.

The point I want to stress here is that, however one determines
to navigate the interpretative waters of the ending of Gulliver's
Travels, it is important to reconcile your view of Gulliver's
behaviour with what he actually says and with the satiric
momentum of the last book, as it arises out of the earlier
voyages.

My own view (not shared by all members of the team) is that Swift
does want us to take Gulliver seriously right up to the end, that
we are to understand his reaction as the natural consequence of a
man who has made it out of the cave, and who now is not willing
to go back to what he once was.  The fact that we find this odd
is a reminder to us of just how much we are the product of years
of watching shadows on the cave wall.  Yes, the Portuguese
captain is a good person, and, yes, Gulliver's wife and family
are neglected, but when you've come to see, as Gulliver has, just
what true reasonableness involves, then a normal life and normal
good people are not enough.  The point, to repeat myself, is not
that we should try to emulate Gulliver, but that we should try to
understand him--and if we do that, we may come to recognize the
illusory pride which makes us claim to be rational creatures.

Of course, I have to admit that the extreme anger Gulliver
displays at the end (like his extreme nausea at the human Body in
Book II) does invite someone to wonder about the extent to which
the satiric purpose might be being subverted by an excessively
strong imaginative distaste for certain elements of human life.
The borderline between very strong satire and a questionable
wallowing about in ugliness or pornography for its own sake is
not always clearly discernible and different readers have
different reactions.  To that extent, I would admit that there is
ground in Swift's style for certain questions to arise.  However,
I do not believe myself that such questions cannot be answered
within the framework of the interpretation I have just outlined.

4. A Final Comment

For me Swift's language, though strong, is still in control.  The
vision is harsh, the anger extreme, but that's a sign of the
intense moral indignation Swift feels at the transformation of
life around him in ways that are leading, he thinks, to moral
disaster.  The central Christian and Socratic emphasis on virtue
is losing ground to something he sees as a facile illusion--that
reason, wealth, money, and power could somehow do the job for us
which had been traditionally placed upon our moral characters.

In the new world, faith, hope, and charity, Swift sees, are going
to be irrelevant, because the rational organization of human
experience and the application of the new reasoning to all
aspects of human life are going to tempt human beings with a rich
lure: the promise of happiness.  Under the banner of the new
rationality, the traditional notions of virtue will become
irrelevant, as human beings substitute for excellence of
character--the development of the individual human life according
to some telos, some spiritual goal--the idea that properly
organized rules, structures of authority, rational enquiry into
efficient causes, profitable commercial ventures, and laws will
provide the sure guide, because, after all, human beings are
rational creatures.

Book IV of Gulliver's Travels is the most famous and most
eloquent protest against this modern project.  The severity of
his indignation and anger is, I think, a symptom of the extent to
which he realized the battle was already being lost.  To us,
however, over two hundred years later, Swift's point is perhaps
more vividly relevant than to many of his contemporaries.  After
all, we have witnessed the triumphant unrolling of the scientific
project, the extension of Descartes's rationality into all
aspects of our lives.

And yet we might want to ask ourselves whether the cheque which
Descarttes wrote out for us is negotiable, whether his promise
has, in fact, made us morally better creatures, more able to live
the good life, more charitable to our neighbours, with a greater
faith in the excellences life does make possible, better able to
work out our differences justly, and more able to achieve true
happiness.

Or, on the contrary, has giving the enormous power of the new
science to the Yahoos not created some of the those very dangers
which Swift is so concerned to warn us about will happen?  The
yahoos now posses the secrets of atomic energy and genetic
engineering; their commercial zest is punching holes in the ozone
and deforesting the planet.  Meanwhile, in Moscow and Washington,
DC, the life expectancy of adult males is plummeting.  Has all
this increase in knowledge and power made us any more just
towards each other?  Has it clarified the good life for me and a
means of settling justly our disputes?  The jury is, one might
argue, still out.