The Importance Of Society In Gulliver's Travels

When Jonathan Swift composed his famous novel, Gulliver’s Travels, he undoubtedly possessed a keen sense of where society was and where it was going. Today, science and reason tend to dominate academia and capture the minds of countless individuals across the globe. While these schools of thought, sciences in particular, were in their infancy during Swift’s lifetime, he conceived a masterful critique of them that remains valid to this day. Swift demonstrates how a science driven society, represented by the people of Laputa, can lead to progress in the wrong direction. With the tale of the Houyhnhnms and their culture, Swift exposes some of the potential problems a society based on pure reason could encounter. Upon Gulliver’s arrival in Laputa,
Gulliver encounters many “brilliant” professors who have dedicated their lives to exercises in futility. Even worse still, some are inventing solutions to problems that do not exist. “There was the most ingenious architect, who had contrived a new method for building houses by beginning at the roof and working downward to the foundation” (Swift 105). Gulliver later notes that most of the houses in the country are badly misshapen or in a state of disrepair. This can possibly be interpreted as Swift warning common citizens about eagerly embracing every new technology brought about by the scientific revolution. Like Swift’s other critiques, this message remains valid in modern times. Shortly after the discovery of the X-Ray, machines were designed to image a person’s foot for the purpose of shoe sizing. While they exposed customers to harmful ionizing radiation in the process, they offered little improvement over older methods of sizing a shoe. Overall, Swift is critiquing the “because we can” attitude that seems to be ever present in the sciences. Gulliver’s Travels also offers a critique of logical reasoning by presenting the reader with a society entirely governed by
It is not likely that Swift is critiquing Utilitarianism, as the book’s publication predates both Bentham and Mill, but Swift’s criticism of unchecked reason is impossible to miss. Most pointedly, the Houyhnhnms have largely displaced positive emotions such as familial love with rational collective friendship. Meanwhile, they retain negative emotional characteristics as evidenced by their hatred of the “yahoos”. Swift writes: “Their old debate, and indeed only debate . . . The question was, ‘whether the yahoos should be exterminated from the face of the Earth?’” (160). For a society that is supposedly unable to comprehend evil in rational creatures, this proposition is particularly sinister. Modern readers, with atrocities such as the Holocaust brought to mind, have no trouble seeing that the Houyhnhnms are on a dangerous course with unchecked reason at the