Swift’s Attack on Cynicism

gulliver-ivjpbVenturing into the heated atmosphere of Supreme Court confirmation politics yesterday is a nice lead-in to my topic for today, which is the temptation to become so disgusted with human behavior that we throw up our hands and walk away. Or, since walking away is not really an option, the fantasy of doing so. Jonathan Swift explores this fantasy in the final book of Gulliver’s Travels.

By the end of Gulliver’s Travels, Gulliver has come to see all humans as yahoos, disgusting creatures that are dirty, smelly, avaricious, lustful, and generally disgusting. He longs to be a houyhnhnm instead, these horses being pure, high-minded, fair, civil and, oh yeah, unemotional. In other words, he longs to be inhuman.

And why ever not? After all, humans and human behavior have been whaling on him for a long time, and each one of his defenses against human perversity has been breached. In Book I, he thinks he could rise above human baseness and focus on the potential in people, and what is the result? The Lilliputians want to shoot his eyes out for his principled stand not to destroy Blefescu. His fantasy that he can avoid human baseness proves him a gullible fool.

In Book II he avoids facing up to human malevolence and corruption by fanatically insisting that his country can do no wrong. When his loud insistence fails to impress the Brobdingnag king, he then proceeds to trumpet his country’s superiority by boasting about gunpowder, thereby inadvertently proving the king’s assessment of human beings as a “pernicious race of odious little vermin.”

He begins repeating his extravagant praise of his country in conversations with the head of the houyhnhnms but, in fairly short order, abandons it and swings to the other extreme. Sudddenly he finds humans irredeemable. He has been a total believer and now he is a total cynic.

Scratch a cynic and you will find a disillusioned idealist. Like denial and fanaticism, cynicism is a way of protecting us from disillusion. If we think the worst of people, then we will never be disappointed.

But Book IV shows us the dangers of cynicism, just as it shows us the problems with the other defense mechanisms we use. Gulliver by the end of Book IV has gone mad. When he returns home, he faints when his wife hugs him (her problem is that she smells like a human, not like a horse), canters around town, and spends hours each day talking to the horses in his stable. He proves incapable of seeing the good that exists in human beings, such as in Pedro de Mendez, the Portuguese sea captain who rescues and cares for him.


This isn’t even the worst that Gulliver does. When forced to leave the houyhnhnms (they fear he will lead the other yahoos in a revolt), he makes a boat out of—human skin! He uses yahoo hides for the outer covering and uses the skin of baby yahoos for the sails. Almost as bad, he describes this process in such a matter of fact manner that we barely notice what he’s doing.

I think Swift is saying in Book IV that, no matter how many problems human beings have, no matter how tempted we may be to throw up our hands (say, at politicians playing games with the Supreme Court confirmation process), we have to engage with this messy creature. If we don’t, we risk becoming cut off, ridiculous, even monstrous.

Swift isn’t saying this is easy. It hurts to be bruised by humanity. So how do we hold onto our ideals in spite of it all? How do we keep fighting the good fight?

Keep perspective, Swift would say. Don’t think you are, or can be, a paragon of virtue, and also don’t think you are totally base and worthless. Avoid extremes. Acknowledge human perversity (unlike the Gulliver of Book I), don’t be fantatical in pursuit of your ideals (like the Gulliver of Book II), and don’t give up in disgust (like the Gulliver of Book IV). Be humble and keep on striving.

You also have one other resource. If remaining hopeful seems impossibly difficult, you can turn to laughter. Laugh at others and laugh at yourself. Humor is a wonderful restorer of perspective. Take yourself less seriously and you’ll find yourself able to negotiate any number of thorny passes.

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