Science and its discontents
Jonathan Swift's satire of science in Gulliver's Travels offers some lessons that remain valid today
If Gulliver’s adventures among the thumb-sized Lilliputians are imprinted in the public imagination as a cherished bed-time story, the biting satire at the heart of Jonathan Swift’s unabbreviated Gulliver’s Travels (1726) is hardly intended to induce slumber. The book offers several takeaways, but one hits especially close to the present moment.
Born in Dublin in 1667, Swift developed through his life a deep suspicion of Enlightenment optimists, who believed science might unlock the understanding of the whole world and be the solution to all problems. Emerging from an age of bitter doctrinal dispute, science’s cold rationalism seemed to present universal answers. But in this antidote to uncertainty, Swift also glimpsed an antidote to liberty: science’s ability to create consensus threatened to give it a stranglehold on truth.
In Swift’s view, the supposed objectivity of science could be used to suppress dissent for self-serving purposes. But his concerns shouldn’t be mistaken for a gratuitous antagonism to scientific progress. Swift did not oppose science in the service of a definite public good, but rather its use for the advancement of one group’s interests over another’s.
The past two years have shown that there are indeed great risks to a society intent on pursuing science above all else. Where before May 2020, mandates like lockdown would have been thought utterly irreconcilable with a democratic style of governing, across Europe and the US the pandemic oversaw the intermittent suspension of our rights to freedom of movement, moral autonomy, and non-discrimination in the all-important endeavour to “follow the science”. Those who questioned the official consensus were shut down as propagators of misinformation—even if the objectors were themselves scientists.
Swift’s distaste of absolutism is especially prominent in the third section of the Travels. Gulliver visits a floating island called Laputa, where people spend a life of complete absorption in mathematics, music and astronomy—so much so that they have to be extricated from it by servants employed to gently strike their faces with flappers full of peas. Though inept at anything else other than their disciplines, notes Gulliver, the Laputans are rather politically opinionated:
“What I chiefly admired, and thought altogether unaccountable, was the strong disposition I observed in them towards news and politics, perpetually inquiring into public affairs, giving their judgments in matters of state, and passionately disputing every inch of a party opinion. … I rather take this quality to spring from a very common infirmity of human nature, inclining us to be most curious and conceited in matters where we have least concern, and for which we are least adapted by study or nature.”
Practical reason, just like imagination and invention, is so out of the Laputans’ range of abilities that their houses have “no right angle” and their clothes are “ill made, and quite out of shape”; yet, they still care to put forth their opinions in matters of government and policy.
Bored with the Laputans’ poor social skills, Gulliver steps down on Lagado, a city over which Laputa hovers by magnetic levitation. Here, houses are in disrepair, inhabitants rove the streets in rags, and the land, though worked by hundreds of labourers, bears no crops. The culprits for this state of decay are the academics—probably a caricature of the emerging technocratic elite of the Royal Society of London, who conflated their scientific expertise with political and moral authority.
Munodi, Gulliver’s Lagado host, explains him that the nation’s academy was set up after a group of some people’s visit to Laputa, who, upon returning to Lagado, had begun “to dislike the management of every thing” and took to devising “schemes of putting all arts, sciences, languages, and mechanics, upon a new foot”. One consists in attempting to reconvert human excrements into food; another, in building houses by beginning at the roof, and working downward to the foundations.
These methods sound preposterous, yes; but are not so different from those adopted by some experts today. Let’s take the abolition of SATs for US uni admissions, supported by evidence that race gaps in scores undermine upward mobility: fretting over black representation in academia, rather than, say, studying sustainable ways to boost child support, or to tackle the involvement in violent crime responsible for so many young black Americans' social sidelining (as well as deaths), is like trying to build a house from the top while ignoring the foundational issues. In other words, a method—that consists in solving a problem by only studying its symptoms, while overlooking its causes—which makes us chuckle on paper, is staunchly defended in reality as good and necessary.
Swift’s critique of science is careful to emphasise how progress does not necessarily equal improvement, but harbours potential destruction. Munodi tells Gulliver how he was forced by the academics to move his perfectly operational mill to the side of a mountain in the misguided speculation that “the wind and air upon a height agitated the water, and thereby made it fitter for motion”. Of course, the project miscarries. If we were to continue drawing contemporary parallels, calls to scrap SATs could aggravate the situation for gifted poor kids, and smooth the path for even more members of the ruling class to pay their way into grad school, even though designed to undo class and race privilege and staunchly supported by research.
Reciprocal pressures on scientific research to be socially useful and on politics to seek authority in science have replaced scientific objectivity with a kind of scientism that mixes curated facts with public opinion and is having unfortunate consequences on flesh-and-bone human beings. In the name of “public health emergencies”, individual liberty has been progressively restricted; in the name of “progress”, the wet dreams of fantasists are being actualised at the cost of people’s well being.
Swift was once described by George Orwell as “driven into a sort of perverse Toryism by the follies of the progressive party of the moment”. In much of the West today, progressive narratives cast science as inherently good, and as such impervious to criticism—while being abused as a pathway to arbitrary power. Without being driven to a perverse Toryism, or falling in the devious net of nihilism, from now on let us, too, be more sceptical: not of science itself, but of the many ways in which can be moulded into the perfect instrument of tyranny.