HOPEFUL SKEPTICS:

So why do we choose to believe in a framework where suffering and violence seem to be the world's most fundamental realities? How can pain and suffering coexist with these small joys that we experience daily?

 

Dostoevsky's answer to the second question is based on his conviction that hope is an essential part of the human spirit. In The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan Karamazov curses God to his brother, Alyosha, for the murder of innocent children. He writes a short story--"The Grand Inquisitor"--spurning God for enslaving humans in a world of suffering by making them dependent on faith. Nonetheless, Ivan declares he will always love life's small beauties, although it defies his own intellect:

I have a longing for life, and I go on living in spite of logic. Though I may not believe in the order of the universe, yet I love the sticky little leaves as they open in spring. I love the blue sky, I love some people, whom one loves you know sometimes without knowing why. I love some great deeds done by men, though I've long ceased perhaps to have faith in them, yet from old habit one's heart prizes them.

Despite the violence and heartache he witnesses in the world, he yet experiences--perhaps irrationally--a love of sticky little leaves because he innately believes them to be good. Ivan cannot extinguish the hope he has from the objects the world presents to him, a small but potent joy in the deepest core of his being.

Humans thus believe in bringing about a better world, despite rationality or external circumstances. In the wake of the somber aftermath of capitol riots and stark political polarization that divide our society, Amanda Gorman's poem was still met with resounding approbation at President Biden's inauguration. She declared, "For there is always light, / if only we're brave enough to see it / if only we're brave enough to be it." The very fact that this desire to see light exists proves that darkness has not overcome our world entirely. And we not only wish to hope, but we do hope. The human spirit holds belief in a better day as its impetus for living. It is natural for us to want to believe in the goodness of the world because it makes us feel joy.

Swift had a healthy skepticism toward any political science that promotes the centralization of governmental power, and any technology that undermines, rather than promotes, human well-being. And he was disenchanted with Enlightenment thinkers like Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, who prioritized the individual vis-a-vis the "social contract"--separating and alienating him as a result.

The genius of Gulliver's Travels is that it offers illuminating commentary regarding society and human experience by making you a dispassionate observer. Through this literary buffer, you are able to contemplate with greater acumen our own contemporary weaknesses and failings. You see the inconsequence of so many vain strivings. As the king of Brobdingnag says, "How contemptible a thing was human grandeur, which could be mimicked by such diminutive insects as [Gulliver]."

This does not mean that you should become a cynic or misanthrope, as many readers have interpreted Gulliver's development over the course of the novel. The Brobdingnagian king concludes the "bulk" of humanity "to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth."

Maybe he's right. But the race that produced Swift's satire also gave us Shakespeare's sonnets.

However deep our faults and intractable our problems, Swift's humility in the face of technology, science, politics, and human nature would serve us well today.

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