Great Books: Gullivers Travels (16 of 22)

Great Books: Gullivers Travels

In Book Three Swift explodes our sentimental views of reason, science, and technology.
He didn't trust the growing optimistic view of the power of reason.
He didn't believe in progress I think.
He didn't believe that people were wiser than their ancestors.
He didn't believe that technology could make people wiser.
Swift never believed that.
And I think John, he was, you know that was one of the reasons he was suspicious of modern science as it was coming out that was emerging at that time.
Because along with that went the whole - this was the beginning of the Enlightenment if you like.
If you want to trace the Enlightenment back it begins with the confidence in the possibility of progress in modern science.

In Book Three, Gulliver finds himself on the flying island of Laputa...
"The reader can hardly conceive my astonishment to behold an island in the air inhabited by men who are able to raise or sink or put it into progressive motion as they pleased."
It is a land of science gone amok.
It was abstraction that Swift was against.
He associated abstraction with science and I think part of the reason was he was basically a skeptical person.
He didn't think that scientific theories could ever be grounded in reality or could even be proven.
Ah, you've arrived at last.
Here put some of these in there.
In Book Three many of the experiments which appear so silly to us were actually experiments that he's taken out of the official publication of the Royal Society.
"Excuse me, what is it you are doing?"
I'm extracting sunlight from cucumbers!
Just another eight years and I'll have the problem solved.