Misanthropy in A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift

Misanthropy in “A Modest Proposal” by Jonathan Swift
“The judgements that Swift’s satires ask us to make go well beyond straightforward condemnation of the work’s obvious target; rather, we are led to form a series of deeper judgements about language, religion, and politics, and about the operations of human vice and virtue that govern these activities in others and in ourselves.”1

Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” is a satirical essay written in 1729 that suggests improvements for the Irish living situations and social oppressions of the eighteenth century; Swift addresses particularly the issues regarding poverty, hunger, beggars, and abortions to avoid the expense of providing for the child, and unites all these problems in one, making each cause and consequence of the other, but an important issue worth noticing lays below the surface of his proposal, and that is the inhumanity with which he refers to the solution to this problems. Swift refers to the abortions and the providing of these children as the consequence of the economic situation in the country and as the reason for which he is writing his proposal. At the beginning he addresses the subject in a sympathetic way, but at the same time the language used in the next lines, foreshadows the proposal’s real purpose of outraging its audience:
...it will prevent those voluntary abortions, and that horrid practise of women murdering their bastard children, alas, too frequent among us, sacrificing the poor innocent babes, I doubt, more to avoid the expense than the shame, which would move tears and pity in the most savage and inhuman breast.2
By using words such as “murder”, “bastard” and “innocent”, he demonstrates his lack of real sympathy towards the babies, by first addressing them as if they were a despised object, but afterwards, trying to produce pathos in his audience in order to distract them from the real content of the proposition.
Swift focuses on making this economical and social oppression the main hue and cry of Irish society at the time, but particularly making it the central issue of his proposal, or at least during the first part of his essay. He wrote this “Modest Proposal” to raise social indignation in order for Ireland to want to break from this terrible oppression it had been subjected to, and by pointing the clear way in which the social strata inside Ireland was replicating the oppression and judgment of the lower classes, without noticing how harmful the repetition of these pattern could be. For making his point clear, Swift concentrates on the individual and the particulars, addressing the problems as if the conjunction of all would be reflected in the amount of children that have been aborted, and as David Nokes wrote in his book “Jonathan Swift a Hypocrite Reversed” the rest of the problems faded into statistics because that one was the issue he had chosen to particularize. “As he showed many times in his sermons, he would single out for his charity the one beggar in a hundred with a human face, while dismissing the rest as mere statistics”.3
The title of this essay provides the reader with a clear image of what the text is about, creating a hypothesis by which children from Ireland, particularly beggars, are a burden to society, and trying to find a way of making these children be productive for their parents and the rest of the population. By Explaining these problems in Ireland Swift creates the allusion of these being a real social and political pamphlet rather than a satirical approach to an otherwise unexamined issue: The way in which these people, beggars, are treated by the rest of the Irish population, and the way the Irish population is treated by the English population.
For Swift, language, religion, and politics are not strictly divisible, but are all inextricably linked as integral parts of human endeavour [...]Swiftian satire is that it invites (or provokes) the reader to be critical.4
Swift’s essay introduction lays the ground for his thesis statement, which is introduced until the eighth paragraph when he says: “I shall now therefore humbly propose my own thoughts, which I hope will not be liable to the least objection”.5 After saying these words, the author begins to explain how resorting to cannibalism would be a liable way of improving Irish society and economics, by creating this new source of food and of employment, as well as relieving the country of the unwanted children; but with this, he makes perfect sense and by the middle of his modest proposal the reader finds himself believing it to be the best option to resolve this country’s problem.
He challenges his readers to register their own humanity by supplying those humane qualities which his logical formulae deliberately leave out of account.6
This sense of the proposal appearing to be reasonable is caused by the rhetorical devices he uses along his essay, such as hyperbolic statements to mock the appalling treatment towards poor people and anacoenosis by asking the public for their opinion; by the calculations of the portions of food which make the serving human beings as food a reality easy to believe; and by exhausting all the arguments which will prove this to be plausible, for example: the abortions in the country, the amount of money people would earn instead of begging, the raise in the economy, etc.
After all, I am not so violently bent upon my own opinion as to reject any offer proposed by wise men, which shall be found equally innocent, cheap, easy and effectual. [...] I desire those politicians who dislike my overture, and may perhaps be so bold as to attempt an answer [...]7
After explaining all the dishes in which this new “cattle” would serve a good meal, he returns to enumerating the pros and cons of this solution to Ireland’s social reality, and then he proceeds to entice the reader to write his own solution to these problems if he disagrees with the matter which he had exposed earlier, and saying that if the reader feels somewhat offended by this proposal, then he should think that treating poor people in such a way is only a step away from treating them as cattle, and at the same time allowing the deaths of so many by abortions, sickness and hunger, is only a step farther than profiting from them and eating them. But although these structure may be seen as logical and that of discontent towards discrimination, it is permeated with inhumane adjectives when referring to people of lower social strata, and with a misanthropic view of the world because of the Narrators discontent towards the behaviour of human beings inside of society, particularly inside the Irish society.
To conclude his essay Swift declares this proposal is only that, and he does not seek to strive in promoting it, and he adds that he cannot help his statements either, because he has no children whom he could sell or the possibility of bearing another. By saying this, he is anticipating the public’s response to the text, which would certainly have asked if he would have done it himself and at the same time he is detaching himself from the solution he has provided, and also detaching himself from the rest of the Irish population and the problems he isolated at the beginning of the proposal as being the central issues of society at the time. By the way he writes in the last part of his proposal, we can sense somewhat of a guilty conscience: “It is a mealy-mouthed nervousness that wishes to be absolved from any unmentioned or unmentionable offensiveness in what is promised. We sense a guilty conscience in his institutional declarations of humanity.”8
The reasons why Swift wrote “A Modest Proposal” with this type of structure is because he wanted first of all, to catch people’s attention; second, to outrage the public; and third, to make people notice the need for a solution using rhetorical devises all along his essay, but in the process of writing it he allowed certain parts to seem inhuman, detached and misanthropic.
Swift argues that the man really in danger of becoming a misanthrope is he who holds an unrealistic view of potentialities of human nature and who expects that men can somehow transcend their limitations and become, shall we say, angels.9

Bibliography
Fox, Christopher. Editor. “The Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Swift”, Cambridge University Press, United Kingdom, 2003
Greenblatt, Stephen, Editor. “The Norton Anthology of English Literature”, Norton and Company, New York, Eighth Edition, Volume I, 2006, 2904pp.
Clifford, James L. Editor. “Eighteenth- Century English Literature: Modern Essays in Criticism”, Oxford University Press, New York, 1977, 283 pp.
Nokes, David. “Jonathan Swift a Hypocrite Reversed”, Oxford University Press, New York, 1987, 427 pp.