A Modest Proposal Critique - Essay Example

It was a time when under the influence of deductive reasoning Descartes had proclaimed that God was the “mathematical order of nature” (Fiero, 2006, p.304). The Enlightenment and its theorists, however, could not influence Swift’s conservative mind the way they influenced other intellectuals of the time. Having a religious background Swift still considered religious and moral philosophy superior to science and technology. When Swift pondered over the plight of the downtrodden masses of Ireland he empathized so deeply with them that he decided to raise his voice against the indifference of the English towards the poverty, depravity, and sufferings of the Irish people. In A Modest Proposal, Swift successfully fought the case of the deprived Irish masses against the English landlords who had kept the Irish deprived even in the very face of the human progress idealized during the Age of Enlightenment.

Swift seems to have deliberately kept his satire in A Modest Proposal quite sharp and biting. In a society where the difference between the rich and the poor was huge and the indifference of the upper class towards the sufferings and pains of the poor was unprecedented, Swift could not get the attention of his readers without indulging in sarcasm. Society needed a shocking jolt rather than a soft blow to realize what was happening to the poor people of Ireland. Swift considers it a “melancholy object” to see women and children begging on the streets of Dublin. He considers them “a very great additional grievance” and emphasizes the importance of making these children “useful members of the commonwealth” (Swift, 1729). His proposal of selling the one-year-old children or cooking their meat sounds brutal and pitiless at the outset but when the reader realizes the real intention of the author and understands the intentional sarcasm hidden underneath the proposal, Swift’s humanism and philanthropy rise to the surface. A Modest Proposal thus emerges as a political and social satire instead of a treatise for promoting cannibalism.

There is no doubt about Swift’s sincerity for the Irish people. While discussing the proposal Swift indirectly unveils the poverty and depravity of the Irish masses. The Irish children beg on the streets of Dublin “in rags”. When these “helpless infants” grow up they “either turn thieves for want of work, leave their dear native country to fight for the Pretender in Spain, or sell themselves to the Barbadoes” (Swift, 1729). After giving statistics on the Irish population, the number of breeders, and the number of expected infants born by these breeders each year, Swift tries to emphasize the economic and social benefits of trading and cooking children. The trade will “contribute to the feeding and partly to the clothing of many thousands” since they will become items of delicious food that will be “very proper for the landlords, who, as they have already devoured most of the parents, seem to have the best title to the children” (Swift, 1729). This was a satire on the English landlords who had been exploiting the farmers and laborers of Ireland who were mostly Catholics or “papists” by religion. The economic gain, according to Swift, will be “fifty thousand pounds per annum”. Swift further satirizes the brutality, exploitation, and merciless indifference of these landlords and their ladies towards the poor people of Ireland when he proclaims that “the skin” of the carcasses of these children “artificially dressed, will make admirable gloves for ladies, and summer boots for fine gentlemen”.

Swift presented all these merciless details to shock the readers into action, yet this was not the only purpose he had in mind. He wanted to show that his sympathies were with the Irish people and that he felt for them deeply. The satirical encouragement for cannibalism does not make Swift a misanthrope since he has mentioned in the text that the proposal was “for this one individual kingdom of Ireland, and for no other that ever, is, or, I think, ever can be upon the earth”. The social and economic depravity of the Irish people is more vividly described at the end of the pamphlet when Swift writes that Irish people have been going through a “perpetual scene of misfortune” which includes “oppression of landlords, the impossibility of paying rent without money or trade, the want of common sustenance, with neither house nor clothes to cover them from the inclemencies of the weather” (Swift, 1729).

To conclude, I would say that A Modest Proposal is an outcome of Swift’s conservative moral philosophy based on his sincere empathy for a nation suffering from poverty, depravity, and resourcelessness. The sarcasm, the biting satire, and the shocking irony in the pamphlet demonstrate Swift’s sincere, though shockingly sarcastic, effort to raise their voice for the rights of the Irish people and to shock the English into action. Through this proposal, Swift successfully unveiled the social and economic depravity and physical sufferings of the Irish Catholic people in the hands of a Protestant aristocracy.