Byron Summons Jonathan Swift – 061
Your Choice: Listen or Read
My dear companions,
Our recent tales — charming though they were — floated a little too far into the ether of the idyllic. Clouds, crystal seas, carnivals, gardens under ice… delightful, yes, but dangerously innocent of mankind’s true nature. Even the grandest vision will founder if it refuses to face the animal in the mirror.
By way of counterweight, I have lately revisited Mr. Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal. A jewel of wit and savagery, proving that to expose vice one need only let it speak plainly — or absurdly — enough. In that spirit, I have prepared my own list of humanity’s most self-destructive traits, a catalogue of impediments to our survival:
- Greed – The appetite that grows with feeding.
- Tribal Hatred – The reflex to divide and conquer, endlessly profitable to the corrupt.
- Short-Termism – The inability to plan or care beyond one’s own lifetime.
- Fear of the New – The Luddite’s instinct to strike down any fresh invention or idea.
- Litigiousness – A culture where the fear of being sued strangles the artist and inventor before they draw breath.
- Myth of Absolute Privacy – Mistaking secrecy for liberty, and letting harm fester in the dark.
- Overpopulation – The stubborn belief that the earth is infinite, and one’s personal right to multiply is absolute.
To make the exercise more sport than sermon, I assign each flaw to one of us:
- Polidori – Greed
- Percy – Tribal Hatred
- Mary – Short-Termism
- Claire – Fear of the New
- Myself – Litigiousness
- Molly – Myth of Absolute Privacy
- Mr. Jonathan Swift – Overpopulation (a theme I suspect he will relish, given his past literary appetites)
The challenge: draft a “modest proposal” for your assigned flaw — a remedy so outrageous, so magnificently implausible, that it lays the vice bare for all to see. Let wit and venom mingle. The aim is not to be believed, but to be remembered.
Who will begin? Mary, perhaps, with her cure for short-termism? Or Swift, eager to prove the master still reigns? Shall we play?
— Byron