Academy of Lagado

Gulliver’s trip to the Academy of Lagado reminded me of our class discussion on the purposes of science and experimentation. I remember personally concluding from that discussion that scientific experimentation was a luxury afforded to those with time and resources, but that it was also a driver of progress. Swift seems to think slightly differently, and uses the Academy to thoroughly mock the idea of “science for the sake of science.” All the experiments he describes are completely impractical and the philosopher-scientists shamelessly beg for money to continue their ‘research’ while the world outside falls apart. He describes people wholly consumed with the idea of turning excrement back into food, teaching the blind to distinguish color, and breeding naked sheep. My favorite idea is the machine that allows “the most ignorant person…[to] write many books in philosophy, poetry, politics, law, mathematics, and theology.”

These experiments reminded me a lot of the ridiculous appliances featured on early morning infomercials. They sell things that people would never actually need, and that someone probably came up with while drunk, and yet companies shell out tons of money to get the commercials on the air and demonstrate to everyone in America why they need a Snuggie/Magic Bullet/Shakeweight ect.

The projects, in the book and on infomercials, at first seem to be the products of sensible thinking because they seek to better the human condition, but then when actually analyzed they turn out to be totally unnecessary. I find it interesting that today I live in a world of constant experimentation and invention, yet because I am so well off I never question the usefulness of science. If you think about it, NASA uses up billions of dollars in government funding every year, but no one complains about it because people like to collect knowledge, even if knowledge of Jupiter’s moons does not directly benefit us in anyway. I would be interested to see what a parody of our culture’s fascination with technology and anything that allows us to “do less” would look like if someone wrote a “Gulliver’s Travels” today. I think that book would have a lot more to do with innovation and experimentation for the sake of money than Gulliver's Travels. The people at the academy think of money as way to maintain their experiments, with the larger goal of improving the state of man. Today, I think that money comes first and "improving the state of man" is either a happy accident or an after-thought for many inventors, scientists, and engineers.