In the fourth and final book of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Gulliver finds himself in the land of the Houyhnhnms, a race of horses blessed with the gifts of speech and perfect rationality. After living amongst the Houyhnhnms for an extended period of time, Gulliver begins to deeply admire them for their “general disposition to all virtues” (482). Gulliver explains that the Houyhnhnms “have no Conceptions or Ideas of what is evil in a rational creature; so their grand Maxim is, to cultivate Reason, and to be wholly governed by it” (482-483).
Like Enlightenment thinkers of his day, Gulliver views reason and rationality as essential virtues to be perpetually sought after. In such a view, the Houyhnhnms would seem like an ideal race; however, this rosy picture quickly becomes complicated by certain sinister undertones in Gulliver’s narration of life in the country of the Houyhnhnms. At one point in the text, Gulliver explains that Houyhnhnms do not understand the meaning of the word “opinion.” Because they are perfectly rational, they all come to the same conclusions given the same knowledge, and therefore, “controversies, wranglings, disputes, and positiveness in false or dubious propositions, are evils unknown among the Houyhnhnms” (483). While they see this as a positive thing, one must question what it means to live in a society with no dissenting opinions. Is this the result of absolute rationality, or of absolute conformity and oppression?
The sinister effects of such intellectual cohesiveness begin to come to light when Gulliver relates the story of the first debate to ever occur in the Houyhnhnm Grand Assembly. The question at hand was “whether the Yahoos should be exterminated from the face of the Earth” (485). While the term “genocide” would not be coined for another two centuries, the Houyhnhnms are essentially debating (quite rationally) whether or not to commit genocide, without any seeming moral considerations.
Such an abuse of rational thought may be Swift’s attempt to give warning to Enlightenment thinkers of the day. While rationality is something to be desired in the decision-making thought process, absolute rationality without human sentiments, like emotion, altruism, and morality, can lead to dangerous calculations. #10/27
