Swift’s Rational Horses Put Power on Trial

Malise Ruthven’s essay “Jonathan Swift is laughing at us” asks a dangerous question: what happens when a society calls its own order perfectly rational, then considers eliminating those it labels inferior? In Gulliver’s final voyage, the Houyhnhnms are rational horses who debate whether “the Yahoos should be exterminated from the face of the earth.” The people they would erase resemble humans. In the horses’ account, their crime is being “the most filthy, noisome, and deformed animals which nature ever produced.”

That’s Swift’s sharp edge: power can dress cruelty in the language of reason. Ruthven says the passage warns that appeals to rational order can justify eliminating a population declared inferior. He writes that the horses’ society may also rely on suppressing sympathy, attachment and individuality. There’s no simple moral comfort in choosing rulers with the tidiest argument.

The order behind the argument

Gulliver describes the Houyhnhnms’ virtues as “Friendship and benevolence,” extended to their whole race. They maintain “decency and civility in the highest degrees” while remaining “altogether ignorant of ceremony.” Their reason, he says, “strikes you with immediate conviction” because it isn’t “mingled, obscured, or discoloured, by passion and interest.” Yet these same creatures consider extermination. The contradiction sits inside their supposedly flawless order.

The Yahoos, meanwhile, appear filthy, greedy and aggressive. They hoard bright stones, digging for them “for whole days” and hiding them in their kennels. Ruthven says their bodies and “strange disposition to nastiness and dirt” embody their character. Gulliver calls them “so disagreeable an animal.” He eventually judges his family, friends, countrymen and humanity to be “Yahoos in shape and disposition, perhaps a little more civilised,” using reason “than to improve and multiply those vices.” He returns home alienated from humanity and prefers the company of horses.

Swift’s earlier A Modest Proposal applies the machinery of economic reason directly to the treatment of the poor. Published 297 years ago, it presents poor Irish children as a commodity for consumption by the better-off, using bureaucratic economic language to expose society’s treatment of them. Ruthven connects that grotesque premise to documented human-organ trafficking: the UN Office on Drugs and Crime’s Global Report on Trafficking in Persons 2024 records 175 detected victims of trafficking for organ removal across 25 countries during 2017-23. Those figures don’t make Swift’s satire less brutal. They give it an ugly point of contact with the present.

The satire, repackaged

Popular versions have often softened the bite. The 1939 Fleischer cartoon, made in competition with Disney’s Snow White, turns the Lilliput voyage into a musical romance between rival kingdoms. In the 1960 film The 3 Worlds of Gulliver, Gulliver puts out a fire in the Lilliputian palace by spilling wine. Swift’s original has him use the wine he had drunk, which “made the wine begin to operate by urine.” He extinguishes the fire by voiding it “in such a quantity, and applied so well to the proper places, that in three minutes the fire was wholly extinguished.” The empress is enraged: making water in the royal precincts is a capital offence, and Gulliver faces a charge of high treason. Royal authority survives; the method becomes the scandal.

Ruthven also discusses Hayao Miyazaki’s Castle in the Sky (1986), which borrows Swift’s name and image for a world of lost technology, robots and adventure. Swift’s flying island of Laputa satirises intellectuals absorbed in abstract speculation and detached from practical life. Miyazaki’s version is more enchanting, Ruthven says, but retains the danger of technological power separated from ordinary human needs.

Ireland’s divided inheritance

Ruthven describes Swift’s vision as Anglo-Irish in character. In his biography of Yeats, R.F. Foster calls it “the laconic, visceral, uncompromising edge of the Anglo-Irish mind.” Ruthven says Swift exposes the society that formed him; Yeats saw a related quality in Éamon de Valera, whom he compared to Swift as an emblem of Ireland’s “turbulent self-assertion.”

Ruthven recalls seeing de Valera at the Dublin Horse Show in August 1972, aged 90 and then President of Ireland. The event had long been associated with Anglo-Irish society, equestrian traditions and the ascendancy of horse-mounted Protestants; de Valera had built his political career in opposition to the British Crown. That same year was Bloody Sunday, amid bloodshed over divisions between nationalists and loyalists, Catholics and Protestants, and Ireland and Britain in Northern Ireland. Ruthven says the horse show suggested a form of coexistence political argument alone might not achieve, with animals offering connection across sectarian divisions.

Ruthven cites Aaron Matz’s argument against treating satire chiefly as political intervention tied to particular rulers, parties and crises. Swift called the “great foundation of Misanthropy” the basis on which he built the book. His joke keeps returning to people who claim authority through reason, virtue or economics—and to the human beings those claims make small.