Posts Tagged ‘Gulliver’s Travels’
“… preferring their own ease and sloth before the general improvement of their country”*…
Dónal Gill, a college professor grappling with AI, looks to Jonathan Swift for guidance. Three hundred years ago, the satirist warned of a world in which reading and writing are replaced by the flashy simulation of human knowledge…
I have spent a significant portion of my life studying the Irish satirist Jonathan Swift — and in particular, studying Gulliver’s Travels, which turns 300 this year. While working on my Ph.D. dissertation, I was primarily interested in what Swift had to say about the politics of travel. Now, as a college professor teaching Canadian politics and battling to keep generative artificial intelligence out of my classrooms, I’m thinking a lot about what Swift had to say about technology. In his day, as in ours, a dominant narrative portrayed scientific development as both benevolent and inevitable. Swift’s skepticism about that narrative exposes some of our own most deeply held assumptions about the meaning of progress.
Born in Dublin in 1667, Swift is frequently described as the greatest satirist in the English language. This reputation is tied to the biting wit and unruly imagination found across his prose, poetry and political writings. In “A Modest Proposal” (1729), he notoriously suggests that the Irish poor should eat their own children for subsistence. Swift was born into the Anglo-Irish Protestant elite, and the text satires both the callousness of his class and a then-ascendant approach to morality and politics that held that all aspects of life could be cooked down to a pure numerical value. That this approach ended up predominating in the boardroom and halls of government is one reason why the brisk and shocking “Modest Proposal” still speaks to readers today.
Gulliver’s Travels is a much lengthier work. Over the course of Gulliver’s four voyages to fantastical lands, Swift gives the reader wild and varied depictions of political corruption and human hubris. Gulliver’s third voyage takes him to the flying island of Laputa, which rules tyrannically over several territories situated below. On his visit to one of these territories, Gulliver tours the “Academy of Lagado,” where scientific experimentation and deciphering the patterns of mathematics and music are valued above all else. The scientists he meets are profoundly unconcerned with whether their experiments have any useful outcome.
At the time Swift was writing, the experimental scientific method as we know it today — data collection and the development of hypotheses from empirical evidence — was becoming prominent, thanks to the work of Sir Isaac Newton and the Royal Society. Critics and readers have often viewed Gulliver’s third voyage as a moment when Swift chose the wrong subject to satire. The achievements of Newton and the Royal Society are, after all, still celebrated today. But I think Swift knew exactly what he was doing. Far from merely raising a reactionary fist in the air at the new science, Swift identified an attitude that is still around today — and one that has created many of the greatest challenges now facing educators.
Centuries before the internet infiltrated almost every aspect of daily life, Swift described how scientific and technological advances could lead to chronic distraction by producing an obsession with what could be rather than what is. At the heart of Swift’s diagnosis is the idea of speculation, or as Gulliver describes it, “speculative learning.” Gulliver sees a society totally consumed by impractical and abstract scientific interrogation. This plays out in bizarre and frequently doomed projects and experiments: Gulliver incredulously witnesses people attempting to extract sunbeams from cucumbers and turn excrement back into edible food.
Not all the scientific projects in the territories of Laputa fail to achieve their purpose. Gulliver is shown a large wooden contraption that allows “the most ignorant person … [to] write books in philosophy, poetry, politics, laws, mathematics, and theology, without the least assistance from genius or study.” [See the illustration above.] Swift, who was deeply learned, was envisaging a nightmare world in which reading and writing — the essential foundation of wit and wisdom — are replaced by a flashy simulation of human knowledge. Since the advent of ChatGPT, this scenario has become all too familiar. The device Gulliver encounters is massive, requiring 40 individuals to rotate iron handles attached to multiple words, which are then assembled into sentence fragments and called out to a scribe. Reading Swift’s description, I think both of the autocomplete nature of modern large language models and of the underclass of precarious workers whose labor is necessary for the seemingly lean, seemingly all-digital process of generative AI to work.
There are also many Laputans who are given over to a strange life of the mind, “so taken up with intense speculations, that they neither can speak, nor attend to the discourses of others, without being roused by some external taction upon the organs of speech and hearing.” Servants called flappers are required to shake rattles in their ears to keep them from falling or bumping into things. A quick rattle might also be used to rouse them from the somnambulant abyss of speculative abstraction, if conversation is necessary. Again, sounds rather familiar. Sure, people today wandering the streets head down in the infinite distractions of their phones are hardly absorbed in the life of the mind — but they are still absent from the things and the people around them. And isn’t the addiction to scrolling predicated on speculation of sorts? What will come next? What will I find if I look at just one more post?
Modern technology, and AI in particular, has created another Laputa: a society characterized by rampant speculation, blind faith in technology manipulated by cynical charlatans, and the casual disregard of old-fashioned virtues like truth, beauty, imagination and knowledge acquired the hard way. In many cases, the presence of AI in the classroom is a solution in search of a problem — just like the ludicrous, pointless innovations by the Laputan scientists. Swift’s sharp diagnosis of Laputa’s ills is motivating me to push back against the encroachment of AI into the work of education — and to instill in my students the belief that they, rather than the forces of technology, can determine the future…
Do read on for more: “Jonathan Swift v. AI,” from @donalgill.bsky.social in @thedialmag.bsky.social.
* Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, Part III (“A Voyage to Laputa, Balnibarbi, Luggnagg, Glubbdubdrib and Japan”)
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As we shape our tools, we might recall that it was on this date in 1870 that a patent was granted to Daniel C. Stillson for the modern adjustible pipe wrench (an adaptation of/improvement to the monkey wrench) that he had invented the prior year.
“The heart and soul of the company is creativity”*…
Creativity doesn’t have a deep history. The Oxford English Dictionary records just a single usage of the word in the 17th century, and it’s religious: ‘In Creation, we have God and his Creativity.’ Then, scarcely anything until the 1920s – quasi-religious invocations by the philosopher A N Whitehead. So creativity, considered as a power belonging to an individual – divine or mortal – doesn’t go back forever. Neither does the adjective ‘creative’ – being inventive, imaginative, having original ideas – though this word appears much more frequently than the noun in the early modern period. God is the Creator and, in the 17th and 18th centuries, the creative power, like the rarely used ‘creativity’, was understood as divine. The notion of a secular creative ability in the imaginative arts scarcely appears until the Romantic Era, as when the poet William Wordsworth addressed the painter and critic Benjamin Haydon: ‘Creative Art … Demands the service of a mind and heart.’
This all changes in the mid-20th century, and especially after the end of the Second World War, when a secularised notion of creativity explodes into prominence. The Google Ngram chart bends sharply upwards from the 1950s and continues its ascent to the present day. But as late as 1970, practically oriented writers, accepting that creativity was valuable and in need of encouragement, nevertheless reflected on the newness of the concept, noting its absence from some standard dictionaries even a few decades before.
Before the Second World War and its immediate aftermath, the history of creativity might seem to lack its object – the word was not much in circulation. The point needn’t be pedantic. You might say that what we came to mean by the capacity of creativity was then robustly picked out by other notions, say genius, or originality, or productivity, or even intelligence – or whatever capacity it was believed enabled people to think thoughts considered new and valuable. And in the postwar period, a number of commentators did wonder about the supposed difference between emergent creativity and such other long-recognised mental capacities. The creativity of the mid-20th century was entangled in these pre-existing notions, but the circumstances of its definition and application were new…
Once seen as the work of genius, how did creativity become an engine of economic growth and a corporate imperative? (Hint: the Manhattan Project and the Cold War played important roles.): “The rise and rise of creativity.”
(Image above: source)
* Bob Iger, CEO of The Walt Disney Company
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As we lionize the latest, we might recall that it was on this date in 1726 that Jonathan Swift’s Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships— much better known as Gulliver’s Travels— was first published. A satire both of human nature and of the “travelers’ tales” literary subgenre popular at the time, it was an immediate hit (John Gay wrote in a 1726 letter to Swift that “It is universally read, from the cabinet council to the nursery”). It has, of course, become a classic.
“I quote others only in order the better to express myself”*…
A recent query to the always-illuminating Language Log:
I’m reading my new copy of Soonish and came across a reference to air quotes and I got to wondering about the meme. I remember using them at least 30 years or more ago, entirely un-ironically. How does one go about looking up the history of such a thing? How would you reconcile the discoverable print references to its presumably earlier emergence as a metalinguistic thing in itself? At what point do the words, “air quotes” show up to stand for actual physically-performed “Air Quotes”?
Find the answers at: “Air Quotes.”
* Michel de Montaigne
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As we admit that there’s probably no pithier way to be ironic, mocking, or disingenuous, we might recall that it was on this date in 1726 that Jonathan Swift’s Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships— much better known as Gulliver’s Travels— was first published. A satire both of human nature and of the “travelers’ tales” literary subgenre popular at the time, it was an immediate hit (John Gay wrote in a 1726 letter to Swift that “It is universally read, from the cabinet council to the nursery”). It has, of course, become a classic.
From the first edition
“The soul takes nothing with her to the next world but her education and her culture”*…
What does it mean to be “cultured”? Are you? The questionnaire above is from Ashley Montagu’s 1958 book, The Cultured Man…
Montagu—a well-respected anthropologist and former student of Franz Boas, who was influential in his profession’s midcentury rejection of the idea of innate racial hierarchy—wrote many popular books, of which The Cultured Man is one.
The book contains quizzes for 50 categories of knowledge in the arts and sciences, with 30 questions each; 25 of the questions test knowledge and five test what Montagu called “attitudes.” The test-taker could refer to the answers at the back of the book and tap the list of references Montagu offered as correctives to those who found themselves deficient in a particular area.
Distinguishing his project from that of the quiz shows that were popular staples of radio and TV in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, Montagu wrote that a person considered “cultured” would not just be able to readily summon facts, but also to access humane feelings, which would necessarily come about after contact with culture. “The principal mark of the cultured man is not so much knowledge as his attitude of mind in relating his knowledge to the world of experience,” Montagu wrote. A “cultured man” would be curious, unprejudiced, rational, and ethical.
“The function of these questions is not a static one,” Montagu wrote, encouraging readers to see the experience of being tested as an educational opportunity. “Their function is both dynamic and constructive: to tell you more or less exactly where you stand as a cultured person, and precisely in which directions you need to move from that position. No one grows who stands still.”
More, from the redoubtable Rebecca Onion, at “How Cultured Are You, by 1950s Standards?” It’s interesting to note, as Ms. Onion does, that while Montagu was a powerful mid-century voice for antiracism and multiculturalism, his idea of “culture” is essentially Western, and almost totally lacking in representation of non-male, non-white voices…
* Plato, The Republic
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As we hit the books, we might spare a thought for a cultural observer extraordinaire: Jonathan Swift, the satirist, essayist, political pamphleteer, poet, and cleric who’s probably best remembered for Gulliver’s Travels and A Modest Proposal; he died on this date in 1745.
Relatively speaking…
Max Fleischer and his lady love (source)
Max Fleischer and his brother Dave were giants in the history of animation. The most significant competition to Walt Disney in the formative years of the art, they created Betty Boop and Koko the Clown, and brought Bimbo, Popeye, Superman, and Gulliver’s Travels to the screen. Along the way, they invented a number of technologies and techniques that have become essential to the form.
Rotoscope by Max Fleischer, patent drawing from 1914
But possibly the the strangest– and arguably the most wonderful– thing they ever did was this 1923 short film blithely and elegantly explaining the concept of relativity:
TotH to Curiosity Counts.
As we await the animators of our new paradigms, we might wish a minimal(ist) birthday to Philip Glass, award-winning composer and first cousin once removed of (R)D friend and hero Ira Glass; Philip was born on this date in 1937.
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