A Modest Proposal is a satirical work by Jonathan Swift aimed at skewering English reactions to the then-contemporary issues of poverty and famine in Ireland. It revolves around a detailed argument that the problems of poverty, famine, overpopulation and many other social ills could be solved by selling one year old Irish children to be cooked and eaten dressed “hot from the knife, as we do roasting pigs” at English dinner tables (Swift, 1729, p.9). It was written in the early 18th century when Ireland was effectively an English colony and had been ruled as such for centuries. Colonialism is never benevolent, and under the English yoke poverty and its attendant social evils ran rampant among the Irish, especially Irish Catholics. The author was a member of the Irish-Anglo upper class that ruled Ireland at the time and was definitively not subject to the poverty and starvation that the rest of the Irish society was rife with. As such he had a complicated relationship both with England and his Irish countrymen, which he apparently resolved by savagely criticizing all of them.
The overall message of A Modest Proposal is that English people were not doing enough to help the poor. The theme is one of sarcasm and parody, most prominently against the practice of writing political pamphlets and the concept of economic utilitarianism. Utilitarianism had begun to take off as an ethical philosophy in England at that time. Utilitarianism is the idea that an ethical action is one that creates the most happiness or pleasure for the most number of people. It is obvious implications for social and economic policy, which was of course bad for the English self-image since England was an Industrial Revolution era colonial state and colonialism is by its very nature an act and system of violence by which one country forcibly imposes its will on another. Coercion is intrinsically harmful, either on the personal scale or the societal scale, meaning that accepting utilitarianism as a concept meant that English people had to construct theories and rationalizations for why their country was not an actively harmful force in society.
This is all reflected in the character of the narrator. Swift takes on the voice of an earnestly rational and smugly enlightened would-be reformer proposing a way to help the benighted lower classes. This, and the underlying sarcasm that makes it satire, can be seen in his faux economical calculations that the population of Ireland is “usually reckoned one million and a half, of these I calculate there may be about two hundred thousand couple whose wives are breeders,” followed by an estimate of how many of those couples can afford to raise their children in good order and how many births can be written off due to miscarriage or death in infancy (Swift, 1729, p.3). He also makes the pretense of being a good English Protestant, noting that Catholic infants outnumber the Protestant children at least three to one and that his plan to kill off the excess infants“will have one other collateral advantage, by lessening the number of Papists among us” (Swift, 1729, p.7). The narrator is smug, clearly concerned with showing off how smart and rational he is rather than actually caring about any of the people he claims he is trying to help.
A Modest Proposal is relevant because of the obvious way it satirizes pompous supposed reformers more interested in showing off their own intelligence, education and supposed liberalism than actually doing anything to help the poor and suffering. It is hard not to see the parallels between contemporary debates and commentators on poverty and someone who advocates infant cannibalism as a remedy to “prevent those voluntary abortions, and that horrid practice of women murdering their bastard children” that are all too common amongst the poorer segments of society (Swift, 1792, p.3). But that is only the surface level. The real lesson comes from how it utterly failed to influence the attitudes of the people Swift was satirizing. Furthermore, on a meta level, it is relevant because of the tendency of satirical works to be appropriated by the people they were intended to satirize. Witness the popularity of the utterly loathsome protagonist of The Wolf of Wall Street among a generation of would-be stockbrokers and other financial services people who aspire to be like him, or the fact that studies have shown Stephen Colbert has a non-negligible conservative fanbase that believes, or believed, he is not joking.
The Bible says that “you will always have the poor with you” (Matthew 26:11). Some Christians have actually used this as an argument against poverty relief policies, but the more credible interpretation is that poverty and poor people are unavoidable in some form or another and that it follows that Christians should take proactive measures to help them. The Lord and Savior Christ Jesus preached charity and comfort for the poor, but he also preached against the wealthy and the educated who made a great pretense of charity and virtue for their own aggrandisement. Thus, A Modest Proposal fits into a Christian worldview on multiple levels, both by shaming those who would disregard the suffering of their neighbors just as the Savior said “as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me” (Matthew 25:40) and by calling out those who make a show of helping the poor and destitute only to “pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, that they might be seen by others” (Matthew 6:5).
References
Swift, J. (1732). A Modest Proposal. Amazon Digital Services
