Great Works of Literature II

After reading this disturbing proposal, I realize how bad poverty was in Ireland during the 1700s, especially with regards to its next generation of children. Swift asserts that the resolution to the country’s increasingly poor population is to sell one-year-old babies for their meat, though one can infer pretty quickly that his proposal is a satirical attack on Ireland’s lack of efforts to better society. Reform is so desperately needed in Ireland yet so plainly ignored that Swift resorts to a drastic measures to grab people’s attention. Essentially, Swift mockingly proposes that the country should just eliminate part of the impoverished population instead of going to the root of the problem and finding the most effective solution.
To look at young children as an edible commodity instead of potential beneficiaries of society, which they could be through proper nutrition and education, shows that no one in Ireland is taking the problem seriously. I find it quite humorous that Swift ends the piece stating that he has no children of his own to contribute to his plan, nor the want to fix it himself, as it reflects the general opinion of his fellow Irishmen.

At the start of the reading I was curious to see what sort of response the author would provide to solving the conditions of poverty and desperation that were severely plaguing the population of Ireland. However, I was completely taken aback by the response he had put forward. The idea of killing babies to sustain an economy sounds both preposterous and inhumane. The worst part of it all, was that he was able to rationally justify his idea, by showing how much a society could thrive from this kind of work. Mothers would no longer be burdened by children who cannot support the family, the flow of money within society would increase, new sorts of dishes would be formed for the wealthy, and the level of poverty would decrease. But the question is what kind of mother would be willing to give up her own child for the sake of making some money? I can’t imagine mothers sanely being so heartless and immoral towards their own children, regardless of what hardships may have been persisting during that time.

This article had reminded me of the book  Freakonomics, written by the popular economist Steven D. Levitt. The book discusses the idea of how increasing abortions can reduce crime within society. The rationalization of this idea is that mothers who tend to have abortions are those who do not want their children. As a result, there is a higher chance of those children resorting to a life of crime as a means of survival. Thus, the best option for those mothers is to simply go through with the abortion. I was able to draw a strong correlation between both readings after closely analyzing their end objectives. The first, supports the idea of killing babies to reduce poverty, while the latter uses the idea of increasing society’s abortion levels to reduce crime rate. Thus an abhorrent idea is rationalized by stating that it has some beneficial end for society. But in my opinion they both seem to devalue human life, as the means always justify the ends.

-Kristina Rozentsvayg

In Swift’s writing, “A Modest Proposal”, I was initially extremely interested in how he would attempt to solve the nation’s problem of poverty and beggars. However, to my surprise he had made the utmost ridiculous solutions. It was seriously difficult for me to take anything he had wrote seriously. Was his solution to seriously to fatten up the children, to sell and then eat them?! Swift was able to make a decent argument though. He proposed that this was effective in the way that it would reduce the over population, unemployment, enable parents to be a little less financially burdened, become an enjoyment of abundant food to the wealthy and help improve the economy.

After completing the reading, I came to conclude that this piece was completely satire. I believe that he was making a point about how society wanted to remove the less fortunate by being completely sarcastic at the ridiculous lengths which the better off will try to do in order to solve their problem. Possibly, in Ireland at that time, society was making inhumane decisions about what to do with the poor and just maybe Swift went to extremes to help others realize what a ridiculous proposal they were trying to implement. In my interpretation, Swift has made a great point in a satirist manner.

When I first started reading Jonathan Swift’s Proposal, I thought that he was going to come up with a serious idea on how to save beggars and their children from the streets. As I read on, I realized that his idea was sickening and immoral. Using children for money and as food is no better than killing them through abortion. I found his idea to be ridiculous as I kept on reading and the fact that he treats infants as objects and currency shows how inhuman this person is. Some of his ideas might actually help people, but I believe that the negatives far outweigh the positives in this situation.

In the story, he says that his scheme is to “prevent voluntary abortions and to stop women from murdering their children”, but what difference does it make if they are going to sell them or eat them? Most of his points are using infants’ lives as a way to benefit in monetary values and profits, which most people would find unethical. Although some of his points are actually beneficial, it is still a horrible way to earn a living by using children as objects.

I found this piece of writing to be quite interesting as I thought what kind of a person would actually resort to eating children as food or sell their own children to landlords. As I read and thought about it, no one would. Swift couldn’t have been serious throughout the essay. Eating children as a method of reducing poverty and overpopulation? Ridiculous. Reducing ones own burden and the burden of ones country would be great but not by selling your own kid.

This essay reminds me of an article I read about India and how children are being sold each and everyday. Boys are being sold to work in factories with little or no pay and girls born are sometimes just killed because they are females. In India, marrying off a daughter is a burden for many as it requires a dowry of some sort. For most people in India, that isn’t possible. Although this essay is a satire, some of the things mentioned in it happen each and everyday through counties worldwide.