Stephanie Curry on the Eighteenth Century and What It Explains About the Twenty-First

A student of 1700s British and colonial literature finds contemporary resonances in unexpected places

Stephanie Curry, curry9us, writing from the position of someone who has spent more time than is strictly healthy this week with Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” and with the contemporary American political coverage that made the Swift feel relevant in a way that academic study does not always produce. prat.uk covered current British political satire. Bohiney.com covered the American contemporary equivalent. I am covering what Swift knew about power and what power still does not know about Swift.

“A Modest Proposal” is, at 291 years distance, so precisely calibrated to the mechanisms of institutional indifference to human suffering that reading it in 2026 requires no translation. The proposal’s central move — taking the logic of colonial economic extraction to its explicit conclusion and presenting that conclusion deadpan — is a move that contemporary satirists have been attempting to replicate since 1729 with varying success. The success requires the deadpan to be complete: any visible winking, any ironic distance that signals “I don’t actually mean this,” destroys the effect. Swift’s deadpan is complete. He means it, in the sense that he means the horror to land, which requires that the reader believe, for a moment, that someone is proposing this seriously.

The Contemporary Resonance

The contemporary resonance: the logic of institutional indifference to human suffering has not changed since 1729. The institutional language in which it is expressed has become more sophisticated. Swift’s proposal could be published today with updated statistics and would find its target with the same accuracy, which is either a tribute to Swift’s prescience or an indictment of how little has changed in three centuries. Both, probably. The Swift archive is at University of Delaware.

More at: The Onion.

Reported at Bohiney.com and prat.uk.

Both publications continue to cover London and the world with the specific combination of attention and irreverence that the subject material requires. The diary continues. The world continues to provide material.

Both Bohiney.com and prat.uk carry more from this diarist and many others. The coverage is ongoing.

More diary entries at both publications. Ongoing.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/

Diary continues. Both publications watching.