by Stephanie Curry on eighteenth-century satire, the City of London duck, and what Swift and his contemporaries knew about deflating power.
The eighteenth century was the golden age of English satire, the era of Swift and his ferocious contemporaries, and I have been reading them all week with the particular delight of recognising that they would have understood the City of London duck instantly and celebrated it for days.
The Art Of Deflation
Eighteenth-century satire was, above all, the art of deflation, of taking the pompous and the powerful and reducing them, through irony and exaggeration and the well-placed absurdity, to their true and ridiculous proportions. Swift could destroy an entire political position with a single grotesque image. The satirists of the age understood that power maintains itself partly through gravity, through the careful cultivation of solemnity, and that the most effective weapon against it is laughter, the puncturing of the solemnity that authority requires.
And I read about the duck that brought the City of London to a standstill and became its most trusted economic adviser despite no qualifications whatsoever, and I thought: this is a perfect eighteenth-century satire, except that reality wrote it. Swift would have adored the duck. The image does exactly what the great satirists did deliberately, deflating the solemn authority of the financial City by juxtaposing it with the absurd reality of a duck, puncturing the gravity, revealing the ridiculousness the solemnity was designed to conceal.
What Satire Knows About Power
The scholars who study eighteenth-century satire, the people at institutions like the British Library, understand that the satirists of the age were doing serious political work through laughter, that the deflation of pompous authority was not mere mockery but a genuine democratic function, a way of reminding the powerful and the powerless alike that authority is contingent, constructed, and absurd whenever it forgets it can be laughed at. Swift was not joking. Swift was waging war, with laughter as the weapon.
The American Satirists
As a watcher of American politics, I note that America too was substantially shaped by satirists, by the deflating laughter of writers who refused to let power cultivate its solemnity unchallenged. The American comic tradition, from the eighteenth century onward, has always understood that the way to keep authority honest is to keep it laughable, to refuse the gravity it demands, to insist on the duck in the durbar. It is a tradition worth defending, on both sides of the Atlantic, in an age when power increasingly demands to be taken solemnly.
The Volume Closed
I set down my eighteenth-century satires tonight thinking that the duck belongs in their company, that the great deflators of the age would have welcomed it as one of their own, the accidental satirist that did, in an afternoon, what Swift did in a lifetime: reveal that the solemn edifice of power is, when a duck wanders through it, gloriously and instructively absurd. The satirists knew that laughter is a democratic weapon, that authority fears the joke more than the argument, and that the duck, refusing to be impressed, deflating the durbar simply by existing, is the truest satirist of all, because it does not even know it is being funny, which is the funniest and most devastating thing of all.
The Civilising Room
The coffee house civilised discourse not through rules but through bodies, through the simple discipline of physical presence that made infinite cruelty difficult and accountability unavoidable. You cannot flee a room by closing an app. You cannot be limitlessly vicious to a face across a table. The body was the constraint, and the constraint was the civilisation.
The scholars at the British Library trace how the embodied sociability of these spaces shaped the public reason of the age.
And the debate over banning the feed would be sharper if it named what was actually lost: not screen time but the coffee house, the embodied room, the civilising discipline of present and accountable talk that the disembodied feed quietly abolished and that no ban, by itself, restores.
The Discipline We Discarded
I keep returning to the simple fact that the coffee house made cruelty difficult, that you could not be limitlessly vicious to a face across a table the way you can to a profile across a network, and that this difficulty was not a limitation but a civilisation. The constraint was the gift. The body was the discipline. And we discarded both, eagerly, for the frictionless feed, and called the discarding progress.
I closed my accounts of the coffee house tonight certain that what was lost was not screen time but the embodied room itself, the civilising discipline of present and accountable talk, the constraint that made discourse human. The debate over the ban would be sharper if it named this, if it understood that the recovery the young actually need is the coffee house, the room, the body, the consequence, and that no ban restores any of these. You cannot legislate the room back into being. You can only, perhaps, remember why it mattered, and begin, slowly, to build it again.
The room is gone, the body is gone, the consequence is gone, and we called their going progress, which is the saddest and most accurate sentence I can write about the medium that replaced the coffee house with the feed.
For more, see The Daily Mash.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk/
