Slaughtered piglets and legless spiders

On this one I have short-circuited anti-racist activist Darcus Howe with Jonathan Swift, the  writer of Gulliver’s Travels although I deal with the also famous text A modest proposal instead.

After vindicating his wandering life from wife to wife four or five times over, I don’t remember, and after a massive-massive rant against monogamy, which mind you why not! renowned anti-racist activist Darcus Howe once said this in some Saturday family supplement of The Guardian: “Family is overrated and is the most dangerous place in the world to live in”. Hence, if you ask me, Howe is also a bit of a coward who is rather afraid of children, forget wives, and even secretly wishes perhaps that the satirical pamphlet “A modest proposal” by Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) was not so satirical after all.

As you’ll remember Swift’s text should be read without forgetting the specific context of pre-modern politics in which incipient forms of Enlightenment discourses also begin to find their way through. Belonging to what is conventionally known as the Anglo-Irish Protestant ascendancy, he finds himself caught up between the emerging rationalist / instrumentalist bourgeois mindset of the eighteenth century and the still prevailing aristocratic anti-mercantile predisposition. It is not wonder then that as “A modest proposal” places special emphasis on the social and economic maltreatment of the poor and destitute in Ireland, the main ironical thrust is conveyed through the narrative voice of a bigoted merchant.

The story is well known and goes like this: the poor and destitute are made of an increasing amount of tenant farmers unable to pay their rent and the drastic suggestion this tradesman puts forward is that young beggar children be fattened and slaughtered and then used for food. In good and timely merchant style (salable commodity, rearing time, expenses, sale, exchange, revenue, annual profit, value added) the narrator backs up the development of this new industry with a minutely detailed financial “scheme”. According to the proposal, the implementation of this scheme would not only be socially beneficial because “instead of being a charge [these children] shall on the contrary contribute to the feeding, and partly to the clothing, of many thousands”. It would also be instrumental to the purposes of economic growth and moral regeneration.

For instance, instant economic benefits are forecasted to both landlords and farmers alike. Literally speaking food surplus would be made available to landlords since they “have already devoured most of the parents” in the metaphorical sense of having stripped them off from all material wealth. As to the parents themselves, “the poorer tenants will have something valuable of their own” which in turn may also help them pay the rent. Moreover, consumption would increase in public houses and taverns “frequented by all the fine gentlemen, who justly value themselves upon their knowledge of good eating”. In regards of moral benefits, this whole enterprise would primarily offer financial incentives to promote the sacrament of marriage, prevent abortion and “increase the care and tenderness of mothers toward their children”.

Obviously, as Jonathan Swift’s uncompromising use of satire is a vehicle to denounce the injustice of economic unequality and bringing about social reform, I am not literally suggesting that Darcus Howe would want his wifes’ kids be sold as if they were pigs. What I am saying is that caught himself between his lifelong and ever so modern struggle against racial prejudice and for social justice, on the one hand, and post-modern hedonist enjoyment of sexual pleasure outside traditional marriage, on the other, the moral point Howe misses is this: nowadays there is nothing strictly speaking ground breaking in sexual liberation. If anything it is just the opposite. It is pure merchant stuff that one should have sex with as many partners as possible. (The) love industry is good business for restaurants, retailing and increasing the rates of interest in inflationary trips to exotic seaside resorts. What is ethically challanging, however, and dare I say, even politically revolutionary, is to stay put at home and let your children teach you how to deprive spiders from their legs. Going back to the basics of radical politics does take some courage indeed.