Tyler Cowen: prediction

Transcript context

…Or is that just a rebuke of the idea of cancel culture, since it’s just the same thing we’ve always been doing? I think it’s a rebuke of the idea of cancel culture. It’s always been with us. Faction is inevitable, which I take to be one of Swift’s main points, all the more clear when you read his directly descriptive writings, like his actual policy pamphlets. He’s obsessed with faction. It’s a common theme in early 18th century writings. “Oh, Britain, Ireland — it’s all full of faction, and this is our fundamental problem.” The other eternal verity in Swift, I think, is war, and you see that in the different travels. In his own time, there’s basically a war every few years. The Dutch, the Spanish, the French, something. None of it, to us now, makes any sense. I think one of the things Swift is showing us with these very odd societies — their wars, to us, make no sense — he’s saying the wars of his own time, from any future vantage point, won’t make any more sense either. That, I thought he did very effectively. He’s a pacifist in real life, so clearly, that’s where he’s going with this. I was really interested, I couldn’t tell whether he viewed women as better companions than men in this book, because in his own life — it’s unknown, I think, whether or not they were actually romantically involved, but he has a female companion that he at least has a friendship with for a long time. In the book, the person who treats him kindly in basically each place is a woman. There’s this little girl that takes care of him when he’s tiny compared to the giant people, and she makes sure that he’s safely being carried around. She actually cries when she knows he’s going to be taken away. This happens again and again, but at the same time, he describes women as grotesque, and very bizarre things happen with him in the giant land. I don’t know, what did you think?…

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