Infant or Pig?

I found Jonothan Swift's "A Modest Proposal" to be appalling yet humorous. I had to constantly remind myself of the time period and demographics that he was living in- an extremely sexist, and socioeconomic dependent society of early Ireland. Swift proposes an extreme cannibalistic system where the poor papists would be the principle "breeders" of the Nation. But as I read more, I began to find his whole "proposal" to truly be a dark satire. He refers to the human meat as goods and seems to relish in the idea of "Goods our own goods and manufacture."
During the proposal he conjures up an idea that baby meat is a wasted resource. His calculations of the 100,000 wasted poor babies- how much of a negative impact they have, and then how they could be put to use- almost seemed reasonable in some sick way. Swift describes the poor class as dying and roting, cold and famine, and filth and vermin. His system is similar to slavery in the idea that some people are born unequal to others, but different because it appears that people would want to do this, and it would be voluntary. Perhaps the most appalling part of the article was when he claims that men would value their wives more, and treat them better when they were pregnant the same way they did when cows were pregnant. He talks earlier about how awful it is that women have voluntary abortions- but if the meat inside of them was just a product then wouldn't it be their loss of money if they killed it? Swift also compares the preparation of the human meat to that of pig meat when he recommends buying the babies alive and cutting them with a hot knife to serve. But he also claims that cruelty is the strongest objection to any project of his. It is hard to ignore his contradictions.

It is surreal to imagine such a proposal actually taking place. Cannibalism in this context is a trade and social system, not a necessity or survival dependent. Obviously footnotes did not exist in Swift's day because there was no real reference to his commonly applied sources of intellectual knowledge on the topic. Truly, Swift wants to get a rise out of the reader, and in my case he did.

Book Recommendation:

Sanday, Peggy Reeves. Divine Hunger: Cannibalism as a Cultural System. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986.