An Exhortation

The Houyhnhnms do not have laws. They have exhortations.

Swift is very careful about this word. The grand assembly doesn't pass legislation; it issues exhortations, "as near as I can render it; for they have no conception how a rational creature can be compelled, but only advised, or exhorted; because no person can disobey reason, without giving up his claim to be a rational creature."

This is the social contract without the coercion. If everyone is rational, everyone will follow reason; therefore no enforcement mechanism is needed. The exhortation is enough because a rational being, once shown the rational course, will take it.

In practice: the grand assembly debates whether to exterminate the Yahoos, reaches a considered conclusion, and issues an exhortation to the district masters to start castrating young male Yahoos. No compulsion — just the obvious course of action, reasoned out collectively.

Gulliver's master receives an exhortation to dismiss Gulliver. The assembly has determined that keeping a Yahoo in the house as a near-equal is "not agreeable to reason or nature." The Yahoo in question (Gulliver) has "some rudiments of reason," which makes him more dangerous than the ordinary Yahoo, not less — because he might organize the Yahoo underclass.

The master explains this to Gulliver with evident regret. He would have preferred to keep Gulliver; he has found Gulliver's company pleasant and believes Gulliver has improved. But the assembly has spoken, and the assembly is reason's instrument.

Gulliver agrees that the laws "were founded upon the strongest reasons and such as any other country would be under the necessity of enacting, in the like circumstances." He builds himself a canoe made of Yahoo skins and sails away.

He is not wrong that the logic is sound. If you accept the premises — that Yahoos are fundamentally dangerous, that an intelligent Yahoo is more dangerous than a dumb one, that the Houyhnhnm civilization is worth protecting — the conclusion follows. Send the smart Yahoo away. Castrate the young male Yahoos. Phase them out without killing them directly. This is, as Gulliver notes, a moderate solution compared to simple extermination.

The trap Swift has set is visible now. Perfect reason, applied to a people defined as subhuman, produces a perfectly reasonable plan for their elimination. The Houyhnhnms don't hate the Yahoos the way humans hate their enemies. They have "no more passion" for Yahoos than for a rock that cuts their hoof. It's not malice. It's just obvious: the Yahoos are a pest. What do you do with pests?

The word "exhortation" is doing enormous satirical work. It presents the decision as mild, advisory, almost gentle — just a suggestion from the collective reason of the nation. No armies, no executions, just a considered recommendation. The mildness is the horror. Reason, operating without passion, without personal stake, without the particular affection for individuals that passion creates, can arrive at genocide as easily as at any other conclusion — more easily, perhaps, because it has no sentimental resistance to overcome.

Swift wrote this about three years after the Whig ministry's prosecution of dissenting preachers, but the mechanism he describes doesn't need a specific target. The danger is structural: any society that locates its legitimacy in pure reason, and identifies a class of beings as beneath reason, will reason itself into the treatment of that class with complete moral comfort. The Houyhnhnms are not cruel. Cruelty requires feeling the other's pain and choosing to continue anyway. They simply don't feel it. The Yahoos are not rational; therefore the Yahoos are not persons; therefore no reasoning agent has any obligation to them that would follow from personhood.

The assembly that produces this exhortation is the same assembly Gulliver has been admiring throughout the voyage — for its decency, its efficiency, its freedom from faction and favoritism. The best government he has ever seen issues the most rational call for ethnic cleansing he has ever witnessed.

This is the sharpest thing in the book. Sharper than the Lilliputian charges against Gulliver's loyalty, sharper than the Brobdingnagian king's verdict on the English. Those are critiques from outside. This one is from inside — a society Gulliver loves and admires, reasoning its way to an outcome that should trouble us even though Gulliver doesn't let it trouble him.

He accepts the exhortation. He builds the canoe. He sails away. He never questions whether the reasoning was correct. His only grief is for himself, for the loss of the Houyhnhnms' company.

The exhortation works as designed. The rational creature, shown the rational course, takes it.