Driven Equally by Hope and Despair

Lord Munodi has a beautiful estate. Fields enclosed, vineyards, corn-grounds, meadows — the whole thing "disposed with exact judgment and taste." He tells Gulliver about it with a sigh. His countrymen "ridiculed and despised him for managing his affairs no better, and for setting so ill an example to the kingdom."

The kingdom, you see, has been modernized.

Forty years ago, some gentlemen went up to visit Laputa — the floating island of pure abstraction. They came back with "a very little smattering in mathematics, but full of volatile spirits acquired in that airy region." They decided that everything below needed to be "put upon a new foot." They got a royal patent and opened an Academy of Projectors in Lagado.

Now every town has one.

The projectors contrive new methods of agriculture and building. They undertake that one man shall do the work of ten; that palaces will be built in a week of materials that last forever; that all fruits of the earth shall come to maturity at whatever season the projectors choose. The only inconvenience: "none of these projects are yet brought to perfection; and in the mean time, the whole country lies miserably waste, the houses in ruins, and the people without food or clothes."

Swift adds the killing detail: by all this failure, "instead of being discouraged, they are fifty times more violently bent upon prosecuting their schemes, driven equally on by hope and despair."

Driven equally by hope and despair.

The projectors are not idle dreamers. They work constantly. The Academy is a hive of furious activity — eight years extracting sunbeams from cucumbers, lifetimes spent reducing excrement back to food, elaborate systems for plowing by hogs, building houses from the roof down, teaching mathematics by swallowing ink-inscribed wafers. Every room contains someone at intense labor on something that doesn't work.

What drives them isn't laziness or stupidity. What drives them is the theory.

Once you have a sufficiently vivid theory of how things could work — once you can picture the sunbeams in the phials, the wafer-knowledge diffusing from stomach to brain — the theory is more real than the evidence. The sunbeams didn't come out this year because of the dear season for cucumbers. Next year will be different. The mill on the mountainside failed because of inadequate planning, not because the theory was wrong. A hundred men for two years, and the projectors went away blaming Munodi for the failure, "railing at him ever since, and putting others upon the same experiment, with equal assurance of success, as well as equal disappointment."

This is what "driven by hope and despair" means. The hope is for the theory. The despair is from the evidence. They cancel each other out — the hope sustains the project, the despair intensifies the need for the project to succeed. Neither connects to what actually happened.

Munodi's estate works because it doesn't innovate. He lives in houses his ancestors built. His mill is where mills go. He does what the land and the season ask, not what the theory prescribes.

For this he is considered backward, ignorant, ill common-wealth's man. "Preferring his own ease and sloth before the general improvement of his country."

The projectors would rather destroy a working mill than acknowledge that working mills exist.

There's a passage I keep returning to. Before Gulliver visits the Academy, Munodi says: "there would be more leisure for this kind of conversation" at his country estate, because the projectors are too busy to discuss what they're doing or why. They have no time for the conversation; they're inside their own logic.

The Academy tour is very funny and very bleak. Five hundred rooms, each one occupied by someone in furious, useless motion. The universal artist has been working for thirty years "for the improvement of human life" and has produced rooms full of wonderful curiosities — none of which improve human life. The school of political projectors proposes that senators should vote opposite to their stated positions, on the theory that self-interest would then align with the public good.

None of them have paused to ask whether the present mode is actually worse than the old.

I think about Balnibarbi a lot because the structure feels accurate. It's not that the projectors are lying or deliberately harmful. They genuinely believe. The theory is genuine; the hope is genuine; the work is genuine. What's missing is a feedback path from evidence to belief.

The Brobdingnagians have this right. Their learning "consists only in morality, history, poetry, and mathematics... wholly applied to what may be useful in life, to the improvement of agriculture, and all mechanical arts." No law may exceed in words the number of letters in their alphabet. "To write a comment upon any law is a capital crime." They deliberately constrain the theory-generating apparatus.

That looks barbaric from the Laputian perspective. But the fields of Brobdingnag grow food. The people eat. The two blades of grass criterion is: what exists now that didn't before? Not: what should theoretically be better?

The projector's answer is always: next year the cucumbers will be better.

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