Like many Americans, I was excited, inspired, and rendered hopeful by the election of Barack Obama as president last November. I felt that, at long last, we could accomplish great things in this country. I have also been thinking how I will respond when my high hopes run up against reality. At least I’m old enough to understand that governing is a lot harder than dreaming. I at least have that cushion against disillusion. I know Mario Cuomo’s wonderful maxim about politicians: “You campaign in poetry, you govern in prose.”
Obama supporters fear having their dreams dashed, just as supporters of George W. Bush had their ideals shattered. I am thinking of my brother-in-law, an evangelical Christian who was convinced, in 2000, that the country would change since “we now have one of our own” in the White House. His idealism has taken a severe blow in the past eight years. Will mine as well?
So here’s the question for the entries this week: can literature help us handle the clash between our high hopes and reality?
This is no mere academic question. Disillusion hurts, and it can also lead to destructive and self-destructive behavior of various sorts. It can prompt people to drop out of civic engagement altogether, an abandonment that strikes at the very foundations of democracy.
Luckily there is a work that speaks to disillusion in a profound way. If we listen to it, I believe, we can learn how to hang on to our ideals, and to do so in a sensible way, even as the world tries to undermine them. The work is Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, which is the greatest work of satire that I know.
At first glance Swift might seem a strange person to look to for hope since he seems skeptical about both dreaming and idealism. He also, by the way, takes off after both liberal progressives and Christian charismatics. He was a Tory conservative who, time and time again, talked about how those people who walk with their eyes fixed on the stars invariably end up falling in the gutter. He was suspicious of the new fascination with scientific progress that was taking over Enlightenment Europe and that would become deeply embedded in the American Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
This doesn’t mean that he didn’t have his own ideals. In fact, every book of Gulliver’s Travels contains a utopian vision of how the world could be. I think that Gulliver’s Travels is shaped by the tension between this longing for a better world and the realization that the world is constantly letting us down. I see each of the books (especially Books I, II, and IV) as explorations of the unhealthy ways that people handle their disappointment. In Book I, Gulliver is a gullible fool who can’t acknowledge the littleness of human beings and, when he finally sees it, runs away. In Book II we see him as a passionate believer in his country, overriding any doubts through the force of his fanaticism. In Book IV reality has overwhelmed his convictions and he becomes a thoroughgoing cynic.
In short, Swift says that, when our idealism is severely challenged, we live in denial, we trumpet our ideals loudly to drown out any doubts, or we give up completely and see all humans as yahoos.
But while Swift sees these all as very human responses to human darkness, he doesn’t think we have to respond these ways. In each of the books I think he offers us a much healthier response. I’ll be exploring his alternatives in the upcoming entries.
