¶ … Modest Proposal
Jonathan Swift's satirical work A Modest Proposal is particularly successful at lambasting careless attitudes towards the poor because Swift's proposal that poor children be sold as food for the upper classes is rendered in the language of pseudo-scientific argument and economics. When deployed elsewhere, this combination of tone, appeals to authority, and abrogation of evidence is precisely the kind of language used to support various misguided, outdated, or bigoted ideologies, such as any number of various "scientific" works purporting to demonstrate the superiority of whites over blacks, or men over women, for example. In Swift's case, however, the tone he adopts and the logical fallacies he engages in function precisely to reveal themselves, so that Swift's use of these common tactics is a means of pointing them out and revealing that they are in fact tactics, or rhetorical methods used to support an otherwise insupportable argument. By performing a close reading of the beginning of Swift's essay, one can see how the particular tone the narrator adopts, the inclusion of numbers and statistics without any evidence, and appeals to upper class authority are meant to criticize the mode of argumentation so frequently deployed by those seeking to promote insupportable arguments; thus, Swift's goal is not only to shed light on the plight of the urban poor, but also to directly challenge the means by which that plight is perpetuated through pseudo-scientific discourse.
The first crucial thing to note about A Modest Proposal is the sanctimonious tone adopted by the narrator which serves to reveal the true concerns of both the narrator and the upper class of which he is ostensibly a part....
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