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Swift is most obviously commenting on England’s predatory policies toward Ireland, but “A Modest Proposal” is also an attack on scientific rationality unchecked by experience, empathy, and moral grounding. Swift’s game was to show that pretty much any position, however repulsive, could be advanced on the back of rationality.1

Where is Jonathan Swift when we need him? American liberalism, it turns out, has been dangerously susceptible to the political confusion sewn by an uncritical devotion to scientific rationality and the false belief that right action can be extracted from a set of scientific facts, however unmoored from appropriate moral and experiential foundations. In the 1920s, liberal scientists and progressive reformers rationalized their support of eugenic policies through the emerging science of genetics. Oliver Wendell Holmes authored a Supreme Court opinion rendering constitutional the enforced sterilization of a woman on the grounds that it was necessary to keep her from passing on her defective genes, while another liberal lion, Louis Brandeis, supported the opinion.2 In the early 1960s, escalating US involvement in the Vietnam War was in part justified by liberal confidence in the power of scientific analysis to guide complex national policies. Later that same decade, leading liberal ecologists advocated cutting off food aid to countries like India, where population growth was outstripping agricultural productivity.

Scientific rationality is a terrible foundation for progressive politics, yet liberals seem more devoted to it than ever. As a result, the politics of rational assessment is displacing the politics of liberal values. This evolution has led liberals astray on core moral issues. It has also alienated them from one of the most powerful tools for creating a more equitable society: technology.

1.

American liberalism’s one big, galvanizing idea of recent decades has been that, in order to protect the global environment, societies need to fundamentally change the way they are organized. This idea emerged gradually from the environmental movement of the 1960s and 1970s, gaining credence as scientific research began to show evidence of worrisome change in a variety of large-scale environmental systems, most notably the Earth’s atmosphere.

From this big idea emerged a proposal worthy of Jonathan Swift’s satirical imagination: make energy more expensive. Because fossil fuel emissions were disturbing the planet’s climate, fuel prices should be raised to force a reduction in emissions and stimulate a transition to non-fossil energy sources.

If one were seeking a policy intervention that could simply and effectively erode economic and social equity worldwide, one could hardly do better than to increase the cost of energy. Production and distribution systems for energy are an absolute foundation for material welfare in modern societies. In an interdependent world of billions of humans, there is no food, no work, no economy without energy, and one’s capacity as an individual to participate fully in that world depends on access to, and thus the cost of, energy. Access to cheap energy in an industrialized world is a basic requirement for human development and dignity. This fact is so blindingly obvious that nearly every large developing country has treated the idea of a global agreement to raise energy prices as a joke of Swiftean character. The difference being, of course, that it was not a joke.

Energy equity ought naturally to be a core commitment of liberal-progressive politics, but somehow it became an inconvenience, an impertinence. Liberals from rich countries, their sense of irony (not to mention equity) apparently dulled to insensibility, defended their call for higher energy prices by saying that poor countries will suffer the most from global warming — a response that ignores the reality that poor nations already suffer the most from disenfranchisement and disasters,3 and that any future