In his famous short essay, “A Modest Proposal: For Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland From Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public,” author and Anglican priest Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) uses cutting satire to suggest that cannibalism of the young might help solve a battery of social ills.

As we examine our broken society today, it seems to me that reflecting on Swift’s social critique can be quite useful.

Now we face a nation filled with anger and division and there is little to suggest any real solutions other than insisting people “don’t do that!” We can start out with the observation that young children, left to their own, are neither hateful nor cruel. How do they get that way later on in their lives? What drives them toward such emotional states and behaviors?

It is not a problem only for the margins of society, for the extreme misfits or troubled. It is defining the very center of our culture today. Our divisions are not the cause, but the result of something, and nobody is saying what that is.

Swift doesn’t say what it is in his biting little essay. But it is implied by a context of a lack of bounty, or poverty, on the one hand, and an approach to it characterized by obscenely cruel indifference, on the other.

 He coined the phrase “useless eaters” in defining his radical solution. In Hitler’s Germany, that term resonated through the death camps and some in our present situation are daring to evoke it again as the current administration pushes radical cuts in Medicaid funding.

But while that refers to the old and infirm, mostly, it is the young we are talking about here. The problem is that our society is structured to devour our young and as they begin to find that out, they rebel.

Not in all cases is this the practice, of course. Where there is little or no lack, things are different. We nurture our young, as we should, and we love them. Lucky is the child who is born to parents who are of means, and in a community where nurture is possible and valued. But even such children are ultimately not immune from facing a destiny of pale conformity battered by tightly delimited social expectations and debt slavery. If they have enough ambition, education and doors opened for them, some can run the gauntlet with relative effectiveness. 

Otherwise, our young are raised to die on battlefields, or to struggle in myriad other painful social conflicts aimed at advancing the world of their elders. 

In the Bible, there is a great admonition against this process that comes at the very precondition for the tradition it represents that begins with Abraham.

It is in the book of Genesis at the beginning of the Biblical story when, as that story goes, God commanded Abraham to kill his son, Isaac, as a sacrifice. As Abraham is about to obey, God steps in and says no. The entire subsequent eons-long struggle to realize Abraham’s commission by God to make a great nation that would be a light to the world would have been cut short right then if Abraham had slain his own son.

The message is that all of the Abrahamic traditions, Judaism, Islam and Christianity, owe their source, and in fact are rooted, in God’s command to reject the sacrifice of children to the whims of their elders.

The last thousands of years can be best defined in these terms, where nurture is pitted against exploitation of our young with, at best, vastly mixed results.

Scenes like that at the opening of “All Quiet on the Western Front,” the World War I novel and film where a teacher rallies a classroom full of boys to enlist in the war, is bone chilling. 

Or, the lyric in Pink Floyd’s iconic song, Comfortably Numb, “When I was a child, I caught a fleeting glimpse out of the corner of my eye. I turned to look but it was gone. I cannot put my finger on it now. The child is grown, the dream is gone.”