Can you miss a fictional place? I do, thanks to the recent US government shutdown. The episode made me yearn for Laputa – the strange flying kingdom described in Gulliver’s Travels. Written in 1726, Jonathan Swift’s novel is a masterpiece of political satire. Among his targets was the notion that scientists would make good rulers, which Swift skewered in his depiction of Laputa. But October’s events in Washington got me thinking fondly of the place.

For readers not au fait with the shutdown, it began when a group of Congressional Republicans blocked a federal spending bill required to keep the government operating. They did so as part of an elaborate scheme to kill a specific law they did not like. That law, which expands healthcare to the nearly 50 million Americans who lack it, had been legally enacted and declared constitutional. The Republicans, however, refused to pass the spending bill unless this law was retracted. They were able to do this because, despite the fact that their party received a minority of votes in the last election, it holds a majority in Congress thanks to quirks of the US electoral system.

According to the US financial services company Standard & Poor’s, the resulting 17-day shutdown caused more than $24bn of damages. It closed federal agencies and halted much of the infrastructure behind America’s eminence, including medical-research programmes, early-childhood education, climate-change research, much pollution testing and food inspection, some passport and visa approval, and trials of the $8bn James Webb Space Telescope.

Laputa was borderline functional, but the episode left me thinking that things would have played out better there.

Bacon versus Swift

In Swift’s tale, Laputa is a circular flying island 7837 yards in diameter. If positioned over the Capitol Building in Washington, DC, it would just cover the National Mall along with the White House, Supreme Court and most key administrative buildings. Laputa flies using a magnet, resembling a large weaver’s shuttle, six yards long and three yards wide at its maximum cross-section. Thanks to magnetic features of Balnibarbi – the land below that Laputa governs – Laputa’s scientists can move the flying island by changing the magnet’s orientation.

Swift was spoofing Francis Bacon’s work New Atlantis (1624), which depicted a scientific society called Solomon’s House that governs a utopia called Bensalem. Swift was also spoofing the Royal Society, whose founding in 1660 was partly inspired by Bacon’s work. Science apart, Laputa is fairly dysfunctional. Its inhabitants are hyperfocused on abstract and speculative ideas and have next to no patience for practical matters. To cope with their short attention spans, Laputans hire servants to flail them with sticks to remind them to focus during conversations, and to prevent them from slamming into things while walking.

The Laputans are “slow and perplexed” when thinking about anything but science and music, and rarely deign to converse with Gulliver, finding him hopelessly obtuse about these matters. They disdain practical geometry so much that their houses are misshapen, built without right angles. Their clothes fit badly, for the tailors take measurements with quadrants and compasses. Laputans care about the Sun’s health more than their own, and their medical practice is crude.

On the mainland, Gulliver complains of a slight bout of colic, and is taken to a doctor whose cure involves inserting a bellows into the patient’s intestines and sucking or blowing out the disease. After witnessing an experimental test of that procedure carried out on a dog, which dies on the spot, Gulliver declines treatment. Gulliver talks to scientists pursuing schemes to soften marble to make pillows, extract sunlight from cucumbers, turn ice into gunpowder, and resolve political disputes by sawing the brains of opponents in half and putting them together. Left to themselves inside one skull, he is assured, the brains will quickly achieve moderation and “good understanding”.

Scientists, in Swift’s send-up, would make poor rulers. Even Bacon, whose New Atlantis was the first scientific utopia, implicitly recognized this; while Bensalem’s key institution is Solomon’s House, it is not the sole governing body. One reason why Bacon thought scientists should not rule alone is that, while scientists pursue knowledge as an end in itself, politicians seek to use such knowledge as a means for other ends. The realities sought and delivered in the laboratory, in other words, are a different kind from those sought and delivered in the political arena.

Another limitation of scientists is timescale, a point pithily expressed by the sociologists Harry Collins and Robert Evans. “The speed of politics,” they write in Rethinking Expertise (2009), “exceeds the speed of scientific consensus formation.” These two features make it likely that the outcome of scientific rule would look more like Laputa than the utopian Bensalem.

The critical point

After the shutdown started, US politicians made special arrangements to reopen certain of the country’s most famous symbols, including the Statue of Liberty – a symbol of American openness – and Mount Rushmore in South Dakota, which features sculptures of the heads of four famous US presidents. The politicians also retained their perks; the Congressional gyms, for example, remained open. Otherwise, they pursued their cause with a messianic zeal. In a beautiful example of circular reasoning, Republican Representative Steve King from Iowa said he and his bedfellows were taking action “because we’re right, simply because we’re right”, continuing to demand that the hated healthcare law be retracted as the price of reopening the government.

Laputa’s buildings may have been crooked, its land poorly cultivated, its healthcare scary, and its leaders confounded by practical tasks. But even its scientific rulers did not treat their opinions as gospel truth, and practised inquiry as a precondition for resolving disputed matters. And at least Laputa flew.