And then of course in Book IV we get the apparently Utopian vision of the land of the morally and intellectually excellent Houyhnhnms and the disgusting Yahoos — the former being an allegorical representation of what humans might have been, the latter being a savagely realistic picture of us as we are…. At least, that’s what it looks like at first. Reflection complicates things. The Houyhnhnms’ moral excellence comes at a great cost: they cannot lie, but (per necessitatem) they also cannot imagine, cannot speculate, cannot explore. They can only receive what has been handed down to them by Tradition (it’s immensely significant that they are illiterate). What has been handed down is perfectly right … but the cost, the cost of it is high.
