“Gulliver’s Travels” is a first contact novel. Obviously inspired by the Age of Discovery, it creates four occasions during which a traveler comes to a culture that he had not known existed and which did not know that he and his kind existed. Never mind the political satire; Swift is telling four stories of how cultures collide. The small people, the Lilliputians, figure out how to tame him, because power is all that interests them, and he allows them to believe he will not hurt them, which is certainly the case, because he has no reason to. And so they treat him as an admiral, their own Othello. Then the very big people in the second island he visits figure out how they can use him, which is as an entertainment and a pet, which he finds disgusting, but where he has no choice because any one of them could easily crush him. He is too small, as Aristotle would say, to be part of the arrangement whereby people of relatively the same size have to form a polity lest they can choose sides against one another. Then, on the third island, Gulliver meets a passel of fantasists who think they can improve humanity but create, instead, disastrous results, such as old people who linger on into extended debility, and then, in the fourth island, he meets the horses, who try to treat him as a human being, as someone with moral dignity, and this is the most unsettling of all his encounters because he can’t live up to their expectations, and so returns home a broken man. As critics have long argued, the four alternative worlds are a sequence, the first three of them as inferior to the life in Great Britain, their home culture, because each of them are parodies of England, and the fourth culture is much superior to his own in that people have resigned themselves or else achieved a kind of serenity because they are not ambitious, the previous three cultures dominated, in turn, by power, pleasure and fantasy. What is clear is that other previously unknown other societies are either superior or inferior to our present society, and so that is just the way it is.