(RNS) — This week the White House debuted a humanoid robot that walks and talks, and — according to Melania Trump, who introduced the machine — is a prototype for a “teacher” named Plato who will always be “patient and available” in offering the entire corpus of human knowledge in the comfort of your own home.

Three hundred years ago, Jonathan Swift satirized such chimerical and anti-humanistic applications of human knowledge in “Gulliver’s Travels.” Among the places Gulliver visits is a scientific academy where a giant machine containing the inventor’s entire vocabulary is spun and turned to create phrases and sentences: basically a large language model for its time. Elsewhere in the book, Gulliver witnesses the uses of instruments that kill, rather than heal, their subjects, and encounters a race of creatures who achieve the foolish human goal of immortality, to disastrous results.

An Anglo-Irish clergyman, dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral and author of volumes of wry poetry, political pamphlets and witty satire, Swift wasn’t only a satirist, but one whose ends and means were eminently Christian. A fierce defender and lover of humanity, he lamented all the vices and follies that make us less human by refusing our rightful place in God’s order and design. Swift expressed this lament through acerbic and hilarious satire, in hopes he could laugh us into correction.

Swift earned his most lasting reputation as the author of the greatest satire in the English language, “A Modest Proposal,” an essay he published as a pamphlet in 1729 in response to economic oppression of the Irish by their English colonizers. If you read the essay once, you will never forget it. In it, Swift satirically proposes that the British government raise children to be sold and eaten as food — his point being that the policies of the English government were “devouring” the Irish already anyway.

“Gulliver’s Travels,” published three years earlier, is more sprawling than “A Modest Proposal,” but equally wicked in its satire. Its chief object is human pride — pride in our (vain) beliefs in human progress, knowledge and political systems. The book is still recognized for its brilliance and relevance. It ranked third in The Guardian’s 2013 list of the 100 Best Novels. Easton Press named it to its 100 Greatest Books Ever Written. Letterboxd lists 18 film adaptations (not including those inspired by the work, such as Hayao Miyazaki’s classic anime film, “Castle in the Sky,” which features the flying island of Laputa in Gulliver’s third voyage). The number of children’s, young adult and abridged versions of the book is utterly incalculable.

Most of us know the parts of the story told by these children’s versions and adaptations: Gulliver as a giant in the land of little people, and as the small human among the giants of another country; the flying island he discovers on his third voyage; his last voyage, to a land where horses rule and Gulliver is viewed as a goatlike Yahoo.

Sadly, I seldom find Christians naming “Gulliver’s Travels” among their favorite classics of Christian literature. Indeed, I’m not sure many Christians even read it today. To be sure, it’s a challenging work on several levels, disjointed in structure, inconsistent in character development and occasionally crude in language and imagery. But all of those these measures are highly relative to our own time and sensibilities. (The Bible itself can be described in similar terms!)

“Gulliver’s Travels” is not, despite its place on the above lists, a novel. The genre as we understand it had yet to be developed, so few if any novelistic features characterize the work. This makes it a difficult read even for those who love the fantasy of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. (As an aside to those devotees: It’s my guess that you love the novel form itself, and would love more classic novels than you might think, even if you read little literary fiction other than Lewis and Tolkien).

Swift’s fantasy worlds serve the satire — the moral instruction — more than the story. There are no lovable hobbits, grand themes, archetypal quests, wise sages or even any outright villains. There are just oodles of human foibles and vices disguised as otherworldly creatures in otherworldly places who, as we read along, come to resemble human beings in 18th-century England (as well as in every other time and place). There are no heroes in “Gulliver’s Travels.” Certainly, Gulliver is not a hero. He is not even consistent or developed enough to be an anti-hero. He is mostly a vehicle for the satiric voice of Swift, and as such, he is brilliantly written.

Through the gullible Gulliver, Swift shows readers just how unreliable and relative human perspective is. Writing in the age of the invention of the microscope and the telescope, Swift uses Gulliver’s changing perspectives to enlarge the reader’s understanding of how foolish we are to be so certain of and prideful in our own knowledge, given how limited it is from a God’s-eye perspective.

The 6-inch-tall emperor of Lilliput, whose name is many words long and who imagines that his wee little head on his wee little body presses against the sky, looks ridiculous from Gulliver’s (and the reader’s) perspective. When Gulliver later finds the roles reversed and he is treated as a doll, toy or vermin in a land of giants, we remember how fragile the human condition is and how insignificant we can seem to ourselves and to each other in the universal scheme.

No one appreciated Swift’s wisdom more than George Orwell, who took the ingenious insights into the nature of language in “Gulliver’s Travels” and dramatized them shockingly and prophetically in his novel “1984.“ (Orwell also wrote an important critical essay on “Gulliver’s Travels.”)

Christian readers today are often formed, unknowingly, by Victorian norms and might be scandalized by Swift’s pre-Victorian sensibilities. References to bodily excretions — crude to us moderns but an ever-present reality before the convenience of flushing toilets — abound. But more important to Swift’s theological and anthropological purposes is the way in which those things most shameful and humiliating to the human condition are things that ought to keep our pride in check. The Latin phrase “inter faeces et urinam nascimur,” attributed to at least two early church fathers, reminds us, as Swift does, of the humbling origins of our human existence — the very place in the body where we are born.

Swift reminds his readers over and over that only in accepting the limitations of our humanity can we find the only thing that can save us. Gulliver runs away from home and family again and again, seeking the promise of satisfaction that the age of exploration, scientific advancements and modern “progress” in the end failed to bring. Gulliver’s is not the archetypal journey found in other classic works, but is rather a cyclical, unceasing nightmare of starting over and over again with no resolution.

This was Swift’s view of the vision of life offered by modernity unmoored from tradition and the transcendent. In his 1711 work, “Thoughts on Various Subjects,” Swift lamented, “We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.” It is a perception as recognizable today as the empty technological mastery Swift depicts in “Gulliver’s Travels.”

But Swift did not only skewer humanity. His attempts to correct vice and folly were possible only because he loved the objects of his correction. There is no better way to return that love than to read the words written in love.

At 300 years old, “Gulliver’s Travels” has never been a more timely read. I think the real Plato would agree.