In a way, Swift's portrayal of the Houyhnhnms shows that, as flawed as we are—as evidenced by Gulliver's experiences in Lilliput, Brobdingnag, and Luggnagg—a human utopia is not necessarily desirable either. The Houyhnhnms are unfailingly rational and objective. They do not experience extreme emotion, as this would be irrational; their mates are chosen for them, and they are assigned offspring to raise. Therefore, though they will never be forced to endure heartbreak, they will also never have the opportunity to feel great and unique love for one another. The only reason their society can be so peaceful is because they have eliminated the passions that often compel human beings to make war, to engage in conflict, and so forth. However, these same passions also amount to some of the best parts of being a sentient and feeling creature. The implication is that we, humans, could only achieve such a relative utopia by making the same sacrifices, and this is no more desirable than the warlike, greedy society that Swift portrays in Gulliver's grand speeches about his home.
The Houyhnhnms represent rationality, and unlike any of the societies Gulliver has seen so far, including his own, they actually organize their society rationally. Ironically, however, the the Houyhnhnms are horses, and the wild, filthy irrational creatures that the Houyhnhnms use as servants are humans, called Yahoos.
The Houyhnhnms don't tell lies, because they consider language a vehicle of communication, and lying would not accurately communicate. They do not have lawyers or judges, and can scarcely understand why anyone would have them based on how Gulliver describes them. The Houyhnhnms don't fight wars or have weapons, and when Gulliver explains warfare, they find it irrational. They don't need governments or politics or even philosophy, because once they determine what makes logical sense, they simply do it and don't argue about it.
The reader, if not Gulliver, learns after awhile that the Houyhnhnms can be cold blooded in their rationality. For instance, they stop making love after they have had the requisite number of children. They also would see no point in a book like Gulliver Travels, full of fancies and fictions. While Gulliver is completely taken in, many of us would probably dislike living in a world so wholly based on the rational.
The Houyhnhnms are a race of rational, civilized horses that Gulliver encounters when he reaches Houyhnhnm Land. To a large extent, they represent the better part of human nature, with the Yahoos representing the worst. The Houyhnhnms live according to nature, and theirs is a simple life subject to rational laws. This is the ideal we often set for ourselves as human beings. Yet one doesn't have to be as fiercely misanthropic as Swift to see that far too often we fall well short of such noble ambitions.
In theological terms, the Houyhnhnms can be seen as symbolizing man's prelapsarian existence. In Christianity, this refers to how human beings were before the Fall, the punishment inflicted upon humankind for the sins of Adam and Eve. The society of the Houyhnhnms is far removed from any arrangement that fallen humanity could ever establish in the real world. They live in a state of innocence, with no understanding of lying, for example. As they have never fallen from grace, so they remain completely free from corruption. As such, they would have no need for God's saving grace, which for a clergyman like Swift would make them far from being an ideal to which we should aspire.
If the Houyhnhnms are at one end of the scale, and the Yahoos are at the other, we as human beings are stuck somewhere in the middle: rational beings who often behave atrociously, yet nonetheless capable of being saved.
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