Mark Bold

All the way through Voltaire’s Candide, the argument of ideas and philosophies such as Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man are ridiculed and repeatedly proved wrong. ‘One truth is clear, whatever is, is right’ ends Epistle I of Pope’s poem describing humankind’s sovereign place in the great chain of being, and the perfect arrangement of all aspects of existence that creates the best of all possible worlds. God, the supposed designer of everything, had apparently made no mistakes, and it was the blind satisfaction of believers and the theodicean excuses formulated by apologist clergy that Voltaire wanted to correct. He takes on the arrogant optimism and dispels it without wasting many words.

The subtitle of Candide is indeed Optimism, and this is the enduring trait of the novel’s secondary character, Dr Pangloss, a sharply drawn caricature of contemporary thinkers and sophists and their misplaced faith in the harmony of existence. He accompanies Candide, a naive but curious young man, on a journey across the globe, arguing all the time that the world is the best of all possible worlds, no matter what scale of suffering befalls them. As Candide asks how warring nations and natural disasters, religious intolerance, cruelty, torture and execution, murder, prostitution and slavery can be for the best, Pangloss is never at a loss to explain the benefits to the order of the world. His optimism does not fail him, and his influence on the simple mind of Candide means that he too never loses his rose-tinted outlook on life. As Pangloss retains his absurd faith in intellectual excuses for tragedies about the globe, so Candide is sustained through all adversity by the more modest belief that he will eventually find his beloved Cunégonde.

Voltaire keeps the narrative sharp and understated, allowing the desperate plight of almost all the background characters of the book to form a dismal ironic contrast to the benighted optimism of his travellers. The people Candide meets exist in terrible circumstances, have tormented lives and disturbed, greedy dispositions, yet seem resilient to the continuous trials that life throws at them. We read an ethnographic sampling of human situations across the world. Everyone competes with others to claim that they have had the most terrible time, the most humiliating and desperate travails and are the most miserable humans alive. Voltaire may have faith in the fortitude of the human spirit, but as to the glories of god’s creation, he shows us little hope.

A present day Voltaire would not need to give us a journey across the globe to survey the plight of the human situation. Half an hour of TV news is more than sufficient. The gruesome truth is more than evident from an editorial sampling of world tragedies for any illusion to persist that this is the best of all possible worlds. Events in Beslan, casualties of the resource war in the middle east and the occupation of Palestine, suicide terrorism, environmental catastrophe, and rapes and murders in streets a block away are now so routinely lamented by newscasters that only the most naive could believe that all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds. The place is evidently just as brutally sadistic and desperate as when Voltaire wrote in the mid eighteenth century.

This does not stop viewers from being optimistic. But after they have wrung their hands at the complex horrors of the world, it is not god’s grand design and intentions that soothe, nor is it clergymen’s excuses for the presence of evil in a perfect world. In a secular society, our optimism rests on the Enlightenment ideals we have replaced religion with - the idea of progress. There might be terrible circumstances throughout the world, poverty and genocide, wars and murder, but with the application of reason and implementation of the scientific method, we will improve the lot of everyone and eventually thrive in a Utopian dreamland where none of us need suffer and even death has been conquered.

Our faith is not in a flawless design, rather the reverse. The world is a real mess until human reason intervenes and names, categorizes and changes everything. We must constantly strive to improve on very poor starting materials until we have perfected our lot through our reasoning and hard work. The idea of god died long ago, and now we have full responsibility to create the best of all possible worlds. We must create laws to prevent actions that harm, modify genes to stop disability and difference, export a ragged version of democracy to foreign nations and rule out contingency from every aspect of human existence. If an accident intrudes in our clockwork world, we must ask how and takes measures to prevent it happening again. Soon we will be able to control and predict everything, prevent misfortune itself, and our world will truly be the best possible.

A modern Voltaire would no doubt laugh at such optimism in much the same way as he derided the benighted faith of the eighteenth century. While he was a leading figure in the great intellectual invigoration of the Enlightenment, he would not be humoured by the fact that we have again stopped thinking and have resorted to a blind faith in progress. It would probably be horrifying to him that the US, a country whose envied Constitution was founded on Enlightenment ideals, is now forcefully exporting unthinking fundamentalisms around the globe. We ourselves are no better than Dr Pangloss now, regarding the horrors in every corner of our world on live news broadcasts and assuring ourselves that some time soon all will be remedied. It is perhaps evident that things have not changed at all, that suffering is not a thing of the past, no matter how much we place our faith in progress, and as we rapidly destroy our habitable environment, things are probably worse than ever.