Once I retired from professorhood I launched into a slow-moving new project: re-reading books that had meant something to me in my youth. Usually, I remember very little of these books, but I know that they once molded my mind because ideas and events in today’s world keep echoing back to them. Whenever reality makes me think of literature in this way, I know it’s time to put a book on my re-read list.
One such book was the short novel Candide, or Optimism (1759) by Voltaire (born François-Marie Arouet, 1694-1788). I read this book in high school satire class alongside Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts, and Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One. (High school was different then.) The basic story runs thusly: Candide, the bastard nephew of a baron, falls in love with the baron’s daughter Cunégonde and is kicked out of the castle for kissing her. He then travels the world by jumping from misfortune to misfortune, such as being forced into the military and flogged by Spanish inquisitors. He commits a couple of murders, goes to South American and finds El Dorado, comes back laden with gold and jewels but loses them, and eventually reunites with his beloved (but now barely recognizable) Cunégonde in Constantinople. Along the way there is much philosophical debate and an absurd litany of robberies, tortures, triple-crosses, and returns from certain death.
The idea of revisiting Candide arose out of my desperation with current world affairs. I hoped the novel’s non-stop cruelty would help me understand the present state of our world, where my species heaps new indignities upon our fellows every minute. A reminder of the awful things we regularly did to each other three centuries ago would, theoretically, remind me that we have always been the way we are now. This in turn would convince me that our present moment is not unusual in human history, and that I should therefore freak out less at the events of each increasingly mean-spirited day. I wanted Candide to remind me that we are living now as we have always lived: telling lies for gain and stabbing backs for the heck of it.
Candide did that on a surface level and refused to do it on a deeper one, and this is related to the target of its satire. In Voltaire’s own day, that target would have been explicitly clear to all readers: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) and his philosophical doctrine of Optimism, which saw the world as a benevolent place which—despite its many challenges—was designed for the betterment of humanity. Voltaire, completely uninterested in filtering his experience through rose colored glasses, skewers Optimism relentlessly. The book’s most commonly uttered phrase is “All is for the best in the best of all possible words,” a Leibnizian mantra often uttered by Pangloss, the hack scholar who tutored both Candide and Cunégonde. Nearly every event in the novel belies this assertion, as scarcely a page goes by without at least one act of violence, greed, or both. The novel is a wall to wall hit job on Optimism.
As I revisited Candide, I wondered how Voltaire’s day compared to our own and whether Leibniz’s Optimism has any contemporary corollaries. The world that spawned Candide was on the brink of great change, the last trimester of the pregnancy that would birth the modern world. Europe in Voltaire’s time was characterized by monarchies and rigid social stratification, though that was being challenged by a nouveau riche bourgeoisie made wealthy by trade, industrialization, and finance. Candide was published in 1759, and the French Revolution would launch itself thirty years later when the simmering conflict between the aristocracy and the nouveau riche came to a head. The pan-European Seven Years War, a stylistic precursor to the World Wars of the 20th century, had just broken out in 1756. It was in full swing as Voltaire wrote his novel while exiled in Switzerland, having displeased authorities in both France and Prussia—both of whom he relentlessly skewered in his book.
Is the world as pregnant with change today? This is hard to know while we’re living through it, but with our ever-expanding list of problems—climate crisis, creeping authoritarianism, drone warfare, the erasure of our individuality by techno-oligarchies—it sure feels that way. I launched into my re-read of Candide looking for modern corollaries to philosophical Optimism because if and existed, now is a great time to challenge them. But I found no easy parallel, largely because Leibniz’s Optimism had a religious aspect to it. It was possible to view 18th century Europe as “the best of all possible worlds” because at that time and place, humanity’s ultimate destiny was widely understood in a Christian context. There was a built-in endgame, a sense that the balance of the universe was in divine hands and moving toward a predetermined positive outcome.
Theologians in Voltaire’s time, as now, would call this teleology—a focus on our ultimate purpose and goals. But today its Christian context has broken down almost entirely in the West, and a long-familiar sense that our endgame is managed by a divine force has vanished. In the past seventy-five years, a new and decidedly secular teleology has replaced the theological one. It is driven by the spread of scientific methods and great leaps forward in worldwide communication networks, such as the explosion of broadcast television and later the internet. This secular teleology is dominated by two ideas: (1) that we can, through human advancement and trust in our own ingenuity, learn to live together in peace; (2) that we might, if that ingenuity fails, annihilate ourselves with the weapons we have invented for protection against our enemies.
It is in this secular teleology that I found my living corollary to Leibniz’s “best of all possible worlds” thinking, and it was couched in a phrase so commonly used today that we barely even notice it: Everything happens for a reason. This statement impliesthat there is an inherent balance to the causes and effects of the world, while stopping short of invoking divine intervention. The hoped-for end state of humanity is achieved through what Leibniz would refer to as natural law, which acts as a kind of evolutionary social force. Government got you down? Everything happens for a reason. Surgeon cut you open without telling you that the procedure wasn’t covered by insurance? Sorry, pal. Everything happens for a reason.
This mantra arose, in America at least, during the dawn of the self-help era in the second half of the 1970s. As a nation we had just been through quite a tumultuous stretch: a spate of assassinations between 1963 and 1968 (JFK, Malcolm X, MLK Jr., RFK), followed by a polarizing war in Vietnam, a confidence-shaking political scandal in Watergate, and a crippling oil embargo in 1973-74 that caused years of economic chaos. As America emerged from this unrest into a period of self-reflection and interiority, the Everything happens for a reason mindset took shape. Its secular teleology assured us that we were masters of our own fate (on our own in this world, in other words) and generally get what we earn. In the background, an unnamed but emphatically non-divine karmic wheel spun around dispensing justice while we convinced ourselves that we, too, were living in the best of all possible worlds (a.k.a. capitalism).
This mentality ultimately evolved into America’s de facto national religion: a secular spirituality based on becoming the best version of ourselves. If we focus on being the best self we can be, this religion’s thinking goes, then good things will happen to us. If bad things are happening to us, it’s probably because we aren’t being our best selves and need to change how we’re living. Voltaire’s foil for Leibniz in Candide, Dr. Pangloss, is full of lectures about causes and effects, and our secular teleology is based on our collective assumptions about which causes generate which effects.
Is your life falling apart? Maybe the cause of that particular effect is your attitude, and you’d better change it fast. You’re in charge of where your ship is sailing, buddy, and you don’t seem to be steering it so well right now. So straighten your rig out and steer it better, because Everything happens for a reason and you’ve somehow caused the effects that are happening to you, even if they’re awful. Behind this mentality are good ol’ American Social Darwinism and a very deep Calvinism that we don’t usually like to acknowledge, both of which helped Everything happens for a reason morph into a variation of You get what you deserve.
It’s easy to see the attractiveness of this thinking. What you give is what you get, after all, and Karma is a bitch. We prefer to use these catchphrases to talk about individuals whose choices we can clearly identify, and whose punishments are visible to all. Like the ancient Greeks at the dawn of tragedy, we love to watch the mighty fall. On a culture-wide or species-wide scale, however, we aren’t so enthusiastic about that prospect. We don’t achieve much catharsis watching our society falling apart, and even less so our species. If karma is going to be a bitch, we much prefer it be bitchy to specific individuals whose failure we can enjoy.
One thing today’s world has in common with Voltaire’s is that we can easily see society breaking down and commonly held assumptions being smashed. France in the years leading up to the revolution was no more of a picnic than America today, and both were equally ripe for a takedown of their predominant mindsets. Just as Voltaire’s Candide embodied the forces that were taking down the religious teleology of Leibnizian Optimism, forces in our day are taking down the secular teleology of Everything happens for a reason thinking.
What makes that mentality so tenuous today? It’s the breakdown of our tacit agreement about causes and effects, of the sense that we’re all getting what we deserve through our own actions. There’s simply too much suffering and loss being meted out right now for people to have earned it through their own actions, which breaks down the tacit assumption that we are all masters of our own fate and get what we deserve. Can any individual’s crime justify the mass starvation going on in Palestinian refugee camps? Did one person’s transgression cause the flooding at the Nepal-China border? It’s getting harder to pretend that we’re masters of our own fate when geopolitical and climatological factors affect our everyday lives, drowning out the individual choices we make. It’s difficult to comfort ourselves by saying Everything happens for a reason when the reasons are so abstract we can’t even connect them to own tangible lives.
This is when Everything happens for a reason breaks down, as All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds broke down. Your childhood home is swept away, your mother dies of cyclosporiasis, your business goes under because of tariffs imposed in a pissing war, your water runs so dry that this year’s corn is nothing but stumps on a stalk, you end up in a detention center because somebody doesn’t like the color of your skin. Everywhere we turn, the causes of the effects that plague us are distanced from individual lives. Everything still happens for a reason, sure, but that reason doesn’t have a thing to do with us.
Maybe this is what W.B. Yeats meant in his poem “The Second Coming” when he wrote the centre cannot hold. The central assumptions of French society didn’t hold in the run-up to their Revolution, and they don’t seem to be holding very well in America right now.
So we need to be wary. The danger, and perhaps the larger lesson of Candide, is what comes after the center can no longer withstand the pressure on it and stops holding. After the generally agreed-upon teleology, whether religious or secular, no longer convinces the society it arose from. Leibnizian Optimism finally collapsed in the late 18th century thanks to the wrecking ball of the French Revolution in 1789. I shudder when people say they hope for a revolution like that in America, because it was unbelievably bloody. During the Reign of Terror alone (1793-94), Maximilien Robespierre and his Committee of Public Safety presided over more than 15,000 executions. On top of that, it ultimately gave us Napoleon. I won’t argue that we should cling to our old paradigms because what’s coming next might be worse, but because history tells us that it usually is, we should prepare accordingly.
Voltaire died a year before the Revolution, though its leaders often invoked his name. While it feels safe to assume that he supported some of its ideals, particularly opposition to the monarchy and the Catholic church, it’s impossible to tell what he would have thought of the astonishingly violent way it unfolded in reality. It is difficult for me to accept that he would have approved of the Reign of Terror, which Robespierre and his colleagues justified by asserting that those who were not fully with the revolution were necessarily against it, and therefore deserved to die. It was us against them thinking at its finest—a mentality that I suspect rises whenever centers stop holding.
We can easily see the transition from Optimism to terror as a cautionary tale for our own era. Commonly held teleologies—whether religious or secular—create a glue that holds societies together, and care should be taken when dismantling them even if they thoroughly deserve it. Today, while geopolitical and climactic emergencies batter the walls of our reigning secular teleology, we need to know what kind of thinking is waiting in the wings before it sends us into a frenzy we can’t control. Hint: we’re already seeing what’s in the wings, and it’s not a glamorous, glorious revolutionary celebration of freedom for all. Instead it’s an acceptance of cruelty as the natural state of mankind, a bloody embrace of us against them, which is particularly dangerous in a time of global war when cruelty becomes increasingly commonplace.
This, if you remember from above, is why I wanted to revisit Candide. It was supposed to help me accept the tide of hatred rising all over the world, and especially in my country, as something humans simply put themselves through from time to time. It was supposed to help acclimate me to the us against them thinking that suffuses America’s deportations, our trade wars, our electioneering, our suppression of protests. When a society doesn’t have a sense of its own endgame, the temptation of us against them becomes highly attractive and can lead it to justify cruelty on a grand scale.
We’re not at Reign of Terror levels, but it’s impossible to deny that America’s current government is embracing cruelty—it’s a feature, not a side effect. Us against them justifies detaining American citizens in undisclosed locations without anyone knowing where they are because they don’t “look” American, justifies withholding disaster aid from states because they have been insufficiently supportive of the administration, justifies legal decisions that give more power to oligarchs and tell everyday people to suck rocks. We see this embrace of cruelty in this administration’s intellectual supporters as well, with their support of so-called “natural hierarchies” that give people at the highest rungs of society the right to freely exercise their impulse toward domination. We see right wingers like Jordan Peterson saying things like “Granted the opportunity, how many of us would not be Hitlers?” Thinking like this not only accepts the darkest aspects of humanity, but elevates them into something we should embrace and desire.
So it’s not only the cruelty we need to be scared of, it’s the justifications for it—because that is what will pave the way for cruelty to percolate down into every aspect of society. Our modern justifications for cruelty will come to us with self-assured, silver tongued logic, and they will change what we think it means to be human. Right now is a good time to talk about evil and the ways we justify it, and I revisited Candide because that’s exactly what the book does. I only wish it had assuaged my mind better than it did, though something tells me Voltaire wasn’t after that. If he wanted me unsettled, he got his wish. But it was an unsettling that opened my eyes to what’s at stake as our tempers and our desire for control, like our world itself, grows hotter and more fiery. We have to stop the cruelty, undoubtedly. We also need to stop the justifications for it in their tracks, lest cruelty’s widening gyre swallow us all up.
