Wherefore art thou, Candide?

Candide, I'd say it felt petty. Not in the way a lot of satire feels petty, but really, genuinely bitter to the core. Depending on the day, I might follow up that assessment by conceding that I might not have understood why it exists in the form that it does, and that it was probably not written for me. And it wasn't. Historians largely agree, who it was written for, namely for (or rather against) the philosophical optimist of its time. Now, I'm neither of the 18th century, and I wouldn't consider my prospects cushy enough to adapt a view of philosophical optimism if I wanted to, but I still made the conscious decision to read Candide. Mainly because I wanted to see why people considered Voltaire as great of an author as they supposedly do, and secondarily because I had previously done a quick foray into the subject of Western Theodicy for a presentation I was then accused of having plagiarized. I suppose at the time I thought I might have an easier time parsing the arguments, since they might be familiar to me already. Most of the raw arguments made through the text were familiar - after all, the criticism leveled against the concepts the theodicy struggled with are still pretty good, if not better today - but I still came out the other end, either not liking the piece, or not understanding it. Maybe both.

For those who haven't read Candide in a while, Voltaire describes trials and tribulations of a fictional young man, the titular Candide, who studies under a philosopher and professor named Pangloss at a court of a Baron at which things are going about as well one could hope for at the time. Candide finds himself fancying the Baron's daughter Cunegonde, and since she fancies him back, they do some 18th century naughty things and get caught by the Baron. Candide gets thrown out of the court and wanders the lands. Along the way he encounters all the things we would associate with Europe in the 1700s, including some well meaning colonialism, death penalties and barbarism and eventually he is even reunited with his old mentor Pangloss, who - a disfigured beggar at this point - tells him of the army or burglars that raided the property of the Baron's, and did what came part and parcel with raids at the time. It gets worse from there (Details may follow, when they become relevant). However, Pangloss, who survives until the end of the book, believes and repeats that they are living in the best of all possible worlds, since God would not create a world that wasn't the best of all possible worlds.

Voltaire apparently had somebody specific in mind, when he wrote Candide and probably when he invented the character of Pangloss. It was supposedly a direct refutation of the philosophical optimists using Leibniz's thesis that we exist in the best of all possible worlds, even in the wake of the 1755 Lisbon Earthquake, which had somewhere in the higher ten thousands of causalities. Best of all possible worlds, indeed. So yes, clearly this was never meant to do anything profound for me, a 21st century twenty-something with an internet addiction and ambivalent views on the concept of religion, who ironically buys Cthulhu-themed paraphernalia. That's fine. Not all literature I read is specifically for me. Maria Stuart wasn't for me, and I've let it be. Not every piece of media needs to be criticized on the basis of my tastes specifically. Why did I feel I needed to write this then?

Part of it is that Candide feels like an 18th century shitpost, but that alone would probably just make for a hot take in a particularly fun party conversation. It's probably also not entirely wrong.

There is something to be said about the dichotomy between optimism and pessimism as a tool for navigating everyday life. It presents itself as a heavily polarized difference through the language commonly used to define either end of the spectrum, but it doesn't seem to be in practice. Candide made an overt statement about philosophical optimism, but I feel it hasn't underlined the trappings beyond seeming somewhat dim in the face of it. Often Pangloss attempts lines of reasoning that can really only serve to put ones mind to rest, such as the episode, in which a friend and travel companion of Candide's drowns in a harbor. Pangloss reasons that the harbor exists, so that said friend might drown in it. There are several criticisms packaged in this behavior. If we take Voltaire's interpretation at face value, this mindset, if confronted with adversity is prone to accept the situation and won't do anything about it. There is also little incentive to actively try and improve ones and others stations. After all, if one does indeed live in the best of all possible worlds, what point would there be in trying to improve it?

Hence, propagating this line of thought - at least to the extend that Leibniz is herewith accused of doing - engenders passivity to the point of rendering the suffering of oneself and other people irrelevant. Although this technically looks like straw-manning the argument to me, which gives it the distinct shit-postiness I was originally put off by, this could be read as direct criticism of Leibniz's position from which he trivialized the catastrophe. Although, the fact that Leibniz never said anything about the Lisbon Earthquake on account of being dead probably doesn't help with my feelings on the issue. These arguments used by Pangloss and Leibniz are essentially the same, though of course where most prominent philosophical optimist voices of the time would have been several hundred kilometers away from the incident, Pangloss is present for every event he chooses to comment on. Maybe this is why he claimed that god only made that one person drown, and any other people that died during the incident were drowned by the devil. Of course whether a tragedy is for the greater good, should be completely independent of the locality of the person declaring it as such, unless straw-man Leibniz in this case is implying that he himself is God, which I don't think can be seriously entertained as a possibility. Much rather, the hypothetical philosophical optimist is doing something very common, and essentially human, and so are those who could easily file his rationale as a good and reasonable way to address the situation. Pangloss' arguments are immediately ridiculous on their face, and would require a long series of assumptions to be internally consistent. For example, he contracts syphilis from a sex worker he was regularly involved with, and is later cured from it, losing an eye and an ear in the process. The illness doesn't improve his life in the meantime, and even in getting rid of it, there are significant sacrifices to be made. If contracting the illness were for the greater good, he shouldn't have been cured of it, and if the cure was for the greater good, then he should not have contracted the disease in the first place. It must thusly follow, that the exact order of events must have been the best possible outcome, implying that the plan all along was for Pangloss to lose an eye and an ear and possibly abstaining from intercourse in between contracting the disease and losing said eye and ear. However, if one isn't directly afflicted, or witness to the events in question, these assumptions can be silently made and the topic avoided. I personally wouldn't fault the philosophical optimist for making this mistake, but the criticism is fair. Especially, since at the time, he was an intellectual in the public eye, i.e. part of the ruling elite. And this is where the troubles in the application start.

In 2015 a wave of refugees hit Germany (and Europe as a whole, but let's keep this smaller focus for a minute) as a consequence of the war in Syria and the Middle East. At the time, it dominated the national interest in a way a topic rarely did, and it would kick off a trend of news coverage circling the latest topical catastrophe like vultures. This would turn out to be relevant to the national conversation, but little else.

Among the most impactful moments of the coverage were pictures of refugee camps along the borders of Greece and Turkey. The reaction was generally one of disappointment in the acting government, accompanied with calls for regimes to vaguely do something. Because of the political climate at the time, the conversation was quickly tainted by the new reactionary party at the time, but I don't want to focus too much on that aspect of the situation. The pictures of the masses of people trying to escape war and persecution clearly affected the general public, and the demands to accommodate the peoples' needs were leveled against the then ruling party, the CDU. The CDU/CSU regime quickly began paddling back their promises however, some members of the party even advocating for implementing a hard limit of people the country would be willing to accommodate. The insistence of sticking to "Realpolitik" (loosely, realistic politics) overtook the focus of "ending the crisis". At the time, I wasn't too involved in the discourse. To be frank, I've never been able to engage with a single question for very long without getting bored, and the conversation rarely changed beyond the names, the pictures and the dates. I'm sure there was a good number of people calling for the end the conflict in the region, thus reinstating the possibility of civilian life and supposedly putting the crisis to an end. Then Chancellor Merkel welcomed refugees with the words "Wir werden das schaffen." We can handle it. Here, optimism reenters the picture. This however is categorically different from the optimism critiqued by Voltaire. Whereas Leibniz's approach accepts tragedies in passivity, the optimism in respect to handling the refugee crisis implies an action, at least nominally. This posits the question: Is there something fundamentally different between what I will refer to as "passive optimism", criticised by Voltaire, and "active optimism", shown by Merkel?

I, for one, think so. If I understand these decisions correctly, they come from different places. Passive optimism posits the existence of a "best possible world" that one is living in, an unknowable chain of causalities that somehow works in terms of some utilitarian maxim, but is at the same time impossible to both prove and disprove.

Active optimism can do without this assumption, but also posits some element of self-fulfillment that should sound familiar to those familiar with liberal and neoliberal rhetoric. The notion that the individual is all-powerful in the influence of its immediate surroundings and need only display strong enough willpower to succeed. It's not entirely unfantastical in its roots, though maybe a little healthier as a mindset. It is thus much more palatable to the public from the position of authority. After all, positions of authority are meant to carry the confidence of the masses, it would be reasonable to assume that they have access to the means required to address such challenges. I wouldn't even go so far as calling this approach bad faith, or necessarily unhelpful, just maybe prone to overlooking systemic issues. This is a problem for another time though.

All this being said, in this specific example, I think this might even be the one of the best approaches, since 1: It's very much in line with the principles cemented in the constitutional laws that form the basis of that country's judicial values. This should be second nature for any regime that has not tried to change said foundations. and 2: As the head of a nation, this is the correct person to make that claim. Once publicly made, this can well function as a mission statement.

In defense of Leibniz's approach however, humanity does not cope well with apocalyptic situations. During the heat of the cold war, there was a not insignificant portion of the war room (LeMay and the younger Kennedy at the time, specifically) kept insisting they preemptively perform a nuclear strike against Russia and Cuba at the time, which is of course a very American way to handle a nuclear arsenal. After all, they had about the same discussion towards the end of World War II, and the decision has yet to be tried as a war-crime. A direct nuclear threat was met with passive acceptance from authorities on the issue, and that filtered through to the population. The population was not taught to help avoid war, it was taught to "duck and cover", advice that would be wholly unhelpful in the case of a nuclear explosion. Not only that, but any attempt to reconcile with the USSR was made actively harder by propaganda painting the enemy as irredeemable for the crime of "communism". McCarthyism really did a number on the collective consciousness there. If the US regime were to reach a public consent with the USSR, they would have had to explain their decision to their own people. There was a reason why their loss in Vietnam caused a trauma in the collective consciousness, and thus, why the US concessions in the deal between Kennedy and Khrushchev were to be kept secret. The point is, reaction upon being confronted with perspective apocalyptic tragedy often is less trying to collectively avoid it, but rather avoid thinking about it.

Speaking of apocalypses that are addressed with optimism, climate change has always been met with plans to do something, eventually. This too has notes of philosophical optimism, which if keeping in the pattern, will hint at somebody hopefully stumbling our collective behinds out of the crisis at the last minute, even while the structural responses to the issue fail to even address the underlying issue (*cough* capitalism). In the analogy, this is the rich capitalist building a private escape rocket built out of their personal extinction anxiety.

So how practical is Voltaire's criticism of the variants of optimism that are in use now? Active and passive optimism certainly seem not to appropriately address pressing issues by themselves, but that doesn't mean it's ideologically fraught, or at least not fatally so, I think. An optimist position isn't doomed to fail, just on the basis of being an optimist position. Uninspected, it invites errors that certainly seem massive in hindsight. The active optimist may overlook fatal systemic flaws and the passive optimist would be essentially accepting of the status quo, something that especially in times of crisis is an idea that has never held water. So yes, I do think even now Voltaire remains correct in most senses, even for reasons that are not very complicated to explain and easily integrate themselves into a modern worldview. I think that's why it seemed petty to me when I read it. I came off reading "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" by Walter Benjamin when I picked up Candide. At the time, I was already a vocal Marxist/Neomarxist, meaning I was not only superficially familiar with the criticism I thought it contained, but also deeply familiar with the criticism it actually meant to communicate. Telling any flavour of Marxist that the system is not healthy and badly needs to be changed is going to invite a cheap round of assent. Especially now, where most people understand that their prospects are looking increasingly bleak, I think this criticism is something that's deeply ingrained in almost everybody's understanding of their surroundings. Candide carries similarities with a shit-post, because it (correctly) identifies a point of criticism, and places the focus on making fun of those that believe what is criticised. Candide is not meant for me precisely because I agree with its sentiment (more or less), and because I am a reader looking for insight that Voltaire didn't give me. He may well have written these down somewhere else. So what do I do with Candide? I suppose, I'll recommend it. I don't know a lot of people that are entirely content with their situation, but to those people, I suppose I'll recommend Candide. For the rest, I'll recommend "Capital".