101 Letters to a Prime Minister by Yann Martel Read Free Book Online Page A

about a serious problem: evil and the suffering it engenders. Voltaire lived between 1694 and 1778 and was one of the great gadflies of his time. In
Candide
he lampooned what he felt was the facile optimism of the day, an optimism best expressed by the philosopher Gottfried Leibniz’s formulationthat our world is “the best of all possible worlds” (you might remember that line from an ironic Kris Kristofferson song). The reasoning behind this conclusion was that since God is good and all-powerful, the world cannot be anything but the best conceivable world, with the optimum combination of elements. Evil was thus posited as serving the purpose of maximizing good, since it is in having a choice between good and evil that we fallible human beings can improve ourselves and become good.
    Now, we can perhaps agree that adversity can bring the best out of us, and it is still Christian doctrine that we are “perfected by suffering.” But such a blithe justification of evil has fairly obvious limits. It might do for the sort of evil that comes as a kick-in-the-behind, as a retrospective blessing in disguise. But will it serve for heinous evil and egregious misfortune?
    Voltaire wrote
Candide
in part as a reaction to just such an instance of misfortune. On the morning of November 1, 1755, a cataclysmic earthquake struck Lisbon. Immediately, most churches in the city collapsed, killing thousands of people who were inside. Other public buildings also came down, as did over 12,000 dwellings. Once the tremors had stopped, a tsunami struck the city, and after that, fires wreaked further havoc. Over sixty thousand people were killed and the material damage, in an age still innocent of the destructive power of modern bombs, was unprecedented. The Lisbon earthquake had the same troubling effect on people at the time as the Holocaust had in our time. But whereas the Nazi barbarity had us mostly wondering about human nature, the Lisbon earthquake had people wondering about the nature of God. How could God allow such cruelty to take place in a city as piously Catholic and evangelical as Lisbon, and of all days on All Saints’ Day? In what conceivable way could killing so many people in one stroke maximize the good of this world?
    Answering such troubling questions—the Holy Grail of theodicy—remains as troubling then as now. Perhaps the answer still is that we lack perspective, that in a way that we mortals just can’t understand, great evil is part of a divine plan and makes ultimate sense.
    In the meantime, until God comes down and fully explains that plan, evil galls. Voltaire was religiously outraged by the Lisbon earthquake. For him it was clear: there was no Providence, there was no God. To be eternally optimistic in the face of great evil and suffering was not only insensitive to its victims, but morally and intellectually untenable. He set to prove it in the story of Candide, the naive young man from Thunder-ten-tronckh, in Westphalia, who could have had as his motto “All is for the best,” such an optimist was he at the start of the novel. Wait till you see all the catastrophes that befall him. The novel ends, when all has been said and done and suffered, with a simple call to quiet, peaceable and collective work: “we must go and work in the garden,” “il faut cultiver notre jardin.”
    That call still stands as perhaps the only practical solution to what we can do in the face of evil: spend our time simply, fruitfully and with others.
    Yours truly,
    Yann Martel
    V OLTAIRE (1694–1778), born François-Marie Arouet, was a French Enlightenment writer and philosopher. He was immensely prolific, writing novels, poetry, plays, essays, scientific papers and historical works. Voltaire was politically active, supporting social reform, free trade, civil liberties and freedom of religion. He was a fierce critic of the Catholic Church. His satire got him into trouble: in 1717, hewas imprisoned for eleven months in the Bastille