The Candide Complex

November 6, 1983
Lakeland

November 1983
Port Charlotte

The Candide Complex is a way of describing the feeling one experiences of being overwhelmed by dangers and cruel events in the world. This feeling can be a combination of despair and frustration so encompassing as to cause us to retreat from painful confrontations with powerful forces we hardly understand, let alone control.

To put what I call the Candide Complex in context, first, a few reminders about Voltaire and his most famous literary work, Candide.

Voltaire (François Marie Arouet) lived from 1694-1778. At a Jesuit college he learned to love literature and the theater. He also became a free thinker. The religious instruction of the Jesuits turned him not to faith, but skepticism. He observed the contradictions in society. His satiric thoughts and rational comments on religion and nations, his abundant literary works, his magnetic personality made him the toast of Paris. But he also made enemies because of his devastating mockeries of the high and mighty. After the death of Louis XIV, the Regent imprisoned Voltaire in the Bastille for a year because of his effronteries. He was an exile in London, 1726.

Unable to re-establish himself with the French Court, he wandered for 25 years, living in various European centers. Due to good investments, Voltaire was wealthy. In 1759, he settled in the country in Ferney (near the Swiss border). His literary output was astonishing, including not only history, plays, essays, philosophy, but also more than 20,000 of his letters have been published.

Candide, Voltaire’s most famous work, was a penetrating attack on foolish optimism. The philosopher, Leibniz, had argued that in spite of the manifold troubles and sorrows that “this is the best of all possible worlds.” Voltaire, more of a skeptic than a pessimist, tells a story that pokes fun at unthinking optimism with his delightful cast of characters.

Candide is a young, attractive man who, after being expelled from the castle because his love for Cunegonde, wanders the world attempting to discover if this really is the “best of all possible worlds,” a philosophy he was instructed in by his teacher, Dr. Pangloss.

Dr. Pangloss is an absurd character. Voltaire derived the name from the Greek – meaning “all tongue.” Dr. Pangloss is a professor of metaphysico-theologo-cosmolonigology, Voltaire’s way of indicating that Pangloss’ “best of all possible worlds” was abstract nonsense.

Pangloss – in the castle, addressing his pupils: [Editor’s note: what follows appears to be a theatrical variation of the text from Candide; CJW note indicates “280 Classic Theatre”]

“It is therefore demonstrated that things cannot be otherwise, since everything is made for a purpose, therefore everything is made for the best possible purpose. Consider. The nose was designed to support spectacles – and so we have spectacles. Consider. Legs were obviously developed to be covered by breeches – and so we have breeches. Stones were made to be trimmed and turned into castles – and so our noble baron has a castle. The greatest baron in the province must needs have the best possible home. And his good lady Baroness is the best of all possible Baronesses. There is no effect without a cause, my children. Every thing, everything, has its sufficient Reason. And so anyone who tells you everything is good is talking rubbish. Rubbish. Everything is for the best in this, the best of all possible worlds.”

Candide experiences many sorry adventures. After leaving the castle he is drafted into the Bulgarian Army, where he experiences the horrors of war. In his travels, he is tortured by the Spanish Inquisition. He is in Lisbon (1756) when a devastating earthquake occurs. He discovers great wealth and is robbed of it. He kills men when he did not choose to do so. He finds Cunegonde and then loses her.

Cunegonde, his sweetheart, is captured, repeatedly raped and wounded by the Bulgarians. She, too, goes to Portugal where she is the mistress of two men.

Finally, Candide decides that this is not “the best of all possible worlds,” and decides to retire to a ... where he will spend the rest of his life “cultivating his own garden.” Reunited with Cunegonde, they marry. His ardor for her has cooled; she no longer is young and beautiful but older and plain. She becomes a fine cook, however, and is happy with that occupation.

Other of the characters of the story live on the farm, including Dr. Pangloss. Candide’s refuge from a world at war, religious persecution, robbery, rape, injustice, natural disaster, is the farm, where he will cultivate his own garden and have no anxiety about or participation in the world he experienced – not the best of all possible worlds, Candide thinks – very likely the worst of all possible worlds.

There are many differences in the world of Voltaire’s Candide and today. But also there are some striking similarities.

War is no kinder now than then. The threat of nuclear holocaust intensifies as the nuclear forces escalate. Harry Mes-’s warning, “These Things Shall Remain,” may be a scary prediction, but not illogical. When we see and read of Lebanon, Grenada, Central America, I’m reminded of what Frederick Wertham, a psychiatrist, observed on the T.V.-ing of war horrors. “The only way we can possible tolerate it is by turning off part of ourselves instead of television.” [CJW note: 1st casualty, p. 412]

When efforts for a sane nuclear policy and less belligerent attitudes toward hemispheric neighbors are urged on our national leaders, we are answered by very smooth responses, all of which fail to answer the question, “when will the killing stop?”

Candide experienced the Lisbon earthquake. In recent weeks, there have been earthquakes in Idaho and a severe quake in Turkey, the latter causing at least 2,000 deaths. Can this be the best of all possible worlds?

Candide was tortured by the Spanish Inquisition. In our day a religious fanatic, Khomeini, executes Baha’i dissidents in Iran. Such terrible intolerance and cruelty is a reminder of what Voltaire wrote in another work, “If God created us in his own image, we have more than returned the favor.”

Women are still abused, as was Cunegonde, and persons are swindled out of their money, as was Candide.

Elder Olson, the modern poet, has a couplet addressed to a lady who thought his poems too gloomy:

“What? Mere images more than
you can bear?
Look at the world around you,
if you dare.”

In such a world, not the best possible, is not everyone faced with Candide’s temptation, “cultivate your own garden”? Do your job, feed your family, tend the flowers, mow the grass, fix the faucets, turn off part of yourself when you turn on the television. Solve your personal problems. “Cultivate your own garden.” After all, what can you do to change the collision course of the nuclear powers? Your voice is not heard, “your thoughts are not my thoughts,” say the powers that be. So cultivate your own garden.

When I was young, there was a song,

“We’ll build a sweet little nest
Somewhere in the West
And let the rest of the world go by.”

The image is charming, restful, and idyllic. But how? How ... let the rest of the world go by? Years ago, when the effects of atomic bombs were seen, a writer noted “there’s no place to hide.” Even if there were a place to hide, is that where human life is fulfilled?

The pages of religious history have records of many misbegotten, inhumane ventures. Khomeini has countless counterparts in the past. Yet there is a basic belief present even among the worst of religious events. That belief is that salvation, however defined, is more than persons finding his separate peace or individual salvation. The old religious idea was that being saved, one is obliged to lead, persuade, or co-erce others into a salvation scheme.

But for many of us, the idea is larger than that missionary zeal. If we are concerned with our own salvation, or self-realization (which I like better), then our concern has to be that the life of others must be a parallel value. The concerned is wider still, the preservation of the planet itself. The planet: cradle of our birth, sustainer of our needs, resource for us and our posterity.

We have mentors for such values. Suppose Washington, Jefferson, and Madison had chosen to cultivate their own gardens. They owned splendid plantations and could have had lives of relative ease. John Adams had a comfortable law practice in Boston. Benjamin Franklin was a prosperous editorial publisher. He could have cultivated his own garden. Lafayette was a wealthy French aristocrat. He could have had an amiable, luxury-filled life. If these had limited themselves to cultivating their own gardens, would the American colonies have evolved into the United States of America? Who can say. Fortunately, they took Franklin’s advice, “we must all hang together, or we shall hang separately.”

Suppose Lister, Pasteur, Sabin, Sack, Fleming had decided to let the rest of the world go by? Many of us would not be alive if they had not pursued the greater good in their medical laboratories.

Gandhi once put it this way: “I am part and parcel of the whole, and I cannot find [God] apart from the rest of humanity. My countrymen (and women) are my nearest neighbors. They have become so helpless, so resourceless, so inert, that I must concentrate on saving them. If I could persuade myself that I should find God in a Himalayan cave, I would proceed there immediately. But I know I cannot find God apart from humanity.” [See Bruce Southworth’s sermon on Gandhi]

Now I hope I’m not a shallow optimist like Dr. Pangloss. All of us spend most of our time cultivating our own gardens. The determined political and social activists, the persistent change-makers, are few in number. Those in political power count on that. They define the issues for us, paint the picture with patriotic pastels and most of us throw up our hands and quiet our mouths.

Persons will continue cultivating their own gardens. Yet if we lay down our garden tools, even for brief minutes and speak out, express disagreement when we disagree, attempt to judge issues on the application of human values, then there can be a difference.

I’m not arguing that we will all be on the same track, liberal or conservative. What is important is that the moments spared from cultivating our own gardens will be persistent, not spasmodic.

So when I’m tempted not to bother with writing Representatives or Senators or the President because of seeming futility, I’ll try to resist. After all, in the parable Jesus told, some seeds are devoured by birds, some are blown away with a passing breeze, some fall on rocky ground, but some seeds fall on fertile ground. Jesus could have added, perhaps, [that] the greater number [of seeds sown], the more likely there will be a harvest.

I aspire to the faith and confidence of Carl Sandburg when he wrote,

“I am credulous about
the destiny of man and
I believe more than I can ever prove.”

This is not the best of all possible worlds. But if there is to be a world at all, it must be better than it is now. It will be if those we elect will come to know that they can no longer count on our inertia, but can expect that we will be heard.