What I Read This Weekend

Candide, by Voltaire

“Everything is for the best in this best of all possible worlds” — François-Marie Arouet, better known as Mr. Voltaire

Candide remains the most vivid illustration of unbridled optimism, the kind that even hard, cold reality cannot extinguish. In an age saturated with uninterrupted bad news, Mr. Voltaire’s dissection of naïve hope offers a timeless caution. How we balance realism with optimism determines whether we can navigate adversity while building a society that endures.

Published as a reaction to the rising popularity of Mr. Leibniz’s optimism, Candide was Mr. Voltaire’s response to the calamities that struck Europe, most notably the Seven Years’ War and the catastrophic 1755 Lisbon earthquake. While the former entangled European colonial powers in conflicts across several continents, it was the latter that proved most shattering: between the earthquake, tsunami, and ensuing fires, Lisbon was almost completely destroyed, weakening in an instant what had been until then one of Europe’s superpowers. From that devastation, seismology and earthquake engineering were born. Perhaps more importantly, contemporary philosophers began to question the role of faith and the idea of a benevolent order behind every tragedy.

Here, Candide is most seminal. While hope is essential, it must be reconciled with the evidence before us. Mr. Voltaire calls us to be critical in our thinking, to resist the temptation of blind faith and simplistic explanations. This week, as new calamities fill the news cycle, his warning feels less like an 18th-century curiosity and more like a necessary contemporary guide.