Candide and the Modernity Machine
Does Voltaire plant the seeds of divergence, or merely articulate work as the first substance of all worth?
I’ve been reading Voltaire’s Candide for Venkat Rao’s Contraptions Book Club.
The theme for the year is to trace the origins of the ‘Divergence Machine’—the idea that our current era is characterized by proliferating, mutually retreating varieties of life rather than ‘convergent canonicity.’
(I must confess I am still wrapping my head around the taxonomy.)
The question posed: is Candide planting the seeds of divergence?
While it’s certainly lively, absurd, and humorous, I don’t think it does.
Italo Calvino’s essay ‘Candide, or Concerning Narrative Rapidity’ (1974) concludes with the following:
The subdued vein of wisdom which emerges in the book through marginal spokesmen such as the Anabaptist Jacques, the old Inca, and that Parisian savant who so much resembles the author himself, is articulated in the end by the most of the dervish in the famous maxim to ‘cultivate our garden’. This of course is a very reductive moral; one which ought to be understood in its intellectual significance of being anti-metaphysical: you should not give yourself problems other than those that you can resolve with your own direct practical application. And in its social significance: this is the first enunciation of work as the substance of all worth. Nowadays the affirmation ‘il faut cultiver notre jardin’ sounds to our ears heavy with egotistical, bourgeois connotations: as inappropriate as could be, given our present worries and anxieties. It is no accident that it is enunciated in the final page, almost after the end of this book in which work appears only as a curse and in which gardens are regularly devastated. This too is a utopia, no less than the realm of the Incas: the voice of reason in Candide is nothing but utopian. But it is also no accident that it is the sentence from the book that has become most famous, so much so that it has become proverbial. We must not forget the radical epistemological and ethical change which this phrase signaled (we are in 1759, exactly 30 years before the Bastille fell): man judged no longer by his relation to a transcendent Good or Evil but in the little or much that he can actually achieve. And this is the source both of a work ethic that is strictly ‘productive’ in the capitalist sense of the word, and of a moral of practical, responsible and concrete commitment without which there are no general problems which can be resolved. In short, man’s real choices in life today stem from this book.
The admonition to ‘cultivate our garden’ performs a substitution. Transcendent Good and Evil get replaced by achievable local action. People are judged by what they can accomplish, not by their relation to cosmic absolutes.
That strikes me less as divergence-machine than the installation of the modernity-machine’s OS.
The Industrial Revolution instantiates this system. But industrialization and urbanization destroy the literal conditions the advice assumed: most people no longer have gardens to tend. Voltaire’s philosophy becomes one befitting a Jeffersonian yeoman farmer.
The advice survives metaphorically by going inward. ‘Cultivate your garden’ becomes a therapeutic bromide about focusing on what you can control or Marie Kondo-ing your living space (decluttering repackaged as spiritual practice).
But this inner garden only becomes coherent after the ‘century of the self’—Freud, advertising, the entire apparatus that makes interiority into an exercise in consumption.
Then there’s the structure.
Candide’s velocity is rightly praised, with its picaresque romp across cultures and catastrophes. But that velocity is homogenizing, flattening what could have been a rich vein for different cultures and values to emerge. If one satirical framework can process any culture, do we have a divergence machine or a convergent one?
A speculative aside on Westphalia
Candide opens in Westphalia, where the 1648 peace established the European state system, the concept of sovereignty, &c.
Voltaire’s cosmopolitan existence depended on that order. He could flee France for Prussia, settle on the French-Swiss border, move freely among sovereigns.
The Westphalian system was the invisible protocol of his life.
That system has been fraying and indeed may be dead.
Another indicator of Candide being modernity-machine coded?