Candidly Desensitized

Wow. Normally I would strive to compare Voltaire's work with some other piece of literary work, but frankly I don't think I've encountered anything that so bluntly wades into a morass of death (well at least for the nameless masses), theft, corruption, rape, and vehement attacks on the author's peers.

The list of misfortunes Candide is witness to left me wanting the same bullet he begged for a mere four pages into the book after being flogged 4,000 times by his Bulgarian comrades. I do not know what injustices befell Voltaire personally to cause him to offer up such a string of calamities, but he certainly wasted no ink on frivolities such as character development and rising conflict. Throughout, he lingered on a topic just long enough to allow the reader to begin to comprehend the enormity of the incident before moving along to the next, like a UPS guy delivers packages the week before Christmas--the good old "throw it hard enough so the force of the package hitting the door alerts the residents of the package's arrival" routine that we all know and love.

Lest you think that I am somehow exaggerating--as Voltaire does in Candide--let us look at the events in just the first five chapters. By the time of the Lisbon earthquake, Candide has already seen a gruesome battle take place, witnessed at least two villages pillaged by the opposing armies of the Bulgarians and the Abares, been whipped excessively for exercising free will, watched his one-time savior drown saving an ungrateful sailor, and to top it all off Candide then watches as one of the great cities in Western Europe is decimated by an act of God. For any being to experience just one of these events would be emotionally devastating. Candide experiences all of them intimately and almost shrugs them off in the innocent belief that it was all for the best.

To me, the only way one could possibly consider this chain of events to be "for the best" would be to imply that desensitization to emotional trauma is what humanity needs to elevate to a better existence. This is where the irony is at work, because emotions and the reactions to trauma are what make us human. Without emotion and thought, what are we other than an organized collection of atoms? Yet Voltaire sarcastically implies that desensitization is essential to the betterment of humanity, that our inability to rationally interpret and plot a course of action no matter the circumstances causes us to remain distant from our full potential as a race.

This implication is Voltaire's ultimate attack on his peers during the Age of Reason. At a time when other intellectuals are emphasizing rational thought as the way to progress society, Voltaire shows that the purely rational removes the human element, which in turn, runs contrary to the actual progression of humanity. After all, what is humanity without human?

Reading through Candide reminded me of watching the evening news--a succession of often tragic events related to an audience in quick snippets without any emotion from the anchors. Hearing all of the terrible things in the world that happen each day effectively removes the immense significance of many events. The story of a murder can be relayed to an audience in mere seconds, but no sense of the effect on the lives of those close to the murder can be developed in such a short time. Candide kills both the Jew and the Inquisitor in a few sentences because of the absence of immediate remorse. Devoid of emotion, it was so easy to kill once that he might as well do it again to ensure his future.

After finishing the book, I was not desensitized enough to read through the it again, but I definitely empathized with Voltaire's worry of what humanity could become if we all forgot what it means to be human in the quest for rationality and answers to the world around us.

Now to enjoy some chocolate.