Advice for our time from Candide's closing lines: "We must cultivate our garden"

How Voltaire's Candide gives us a valuable idea of how to deal with (gesture in the air) all of this

Original printing of Candide by Voltaire, 1759

At the end of Candide, after the characters have gone through a lot of misfortune and misadventures, have suffered, and finally found some modicum of peace, we find the curious advice to “cultivate our garden.”

Pangloss sometimes said to Candide:

"There is a concatenation of events in this best of all possible worlds: for if you had not been kicked out of a magnificent castle for love of Miss Cunegonde: if you had not been put into the Inquisition: if you had not walked over America: if you had not stabbed the Baron: if you had not lost all your sheep from the fine country of El Dorado: you would not be here eating preserved citrons and pistachio-nuts."

"All that is very well," answered Candide, "but let us cultivate our garden."—Voltaire, Candide, Conclusion

I was recently reminded of Candide, Voltaire's 1759 novella, by talking to a scientist. This was in the context of a qualitative study I'm co-authoring on how scientists conceive of their relationship to the natural world. This scientist is an evolutionary biologist and science writer. We discussed how she deals with the climate crisis. She replied by mentioning the ending of Candide: “I think about planetary care and about, to some extent, Voltaire in Candide finishes with how everybody should tend their own garden. And there are many ways you can interpret that, but you can also interpret it literally.”

What does it mean to interpret this literally? I had not read Candide in over two decades, so I went to hunt for the text again and related media (because my brain works in this way). Here's the closing song for the operetta Candide (music by Leonard Bernstein on a libretto by Lilian Hellman)

One of the Youtube comments, by a pseudonymous poster @sweetolive70601 gave a remarkably astute summary of Candide:

Perhaps we should remember that Candide is not a fairy tale about happy endings. It's a fairy tale about how to live in a world full of injustice, horrors, greed, stupidity, wars. & disease. The metaphor is" make our garden grow". Incrementally, make that life, make that garden better. There is no magic wand, no deus ex machina ending, no knight in shining armor, only the billion individual deeds that billions of individuals should do to grow our earthy garden.

Often summaries of Candide do not focus on this aspect at all, but rather on the “optimism” of Leibniz's best of all possible worlds that Voltaire repeatedly pokes fun of. This optimism is embodied in Pangloss, Candide's tutor and “professor of metaphysico-theologico-cosmolo-nigology.”

I've only read Leibniz's Monadologie (1714) fairly recently and it did not give me a sense of optimism. Rather, Leibniz's God is one of who creates supreme value and beauty and he does it with seemingly with a lack of consideration for his creatures. According to Leibniz, God could choose to create, or not create, and in that moment of God expressing his utter freedom, our terrible fate was sealed. Leibniz was not some sort of pollyanna who wasn't aware that there isn't horrible suffering in the world. He had his fair share of struggles and disappointments.

Leibniz's God adapts substances to each other to create this beautiful, wondrous world filled with consciousnesses in an image of baroque splendor:

Thus the actual existence of the best that wisdom makes known to God is due to this, that His goodness makes Him choose it, and His power makes Him produce it. (Theod. 8, 78, 80, 84, 119, 204, 206, 208. Abrege, Object. 1 and 8.)

Now this connexion or adaptation of all created things to each and of each to all, means that each simple substance has relations which express all the others, and, consequently, that it is a perpetual living mirror of the universe.—Leibniz, Monadologie

This fittingness of things to each other, far from a happy panglossian picture, is compatible with such horrors as the Lisbon earthquake.

So how does tending our garden fit into this?

I think it is this: It's up to us to make things better. One good way to do this is to tend a garden (literally). Maybe Voltaire was influenced by Thomas More's Utopia, where gardens play a prominent role in the overall wellbeing of the whole.

But if you don't have the gift of green fingers, it could also be close to literally. There is so much horror in the world. Warfare. Illness. Wealth inequality. It seems futile in the face of all of this to try to do anything to make things better—it's easy to throw up your hands in the air and to say “Why bother?”

But on the other hand, good things that happen—wars that end, injustices that are addressed, are the result of many diffuse actions that do have some small influence. So, in an important sense, Candide does not liberate us from the optimism of Pangloss as much as it liberates us from the fatalism of Leibniz's uncaring God who makes everything for the best that we have to passively accept.

It emancipates us to engage in melioristic activities, no matter how small and futile. If no one will come down from Heaven to save us, and we are not content with the thought that all is for the best, it is good, praiseworthy, and part of a good life to do the little we can. There's little we can do, but it is still worthwhile (here is a paper by Kathryn Norlock that makes this point very well).

We must cultivate our garden.