Nuts to optimal thinking
Voltaire did not believe that there was any justice or balance in the world, but he believed that bad ideas made people bad. The villains in the book are not, as in Samuel Johnson’s exactly contemporary and parallel “Rasselas,” the fatality of the world and the mortality of man. The villains are the villains: Jesuits and Inquisitors and English judges and Muslim clerics and fanatics of all kinds. If they went away, life would be much better. He knew that the flood would get your garden no matter what you did; but you could at least try to keep the priests and the policemen off the grass. It wasn’t enough, but it was something.
Very good article on Voltaire at The New Yorker. Kudos to Gopnik for not reducing Leibnitz to a cariacature but not letting him off the hook either.
Very good article on Voltaire at The New Yorker. Kudos to Gopnik for not reducing Leibnitz to a cariacature but not letting him off the hook either.
