What is Stephen Harper Reading?

Dedication:

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
This witty book on evil,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel

Letter:

The Right Honourable Stephen Harper
Prime Minister of Canada
80 Wellington Street
Ottawa ON K1A 0A2

Dear Mr. Harper,

You’ve no doubt heard the theory of six degrees of separation, how each one of us on this planet is connected to everyone else through a chain of five people. Well, in a way, you and I are linked through the seventh book I am sending you, Candide, by Voltaire. Let me explain. On pages 110 and 111 of Chapter XXIII there is a brief scene in which Candide, having just arrived in Portsmouth, England, witnesses the execution of a British admiral. “Why execute this admiral?” asks Candide.

“Because he had not enough dead men to his credit,” comes the reply.

This incident was no invention of Voltaire’s. There was indeed a British admiral who was executed for failing to “do his utmost” during a naval battle with the French off the island of Minorca. He was the first and only British admiral so treated by Britannia, and his name was John Byng.

Do you recognize that last name? That’s right: Lord Byng of Vimy, of the “King-Byng Affair”, Governor-General of Canada from 1921 to 1926, and a direct descendant of the ill-fated Admiral Byng. I’m sure you have regular meetings with Lord Byng’s current successor, Her Excellency Michaëlle Jean. And the last degree of separation: a direct descendant of both Byngs, Jamie Byng, is a good friend of mine and my British publisher. So there you have it, six degrees of separation: me-Voltaire-Byng-Byng-Byng-Jean-you.

It’s in this same Chapter XXIII of Candide, in the paragraph just before Admiral Byng’s execution in fact, that Voltaire famously dismissed Canada as “a few acres of snow”, “quelques arpentes de neige”. Isn’t that amazing? Voltaire speaks of Canada and then right after tells a story about a mutual acquaintance of ours. Mr. Harper, the link between us couldn’t be more preordained than that!

One last anecdote. I can also say this of Candide: not once but twice I have come upon people reading a book, thought I recognized the title, exclaimed what a great novel it was, anticipating some good talk about the terrible, funny calamities that poor Candide must endure, only to be told by the readers, in both cases women, that the “e” was an “a” and that the book they were reading was not Voltaire’s brilliant satire but rather a book on Candida, which is a bothersome, often reoccurring and terribly itchy yeast infection of the vagina. After that, as you can imagine, the conversation became a bit stilted.

Let’s get to the point. Candide, published in 1759, is a short, funny and engaging tale about a serious problem: evil and the suffering it engenders. Voltaire lived between 1694 and 1778 and was one of the great gadflies of his time. In Candide he lampooned what he felt was the facile optimism of the day, an optimism best expressed by the philosopher Gottfried Leibniz’s formulation that our world is “the best of all possible worlds” (you might remember that line from an ironic Kris Kristofferson song). The reasoning behind this conclusion was that since God is good and all-powerful, the world cannot be anything but the best conceivable world, with the optimum combination of elements. Evil was thus posited as serving the purpose of maximizing good, since it is in having a choice between good and evil that we fallible human beings can improve ourselves and become good.

Now, we can perhaps agree that adversity can bring the best out of us, and it is still Christian doctrine that we are “perfected by suffering”. But such a blithe justification of evil has fairly obvious limits. It might do for the sort of evil that comes as a kick-in-the-behind, as a retrospective blessing in disguise. But will it serve for heinous evil and egregious misfortune?

Voltaire wrote Candide in part as a reaction to just such an instance of misfortune. On the morning of November 1, 1755, a cataclysmic earthquake struck Lisbon. Immediately most churches in the city collapsed, killing thousands of people who were inside. Other public buildings also came down, as did over 12,000 dwellings. Once the tremors had stopped, a tsunami struck the city, and after that, fires wreaked further havoc. Over sixty thousand people were killed and the material damage, in an age still innocent of the destructive power of modern bombs, was unprecedented. The Lisbon earthquake had the same troubling effect on people at the time as the Holocaust had in our time. But whereas the Nazi barbarity had us mostly wondering about human nature, the Lisbon earthquake had people wondering about the nature of God. How could God allow such cruelty to take place in a city as piously Catholic and evangelical as Lisbon, and of all days on All Saints’ Day? In what conceivable way could killing so many people in one stroke maximise the good of this world?

Answering such troubling questions—the Holy Grail of theodicy—remains as troubling then as now. Perhaps the answer still is that we lack perspective, that in a way that we mortals just can’t understand, great evil is part of a divine plan and makes ultimate sense.

In the meantime, until God comes down and fully explains that plan, evil galls. Voltaire was religiously outraged by the Lisbon earthquake. For him it was clear: there was no Providence, there was no God. To be eternally optimistic in the face of great evil and suffering was not only insensitive to its victims, but morally and intellectually untenable. He set to prove it in the story of Candide, the naive young man from Thunder-ten-tronckh, in Westphalia, who could have had as his motto “All is for the best,” such an optimist was he at the start of the novel. Wait till you see all the catastrophes that befall him. The novel ends, when all has been said and done and suffered, with a simple call to quiet, peaceable and collective work: “we must go and work in the garden”, “il faut cultiver notre jardin.”

That call still stands as perhaps the only practical solution to what we can do in the face of evil: spend our time simply, fruitfully and with others.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel .

encl: one inscribed paperback book

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