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Doctor Pangloss tutors Candide,
the hero of Voltaire’s classic. The doctor who teaches
‘metaphysico-theologo-cosmolonigology’ proves that there is no effect
without a cause and that his patron’s castle was the best of all castles in
the best of all of possible worlds. Things could not possibly be otherwise,
he argues, “for everything is made for an end, everything is necessarily for
the best end. Observe that noses were meant to wear spectacles; and so we
have spectacles. Legs were visibly instituted to be breeched, and we have
breeches. Likewise, stones were formed to be quarried and to build castles….
Consequently all those who have asserted that all is well talk nonsense,”
Dr. Pangloss asserts. “They ought to have said that all is for the best.” Of
course, Voltaire did not expect his readers to take Dr. Pangloss seriously.
Otherwise he wouldn’t have shown his protagonist arguing that pigs were
‘meant’ to be eaten because men ate them. By that token, men too were meant
to be eaten by tigers.
A more sympathetic reading has
the pompous little doctor whistling manfully against an inherently chaotic
world which, alas, is constantly grinding down everything whether it is
castles or builders. Moreover, recent research also suggests that Panglossian philosophy is not without merit. In his recent book Stumbling On
Happiness, Danie Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard, asks, for
example what would have happened if, a the end of Casablanca Ingrid Bergman
had stayed with Humphrey Bogart in Morocco, instead of flying to Lisbon to
join her husband in his fight against the Nazis. Would she have regretted
that decision? Or did she end up ruing the day she fled from Bogart? Gilbert
argues that both the decisions are in relevant, that either would have made
her equally happy in the long run. In a manner that echoes Doctor Pangloss,
Gilbert goes on to say that screen superman Christopher Reeve believed
himself in some ways better off after the became a quadriplegic; that the
bicycling champ Lance Armstrong was glad to have had cancer, and that cancer
patients in general tended to be more optimistic about the future than
healthy people. Belief, however misguided or ever delusional, is crucial to
a person’s perceived state of happiness. That’s why choosing the fuller half
of the glass makes better survival sense. Best, Dr. Pangloss would have
said. |
