We must cultivate our garden (without pesticides)

Now put that rubble over there, next to the other rubble.

When an earthquake struck Lisbon in 1755, deists all over Europe collectively wet themselves. If you ever read Candide, you remember Pangloss, "all words," the philosopher who died fifteen times, only to be revived fifteen times, so powerful was his optimism that he could not be extinguished. Well, Voltaire, the author and derider of Pangloss, with all his Leibniziana in tow, didn't find the nonfictional extinction of the Portuguese so amusing. He suffered quite a crisis of conscience, in fact, in trying to reconcile his deism, which prescribed a benevolent, or at least curious and not malicious, Creator with human and natural evils, such as Stephen Baldwin existing or earthquakes in Portugal. Ultimately, Voltaire decided that the problem was insoluble, courageously chucking along with it his belief in the Innocence of Nature--he called it "optimism"--and instead opting to accept the practical reality of evil forces, rather than explain them away as somehow mysteriously necessary gifts from Father Knowledge. For many years, he struggled painfully with this paradox, until, angry in his elderdays, while mocking and chuckling his peers into rumination, he came to a gentle and obvious, and therefore quite clouded, solution.

We have an obligation to be moral, happy, wise, and deliberate. Just as we owe our consideration to others, we likewise owe it to ourselves. It is ethically repugnant to be self-defeating or self-insensitive. (Provided, of course, that defeating or neglecting oneself does not induce any of the four previously mentioned virtues. Masochists, you are exempted.) Now, this banal insight, while conciliatory and kind of cute, and true, doesn't quite cut it, but only prepares us for the rarer, brighter intelligence to come: when we tend to ourselves, we make a reasoned choice to be helpful to others; to reform social injustices and intervene on behalf of those who suffer them; to make inferences and acquire knowledge and not to hold beliefs; and to divide our desires, which we cherish most personally and preposterously, as well as destructively, from our works, which we execute upon others. From this distinction, it follows that if we fail to help ourselves as we would another, we have injured not only ourselves but also every person or animal that would depend on us, converse with us, care for us, or even cross paths with us; we also have undermined the moral model upon which we build our laws, from which we inherit our discourses, and against which we measure our sensibilities. Self-waste, in other words, is toxic, and it prevents its agent not only from accomplishing any good but also from blocking its poisonous infiltration into larger social and ethical structures. To do good socially, you must do good personally. A bit trite, I concede. However: to do good personally, you must be faithful to reason, whose fidelity requires that you both know the facts in their best availability and live your life not in contradiction to but in harmony with them.

So back to Lisbon. When anywhere from ten to one hundred thousand people died there during and after the earthquake, deists like Voltaire faced a new challenge: to somehow justify either God's intention to cause such evil or his refusal to stop it, as Rousseau chose, or to infer on the basis of such natural evil that God, if He exists, has no business in human affairs and that, therefore, an unbridgeable moral and theological gap separates God from everything else. In his humility, Voltaire picked the latter, not an easy inference for a man whose entire universe ticked on the clocks of Newton's celestial smoothness. Descartes, after all, had argued, and Leibniz had concurred, that Nature, like a fluid, moves its components in such a way that everything preserves two principles, those of economy and coherence. A world in which God is one thing, and everything else another, flagrantly violates the Cartesian code.

Nevertheless, Voltaire proposed it, and then accepted it, and then loved it. That is the garden that he told us to cultivate. Our human, earthly, personal garden. Not a wilderness of abstractions and precepts and rules, but an orderly, kind, reasonable, careful community. A living world, not a dead idea. And from this declaration he forged a brilliant moral program and description of our place in this floating, wandering world. Nature, with its inscrutability, may be indifferent, or fickle, or hostile; mobs of men, with their religions, their extravagances, and their dangerous whimsies may be cruel, or prosecutory, or unthinkable. But an individual person, whose garden is cultivated, who enjoys the simple pleasures of good food, good company, love, and friendship, whose very soul is itself simplicity, can be generous, and tranquil, and sane. We ourselves are a world. And although the laws of our own worlds continue from and comply with the laws of unthinkable mobs and a fickle, inscrutable Nature, they are not identical to them; we have a choice, whether to mimic the caprice and coldness, the fervent and fury, or to take what we have been given, our inner turmoil and tension, and to feed and craft them into superior, personal truths. Nature may be deadly; men may be violent; but I may be sane.

[Send complaints to my therapist, who stimulated this unavoidably pretentious diatribe by sagely suggesting that I haul my hyperreflective, ego-musing brain down to the pawn shop off I-35 and Cesar Chavez, where "compramos oro," and trade it for some gold teeth or an eight-year-old's brain. And he was serious about the brain exchange. He suspects my biggest problem is that I think too much. And he's right. Like a latter-day Kierkegaard, I've wondered my way into mind-forged manacles. His exact words, I think, were "you need to start being stupider." So: goals for the week: find, capture, and interrogate an eight-year-old to learn his secrets; dispose of same; windowshop for lobotomies.]