Book written by Voltaire

Poor Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz! I know, I know- you were thinking the same thing just the other day! He gets ripped off on the credit for inventing calculus, which he did all by himself. Then, it turned out that Isaac Newton had come up with calculus at the same time all by himself. And it was just easier to tell stories about Newton and that apple falling from the tree and, by the way, this guy who “invented” gravity also invented calculus, leaving Leibniz out of all future discussions (not really, but we do not do well giving credit for inventions to more than one person, which is pretty lame).

Moreover, Leibniz is a philosopher, an area that thoroughly overlapped with mathematics and science in those days. So, he goes and explicates this idea that our world must be the best of all possible worlds because it was created by an all-knowing and all-powerful God. At least he gets credit for that one: Leibnizian optimism.

In the other corner, we have Voltaire, that bon vivant of French life, who spent most of his life away from French life. I think it must be easy to envision anyone who attacks Leibnizian optimism as someone who retorts to a greeting of “Good morning!” with a “What’s so good about it?”, but that is rather far from the truth. Reportedly, Voltaire could not stomach the idea that any all-powerful being would inflict natural disasters on humanity and take so many innocent lives.

The book takes the form of a journey with various adventures along the way ending with a homecoming, much like the Odyssey. After Don Quixote and Gulliver’s Travels, a reader really has to wonder when those early fiction writers were going to discover some new plot devices. For me, the humor with which these authors embued their work speaks to a certain universal acknowledgement of the folly of trying to place a structure on our journey through life. An Englishman, a Frenchman, and a Spaniard sit down to write a book and cannot help but chuckle to themselves.

Of course, Candide is Voltaire at his best, so we are not talking about some dreary diatribe or any easy answers. (Voltaire at his worst, struggled with prejudices that he recognized in himself as well as a few he felt were justified.) A lot of words have been written about Voltaire’s insistence on not providing a clear alternative to Leibnizian optimism, which makes me wonder about the larger artistic question. Other than because we like closure at the end of a story, how much does an artist owe the audience? Are you only allowed to create art that asks questions as long as you provide answers also? Maybe the artist will come across as whiny and be open to criticism for poor work, but that hardly seems the case with Candide. The real accomplishment here is the admonishment to seek life’s answers in our own experiences and not in paths that are well-trodden. Being told to think for ourselves is never really a wrong answer for an artist.

You’ve Got to Check This Out is a blog series about music, words, and all sorts of artistic matters. It started with an explanation. 235 more to go.

New additions to You’ve Got to Check This Out are released regularly. Also, free humor, short works, and poetry are posted irregularly. Notifications are posted on Facebook which you can receive by friending or following Craig.

Whine and Grine by Prince Buster, Stand Down Margaret by The Beat
Performed by The Beat (known as The English Beat in the U.S.)

I was tempted to post the lyrics and call this done.

The economic devastation brought about by the policies of those in power in the 1980s may not have been anything new, but the scale of the damage and the long preceding period without such widespread pain created a new dynamic in the us vs. them storytelling that feeds most politics and all power grabs.

The intersection of punk and reggae now seems inevitable- two musical styles inspired by pain, anger, and deprivation. In some ways, punk is derived from looking inward and reggae from looking outward, which may explain the discomfort engendered by punk performers and the rhapsody created by reggae artists. Nevertheless, the music of both was born of personal experience.

Moreover, the major waves of musical styles which have taken over popular music have all arisen from the disenfranchised. Others have discussed the desire of the enfranchised to co-opt the art of the less fortunate, but I have never entirely accepted the notion that marketers in board rooms are so much sitting around looking around for some suffering cultural group that can be ripped off. I do think they are probably looking for whatever might have reached a critical mass as well as appear ready-made for corporate packaging and mass marketers care not from whence it comes.

And yes, this is ska, not reggae. All right, to be specific, this is 2 Tone. I bring this up because that’s how we circle back around to marketing. All definitions applied to art are marketing. Musicians talk in rhythm, feel, key and such when they want to talk about how they are going to play a piece of music. When they are talking about blues or soul, that’s for the consumer’s benefit. The Dadaists had a manifesto and even applied the term to themselves, but the coinage has more value in the auction house nowadays than as a working term among practicing artists. For that matter, a quick glance at the manifesto and you might think the signatories saw the term as a marketing gimmick.

Why all this focus here on co-opting art and marketing? Because it is very hard to rise above the morass and make a political statement once you achieve success. While any artist runs the danger of having their intended message being completely misunderstood, far more controversial statements are buried by the desire not to offend. Consider that any statement must make it past the artist’s self-censorship, the discouraging statements with a direct influence on the creation of the art, and the powers that control the communication channels for that art.

Somehow, The Beat, on a recording sold through major sales outlets, still managed to call for the resignation of the Prime Minister of their country. Sure, people say all kinds of things on social media these days, but people were less publicly vocal (or maybe they just spouted while driving as yelling inside cars seems like the best analog to social media). The truth is things were a lot worse. Unemployment is currently more than a percentage point lower. Violent crime has dropped by a third since 1980. Today, we spout bile from perches of privilege and ignorance while coalescing around like-minded thinkers who have been packaged and preened for our easy digestion.

You’ve Got to Check This Out is a blog series about music, words, and all sorts of artistic matters. It started with an explanation. 236 more to go.

New additions to You’ve Got to Check This Out are released regularly. Also, free humor, short works, and poetry are posted irregularly. Notifications are posted on Facebook which you can receive by friending or following Craig.