Nature's Evil

If he happened to turn up in our too sunny world, Candide would recognise familiar themes. The pandemic would not surprise him – he had heard of plagues that were even more horrible. He would rejoice for Pangloss, who would be cured of his venereal disease, and would be amazed by all the gadgets in our technological Eldorado. But he would be still more astonished to hear taxi drivers banging on about prices and oligarchs, traffic jams and wildfires. He would think how simple and comprehensible the Lisbon earthquake was. It killed people but didn’t discredit humanity. Victims were counted in thousands, but there were no perpetrators. Man-made horror is a different thing altogether: it humiliates and devalues. There’s nothing worse than feeling guilty, Candide would think, observing the mess we have made of our world. For centuries people have been inflicting suffering on one another, all the while repeating sermons about goodness and peace. The reasons were and are the same – the greed of some and the stupidity of others. Greed and stupidity eat away at the foundations of solidarity which nature instilled in us. Because of them, humankind grows on nature’s beautiful body like a malignant tumour, gobbling up some of her juices and poisoning others.

‘Excellently observed,’ Candide would say; ‘but let us cultivate our garden.’ 15

Note

Notes

1   Bonneuil and Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene . 2   Smil, Energy Transitions ; Smil, Making the Modern World . 3   Lovelock, Gaia . 4   Latour, Facing Gaia . 5   Nordhaus, ‘Reflections on the economics of climate change’; Beck, The Metamorphosis of the World . 6   Osokina, Zoloto dlya industrializatsii . 7   Mokyr, The Lever of Riches ; Zaretsky, Secrets of the Soul . 8   Kuznets, Toward a Theory of Economic Growth . 9   Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism . 10  Bonneuil and Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene . 11  Latour, ‘Europe as a refuge’. 12  Agamben, The Time that Remains . 13  Deaton, ‘How FDR fought climate change’. 14  Fraser, ‘From redistribution to recognition?’; Fraser, ‘Behind Marx’s hidden abode’. 15  Voltaire, Candide , p. 97.

References and Bibliography

Acemoglu, Daron, and James A. Robinson, Why Nations Fail: the Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty . New York: Crown, 2013.

Adam, U., The Political Economy of J. H. G. Justi . Oxford: Peter Lang, 2006.

Adler, Daniel S., Guy Bar-Oz, Anna Belfer-Cohen and Ofer Bar-Yosef, ‘Ahead of the game: Middle and Upper Palaeolithic hunting behaviors in the Southern Caucasus’, Current Anthropology 47/1 (2006): 89–118.

Adshead, S. A., Salt and Civilization . Christchurch, New Zealand: Canterbury University Press, 1992.

Agamben, Giorgio, Stasis: Civil War as a Political Paradigm . Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015.

Agamben, Giorgio, The Time that Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans . Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005.

Agricola, Georgius, De re metallica . New York: Dover, 1950.

Albertone, Manuela, National Identity and the Agrarian Republic . London: Routledge, 2016.

Albertone, Manuela, ‘Physiocracy in the eighteenth-century America: economic theory and political weapons’, History of European Ideas (2020): 1–22.

Alexeev, Michael, and Shlomo Weber (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the Russian Economy . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Allen, David, Farm to Factory: A Reinterpretation of the Soviet Industrial Revolution . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003.

Allen, Robert C., Global Economic History: A Very Short Introduction . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Al-Rawi, Farouk N. H., and Andrew R. George, ‘Back to the cedar forest: the beginning and end of Tablet V of the standard Babylonian Epic of Gilgameš’, Journal of Cuneiform Studies 66/1 (2014): 69–90.

Ananyin, Oleg, ‘“Quorum pars magna fui”: on the Cantillon–Marx connection’, European Journal of the History of Economic Thought 21/6 (2014): 950–76.