Posted on January 9, 2011
My holiday wanderings this year took me to two wildly different, but strangely, similar places: EPCOT Center in Orlando, Florida, and a performance of Candide by the Shakespeare Theater Company in Washington, DC.
The crowds drawn by these entertainment venues could not have been less similar. The average age of the audience for Candide had to be somewhere in the vicinity of 45, while EPCOT drew the stroller set. At Candide you could spot people in mink coats. At EPCOT — where it was about 20 degrees — hoodies and Gryffindor scarves (no doubt purchased the day before at Universal Studios’ Wizarding World of Harry Potter) abounded.
And yet, EPCOT and Candide are both fundamentally about the subject of optimism.
This hit me during the EPCOT ride called “Spaceship Earth.” With a title like that I braced myself for a lecture about climate change that would make me feel bad about the my puny recycling efforts (not to mention my SUV). But no. Instead, I got a vision of a better future (complete with campy animatronic puppets), which reminded me of the vision of the future we used to get back in the early 1960s.
What happened to those visions of the future? Today, when I turn on Discovery Channel, or History Channel, or any of the other channels that purport to be about education, I get Mayan prophecies of doom, The Rapture, and apocalyptic visions of the world after people have become extinct. There are whole sub-genres of fiction that devote themselves to scary and depressing visions of the future. Star Trek is so passé.
This brings me, in a strange and circuitous route, to Candide, Voltaire’s wickedly satiric look at all of man’s institutions. He could have written something preachy and frightening, but instead he wrote a funny, funny story about an innocent making his way in a world where everything bad that can happen, does happen. And in Leonard Bernstein’s brilliant adaptation for the stage (with help from Stephen Sondheim and Dorothy Parker, to name just a few), the play ends with Candide sadder, wiser, but still trying to do the best he can in a world that isn’t “the best of all possible worlds.” Instead, Candide comes to realize that it’s the only world we have and we need to work to improve it. Bernstein’s adaptation of the eighteenth century book was first produced in 1957 — three years after Disneyland opened.
So why is it that today in 2011, when we’re living in the modern world predicted for us back in 1957, that we’re so depressed? Think about what we have: Kids in America don’t die of polio or a host of other diseases, hunger in America is no longer a problem (obesity is), we communicate instantaneously, we can travel anywhere in a matter of hours, we can hold a library of words and music in the palms of our hands, women and minorities have the right vote. All-in-all, life is better today than it was 100 years ago. Heck, it’s better than it was in 1957. Yes, many of the people in the rest of the world don’t enjoy a life like that. And we sure do have a lot of problems that still need solving. We always will have problems. But we’re on a continuum of improvement. History doesn’t lie.
Why have we given up on the future? Why does a vision of the future that doesn’t involve human extinction surprise me?
I can’t answer that question. I’m an optimistic person, who writes books about optimistic people. I like to think that we have the capacity to make the world a better place. I believe that humanity has the capacity to rise above hatred and war, although I know sometimes the evidence of that is hard to find. Still, I believe that now is the best time to be alive.
And as for Yellowstone exploding and sending us all back into the stone age — well there isn’t much I can do about that, so why obess about it?
I guess that makes me like Candide . . . and Walt Disney.
