Voltaire and the Courage to Question Authority

There are philosophers who sit quietly and think. Some of them even sit on rocks and stare out to sea. I do that myself sometimes and increasingly recommend it, if only as an antidote to spending too much of life staring at a screen.

Voltaire was not really the sitting quietly sort. He argued, provoked, mocked and occasionally got himself thrown in prison.

Born François-Marie Arouet in Paris in 1694, he discovered fairly early that powerful people don’t always appreciate being laughed at, particularly when the joke is about them. But that didn’t stop him.

What interests me about Voltaire isn’t really whether I agree with his philosophy. I’m not sure he had a philosophy in the grand sense. He had more of a stance, a swagger really.

Think for yourself. Question authority. Be suspicious of certainty.

That seems remarkably simple but it wasn’t in eighteenth-century France. Come to think of it, it’s to that simple today!

Voltaire lived in a world in which church and state possessed very real power over what could be said, written and believed. He was imprisoned in the Bastille, spent periods in exile and still kept writing. During a spell in England he encountered Locke and Newton and, perhaps more importantly, a society in which there appeared to be rather more room for disagreement, which he obviously loved.

What particularly angered him was not religion itself. He believed in God, although his God was closer to a watchmaker who had set the universe running, than a deity constantly intervening in human affairs. What he despised was what people did with certainty: superstition, fanaticism and the use of belief to exercise power over others.

And doesn’t that also sound familiar today? Maybe we humans haven’t evolved that far over many centuries.

We have access to more information than Voltaire could possibly have imagined. I carry around in my pocket a device capable of accessing a sizeable proportion of recorded human knowledge. And yet I’m not convinced we’re harder to fool.

Perhaps the problem was never access to information. Perhaps it was our willingness to question what we already want to believe.

Voltaire understood something else I like: humour matters. Ridicule can sometimes puncture pomposity more effectively than another carefully constructed argument. His Candide attacked the fashionable idea that we inhabit ‘the best of all possible worlds’ by subjecting its characters to one catastrophe after another.

Eventually philosophy gives way to something rather more practical and it’s this.

Get on with life.

Voltaire himself obviously did more than make jokes. When Jean Calas, a Protestant merchant, was wrongly convicted, tortured and executed, Voltaire campaigned publicly to clear his name. Questioning authority wasn’t simply an intellectual game when another human being was paying the price.

That, for me, is where Voltaire becomes interesting. Not because he supplied answers. I find myself increasingly suspicious of people who have answers to everything and solutions to nothing. Think of political parties that have never been in power, peddling simple solutions to complex problems. Snake-oil salesmen — and they do seem almost always to be men.

He defended the right to ask questions. And perhaps that matters even more in our peculiar digital age, where everyone can speak, everyone can pronounce, and certainty can travel around the world before doubt has put its shoes on.

I suspect Voltaire would have enjoyed social media enormously, but only for about twenty minutes.

The Bottom Line

Question authority and certainty. And occasionally, when both become too self-important, laugh at them.