Voltaire’s grim comfort and the Halloween tragedy in Seoul

All’s Not Well on All Hallow’s Eve

Unhappy mortals! Dark and mourning earth!
Affrighted gathering of human kind!
Eternal lingering of useless pain!
Come, ye philosophers, who cry, “All’s well,”
And contemplate this ruin of a world.

Voltaire, “Poem on the Lisbon Disaster,” trans. by Joseph McCabe (from Project Gutenberg)

Photo by Mathew Schwartz on Unsplash This picture was already on Unsplash and doesn’t appear to have any connection with the October 29, 2022 tragedy in Seoul.

Over 150 people died in a crowd surge in Seoul, South Korea — a stampede.

One club owner reported opening his doors to minors when he discovered the emergency,

“But even after we did that, there were people collapsed at the entrance, and some passed out…We tried to rescue them, but our club was at the end of the surge and there were already three or four layers of people piled on, so we couldn’t.”

He said his inability to help people “keeps haunting me, and pains me.”

Jaclyn Diaz, “Survivors recount chaotic scene in Seoul during tragic Halloween stampede,” NPR (Oct. 30, 2022)

The “Great Lisbon Earthquake” of All Saint’s Day 1755 and the tsunami and fires that followed it killed between 12,000 and 50,000 people.

It is worth considering Voltaire’s response to certain thinkers, because he cuts short lines of false comfort likely to be raised to contain the angst and dread raised by such a tragedy.

Before that earthquake, a number of Rationalist Optimists proposed that the world perfectly reflects the will of God, and thus, while what we see may be evil, that does not reflect the world but merely our mindset. Such optimists, confronting a tragedy such as Lisbon, sought to explain it somehow, and in so doing, contain the feeling of dread and sorrow, comforting themselves and their fellows.

Not Volaire. When he read reports of disaster in Lisbon, his “Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne” skewered optimists like Alexander Pope and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Voltaire saw victims of the earthquake as testifying against any ‘perfect world’ where ‘All’s well.’

To him, falsely comforting religious platitudes and philosophic axioms trap us, empowering brutality.

• Voltaire denounced a religious interpretation that sought to explain the disaster in Lisbon as a judgment of God for the sins of that city. “Hellbound,” a recent Korean dramatic series, presents exactly this concern, as well as the ruthless absurdities it raises.
• Voltaire denounced a post hoc justification, that such death and misery was ‘necessary’ to bring about some betterment to the world, the ole ‘suffering makes us stronger’ motif. In a manner of speaking, “Squid Game” interrogates that concern as well: in games of chance, suffering through one horrific incident is no help whatsoever in the next — arbitrary chance reins alone.
• And finally, Voltaire offers this line —

All dead and living things are locked in strife.
Confess it freely — evil stalks the land,

which oddly invokes the notions of “The Kingdom,” in which a power struggle for the throne transpires during an all-consuming zombie plague.

I am uncertain what Voltaire would favor in the face of such tragedy, beyond resisting the urge to invoke false comfort. Surely, he would question authorities and structures in Korea, and seek improvements where such improvements can be made. What exactly drew such crowds to press into such tight back alleys? Could it be that certain moral codes require hiding certain ‘adult’ practices from public, but tolerating them around corners?

But beyond that, I believe Voltaire would resist any grand explanation as to what occurred, perhaps insisting instead on rooting choices in actual experiences. Grim comfort, but at least, comfort that does not result in comforters seeking to exploit a disaster and built tyranny therefrom (as indeed occurred in Lisbon).