Candide’s Legacy

The Awareness Trap: Self-Absorption Instead of Social Change, by Edwin Schur. New York: Quadrangle Books. 213 pp.

According to the revisionists, Candide decided to cultivate his own garden when he and his companions reached California. He gave himself wholly to that task, obeying the dictates of the work ethic as he had once honored the precepts of Dr. Pangloss. And he prospered. To the very end of his life he preached the importance of cultivating one’s garden, and each generation of the family instilled the idea in the succeeding generation. But by the time Candide’s great-grandchildren reached maturity—what with the family’s ability to invest in the latest agribusiness technology and the availability of Mexican wetbacks—the family was not needed in the fields. They had become, in short, a leisured, middle-class group that could not easily practice the family faith. It was not long, however, before it occurred to them—many, after a...