HISTORY ASSIGNMENT
In Candide, the French Enlightenment's most notable personality, Voltaire, created a sometimes scathing, sometimes humorous survey of divergent cultures in the form of a global adventure tale. The title character finds himself embroiled in a myriad of fantastical situations, survives by the skin of his teeth, gets rich, loses all his money, finds his love and friends again, makes new friends, and winds up a happy farmer far from his original home. Through it all he wonders whether the world really lives up to his old tutor's maxim that "since everything [is] made for a purpose, it follows that everything is made for the best purpose." In fact, Candide's wanderings place him in the midst of many philosophies of life and in the end Candide finally replaces baseless optimism with a more grounded worldview based on making a contribution to one's society. In one memorable section, Candide finds himself and his man-servant in Eldorado, a mythical South American society where he discovers a culture that treats religion and faith very differently than did European cultures. In these chapters Voltaire engages in a typical rhetorical strategy of the Enlightenment, creating a mythical place as a means of contrasting the actual world to an ideal. In this case, Eldorado is an idealized place where there is no lack of material wealth, where there is deep social peace, and where religion unified rather than divided society.
In this essay, which should take you up to 30 minutes to write (after prepping the document (read chapters 18 and 19 in the pdf file) and pre-writing your outline or web or idea map), please reply to this prompt:
How does Voltaire describe spirituality and religion in Eldorado? How does he imply that the Eldoradan viewpoint is superior to the reality of Europe in the 18th century?
NOTE: It will be one page without double space and you have to read chapter 18-19 in pdf file. You have to compete the assignment in 10 hours.