Henry Adams and the meaning of life

Paradox

When Henry Adams described the "task of education" as being "this problem of running order through chaos, direction through space, discipline through freedom, unity through-multiplicity," it appears that he was referring to something that people today would more readily refer to as the meaning of life. This may seem a loose phrase that risks cliche, but in fact it is the easiest way to make sense of Adams's set of paradoxes about education. After all, the events of life are a pure chaos of one event after another, unless one has obtained the mental criteria to evaluate them. Similarly, life is directionless unless one has a specific purpose, and life is marked by a bewildering freedom of options unless one is restricted to certain choices, and life can appear as numerous unique phenomena unless we have learned to recognize the underlying patterns and categories in those events. In some sense, then, what Henry Adams means is that education is our chief way of providing meaning to life (and religion, philosophy, science, art, politics, and economy) although he is too rhetorically elegant to come right out and say so. In the writings of great minds, as in life, the meaning is never readily apparent.

Certainly I agree with Adams's contention that education is how we discover meaning in life. This is perhaps easiest to see when a bad or inadequate education performs a pale parody of this task, and gives people an illusory meaning. The first example that springs to mind are devotees of the writer Ayn Rand. In these overheated paperback screeds familiar to many adolescents, Rand offers her readers a form of education: she has figured out her own meaning in life (and in religion, philosophy, science, art, politics, and, alas, economics) and she intends to share it, at great length. Ultimately these books are offering a course in the meaning of life -- the meaning propounded by Ayn Rand and her followers seems to be that there is no God and the only moral obligation is to be selfish -- but this is why they appeal mainly to teenagers, who are undergoing their education at the same time when they may be experiencing difficult relationships at home. That is why these books offer a bad form of education, which is calculated to appeal to the immaturity and emotional bias of their readers -- but nonetheless, in the attempt by Ayn Rand to provide her readers with a simplistic and ready answer for everything, we can glimpse the nature of education. It is to find a worldview, a meaning in life: the person who reads Ayn Rand is invited to say in consequence that he or she (but usually he) is an "Objectivist." Joining a cult like this is a quick way to finding meaning in life, of course. I do not agree with Ayn Rand's philosophy on anything, really, but I understand the way in which certain people latch on to this readily-available worldview -- because it is a difficult task to fashion one's own worldview, and this one arrives in bookstores readymade. Claiming that it is a virtue to be selfish is a way of providing order in chaos, direction through space, discipline in freedom, and unity amid-multiplicity. It just happens to be an extremely shallow way of doing so.

Cult membership like Ayn Rand offers is just one way of providing meaning to life. People can also find meaning through genuine religion, or by constructing their own set of beliefs about the world, and either of these tasks can be the result of a genuine education. The important point to realize is that education is not indoctrination. I think this can be evident if we consider a different thinker, perhaps the one Ayn Rand disliked most -- Jesus Christ. The difficulty here is that most people who claim to be Christians seem unfamiliar with many things that Christ actually said. For example, President George W. Bush once responded to a question by claiming that Jesus was his "favorite philosopher." This unfortunately did not provoke the obvious follow-up question about camels and eyes of needles, or offer an explanation how the pointless invasion of foreign countries follows from the claim that peacemakers are blessed. However, this just shows that religious education can offer a specious shortcut to providing meaning in life -- there is a difference, of course, between providing actual meaning and providing glib answers that one has memorized.