Culture / Book Review

The Miseducation of Henry Adams

Henry Adams's classic autobiography speaks to concerns of privilege, failure, and progress in his rapidly changing world.

by Michael Lindgren via The Millions on June 30, 2017

Henry Adams writing at a desk (1883).

Marian Hooper Adams/Massachusetts Historical Society (Wikimedia Commons)

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As Adams broadens his thesis, he also casts his eye backwards, and he begins to feel himself dissolving into the past, into disembodied experience. He begins to wish for the negation of learning; “he saw his education as complete, and was sorry he had ever begun,” and expresses doubt about the fundamental communicability of the liberal project, noting that “words are slippery and thought is viscous.” He limns a profound understanding of the futility of assuming that progress is cumulative. “The attempt of the American of 1800 to educate the American of 1900” had

not often been surpassed for folly; and since 1800 the forces and their complications had increased a thousand times or more. The attempt of the American of 1900 to educate the American of 2000, must be even blinder than that of the Congressman of 1800, except so far as he had learned his ignorance.

Adams’s conclusion, as John C. Orr puts it, emphasizes that “the mental paradigms one inherited [will always] lag behind technological and scientific developments;” in a world where the acceleration of knowledge and technology increases exponentially, the inner truth of education lies in recognizing its limits. We must know above all what it is that we do not know.

This conception strikes me as fundamentally humble, not just towards one’s peers or superiors, but towards the unknown future generations. So many current leaders, thinkers, and writers are absolutely sure of their own values and achievements; so many of them are absolutely certain of the superiority of their moral vision to that of their predecessors, and of the utility of their perceptions to posterity. Adams was relentless in his denial of this (after all) very human urge; he looks back on his own preconceptions of youth and concludes that anything he would try to say to future generations would be worse than useless. Underneath all of his elegant melancholy is an asperity that is unsparing of himself, that is ruthless towards sentimentality, cant, moral certitude, all of the pious superiorities that so often accompanied the 19th-century idea of progress. It’s a little frightening; the intensity of Adams’s world-historical skepticism approaches nihilism.

This, I think, more than its somewhat convoluted theories or its value as a historical document, is the heart of The Education’s continued appeal. Its emotional valence is remarkably bracing to anyone who finds himself out of tune with the received notions of a culture.

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