Written in response to David Mnitsa’s “Ignorance is Bliss”
Last week’s op-ed, titled, “Ignorance is Bliss,” accepts as a premise that life is meaningless. Writer David Mnitsa then claims that the best way to get around our fundamental state of despair will be through the distractions of video games, work and family. Although Mr. Mnitsa starts his column “willing to answer [the] call” of the “big questions,” he ends bleakly, noting that the only way to get through a day so filled with despair will be by ignoring such questions entirely.
Perhaps “thinking about the meaning of life is a Sisyphian and isolating adventure” but I hope that our campus will demand more than a nine paragraph op-ed before we convert to nihilism. I am nervous about the state of any college that prefers “blissful ignorance” to thoughtful inquiry. We ought to fear what Mr. Mnitsa believes apparent – namely, that we must choose between happiness and knowing certain truths. If we take him to mean that the fundamental experience of “being human” is to be universal, comprehensible and tragic, then we should treat any evidence with the utmost caution. The consequences of such a discovery would simultaneously complete and kill the project of liberal education.
Mr. Mnitsa informs us that humans have discovered the emptiness the uni- verse and of our lives through the faculty of reason. He has another word for reason: science. However, in his invocation of Mr. Mansfield’s lecture on science and liberal education, he misses the thesis of Mr. Mansfield’s argument. Mr. Mansfield explains that science depends on “non-science” in order to be valuable. Science may provide us with facts, but non-science determines which facts are worth discovering and teaches what to do with those facts. I hope that our campus, too, might flirt with the idea that not just facts, but “non-science” and other “irrational” experiences might expose meaning in our lives. And if meaning is too much to ask for, then at least we might find some hope in our capacity to search.
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