seekersandsought.com

By Vwadek P. Marciniak

The following is drawn from Sean Healy’s Boredom, Self, and Culture (1984) using quotes from him while concepts analysis and interpretations are this writer’s responsibility.

“The center will not hold,” as William B. Yeats stated, while vidiots sit in front of the tube stunned by the department of redundancy department enveloping us in order to leave one so redundant as to look to redundancy for answers.

Is there a more boring topic to analyze than boredom? As J. Heller put it, a world empty of “meaning seeks to escape from the infinite boredom of its meaninglessness by the magic of words without flesh, and forms without content.”

If you feel jaded or are sitting with cabin fever are you bored? An article in Reader’s Digest a few years back on “How to Cope with Boredom” read in part: “Despite its extraordinary variety of diversions and resources, its frenzy for spectacles and it feverish pursuit of entertainment, AMERICA IS BORED.” Continuing, it stated that “The abundance of efforts made in the United States to counter boredom have defeated themselves, and boredom has become the disease of our time.”[89]

Are there paradigms for such grit? We throw “boredom” around as though it was a child’s toy without concern for meaning or appropriate application. Words too often can create more problems than resolutions and boredom can fit that niche. Placing it in historic context, therefore, is one issue here confronted. What follows may be aggravating and pointless but words need space to face meaning for our times.

Early hermits in Lower Egypt used a term like “noonday devil” while fourth century Greeks referred to the “tedium or perturbation of heart”.[16] During the Middle Ages sloth as well spiritual laziness came close to our understanding. Around the thirteenth century the root for the French ennui appeared while Petrarch suggested “melancholy” for what he perceived as “hatred and contempt” being part of the “human condition.” This was a pre-cursor of the English “bored” when Robert Burton wrote in 1621 The Anatomy of Melancholy.(18-19) Shakespeare used “weary” some twenty times.

The French jumped on this issue earliest with ennui which in a seventeenth century French/English dictionary was listed as synonyms with “annoy; vexation; trouble; disquiet; molestation; sorrow; grief; anguish; wearisomeness; tediousness, irksomeness; importunity; a loathing, …; discontentment, or offence, at.”[19] Where is there clarity for understanding?

In France the “inner, deep-seated changes in the psyche during the early seventeenth century, occurred.”[20-1] Pascal wrote of “the state that defines man’s structure” in noting “ennui had become no longer a problem of existence, it had become man’s problem.” His contemporary, la Rochefoucauld, observed that hanging at court was an endurance of boredom. Voltaire found ennui the most horrid of conditions, and spoke of it as being “the abyss of eternal nothingness.”(23) France being at the beginnings of the scientific revolution and Enlightenment, was on the cutting edge that some might wish never occurred. A comforting faith driven religion was being replaced with a faith in divisive and confusing reasoning where each would create their own path to understanding.

Blaise Pascal, one of the first modern writers to expatiate on boredom, suggested that “justice does not lie in these customs but resides in natural laws common to every country” where the joke “is that man’s whims have shown such great variety that there is not one.”(77) The more exciting aspect of Pascal’s position was that he was not speaking of the “actual condition of his fellow men of the seventeenth century, but as a prophet (an early-warning system to put it in modern terms), acutely sensitive to changes still so subtle and undeveloped as to be quite invisible to be undetectable by the vast majority of those around him at the time.”(54-5)

It was at the University of Paris where late Medieval intellectual advances challenged tradition notwithstanding objections from the Church. There was an explosion of population, growth of cities, revival of trade, and the circulation of new ideas (a smaller version of what we now see), both exciting and profoundly disturbing. Intellectual growth can create contempt, especially for a declining church where this new faith in reason was finding fruitful soil.

Later we have Flaubert offering not only suggestions for this anxiety but who also was one of the first to draw a distinction “between occasional boredom and more chronically fixed boredom which he referred to as ‘modern boredom’ or what might be labeled as ‘hyper-boredom’ a ‘deep-seated agony recognized only by its effects.’” The idea of some form of painful circumstance, something of an existential experience, began making an early appearance.(28)

It was “Baudelaire who most acutely captured the morbid richness of l’ennui moderne. He too points to the blankness of the state and to its sweeping extent …. he is in himself one the great prophets of the malady” since raising this above all other vices or painful conditions.(29)

We arrive at the English word bored around 1766(24) when an English philologist noted that what we have is “the curious class of verbs and adjectives which describe not so much the objective qualities and activities of things as the effects they produce on us.”(24) While accurate it also demonstrates a fundamental problem when discussing bored, a subjective experience looking for an objective definition. As for leisure as a cause, it suggested “For the vast majority, the tediousness of life is experienced as boredom (or boredom 2), the common or garden variety that tends to afflict any leisure class.” Since contrived busyness is tied to leisure it lies at the heart of this manifestation.(66) And for the “British Isles we discover those who tended to be morose, sullen, phlegmatic, and generally private, in contrast with the forms it assumed on the Continent, where it had fast become fulminating, virulent and destructive”(27)although this delineation between cultures is more apparent than real.

Entering our own era, Kierkegaard offered that “Boredom depends on the nothingness which pervades reality.”(15) He further suggested that boredom is the root of all evil,(26) demonstrating how lost one can get in trying to pin down this all too common condition. On more solid ground he noted “that everyone who feels bored cries out for change…. One tires of living in the country and moves to the city; one tires of one’s native land, and travels abroad;…”(26) This is a classic example of not only seeking busyness but equally avoiding productive work because we’ve arrived where nihilism, nothingness, is a void today’s mind all too willingly grasps.

For Emile Durkeim, suicide reveals this deep crisis in modern society. This sense of something not holding together was also recognized by Flaubert who recollected “how he and his friends had ‘lived in a strange world … we swung between madness and suicide.’”(33) As the song states: “Suicide is painless, it brings on many changes.”

Some could suggest that a person bored by work is too busy most of the time to realize it and therefore it is not leisure but its recognition that creates boredom. But we could echo Baudelaire in saying that “one must work, if not for taste then at least from despair, or, to reduce everything to a single truth: work is less boring than pleasure.”(86) Work unlike leisure or busyness offers creative opportunities for expansion of the self beyond the world of the bored.

Lewis Mumford suggested that “those who have great wealth, that minority with privilege, commanding all that the heart desires, could be classic examples of those who suffer from chronic disaffection, malaise, anxiety and psychotic self-destructiveness.”(96) While this may appear rather cavalier, when things do become too easy there is more room for boredom thanks to technology.

This raises an interesting issue of how much and of what importance the development of the modern self has or has not contributed to this pervasive sense of boredom now running rampant. The answer is no more clear than defining what it is to be an individualized self. The appearance of the modern individual has contributed to the birthing of the contemporary self where increasingly the center of the universe has found its discoverer. It is not the ego which asks “look at me” but rather one’s inner becoming where there are beginnings of opportunities that only end when the curtain is drawn.

The individual is now where today’s boredom can find comfort, blossoming unless the self creates an openness, that place where freedom finds fertility. The difficulty for most is that this is a huge personal burden that one would just as soon ignore. To look in the mirror and see the beginning and end of all of the best and worst looking back at you is not a popular sport. Yet this authentic privacy stands against that which is more than an escape from a public commune that we all belong to. Beginning alone is an early positive step—when properly embraced—towards the eventual communion with fellow travelers. Thus the self-conscious being is freed (not politically liberated)to enter the next expansive opening.

To note: “… there was one characteristic common to all instances of boredom, present and past, namely the loss of personal meaning, whether in relation to a particular experience or encounter.” This loss could be occasioned by the absence of something comforting like religion, for where doubt and hypocrisy find a berth so might boredom. And today’s idea of human nature does not offer supportive roots for a place in a community beyond doubt. Where was “some objective reality corresponding to the term ‘human nature’” when the line between objective and subjective is blurred. Having “inauthentic selves, to be untrue to their perception of their own nature as human beings”(101)is deception and boredom awaiting us. This is just one more reason for suggesting that individuality is where a self finds authentic expression which is far more complicated and difficult than one may wonder. Today we find an increasing collapse in modernity and its blind optimism in the rational and progressive nature of humankind. Since this pattern of a breakdown of the older order has taken hold, the counter- culture developed a youth driven revolution for those unwilling to be bored or conform, often two sides of the same coin.

Many drop-outs, literally and figuratively, do so because of a boredom with our systems - schools, industry or corporations. The certitude inherent in religious faith is now replaced by a faith in a collective reasonableness that has lead to a post-boredom where space and time is now torn apart beyond our traditional expectations. Two phenomena confront us as we transmigrate through and beyond the modern world. We have the evolving modern and high-tech maturation based upon the developmental roots of the late enlightenment. Now comes the surreal and fresh arts referred to as “absurd,” new physics beyond order and unheard of destructive planetary wars as well as the view of a rationally ordered world now seen as challenging. Consciousness within a growing self should now begin to find some central birthing.

We note that “The difficulty of finding an answer is only compounded when, on closer inspection, it becomes evident that it is actually not rationality as such that lies at its root but the immense and it would seem irreversible growth in consciousness and self-consciousness (reflexivity) which is dialectically related to that rationalism.”(166) Also it is that “greater consciousness and deliberation had ‘completely upset the balance between conscious and unconscious forces operating in our society,’”(108) The more actively we apply conscious states to given circumstances the more one exercises a self outside the mainstream of traditional assumptions.

Sometimes we must reach beyond the familiar in risking our understanding in order to embrace a new road. While no certain definition fits terms like boredom and consciousness, the more forceful element, the voice of post-modernity further adds to this confusion. Elements of post-modernity include that no inherently rationally organized universe exists, that art defies simple definitions given our inherent uncertainty; we now have extreme meta-fiction, fragmentary, full of a discordant genre mixture, lacking any hierarchy of discourse, and we now possess self-contradictory and unresolved uncertainty as a basis for living. There is a beginning and end but what is between is the existential burden of what is partly an absurd existence. It has even been suggested for boredom that “the world is eaten up by boredom … you can’t see it all at once. It is like dust. You go about and never notice.” This same commentator also noted that boredom “is like a fermentation of a decomposing Christianity”, what could be called a legacy of a materialistic and mechanistic world.

When signs of post-modernity appeared we hear Kafka’s voice offering feelings of “absolute indifference and apathy.” It was as if “A well gone dry, water at an unattainable depth and no certainty it is there.” Here we find something more than boredom as “Nothing, nothing…. The present is a phantom state form…a Nothing, nothing. Emptiness, boredom, no, not boredom just emptiness, meaninglessness, weakness.”(35) And Beckett’s Waiting for Godot offered boredom as a central point of interest.(35)

The population today is more than 300 million versus some 92 million a century ago; average age now in the 70s versus the 30s, while relationships to speed dramatically altered our sense of time and space. Our agrarian rural society is now urban where living, sleeping and eating is performed by the power of mechanical time which is fixed outside London by an atomic clock. While divorce is common and wars are as insane as one can make them, the planet is smaller, polluted and dependent on electronics, our new deity. Dissonance applies in music, painting, sculpture, architecture, literature and even in some ways politics. This is not the time to be looking for order or a sense of harmony but one for hiding. Erich Fromm, in Sane Society stated: “one of the worst forms of mental suffering is boredom, not knowing what to do with one’s self and one’s life.”(55) What then is the choice?

The following by Rollo May adds that “while one might laugh at the meaningless boredom of people a decade or two ago, the emptiness has for many now moved from the emptiness of boredom to a state of futility and despair” which is followed by a sense of “nausea, disintegration, and to the terrifying situation in which even ‘evil itself bores.’”[86] When Mersault in The Stranger was asked if he regretted committing murder he responded that “what I felt was less regret than a vague boredom” (”un certain ennui“). Today we embrace phrases like “bored to death”, “crushingly bored” or “out of one’s mind with boredom.”

This was expressed in part by Alan Watts’ “divided mind,” suggesting that as “long as the mind is split, life is perpetual conflict, tension, frustration, and disillusion. Suffering is piled on suffering, fear on fear, and boredom on boredom.”(63-4) Mersault noted that they are “not having any feelings, of being blocked emotionally, being frozen, of feeling the self to be unreal, in a word, apathy.” All these are “affective states and states of mental inhibition.”(49) Robbe-Grillet’s The Voyeur has a salesman leaving a ship again and again and again. As Susan Sontag explained it, the brutal nominalism of the artists as minimal has replaced the place for detailed and lengthy visual explanations of what is perceived. The world like art is reduced to the point of lacking definable clarity.(71)

Only when man is seen as Dasein, as a being whose essence is a function of Being-in-a-world, is there found a resolution of the riddle as to what is the crises for a generalized ennui.(64) The German term Dasein implies man in context.(64) William Barrett’s Irrational Man stated that “words like dread, fear, guilt and boredom are not merely mental figments, but… modes of man’s Being-in-the-world”[72], a none enviable position. Heidegger offered that this mood that assails us “comes neither from ‘inside’ nor from ‘outside,’ but arises out of the Being-in-the-world, as a way of such Being.” As with anxiety, boredom has no special object.(65)

If a prime function of culture is to provide meaning, and if the incidence of boredom (the result of an unaware realization of the collapse of meaning) greatly increases, then it follows that there is something gravely amiss within such a culture, something seriously disordered at its deepest and least accessible level. We may wonder about the act of living while not understanding it with no heaven or hell, or reason or progress. Thinkers like Rilke and Nietzsche were early in pointing to our being worn-out of things and of the words attached to them, a process that has accelerated enormously since.(68) “As has been made clear, the sheer number of things has depreciated any particular one of them” while “our reckless destruction of things has sundered us from them in spirit.”(68) The irony of all this is that things are no longer precious (however expensive they may be). For Rilke, the sharing of lives, the preciousness of our lives and of others has been diminished.(68)

We have gained much outside around us and lost much inside us. We run away from ourselves with useless busyness. So much of our social activities are nothing more than an avoidance of our threatening boredom and the fear of it. And one may add that “as the meaning continues to be eliminated from the world and from man (meaning in the sense of an answer to Heidegger’s question, … `why is there anything at all, rather than nothing?’)” what is called hyper-boredom, “will become increasingly powerful forces in Western culture.”(69) The “Great Chain of Being” has been reduced to a heap of links unattached to one another or anything other than redundancies. (70) Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse stated that “there are times when a whole generation is caught between two ages, two modes of life, with the consequence that it loses all power to understand itself, and has no standard, no security, so simple acquiescence.”[60] Only with individual and personal work do we find dignity.

We live in two worlds beyond a faith in religion, one a belief in the tradition of utilitarian modernity and the other an unknown post-modernity appearing on the horizon. This idea of transition between these two epochs can be found as early as in Hegel: “The spirit of the time growing slowly and quietly ripe for the new form it is to assume, disintegrates one fragment after another of the structure of its previous world.” He died in 1831 while the Great War did not begin until 1914 when technology became the dog and human reason the tail—simple rationalizations. Little wonder that the idea that “frivolity and again ennui, which are spreading in the established order of things, the undefined foreboding of something unknown,” has “betoken that there is something else approaching.”[61] For those of the world of hyper-boredom, “they have merely let the sense of vacuity ensuing from the collapse of the ‘traditional paradigm’ break through.”(88) An early poet of our era, T. S. Eliot, suggested that “We are the hollow men/ We are the stuffed men/ Leaning together/ Head pieces filled with straw. Alas!”(90)

As our sources have noted: “boredom is the inevitable accompaniment of the absence, or even serious uncertainty about the stability and reliability, of values, purposes, meanings and commitment.”(91) What is there when there is nothing but the “nihilism of the masses; the largely unconscious, unacknowledged sense that the bottom has fallen out of the world.”(91) Boredom exists because “our present temporarily schizoid existence” is centered “in the two cultures—vacillating between dead purposes and deadly devices to escape boredom,”[77] one leading to the other!

We’ve arrived full circle where modernity bumps against the wall of this strange and ill-defined post-modernity that demands more of the individual, that inner self trying to create focus where once it was a given. There are forces to face and keep in mind that delineate these two eras as Alvin Toffler in Future Shock (p284) suggested that we now need a “new theory of personality” to take account of the novel type of man already coming into existence. He further admits that “the multiplication of life styles challenges our ability to hold the very self together.”[43] Distractions are comfort blankets to hide beneath when boredom knocks at your door.

Self is what has let go of the familiar collective that hides the pain that rains when the ego is the star attraction. The self is the existential becoming rather than traditional religion or some rational ego dominating force, a recognition that only between birth and death is where one’s own loving works. The self cannot be discovered, it can only be created by effort.

This changing horizon also offers freedom from the burden of uncertainty and its fear in a world no longer providing meaning with its response of boredom. This is not just a subjective reaction since the world of mechanics and consumption is boring (except for workers).(93) Selves live by judgements of correct and incorrect rather than ancient metaphors of right and wrong secured in righteousness that can transcend fearful moments and leave boredom for the boring.

But then this is only a beginning.

PAX/LOVE