The Perils of Boredom

I have often wondered what has allowed our affluent country, under no undue stress, to become so fundamentally polarized? There was no major depression, no unpopular war. Even the Cold War had settled down to an agreed-upon detente. I don't think it is sufficient to say Ronald Reagan or Newt Gingrich or Grover Norquist did it. I suggest people such as these were merely catalysts, who for their own purposes tapped into a pervasive social phenomenon: boredom.
When a society becomes sufficiently affluent the necessities that drive human beings are diminished. The greater the affluence and the wider its distribution the more profound is this loss of necessity, which people like Bill Bennett have glossed and misused as the loss of a “moral compass.” This cultural loss of focus is a byproduct of affluence and results in a heavy emphasis on amusement as an antidote to the boredom that ensues. It also makes a society more vulnerable to political manipulation.

Notice that Ronald Reagan's main message was not greater affluence. It was not even overcoming the Russians, although this was prominent. It was that Americans should “walk tall.” That they should move in the world independent of other nations and cultures. That they personally should be self-sufficient and forgo the securities of government support. Shortly before Reagan was elected, President Carter drew attention to America's cultural boredom in his “malaise” speech of 1979, which subsequently played a significant role in his defeat in the election. Americans did not want to hear the truth: they wanted to feel good about themselves. Reagan and/or his advisers were aware of the same phenomenon and used it to gain office and turn the country over to corporate rapine and religious bigotry. What Reagan did was persuade Americans that they were still the self-dependent pioneers that their forebears presumably had been. People did not ask how the criteria of the frontier might play out in a nation of hundreds of millions and a world facing nuclear weaponry. This was the reinstilled purpose, benighted though it was, for American political life. Americans, so devoid of historical awareness, did not see that we had been through what Reagan proposed before. The age of the Robber Barons had amply demonstrated what an economy dominated by the frontier dog-eat-dog encounters between economic goliaths who had no regard for the common good was like and what its consequences were, e.g. repeated recessions and depressions.

Robert Nisbet in his book Prejudices: A Philosophical Dictionary
observes that “The range of cures or terminations of boredom is a wide one: migration, desertion, war, revolution, murder, calculated cruelty to others, suicide, pornography, alcohol, narcotics. Tiberius relishing those he tortured, or Sherlock Holmes taking to the needle, the pains and results of boredom are everywhere to be seen, and nowhere more epidemically than in Western society at the present time.”

Obviously the political process was one of moving the country from a common interest politics to a self interest politics. Once the pressure of the Great Depression was off and the prosperity following World War II had taken effect, people thought they no longer needed government except for military purposes. A public hubris set in, massively encouraged by the corporate financial sector eager to weaken the people's control of them. We are now living with the consequences.

The social hazards of affluence are many. Among the most subtle, yet dangerous, is the tendency to boredom. Barbara Tuchman, I believe in her book The Guns of August, notes that the Great Powers of Europe were armed to the teeth and had detailed plans for invading each other prior to World War I and that this was commonly known. She describes one episode in which German. French and English college students are congenially noting that they would probably be fighting each other soon. Such is the absolute idiocy of boredom. In a world bent on massive introduction of technology, with the resultant removal of necessity, this poses an ominous portent for future generations. What the antidote might be I am not sure. We know that social purpose can address boredom, whether for good or ill. However, purpose as a motivator is very risky in its reliance upon the emotions and difficult to maintain for the same reason. Perhaps we will wind up breeding boredom-resistant humans as Aldous Huxley suggests in Brave New World.

Bob Newhard