The Importance of Boredom

Friday, February 19, was dark and cloudy here in Hollywood, and a little spooky. One does get used to sunshine all the time, even if it is a tad boring. Maybe Southern California is paradise, and maybe not. Live here for over thirty years and it becomes just another place. The actor George Sanders, so pleasant and deadpan ironic in A Shot in the Dark – the pool game with Inspector Clouseau is a classic – left that famous suicide note – “Dear World, I am leaving because I am bored. I feel I have lived long enough. I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool. Good luck.” He’d had enough.

That’s a bit extreme, but what is one to do on a dark afternoon in Hollywood? A glance at the television showed that they were still at it at the Winter Olympics in Vancouver, and as it wasn’t primetime it was curling. Now that is boring – shuffleboard on ice with brooms. Is this a joke? But the concept is not that different from Bocce, which Italian men still play all the time – just the medium is different. And in France they play Boules – Petanque. That’s pretty much the same thing, as is Lawn Bowling in Britain, or out here in Santa Monica. Maybe nothing is inherently boring. It’s just that people get bored, no matter what’s in front of them. George Sanders didn’t say the world, this sweet cesspool, was boring. He said he was bored. That’s a different thing.

Not many make that distinction, and anyone who has taught high school English knows this all too well. The unhappy teenager, worried about what the girls think of him, and about who thinks he’s cool and who doesn’t, and about the big game that night, and about getting his driver’s license, and about what he hopes his parents never, ever find out he did last weekend, and about his grades, will throw up his hands and, almost in tears, declare that Dickens is just so boring. And you sense his despair. But you do have to explain that Great Expectations is not boring, and it is not not-boring. He’s talking about himself, not about the book, which is just what it is, a complex novel. A good number of the others kids, usually most of them, love the book, so the book is not the problem. That’s not what is generating his unhappiness, and the only way to fix things is to understand what’s broken and needs to be fixed. And then he hunkers down in his seat and scowls, and mutters that the damned book is boring – the other kids are stupid and it can’t be him. And at that point all you can do is wait for him to grow up, and to stop blaming what is out there. The problem is almost never what is out there.

But none of us grow up in that way. Curling on television is boring, but in June 1997 in Paris, in the hidden gardens of the Palais-Royal in the center of the city, the old men playing Boules was fascinating. Context is everything. And boredom is a philosophic issue, or a semantic one. We have an adjective, or predicate adjective – boring – that we apply to objects and activities as if that were an inherent quality, often the essence of the thing. But even a minute of thought shows the fallacy. We project our unhappiness onto the object, and we misunderstand it entirely. Oh heck, the issue is one of epistemology – how we know what we know. We’re always telling ourselves that we really have it nailed – we know what’s what, the thing itself, and what is of value and what is worthless. And we don’t have much of anything nailed.

And that’s why we have philosophy. It’s very simple. There’s only one aim. Let’s think more clearly about things. And of course no one wants to do that. It’s boring, you see.

But in Philosophy Now – there really is such a thing – Colin Bisset offers La Vie D’Ennui (the Boring Life). And he defends boredom, as a good thing.

The item opens with an anecdote. He wanders through the lush gardens of a grand country home, as he puts it, with a friend and gushes that it be wonderful to live somewhere like this, lazing about, idly rich, being wonderfully bored. And his friend bristles. How could you be bored in such a place? And curiously, friends back east ask the same thing about Hollywood. Being retired in Hollywood with all the time in the world and all that stuff around you cannot possibly be boring. And you remember what Samuel Johnson said back in the middle of the eighteenth century – when a man is tired of London he is tired of life. And one thinks of George Sanders. It seems we have a universal question here.

But Colin Bisset clarifies things:

I have always fancied being bored on a huge and stylish scale. I’m talking Great Gatsby boredom, with everyone lying around in white clothes and floppy hats, sipping long drinks with cooling names, and being utterly and divinely bored. How sophisticated can one get, goes my thinking, that even when surrounded by the best things in life, it’s not enough? Boredom wins through.

He simply maintains that there is something exquisite about boredom:

Like melancholy and its darker cousin sadness, boredom is related to emptiness and meaninglessness, but in a perfectly enjoyable way. It’s like wandering though the National Gallery, being surrounded by all those great works of art, and deciding not to look at them because it’s a pleasure just walking from room to room enjoying the squeak of your soles on the polished floor. Boredom is the no-signal sound on a blank television, the closed-down monotone of a radio in the middle of the night. It’s an uninterrupted straight line.

And it has little to do with wealthy surroundings (or Hollywood perhaps) as it is about a certain mindset:

Perfect boredom is the enjoyment of the moment of stasis that comes between slowing down and speeding up – like sitting at a traffic light for a particularly long time. It’s at the cusp of action, because however enjoyable it may be, boredom is really not a long-term aspiration. It’s for an afternoon before a sociable evening. It marks that point in a holiday when you’ve shrugged off all the concerns of work and home, explored the hotel and got used to the swimming pool, and everything has become totally familiar. “I’m bored” just pops into your mind one morning as you’re laying your towel over the sunlounger before breakfast, and then you think “How lovely.” It’s about the stillness and familiarity of that precise moment before the inevitable anxiety about packing up and heading back to God-knows-what.

Well, maybe it would have been better to tell that bored student to savor his boredom, as a luxury. But then he would have decided his teacher was quite mad, perhaps dangerously so. That would be asking for trouble.

But Bisset understands we are dealing with maturity, and the kid would have not been ready for that:

Like everyone, I’ve been bored in the way often linked with death, but that was mainly as a child, and as you get older you become more resilient in dealing with it. As an adult, you can choose between luxuriating in your boredom or eliminating it by getting up and doing something. The choice is yours.

But kids don’t have that choice. You know what happens if you look bored, and you’re just doing nothing much, and getting to like it. Parents and teachers ask the same question – “Haven’t you got anything better to do?”

It’s best not to answer no:

Do they expect the truth? That you do have nothing better to do than lie around listening to music, but that you’re also perfectly happy doing this? And when did being told to tidy your room constitute an interesting alternative?

And there is the notion that boredom is useful, as Bisset, after a long passage on growing up in rural Scotland, bored to tears, tells what boredom leads to:

I would sit at the top of the garden looking out over the roof of the house to the water beyond, and wonder what it would be like to live on a boat. And I would sit on the rocks on the seashore and watch the birds foraging for food, and wonder what it would be like to fly. And I would sit in the sunroom listening to the rain on the roof, and wonder what it would be like to be old enough to have holidays on your own, in proper hotels with swimming pools and waiters and organized amusements. And sometimes it was lovely just to be sitting and thinking like that for hours on end.

At other times my thoughts took more perplexing turns. I would wonder if everything I was looking at wasn’t actually there, that it was just an illusion. Or what if everything was pitch black but only I thought it was light and colorful? Or what if what I heard didn’t match what I thought I was seeing? These were not the sort of thoughts I felt able to own up to at the afternoon tea table, and so I ended up for quite some time believing that nothing could be trusted because my eyes were certainly being deceived. I’m not sure why a ten year old boy was experiencing philosophical angst, but it certainly shows that I had an awful lot of time on my hands.

And that’s the point of boredom, isn’t it? Wasn’t Newton sitting underneath an apple tree staring into space, and Archimedes wallowing in the bath, when clarity struck?

So doing nothing is the key to getting somewhere in an odd sort of way – but again, context is everything, as boredom in the workplace, where time is money, doesn’t allow for such moments of clarity:

This kind of boredom sucks the life from you. It has none of the hallmarks of the grand boredom that I’m after – the sort with a rousing soundtrack as you emerge from the darkness of sloth into the light of inspiration. The sort that illuminates new questions: Why not go and live in another country? Why shouldn’t I write a novel? That sort of boredom is the equivalent of a long bath with French soap and frangipani flowers floating on the surface; something so relaxing and pleasurable that you really don’t want it to end. And yet, when the bathwater has cooled and the flowers have gone mushy, you’re happy to lift your glowing self from the tub and move forward into the stream of life with renewed vigor. Such is la vie d’ennui. …

But that’s how boredom works. Eventually you will step out into the brave new world. You have to move. That’s what boredom is for, and perhaps why God invented cramp and bed sores.

And that’s why it sometimes rains in Hollywood. You can’t stare at the palm trees in the sunshine forever, or drive to the beach and watch the surfers. It’s not that you really should get your act together and do something else, something useful. Sometimes you have to. It’s raining.

And this isn’t Paradise. The whole issue of what is paradise is always perplexing. As Russell Jacoby, a professor in residence in the history department at UCLA who wrote Picture Imperfect: Utopian Thought for an Anti-Utopian Age (Columbia University Press, 2005):

In four beautifully crafted, highly allusive essays, Jacoby excavates a plethora of utopian movements, with an emphasis on Jewish traditions and thinkers, with the aim of getting readers to dream of a better world. The first chapter immediately confronts the 20th century’s giant utopian failure: totalitarianism in its various forms. The second chapter details philosophical (and particularly liberal) objections to utopian thought generally. The next chapter concentrates on Zionism as it was originally envisioned, moving from Mordechai Noah and Theodor Herzl to Martin Buber, Gustav Landauer and Fritz Mauthner. The last chapter, “A Longing that Cannot Be Uttered,” treats god as a kind of utopia, looks at a variety of Jewish approaches to the sacred. A tremendous amount of ground is covered along the way, and Jacoby’s idiosyncratic connections won’t move everyone. But as one person’s attempt “to build castles in the sky” (in Lewis Mumford’s phrase), the book works beautifully.

And five years earlier it was The End of Utopia: Politics and Culture in an Age of Apathy:

The near-total triumph of free market capitalism around the world has put a damper on utopian visions, leading many politicians and activists to believe that radical change is impossible, that at best one can hope for slight modifications of the status quo. For Russell Jacoby, this attitude is not so much the result of practicality as it is the product of exhaustion, and he argues that as a society we can do much better. The End of Utopia is an uncompromising look at the intellectual caliber of late-20th-century liberal and leftist politics, particularly within the academy. He portrays the class of professional intellectuals as insiders adopting the pose of marginality, and lambastes the current practitioners of “cultural studies” in particular for their tendency toward banal “analysis” of mass culture in tortured, jargon-laced prose. …

And he proposes that multiculturalism may be little more than a last-ditch attempt at differentiation within the one, dominant culture. “What is to be done?” he asks after cataloguing this state of affairs. “The question, routinely addressed to all critics, insists on a practicality inimical to utopianism. Nothing is to be done. Yet that does not mean nothing is to be thought or imagined or dreamed.” The End of Utopia shows to what extent the dreams have been abandoned, with the means of rekindling them yet within grasp.

Or as Kirkus Reviews has it, “an ill-spirited but perceptive blast at contemporary political action, ideology, and theory.”

There is no paradise. And those who think there can be one are full of crap. And now in the Chronicle Review, as in the Chronicle of Higher Education, he offers a review of the new Thomas Sowell book, Intellectuals and Society, which has this product description:

The influence of intellectuals is not only greater than in previous eras but also takes a very different form from that envisioned by those like Machiavelli and others who have wanted to directly influence rulers. It has not been by shaping the opinions or directing the actions of the holders of power that modern intellectuals have most influenced the course of events, but by shaping public opinion in ways that affect the actions of power holders in democratic societies, whether or not those power holders accept the general vision or the particular policies favored by intellectuals. Even government leaders with disdain or contempt for intellectuals have had to bend to the climate of opinion shaped by those intellectuals.

Intellectuals and Society not only examines the track record of intellectuals in the things they have advocated but also analyzes the incentives and constraints under which their views and visions have emerged. One of the most surprising aspects of this study is how often intellectuals have been proved not only wrong, but grossly and disastrously wrong in their prescriptions for the ills of society – and how little their views have changed in response to empirical evidence of the disasters entailed by those views.

Jacoby is not impressed:

He intimates in its preface that his new book, Intellectuals and Society (Basic Books), should be considered the third of a conservative trilogy that blasts intellectuals. Paul Johnson in Intellectuals (1988) cataloged the personal misconduct and dishonesty of the species. From Johnson we learned, for instance, that Ibsen sometimes got drunk and wrote suggestive letters to young women. Johnson concluded that a dozen people picked “at random” on the street should be preferred to immoral intellectuals, which may include himself, inasmuch as his long-term mistress later denounced in public the long-married author for hypocrisy. Richard Posner in Public Intellectuals (2003) snared the species in a scientific net to show that it behaved poorly outside its narrow terrain. For example, law professors who protested the Bush military tribunals were not specialists in criminal or international law and could not understand the pertinent issues. For Posner, intellectuals should stick to things they know, advice he flouted in his own book.

In Intellectuals and Society, Sowell cleans up what is left and – in his eyes – on the left, intellectuals who influence policy. They are not necessarily “public intellectuals,” but “writers, academics, and the like” who have enormous impact on society. The question of who these intellectuals are does not much interest Sowell. He specifies that his targets are less engineers and financiers than sociologists and English professors. Their influence on millions of people, he writes, “can hardly be disputed.” He mentions the impact of Lenin, Hitler, and Mao, but does not explain how English professors influenced those figures.

In short, this is all nonsense, and of the usual sort:

His position is straightforward. Intellectuals do not understand the genius of the market. They ignore empirical evidence. They are elitists. They operate with ideological blinders. Ultimately, they are “unaccountable to the external world.” They judge ideas by how clever or complex they are, not whether they work. “But no one judged Vince Lombardi’s ideas about how to play football” by their complexity or novelty, writes Sowell, but by “what happened when his ideas were put to the test on the football field.” Mr. Sowell champions what might be called the Vince Lombardi Interpretation of Ideas, or VLII. Test ideas in the field.

VLII might be a tad simplistic. After all, Nazism “worked” and yielded a bustling economy, until it was militarily defeated. Would Sowell say all was well with Nazi ideas until 1945? The Soviet Union lasted many decades. Did Stalinism “work” until it did not?

And Jacoby goes on in the vein. He dismantles Sowell, saying “it feels like an ‘oldies but goodies’ compilation for conservative seniors at Leisure Lakes Golf.”

In the Conservative Series on American Politics, Sowell has given us the Idiot’s Guide to Intellectuals, Big Print Edition. We should take him at his word. This is not a book for intellectuals. It is a gift item for conservatives who do not read.

But Jacoby doesn’t say the Sowell book is boring – it’s just shallow, badly thought-out, simplistic and rather mindless, and empty. That may be saying the same thing, actually. But the simple message is clear enough. Thinking – just thinking, of the sort Colin Bisset was championing when he spoke of the virtues of boredom – is bad for you. Yeah, you heard the same thing from your parents. Haven’t you got anything better to do?

But what are you going to do, clean your room, or watch Olympic curling and let your mind wander to new and potentially useful places?