Bored with Being Bored
In 1939, William Butler Yeats wrote a famous poem titled “The Circus Animal’s Desertion.” The poem is about the boredom and exhaustion of modern life, and in it Yeats explains that he can find no new ideas to write about — Western culture is exhausted and has reached its limits, having disposed of God and traditional ethics. And it has nowhere to go. His old ideas are like animals at a circus that have departed, leaving behind an empty, abandoned circus tent.
Or perhaps you are more familiar with Samuel Beckett’s 1953 play Waiting for Godot, in which two characters spend the entire play awaiting Godot, a figure of hope who never comes. Instead, they fritter away the allotted time of the play, saying nothing, accomplishing nothing.
The concept is called ennui. Boredom. Exhaustion. It’s a modernist idea that has very little appeal to me — we are almost a hundred years past Yeats and life hasn’t stopped or exhausted itself. Generations of people have lived and died since Yeats’s day, and most of them would not agree they have lived bored, exhausted lives. Stressful and painful at times, yes. Bored? No. The boredom and exhaustion lives mainly in the minds of certain intellectuals, who can think of nothing new to write about, find nothing sacred left to knock over and criticize, and so conclude this must be true for everyone else as well.
Ennui is an okay idea for a work of art. If you can’t think of anything to write about, write about not having anything to write. Fine. But as a moral guideline, it’s crap. Telling people they should be bored and dismissive is not constructive and misunderstands what motivates people to live. It is stripping away the whole of human culture and beliefs, leaving a big fat zero in its place.
But the complaint of boredom remains with us. The other day I read this article in Vox online magazine, in which it was explained to me that the musical Hamilton is racist and passé. (The actual word the writer used was cringe.) The story seems to be that Hamilton, while played by actors of color, still lionizes the achievements of white slave owners. (The word used was whitewash. I couldn’t make this nonsense up.) I single out this particular article, but the writer cites other articles, and implies this is a fairly widespread opinion among her cohorts.
Excuse me, but what?. I thought the point of using Black and Hispanic actors in Hamilton was to mock the concept of racism. The Founding Fathers were racist, but, Hamilton tells us, they inadvertently created a multi-ethnic nation that is now diverse enough to have outgrown their racism. We’ve outgrown the Founders as people, without outgrowing their ideas. The actors, as people of color playing the roles of racists, stand for the idea of equality since now, a Black person can substitute for a white one. (Dave Chappelle did a similar thing in a famous skit where he played a blind Black man who, not knowing his race because he couldn’t see, was a white supremacist. Same idea — a person of color acting as a white man undercuts the concept of racism.)
How could an intelligent writer miss something so obvious and elemental? Answer: Boredom. Boredom is modern. Au courant. Boredom is cool. Boredom is when the pointy-headed critic overhears two people talking about a new musician at a dinner party and says, “Oh, I only like her early stuff.” Boredom is when the nouveau critic dismisss John Milton as a dead white male, as if deadness, race, or sex makes anyone irrelevant. (I thought the point of social progress was to ensure that these categories could not be used as grounds for dismissal. But whatever. I’m not hip, you know.) Boredom is when you find a weak-minded excuse to dismiss a very good work of art like Hamilton as irrelevant trash, mostly because it is six years old and you are so proud of yourself for having six magnificent years of perspective to make yourself feel superior.
Boredom, and its evil sister pessimism, are the playground of the lazy thinker. When you have nothing intelligent to say about something, just say it is boring. I once heard an idiot dismiss everything Bob Dylan ever recorded as “stuff no one born after 1980 cares about.” As if 1980 is some kind of cutoff for intelligent life, as if someone who did his best work before 1980 might not be smarter than most people who lived after, as if music has an expiration date like milk. (As if he didn’t tap that out on a smartphone, which was invented by someone who was born before 1980.)
I don’t intend to argue any further about the foolishness of such people. In fact, I rather like it that the self-important people of today are so ready to disclose their silliness. It’s the kind of weakness that keeps old white guys like me in control.
But boredom itself….that is an idea a few modernist writers built nice reputations around about a century ago. As I said before, I don’t begrudge people like Samuel Beckett and W. B. Yeats the ability to make a buck off the concept of boredom. At one time, the concept was new. Wrong, but fresh. It had surprise to it — before World War II. But now, boredom is boring. Passé. Cringeworthy. To dismiss past human experiences as boring and reward yourself for your cleverness is to pass off someone else’s shopworn concept as a new idea. Hey, I’m bored with Hamilton! Look at me, plagiarizing Waiting for Godot in the twenty-first century!
Rubbish. There is nothing to be gained in boredom. Boredom isn’t maturity, it’s stupidity. It is casting aside everything that happened before as worthless, because, well, it’s already happened. If it isn’t hot and in the moment, if it isn’t number one on Netflix, it can’t be any good. It is measuring value strictly by its proximity to now. It is ignorant thinking, and even a moment of reflection betrays its silliness. Yes, you can look at old things and not get tired of them.
The key to not being bored with old ideas is to put yourself into the minds of the people who cooked them up. Yes, George Washington was a racist and a slaveowner. But put yourself in his place and see him as he saw himself: A leader who wanted to give the gift of political freedom to his country. Something he, to some degree, actually accomplished. It has taken awhile for the idea to percolate through, and the process isn’t over even yet, but Washington helped get the idea rolling and it rolls to this day. This is a much more complex picture of Washington’s achievement, one that makes a term like whitewash seem callow and empty. Whitewash throws out the baby, throws out the bathwater, and then throws out the tub, sink, and toilet too and calls porcelain immoral. Nothing that anyone thought in the past is worth anything to me if I can find fault, large or small.
So if you throw out all your porcelain, where are you going to put your shit? Apparently, in articles like the one in Vox. And it’s not the only one. Dismissing past generations, especially past idealism, is the sport of the present day. You’re not cool if you aren’t putting someone down. (And why does that idea have a ring to it that calls up the concept of bigotry?)
The remedy to the suffering that is boredom is to not get tired of things. To appreciate the past as a mixed picture — corrupted, but with much to redeem it. When things don’t lose their value with time, we can continue to cherish them. We can learn to love what we have, instead of pining for what we don’t. There is no value to the philosophy of throwing things away. You’ve heard it — the Obama people were stupid, the Clintons were stupid, the Boomers were stupid. Victorians? Sexist. Philosophers of the Enlightenment? Racists. Don’t get me started on those witch-hunting medieval Christians. Superstitious barbarians. And boring. All of them are boring. Dis-missed!
Don’t fall for boredom as an intellectual trick. You can be dismissed as easily as you dismiss others — and on the same grounds. And if everything can be dismissed as boring and passé, then nothing is worth anything, and we are all stuck, bored with one another.
