In his recent posting, ‘Hard Work’, Wretchard has provided me with even more blog fodder. Do read it. His point is that work – particularly manual labor – has been regarded by many intelligent people as merely a necessary evil that will no longer be necessary in an evolved society that’s subdued nature itself. The question he poses is whether destitute, desperate Westerners will eventually be grateful for the very thing they’ve come to despise? For otherwise intelligent men like Bertrand Russell, leisure was supposed to creative and liberating. As Wretchard points out, however, leisure doesn’t – and cannot – liberate men from the habit of dominating others.
He’s right, of course, but for once he misses the larger point: as Robert Nisbet observed (quoting C.E.M. Joad), ‘Work is the only occupation yet invented which mankind has been able to endure in any but the smallest possible doses.” The real point is that very few people can endure leisure and its handmaiden, boredom.
The late Harlow Shapley, eminent Harvard scientist, two or three decades ago listed the five afflictions which are most likely to destroy Western civilization. Boredom ranked third in his list-which included nuclear warfare, overpopulation, climatic or topographical catastrophe, and invincible plague. It might be remembered too that Aldous Huxley in his Brave New World, fully aware of the boredom that must be expected in utopia, conceived
as one final adornment of the technology that gave leisure to all, the drug Soma, free to all those suffering unusually intense attacks of boredom or leisure-related anxiety. Orwell in 1984 did not feel it necessary to go beyond unlimited handouts of gin for the masses to thus spare them the pains of boredom and to offset possible eruptions of revolt spawned by boredom. Anthony Burgess in his 1985 has very recently shown how much worse the future may prove to be; Burgess, after all, has had the opportunity denied Orwell to witness the past two decades.We have not reached that point; perhaps we never will. But we very clearly have reached approximations of it. Leaving the neurology and psychology
of boredom to one side, what this state of mind means in social and cultural terms is increasingly widespread and chronic indifference to ordinary
values, pursuits, freedoms, and obligations. The present becomes a scene composed of the absurd, the irrelevant, the demonic. So, necessarily, does the past and of course, the future. All that matters is what lies within the Me – its pains and release from pains.
And for Nisbet, boredom is utterly corrosive of normal life itself and eventually generates ‘the unmistakable if not always fully voiced longing for some kind of secular redeemer, the Caesar, the Napoleon, even the Hitler or Stalin. Anything to liberate one’s self from the boredom which today lies associated with politics, culture, even life itself.’
In the whirlwind to come, we may well be forced to relearn life’s harsher virtues in the crucible of work – hard work.
