Defining boredom

Boredom has both a sociological and a philosophical dimension. It refers at once to the ‘experience of subjective crisis’ and to ‘an empirically conditioned social phenomenon.’Footnote ¹¹ By psychologists, boredom has been understood as ‘an unpleasant, transient affective state in which the individual feels a pervasive lack of interest in and difficulty concentrating on the current activity’.Footnote ¹² By sociologists, it has been defined as the ‘emotional apprehension of meaninglessness. […] When meaning is absent, boredom arises and leads the individual towards the construction of meaning’, be it in private expressions, in interpersonal or communal relationships, or in violence.Footnote ¹³

Thus defined, boredom shares a family resemblance with sociological categories like ‘alienation’ and ‘anomie’. This is unsurprising given that all three have been advanced as valid, albeit diffuse, meta-descriptions of aspects of modernity. Modern society, in contrast to traditional societies, is anomic, that is, without norms; modern, capitalist, modes of production are alienating; boredom characterises the modern way of experiencing oneself and one's environment.Footnote ¹⁴ At the same time, anomie, alienation and boredom can be analytically distinguished, and thereby related to one another. Boredom can for example be understood as one specific form of alienation: it is the estrangement of oneself from one's sense of self.Footnote ¹⁵ When one is bored, one perceives one's agency as meaningless. Moreover, this feeling can occur to the most powerless labourer as well as to the most powerful CEO. Boredom is for that reason more than, and different from, powerlessness.Footnote ¹⁶ It is not so much the inability to get things done, or the lack of efficient causal agency, as the experience that what one gets done is without much import. Boredom is the experience of meaningless agency. Sometimes powerlessness will coincide with it, but at other times it will not.

Boredom is also not the same as anomie. First, one can be bored in a society replete with social norms, especially when those norms are seen as lacking in transcendental meaning. That is, our boredom may stem directly from a sudden awareness of the futility of society's petty rules and principles. Secondly, while both can be associated with acts of aggression, anomie and boredom relate to violence in quite different ways. Anomic violence is illegitimate violence by definition. Robert Merton defined it as ‘the use of conventionally proscribed but frequently effective means of attaining at least the simulacrum of culturally defined success – wealth, power and the like’.Footnote ¹⁷ Anomic violence results from a dissatisfaction with one's position within the existing social order, not with the value-system of the order as such. By contrast, the violence which boredom incites is not necessarily illegitimate. Anomic and bored violence both aim at re-establishing a sense of agency, but the agency envisioned is fundamentally different in the two cases.Footnote ¹⁸ A bored person may, vicariously, restore his or her agency by playing a violent computer game, or, in person, by joining an army and going to war. Neither reaction is illegal. And yet, violence spurred by boredom is more radical, since it contains the hope that in war, not only the bored agent, but also society as such, will transcend themselves.

Boredom, furthermore, is an affective state; it is an emotion.Footnote ¹⁹ Politically speaking, emotions matter only to the extent that they are shared by a sufficient number of people. Emotions matter, that is, when they aggregate into a ‘public mood.’ Public moods can be defined as ‘diffuse affective states, having distinct positive and negative components, that citizens experience because of their membership in a particular community’.Footnote ²⁰ As such, moods are socially and historically situated; they are facts about society rather than about individuals; moods are brought on by cultural triggers and not by the quirks of personal biographies. Notice, though, that for a mood to be public, it need not be shared by all members of the community, only by a sufficient number of them. In addition, a ‘particular community’ need not be a ‘national community’, and a public mood not the same as a ‘national mood’.Footnote ²¹ Moods can travel across boundaries. Modernity is a transnational condition and boredom is for that reason a transnational mood.

However, unlike individual emotions, public moods cannot be studied with recourse to a hard science such as neurobiology.Footnote ²² Public moods do not register as chemical reactions in individual brains. Rather, they have to be studied with the help of a range of sources, from visual art and poetry to diaries, literature and speculative philosophy. These can be interpreted as expressive, and co-constitutive, of the reigning public mood, in spite of being performed or penned down by individuals. Obviously, one person writing about boredom is no evidence of boredom as a public mood. To be indicative, articulations of boredom have to be sufficiently widespread. To some this may sound like a not-quite-good-enough solution to a methodological conundrum, and admittedly, these intangible sources will yield few statistically valid measurements. On the other hand, interpretive methods provide abundant access to precisely those features of society ‘that remain elusive’.Footnote ²³ As such, they are true to the fundamental nature of emotions and moods. Moods might be vague and diffuse, but this does not make them less real nor less important.

Modernity, agency and peace

All comprehensive peace proposals – from Abbé de Saint-Pierre onward – have originated with thinkers who take a progressive view of human history. Society, as they see it, is moving, inexorably, from darkness to light or from ignorance to maturity. Things were bad, but they are steadily getting better, and the future will be better still. War is a case in point. In ancient times wars were unbelievably cruel, yet in modern society – at least among civilised enemies – wars are governed by legal provisions.Footnote ²⁴ ‘At the present day’, William James wrote in 1906, ‘the military instincts and ideals are as strong as ever, but they are confronted by reflective criticisms which sorely curb their ancient freedom’.

Jeremy Bentham's A Plan for a Universal and Perpetual Peace in 1789, provides an example of a comprehensive peace project – although he admits that his scheme suffers from an ‘apparent impracticality’.Footnote ²⁶ Bentham advocated strict limits on the size of armies and the resolution of conflicts through international courts of arbitration. As he saw it, the gradual spread of rationality was bound to make war increasingly redundant. More than anything wars are ‘destructive of opulence’: ‘All trade is in its essence advantageous – even to the party to whom it is least so. All war is in its essence ruinous’.Footnote ²⁷ In fact, if statesmen only considered their situation carefully they would find that there are no nations that are likely to invade them.Footnote ²⁸ The only legitimate causes of war which Bentham acknowledges pertain to colonies: in the contemporary world, states are more than anything likely to fight over overseas possessions. Yet the rationale behind colonies, Bentham argued, is itself flawed – colonies are a mercantilist mistake.

Six years later, in his essay, ‘Perpetual Peace’, Immanuel Kant provided another plan for a peace project.Footnote ²⁹ Kant agreed with Bentham that it is in people's common interest to seek peace. After all, people banded together for common protection when they initially formed the state, and the same logic will now make them form a multinational peace federation. However, Kant was only prepared to admit ‘republican’ states into the scheme. It is only where people have a say in the making of foreign policy that we can be sure that states act based on reason and not passions or whims. In the ancien régime, by contrast,

In the olden days, that is, wars often occurred since kings were bored, but in the modern era such wars are increasingly unlikely. Only modern times have republican states, and only modern times have fully rational citizens who can conclude a final peace settlement. The Enlightenment has created a new kind of person, a mature individual who is able to take full responsibility for his actions.Footnote ³¹ In addition, Kant explains, peace is modern since it only is in modern times that wars have become sufficiently destructive. The more terrible wars are, the more people will come to see that they must be abolished.

To both Bentham and Kant it is obvious that society is a human creation and that human beings as a result are in a unique position to understand it. This privileged access provides us with the knowledge we need in order to make and remake society in accordance with our wishes. There is a particular anthropology at work here, rooted in the outlook of the new middle classes of the late eighteenth century. Bentham and Kant are defending a ‘can-do’ spirit which contrasts sharply with the decadent ways of the upper-classes of the anciens régimes.Footnote ³² While kings may have gone to war to alleviate them of their boredom, citizens would never act that way. In fact, people in modern society are never bored since they, ceaselessly, are engaged in a long range of different activities. Bentham had a naive faith in the ability of people to cheerfully go on striving for their goals.Footnote ³³ ‘Filling one's life with harmoniously progressive activities’, as Kant put it in his Anthropology, ‘is the only certain means of becoming happy with one's life and at the same time feeling satisfactorily experienced’.Footnote ³⁴ And endless activity, in turn, is what propels history forward. The progress of history spreads enlightenment and assures the advance of reason and, ultimately, of perpetual peace.

Modernity, boredom and war

There was obviously something wrong with these analyses. In Europe, the twenty-five years after the publication of the two proposals was a time not of peace but of ‘absolute war’.Footnote ³⁵ And although the Congress of Vienna, 1815, inaugurated an era of more pacific inter-European relations, the solution was based on balances of power and not on idealistic schemes. In addition, Bentham and Kant's anthropological assumptions held up badly. The inhabitants of modern society seemed to be far less rational than they had assumed and far less capable of independent action.

There are two main stories to be told about the nineteenth century. The first is the official, optimistic, account regarding steady economic and political progress and an increasing technical mastery of nature. This story describes nineteenth century society from a macro-perspective, and it features wealthy industrialists, colonial officers, ingenious engineers and Suffragettes and union members marching for their rights. But then there is the other, the unofficial story, as told by many of the ordinary people who actually lived through the period. Theirs, largely, is a story of dislocation and loss. Their story was eventually picked up and shared by writers and intellectuals, and given articulate expression in terms such as ‘alienation’ and ‘boredom’.Footnote ³⁶

The deep and rapid social and economic changes that took place in the course of the nineteenth century provide the background for both accounts. The commercialisation of agriculture and industrialisation forced people to move to the cities. And while the official story tells of higher wages and better living standards, the unofficial story discusses the spread of a new sense of alienation. With urbanisation, the old village-based communities disappeared: thrown into vast, impersonal, metropolises, the former villagers often lost their bearings. At the same time, life in the city was far more regimented than life in the countryside. People lived by the clock, and time belonged not to them, but to their employers. As a result, life was more controlled and less spontaneous.Footnote ³⁷ Rapid technological changes added to this feeling of malaise. In a few decades there were suddenly railways, telegraphs, electric lighting, phonographs and motorcars.Footnote ³⁸ The pace of life was speeded up, distances were reduced, space and time were synchronised and homogenised. The official story heralds these as the ‘great inventions of the Victorian era’, but to many people the pace of change was simply too quick. The very perimeters of social life were shifting and the traditions of the past no longer provided guidance for the future.

Meanwhile Enlightenment scepticism – the very reason whose final self-realisation Kant had looked forward to – turned out to have a corrosive impact on social life. As many contemporary observers complained, the spirit of modern society was too critical. Religion was in retreat, both as a moral system and as a system of beliefs, and, eventually, according to Nietzsche's pronouncement in 1882, God just died.Footnote ³⁹ If there was no God, everything would surely be permitted? Yet this new permissiveness was not experienced as a new sense of freedom but often instead as a new kind of meaninglessness. No one knew where to turn for guidance.

Taken together these changes resulted in a widespread loss of the ability to act. People's options were constrained, their actions monitored and their careers blocked. Nowhere in Europe did workers and peasants participate in the political system, and even members of the industrial and commercial classes were often politically marginalised. The result of this enforced inactivity was ‘an epidemic of ennui’, of boredom.Footnote ⁴⁰ ‘Ennui is the sentiment’, wrote Émile Tardieu, a French doctor, ‘that shows the absurdity of the fate given us in a world where we are thrown without receiving sufficient explanations’.Footnote ⁴¹ While in the anciens régimes, for a nobleman, boredom had been a marker of social distinction, in the modern age, it was a problem and an embarrassment.

Clearly people react in different ways to experiences of boredom. Some are overcome by despair, others by lethargy; some hope, against hope, for a revival of their spirits. Very commonly, however, boredom makes us dream dreams of transgression. To transgress, from the Latin transgressus, literally refers to the act of ‘passing to the other side’ or ‘going beyond or overstepping some boundary or limit’. It is by transgressing, in this etymological sense, that we escape from our present condition. Yet most transgressions take place vicariously; they happen, as it were, in the third rather than in the first person. It is media – newspapers, books, film, radio and TV – which make vicarious transgressions possible. Media mediate between one world and another; between the world where we live and another world which these media allow us to imagine. By engaging with a mediatised account, we are taken out of ourselves and allowed to experience things as though we were someone else.

The nineteenth century made it increasingly possible for people to dream such transgressive dreams. For one thing, literacy increased dramatically with the establishment of systems of compulsory public education – in Germany in 1871, England 1880, France 1882.Footnote ⁴² The introduction of new printing technologies, and mass produced paper, made newspapers and books dramatically cheaper, and the abolition of taxes – such as the repeal of stamp duties in Britain in 1855 – meant that printed matter could be distributed more cheaply.Footnote ⁴³ The result was the appearance from the middle of the century onward of cheap novels and newspapers – so called ‘penny dreadfuls’ – intended for the common man. And as for common man, and common woman too, rising prosperity gave them more time off from work and hence more time to fill with alternative activities. Much of the time they were reading – escaping their boredom through mediatised dreams.

Peace and boredom in 1913

In the official account of the nineteenth century – in the story of continuous progress – this malaise never registered, or it showed up only as a pathology to which members of the medical professions had to attend.Footnote ⁴⁴ If you subscribe to a progressive view of society, agency is never a problem. In fact, throughout the nineteenth century, thanks to the reformist zeal of Bentham and Kant, the cause of peace was celebrating a number of successes. A peace movement was growing in strength across the world, supported by rich industrialists like Andrew Carnegie, George Cadbury and Alfred Nobel, and a number of peace congresses were convened and international conventions – at Geneva, the Hague – ratified.Footnote ⁴⁵

As Norman Angell pointed out in The Great Illusion, 1913, this was a good time to finally rid the world of war.Footnote ⁴⁶ Wars, he argued, echoing Bentham, could still happen, but ‘even when completely victorious’, war is ‘useless as a means of securing those moral or material ends which represent the needs of modern civilized peoples’.Footnote ⁴⁷ Just as for Bentham, Angell's primary rationale was economic. ‘It is impossible’, he says, ‘for one nation to seize by force the wealth or trade of another’. In modern society, the sources of wealth are largely intangible; it is a matter of business confidence, of commercial credit and contacts. If these foundations of the market are tampered with ‘the credit-dependent wealth is undermined, and its collapse involves that of the conqueror’.Footnote ⁴⁸

Compare the conclusions reached by Agathon in Les jeunes gens d'aujourd'hui, 1913.Footnote ⁴⁹ Agathon was the nom de plume shared by two authors, Henri Massis and Alfred de Tarde, both staunchly pro-Catholic, anti-Dreyfusards, and active in support of various nationalist causes. Their book was an attempt, using the new method of public opinion surveys, to investigate the mood among young people in contemporary France.Footnote ⁵⁰ What they found was very encouraging to them. A generational shift had taken place. For much of the nineteenth century young people had indeed been listless and lacking in direction, but now things were rapidly improving. The new generation is not sitting around philosophising, they concluded, instead they want ‘to get things done’. ‘To tell the truth, they are not asking too many questions, their vitality is in the action, that's all’.Footnote ⁵¹ One thing the younger generation is eager to do, is to go to war. Students in our best high schools insist that they find war to be an ‘aesthetic idea of energy and power’; they believe ‘France needs heroism in order to live’.Footnote ⁵² ‘Better a war’, the students argue, ‘than this perpetual wait’.Footnote ⁵³ A war is above all an opportunity to express the most noble of human virtues: ‘energy, mastery, sacrifice to a cause which goes beyond our individual selves’.Footnote ⁵⁴

A similar sense of ennui seems to have overcome contemporary Americans, and to them too, war appeared as an attractive option. This, at least, was the argument of William James in a lecture – ‘The Moral Equivalent of War’ – given at Stanford University in 1906.Footnote ⁵⁵ ‘War’, he said, ‘is the romance of history’, and everyone feels the attraction of the military character. Military life makes us hard, and protects us against our ‘weaker and more cowardly self’.Footnote ⁵⁶ Above all, war forces us to rise above our private circumstances and to associate with the life of our communities. Much as he admired the military ideal, however, James declared his abhorrence of war. His solution was to establish a peace corps – charged with various worthwhile social tasks – which could instil military values in the population without the accompanying horrors of actual warfare.

In the end, of course, the world opted not for the moral equivalent of war but instead for the real thing. In retrospect, Agathon was in far better touch with the spirit of the times than Angell. War, when it was declared in July 1914, was enthusiastically received all over Europe.Footnote ⁵⁷ Great demonstrations took place in support of the military effort and young men hurried to sign up to go to the front. ‘The trumpet call to a great world war’, said the German politician Johannes Becker, meant that people no longer had to sit ‘rotting at their desks’.Footnote ⁵⁸ ‘Today's man’, wrote the Hungarian author Dezsö Kosztolányi, has ‘grown up in a hothouse, pale and sipping tea’, but now he ‘greets this healthy brutality enthusiastically. Let the storm come and sweep out our salons.’.Footnote ⁵⁹ ‘This is not a war against an external enemy,’ the German Expressionist painter Franz Marc insisted, ‘it is a European civil war, a war against the inner invisible enemy of the European spirit’.Footnote ⁶⁰

Not everyone went enthusiastically.Footnote ⁶¹ Members of the professional army went because it was their job, and a majority of civilians enrolled mainly since other civilians were enrolling. However, all across Europe enthusiasm for war was palpable and widespread.Footnote ⁶² The young recruits wanted to be part of a great historical event. They looked forward to adventures, they wanted their resolve and their courage to be tested; they hoped for glory, or at least for a glorious death.Footnote ⁶³ What they expected, in short, was everything the nineteenth century, in its drawn-out tedium, had denied them. War was going to empower them; restore a sense of agency to their limbs and lives.

This imagined war, to be sure, was not a war anyone had personally experienced. In fact, very few of the soldiers in 1914 had personal memories of warfare. Instead the war they went off to fight was a war they repeatedly had imagined in their transgressive fantasies.Footnote ⁶⁴ The young menFootnote ⁶⁵ wanted to be like the dashing heroes in the trashy novels by George Alfred Henry and Henry Rider Haggard; they wanted to recreate Tennyson's high-minded Arthurian poems; they modelled themselves on Alexandre Dumas' The Three Musketeers and on Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac.Footnote ⁶⁶ A large number of the English recruits interpreted the war in terms of William Morris' medievalist drama, The Well at the World's End, or John Bunyan's Christian allegory, Pilgrim's Progress, a work they all had read in school.Footnote ⁶⁷ Both texts were constantly referred to, in letters and diaries, by the men at the front, and they helped them make sense of the senselessness they experienced.Footnote ⁶⁸

The Great War as a missed opportunity

In the end, the experiences of the soldiers of the Great War were nothing like they had expected. Modern trench warfare was not heroic, it involved no personal decisions, and it restored no sense of agency. The soldiers were lambs to the slaughter, never more so than when caught in gas attacks without protective equipment.Footnote ⁶⁹ The transgressive dreams, cast as romantic quests, ended up as ironic tales of the absurd.Footnote ⁷⁰ Altogether some nine million people died in the war, and in 1918 all survivors felt betrayed – by their dreams and by their political leaders. The most obvious conclusion may well have been that a war of this kind never should be fought again. Indeed, the peace movement of the pre-war era soon regrouped and scored a number of notable successes.Footnote ⁷¹ In 1919, a League of Nations, a very Kantian project, was established, and in 1928, the Kellogg-Briand Pact – ‘providing for the renunciation of war as an instrument of national policy’ – was signed by some 31 states.

Yet the official optimism of the pre-war years never returned. The fundamental problem was that ‘the Great War’ was impossible to insert into a progressive account of history. From a rational point of view, it was simply impossible to explain why the war had taken place, and soon economic hardship undermined any return to self-confidence.Footnote ⁷² Europe was struck by a severe post-war recession; in Austria and Germany there was hyper-inflation; in the US the stock market crashed; and in the 1930s the world was hit by the Great Depression. The post-war generation of politicians was soon discredited, and there was widespread disillusionment with all symbols of authority. To many, hedonism, if you could afford it, appeared as the only viable ideology. Life was again, just as during the Great War itself, told as an account of the absurd. Compare the work of the Surrealists, of Dada, of James Joyce and Franz Kafka. If the world really was senseless, only a senseless account of it could provide a true description.Footnote ⁷³

Thus, as far as Europe's malaise was concerned, the war had resolved nothing. There was still no new sense of direction and no restoration of agency.Footnote ⁷⁴ What does it tell us about our existential condition, Martin Heidegger asked, ‘if such an event as the World War passed us by essentially without leaving a trace?’

Not surprisingly Heidegger made boredom into a key concept of his philosophy.Footnote ⁷⁶ For him Langweilichkeit was both a challenge and an opportunity. Boredom, to begin with, is a problem since, when we are bored, we are living inauthentically. Bored people are always looking for distractions, for things that help them ‘pass the time’, and before we know it our entire lives are taken up by such time-passing. Yet boredom also presents an opportunity.Footnote ⁷⁷ When properly analysed, boredom can be overcome, and we can learn to confront our existence without any comforting illusions. In this way, Heidegger believed, the experience of boredom can awaken a sense of ‘mystery’, an ‘inner terror’ which ultimately is life-affirming.Footnote ⁷⁸

It has often been remarked that the soldiers who returned from the front in 1918 were reluctant to discuss the war, even with their own families.Footnote ⁷⁹ Perhaps they, together with everyone else, preferred to look forward rather than back, or perhaps there was no way of accurately conveying their wartime experiences to ordinary civilians. At any rate, it was not until ten years later that a spate of memoirs suddenly appeared, including Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, 1928, and Robert Graves' Goodbye to All That, 1929.Footnote ⁸⁰ Although both books at the time were labelled as ‘anti-war tracts’, it was soon obvious that the war as remembered was something quite different from the war as experienced. What many ex-soldiers recalled were not the horrors of the trenches as much as the selfless sacrifices of fellow soldiers and their intense sense of camaraderie. These were admirable virtues, much in demand in the 1920s. In this way, little by little, the horrors of the Great War were ignored and warfare once again came to be romanticised. Just as in 1913, war was seen as giving ‘purpose to purposeless lives’.Footnote ⁸¹ Unable to present the progressive account of history as a valid description of the era, the internationalists and the peacemakers failed. In this sense the Great War was a missed opportunity.Footnote ⁸²

As for Heidegger, his final solution to the problem of boredom was not all that different from James' notion of a ‘moral equivalent of war’. Addressing students when accepting the rectorship at the University of Freiburg in 1933, he encouraged them to dedicate themselves to the ‘common cause’ shared by all Germans.Footnote ⁸³ In 1933, as Heidegger saw it, it was the National Socialist Party which provided the best opportunity for bringing back a sense of authenticity, and agency, to national life (‘the march of our people has begun into its future history’). In the end, of course, Hitler had little interest in moral equivalences and opted instead for the real thing. And Heidegger, to his credit, increasingly distanced himself from the Nazi movement after 1935.Footnote ⁸⁴

Hitler's own experiences in the trenches of World War I were to have a decisive influence on his subsequent policies.Footnote ⁸⁵ Apart from nine months, he spent the entire war on active duty at the front, and by all accounts he was a committed and courageous soldier. The war made him very happy. It was, he said, ‘the greatest and most unforgettable time of my earthly existence’.Footnote ⁸⁶ What was important was the camaraderie, the simplicity, the energy, and the larger-than-life quality of the war. What Hitler hated was everything he believed to stand in the way of such dynamism. The aim of the Nazi Party after 1933 was to replicate the ethos of the trenches on a national, indeed a pan-European, level.

Peace and boredom in the twenty-first century

In the beginning of the twenty-first century, just as in 1913, there are two main stories told about our contemporary condition. There is the official story, not too different from Norman Angell's account, which emphasises the benefits of globalisation. Although the twentieth century constituted a terrible set-back for progressivism, we are today once again told that shared economic benefits are bringing us all closer together and that wars are, if not inconceivable, at least utterly irrational.Footnote ⁸⁷ Yet there is also an unofficial story. This story, just as the one once told by Agathon et al., tries to pick up on the mood of ordinary people, especially the mood among the disaffected and the young. And just as in 1913, boredom features prominently in this alternative account.Footnote ⁸⁸

Take the case of a white, badly educated, lower-middle class, youth from a relatively disadvantaged area of the US – ‘your average North Carolina loser’.Footnote ⁸⁹ In stark contrast to the official story of the American dream, this person has few opportunities for a successful career. He is sidelined by economic development and by cultural change, often resentful and definitely bored. Or take the case of a young Muslim man living in a deprived part of an inner-city somewhere in western Europe.Footnote ⁹⁰ As a second generation immigrant, he is likely to encounter racism, but also an established society which provides few opportunities for self-improvement. He too is likely to be mis-educated and under-employed. His ambitions are blocked, he feels humiliated; deprived of agency, he expresses a strong sense of resentment.

Both these youths are likely to dream dreams of transgression, and just as their counterparts in the nineteenth century, they rely on media to provide them with vicarious experiences. It is as media-consumers that they temporarily regain control over their lives. In contrast to the nineteenth century, however, television, films and computer games provide the bulk of their entertainment, and they spend much more time watching screens than their nineteenth century counterparts did reading books. The main genre, however, is the same: romantic quests, filled with heroic accounts of violence.Footnote ⁹¹ And death really works. In the beginning of the twenty-first century, death is the final taboo, the last thing that turns us on.Footnote ⁹² Death, indiscriminately administered by a superhero, makes us feel good about ourselves. And the more boring our existence, the more urgent the demand for such mediatised violence. It is estimated that by the time they reach 18, an average American has seen at least 18,000 killings on television, in addition to all the killings in movies and on computer screens.Footnote ⁹³ ‘They are kids raised on hip-hop, Marilyn Manson and Jerry Springer’, says the American journalist Evan Wright, who studied a group of American soldiers in Iraq.

Although mediatised violence provides a way of escaping boredom, it also, just as in 1913, helps prepare young people for the real thing.Footnote ⁹⁵ Compare the way American soldiers have been recruited for the war in Iraq. The ads emphasise self-improvement and how the military can provide them opportunities that otherwise would be out of their reach. It is a matter of empowering individuals; to help them to ‘be all they can be’. Or take the case of the, albeit very small, group of disaffected European Muslims who turn to terrorism. As studies have shown, terrorism is not a response to what these people believe but instead to how they feel.Footnote ⁹⁶ The average radicalised European Muslim is not a theological scholar, but is far more likely, just like other young men, to be ‘chasing dreams of glory’.Footnote ⁹⁷ He, and occasionally she, is unemployed, with too much time on his hand, and surrounded by friends who share a sense of alienation. Much like the militarist youth in 1913, he imagines his fight as a kind of civil war. European society, but also global society and the local community, are corrupt, and there is a ‘need for violent action to cleanse it’.Footnote ⁹⁸ Tanked up on Internet videos of infidels being beheaded, these radicalised groups plot domestic bomb attacks or travel to the Middle East to join Al-Qaeda. Terror, for the perpetrator, is very empowering.

Compare the war crimes committed by American soldiers. In the years following the occupation, wrongfully imprisoned Iraqis were systematically threatened with dogs, stripped and beaten, put in stress positions and subject to sleep deprivation.Footnote ⁹⁹ To torture another human being is the ultimate transgressive act; torture is also the ultimate affirmation of one's agency. Suddenly you have all the power and the person subject to you has none. As Charles Granier Jr., notorious employee of the Abu Ghraib prison, put it in an email to which he attached photos of inmates beaten and bloodied beyond recognition, ‘sometimes you get to do really cool stuff over here’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Torture, just as terrorism, is the perfect antidote to boredom.

War as cure

Boredom, in Heidegger's terms, is a Grundstimmung of society, or what we called a ‘public mood’. But what can public moods help us explain? Can they, for example, explain why states go to war or why a young man joins the army or a terrorist organisation? Neither is likely. Not even the war in 1914 is convincingly explained this way. The outbreak of World War I has attracted a tremendous amount of scholarly attention and boredom does not feature prominently among the most commonly mentioned variables.Footnote ¹⁰¹ What serious scholars point to are factors far more tangible, and more well-known to students of international relations. As for the decision of young people to join the army, a number of extensive surveys exist.Footnote ¹⁰² Money is an obvious motivation, prospective soldiers tell us, but so is the opportunity to get ahead and to ‘better oneself’. This latter motivation, however, is rarely, if ever, explicitly connected to feelings of boredom. And yet we know that moods matter. The public mood mattered in 1913, and again in 1933.Footnote ¹⁰³ Similarly, the public mood in the US after 2001 allowed a certain kind of foreign policy to unfold – a foreign policy which the public mood in Europe largely rejected.

Although never a direct cause, public moods can be understood as a contributing or permissive cause. As such they may explain why other factors – ‘the real causes’ – turned out to be efficacious. A public mood provides a disposition which, while never determining an outcome, nevertheless determines the range within which likely outcomes will fall. Permissive causes can never be conclusively tested for in a statistical or experimental fashion, but this does not make them unimportant. Public moods are real and they make a difference to political outcomes. But there is no reason to apologise too profusely. After all, the causes of war identified within a Realist framework of analysis are permissive in exactly the same fashion. Anarchy, after all, does not cause war, it only allows some wars to happen. Indeed it should be possible to construct a structural theory of moods which mimicked the features of structural realism. Instead of an international system based on the interaction of decentralised political units, we would have an international system based on the interaction of decentralised units of meaning.

Boredom, however, is not only a causal factor, however circumscribed. An analysis of boredom is above all a way of understanding the shifting cultural significance of war in modern society. Rather than explaining why certain wars occur it helps us interpret what wars mean. It shows war as a possible solution to a deep-seated problem of modern society – war becomes a cure for a social malaise. People who need such cures, and believe in them, and the political and cultural leaders who provide them, are as intrinsic to modern society as boredom itself. Seeing our modern society in this fashion is to understand it better.

This conclusion has obvious political implications. After reviewing the situation, a proponent of the official, progressive, account of modern society would, cheerfully, set off doing something about it. Public moods, he or she would insist, are never immutable; indeed, public moods can and do change and they can be changed through political action. After all, ‘the inability to act’ is not a brute fact about society but it can be altered by presenting people with a wider, and increasing, range of meaningful opportunities. Suggesting such an alternative cure is what William James did in his Stanford lecture from 1906, but at the time there were many similar proposals. For people who lacked opportunities in Europe, ‘the colonies’ often seemed a perfect setting for re-empowering action: for some to exploit, often ruthlessly, and for others to use for good works – as missionaries or as doctors. Some called for a revolution. As revolutionaries like Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and John Reed never tired of proclaiming, a revolution will not only dramatically alter the very structure of society but also provide endless excitement.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Others put their hope in entrepreneurial action. Entrepreneurs, Joseph Schumpeter argued, are not only able to make good money but also to define themselves as ‘men of action’ in a era of mediocrity.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

To a proponent of the sceptical account of modern society, however, such suggestions will always appear as hopelessly naïve. There is no simple, cheerful, cure for the existential hunger which torments us. Before long the same ennui will reassert itself and render life also in the most exotic locations and extraordinary times perfectly humdrum. As many colonial officers, and their wives, quickly discovered, life in the local club in Madras or Kyauktada was at least as tedious as life back in Old Blighty.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The excitement of the revolution too soon died down, and transformed itself into bureaucratic routine or capricious dictatorship – and while capricious dictatorships may be exciting in their own way, they are not empowering for anyone but their leaders. As for the dreams of entrepreneurial action, they were in next to all cases crushed by hyper-inflation and mass unemployment.

Ultimately nothing is ever going to plug the hole in our souls. People in modern society have no definable desire except the desire for desire, but this second-level preference is itself insatiable. Once we have tried the new thing, we will always want the new new thing. In modern society ‘everything is boring’. In fact, war is becoming boring too.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The increasing reliance on technology has dehumanised warfare to the point where the actions which take place on the computer screens during a battle resemble less a game than the control-system of a factory. Perhaps in the end we simply have to accept that boredom has no cure, but that a bored life is not necessarily unliveable.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ And if that fails, perhaps, with Heidegger, we will have to conclude that ‘Only a God can save us’.Footnote ¹⁰⁹