Boredom and violence

Boredom is exciting. It is one of those themes that one gets carried away by. This is a specific danger for political scientists, such as I am, whose fellows are wont to dismiss the relevance of boredom in serious scholarly accounts. Our concern for boredom makes us stand out. Boredom makes us look special and sound erudite. Boredom is a performance. An earlier argument notwithstanding (cf. Kustermans and Ringmar 2011), it is a performance that I find increasingly alienating. Boredom is too much of a privilege. Boredom is real enough. Children, but not babies or toddlers, can be excruciatingly bored. They will hang around, their bodies twisted in the strangest contortions, occasionally giving way to a vocal or motoric spasm (when they are pre-teens), or submitting to a comprehensive state – calling it a posture would be too much praise – of listlessness (when they have become adolescents). It has been reported that ‘91% of [American youth] experience boredom’ (Eastwood 2012: 482). Boredom is pervasive, a universal experience, although with some the severity of the condition will obviously be worse than with others. Cultural theorists, meanwhile, argue that boredom has become ‘omnipresent’, no longer an emotion with which everybody has some familiarity, but now a condition from which most of us truly suffer. They identify boredom as a ‘fundamental mood’ of modernity. Some attribute the greater prevalence of boredom, and its continued exacerbation, to relatively recent developments in the organisation of capitalism (Gardiner 2014: 31), while others situate the origins of the ‘epidemic of ennui’ in earlier phases of modernity already. Whether because ‘skepticism has become democratized’ (Goodstein 2005: 412), or because modern people are incessantly and deliberately being summoned to attention (Ringmar, in this volume), or – reversely – because modern ‘comfort has loosened the hold necessity has on our lives’ (Kekes 2005: 109), it is alleged we have become care-less. Modern people fail to care anymore. They observe the world and find it boring (Heidegger 1995: 132-159). Such care-less-ness is not without risks. Boredom can bleed into depression (Malkovsky et al. 2012) and it has been associated with a range of social

‘troubles’, ranging from drugs and alcohol abuse to vandalism (see Jervis et al. 2003). Likewise, boredom has been presented as a cause of violence. Writing in 1962 in Harper’s Magazine about the worsening problem of violence in modern cities and suburbs, Arthur Miller explained that suburban and inner city delinquents ‘are drowning in boredom’ (Miller 1962: 51). ‘School bores them, preaching bores them, even television bores them. The word rebel is inexact for them’, Miller continued, ‘because it must inevitably imply a purpose, an end’. Older violence, many believe with Miller, was either honourable or reasonable or both (Vrints 2011). But modern violence so often feels meaningless. Modern violence is haunted – propelled and marked – by the very boredom that is at its root. We should be sceptical about this kind of argument, if for no other reason that the causal relationship between boredom and violence is so difficult to establish, let alone between ‘modern boredom’ – with boredom being a ‘hallmark of our society as a whole’ (Miller 1962: 51) – and ‘modern violence’. I have come to agree with John Keane’s conclusion that ‘boredom theories of violence are interesting, but [that] they turn out to be rather more provocative than persuasive’ (Keane 2004: 89). Rarely does boredom convince as an explanation of actual instances of violence. Precisely when boredom becomes mobilised as a purported ‘cause’ of violence, does boredom reveal itself for the discourse it is: a moralising discourse about or around said violence, typically spoken by the privileged. In the remainder of this chapter, I will try to substantiate that claim. I will first describe the arguments causally associating boredom with violence. Drawing on a dramatic example, I will explain that violence promises to restore the sense of agency that the bored person had lost, but I will also point out how this promise of violence must not materialise. Boredom’s violence, that is, is un-real. I will then explain how boredom theories of violence typically entail an aspect of moral evaluation but that the object of that evaluation and also its tone can differ substantially. Sometimes it will be the privileged pronouncing on themselves and at other times it will be the privileged pronouncing on the many. In the first case, there can be a sense of self-satisfaction, a feeling of self-importance in the discourse; in the second, the tone is typically reproachful. Here modern boredom morphs again into latter-day acedia; a sin more than a disease, an allegation of immaturity (cf. Svendsen 2005: 149; Toohey 2011: 189).