"DID YOU HEAR IT'S THE CENTURY OF LIBERTY," HE YAWNED:

Bad and bored: Britain is sick and tired, there is no religion, no culture and no patriotism — and not even leisure can lighten our burden (Theodore Dalrymple, 9/04/04, The Spectator)

It has fallen to our generation...to create a population that is bored equally by work and leisure. (That, of course, is why ‘leisure management’ has become both an academic subject and a career.) When I meet patients who tell me that they are fed up with their work because it is so boring, and they wish they could stop working altogether, I ask them what they would like to do instead. The question comes like an unexpected thunderclap, or a flash of lightning in a darkened landscape: they’ve never thought about it, and when they do they are completely unable to answer. They realise for the first time that it is not so much work that bores them as existence.

This underlying, or existential, boredom — and the desire to overcome it by whatever means — is a major cause of the epidemic of self-destructive, as well as antisocial, behaviour that has swept the Western world in the past few decades, Britain above all. In matters of self-destruction, in fact, we are in the vanguard. If gold medals had been awarded at the Olympics for senseless, self-destructive egotism, we’d have swept the board, gold, silver and bronze.

By and large, the struggle for existence, which once might have given a grim purpose to life, is over. You can’t really go hungry, whatever you do. On the other hand, it seems to millions of people that a life of labour will bring them very little more than would a life of laziness. Not only is the work unsatisfying in itself, having little or no intrinsic meaning, but it brings only marginal benefits from the point of view of standard of living. The dignity of labour is nothing, especially to people who inhabit the fantasy Hello! magazine world of Posh and Becks. To be busy, bored and poor is not much fun; in fact there are few worse fates.

Religion, except for a small minority, has long since ceased to give the transcendent meaning to existence that, for some reason as yet undiscovered, most men need. The Church of England has become social democracy at prayer, with the politics and prayer removed; the Pentecostal churches are flourishing in a small way, but not everyone can become a Holy Roller. Young Muslims of Pakistani origin have become entirely secular, except when it comes to mistreating women. No, religion is not a likely path out of our current existential impasse.

Culture — in the sense of belonging to a great tradition which one inherits and to which one does one’s small best to contribute in some way — is not a solution either. We now live in a culture of the present moment that specifically derides the achievements of the past and treats the latest thing as inevitably the best thing. There is therefore no transcendence in it, only trance and distraction.

Patriotism is as dead as religion as a source of transcendence or sense of purpose. I am not much of a flag-wagger myself, and I acknowledge that patriotism, whosever it might be, can all too easily turn into abject self-worship. Nevertheless, a sense of national achievement is a spur both to further achievement and individual self-respect, a quality in which the contemporary British are so obviously and conspicuously lacking.

What, then, is left? The day-to-day flux of existence, which is boring, banal and meaningless.

Imagine how bizarre President Bush's speech last night must have seemed to the average European as he declared that it is the unique role of America in the world to extend liberty to every dark corner. These are people who go on strike if they're asked to do their jobs. We see ourselves as having a universalist mission--many of us anyway--that we're obligated to accomplish in addition to our regular domestic lives. We just are not like them in any meaningful sense anymore.

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 3, 2004 8:24 PM