The Narrative of Dreariness

Tracing the history of blasé existence.

Poor René Descartes. He gets such a bad rap for formally introducing dualism into Western culture, and the ‘disenchantment’ of the world that supposedly followed. For that matter, let’s give a break to Isaac Newton, the other half of the Newtonian-Cartesian duo that’s often saddled with blame for the spiritless, materialistic, disenchanted modern world.

Descartes may have been wrong about a few things, but he wasn’t responsible for the ‘disenchantment of the world’ (Max Weber’s term), and Isaac Newton was anything but a spiritless materialist. Other folks read too much into Descartes and jumped to conclusions based on Newton’s work, but that’s not the fault of the two thinkers.

Besides, I doubt many people were feeling fine until one day when they happened to read the Meditations, only to suddenly find themselves despondent. Even the most earnest student of philosophy probably doesn’t get past ‘interesting’ with Descartes.

What I’m calling the narrative of dreariness is the thread of despondency about everyday life that ran through collective academics, art, and literature for more than a century. This isn’t an academic paper, so I’m going to write in broad generalizations — you can get the idea, agree, disagree, and fill in the blanks as you see fit. It’s just an idea.

I think the narrative of dreariness began in earnest with Marx and Engels. Leaving aside everything else they said, this pair identified the tedium and hopelessness of factory life and made a plea to the workers to recognize their condition.

Factory workers (and coal miners, and others) in the 19th century had more or less taken up the plight of medieval serfs, with one key exception: they knew that they could have it better. The European Enlightenment, and the American and French Revolutions that ensued, had not only inspired the readers of philosophy that personal autonomy and freedom were a birthright, the message had made its way to the masses. Unlike agrarian serfs, the industrial workers knew what they were missing.

In reality, things were often far worse than merely dreary for workers: working conditions were dangerous, living spaces in cities were horrid, and compensation was criminal. But we’re focused here on dreariness, and that seems to have been a condition that not only affected the lower class industrial workers, but also the middle class. The dreariness of the factory floor soon translated into middle management and the cubicles of the office worker.

Sociologists really caught hold of the idea of dreariness at all levels of society. Max Weber’s The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904) is a classic, although it took another fourteen years for Weber to come up with ‘the disenchantment of the world.’ Weber had mixed feelings about the move from faith and spirit to materialism and science, but he noted, in his way, that things had become more dreary in the rationalist world. David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd (1950) and Earl Shorris’ The Oppressed Middle (1981) are among the many sociological treatises that explain how and why life became and stayed so dreary, particularly for the middle class.

Bureaucracy was a keyword for the era of dreariness. The impersonal coldness of the bureaucratic office was seen as the very antithesis of personal autonomy and dignity (for a contemporary experience, stop by your local motor vehicle bureau). The sense of being meaningless within ‘the system’ showed itself in the 1960s with folks wearing t-shirts that repeated the computer card warning, do not fold, spindle, or mutilate.

Bureaucracy was close to the heart of the West’s vision of communist dreariness, and ironically enough it was in following Marx and Engels that the great experiment in dreariness took place. Fascism produced dreariness too, but it also produced far worse. A further irony was that socialism was often decried as ‘godless communism’ in America, which itself was drifting rapidly away from any sense of spiritual grounding.

In film, the dreariness of the factory was rendered in Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 classic, Modern Times. By the 1950s, many films pointed to the dreariness of middle class life: Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1956) are two standouts among many. The Graduate (1967) is about the most overt popular film that deals with dreariness.

The existentialist writers really caught the spirit of dreariness, and from them it moved into the Beat Generation poets and writers in the 1950s. The term ‘beat’ itself is nebulous, negative in its association with ‘beaten’ but positive in the sense of musical beat — it obviously wasn’t a negative for The Beatles.

The Beats represented a turning point, no doubt one of many. As much as they rejected the dreariness, conformity (a big part of the dreary narrative), and materialism, they also pointed towards something better. They couldn’t find spirit in Western religion, but they found it in the East, particularly in Buddhism. In that sense they paved the way for New Age spirituality, which not only looked East but also to the pagan and esoteric history of the West for ‘re-enchantment.’

The narrative of dreariness continued well into the 1960s, finding expression in songs like The Monkee’s 1967 hit, Pleasant Valley Sunday (by Gerry Goffin and Carole King) and The Kinks Well Respected Man (1965). Yet by the mid-1960s the narrative was directed at others, often the younger generation’s parents. Dreariness was something to be avoided — but the point was that it could be avoided.

The rebellious tone of rock and roll had started a crack in the dreary egg. Elvis pushed back against dreariness, but The Beatles seemed to avoid it altogether (remarkable since the postwar England of their formative years was famous for dreariness).

Psychedelics widened the crack, to the point where the counterculture (a term dating to 1968) became a strong force for social change. While the visions of the 1960s may not have manifested in their most idealistic form, the narrative of dreariness seems to have drawn to a close, Dilbert comic strips aside.

Not that all is well. There are worse things than dreariness, and apocalyptic sentiment rages. Climate change and the specter — once again — of nuclear war are only two of the most obvious problems we face. But darkness and dreariness are not the same.

As for the working conditions that spawned the initial narrative, they have improved in many ways and in many places, while they have deteriorated in others. By and large, the most oppressive factory conditions have been exported out of Westerners’ sight, to China and the East.

Yet even in the West many problems remain, or should remain if the workplace is key to the dreariness narrative. The United States, in particular, has actually lost ground in workers’ rights and conditions. Even high-prestige professions like physicians are subject to ‘productivity quotas’, and employees are monitored in very intrusive ways. To get any job in any field often requires a background check, credit check, lie detector test, and drug test. Social media account passwords have to be handed over. Yet most people don’t seem too concerned about having their body, let alone their history, searched without probable cause, nor do they complain loudly about being subjected to constant scrutiny. The Great Resignation indicates that people are unhappy at work, but they aren’t producing much in the way of a popular narrative about it.

It’s curious, but an explanation might be that folks have decided to reject the narrative of dreariness itself, independently of the causes of that could lead to feeling dreary or oppressed. That is, if you say you’re not unhappy, you’re not. That makes sense.

Right?