Joy can be our resistance to the culture of death all around us. Joy refuses to look at unborn children, an aged great-grandmother, and the uncultivated prairie meadow as problems to be solved. Rather, people who live in a culture of joy can receive them as gifts because they can see the Giver—and his Goodness—in them.

Which of these two people is bored? One man has to sit through an entire three-hour baseball game, yawning, uninterested in the action and the rules, yearning to be anywhere else. The other man spent three anxious hours rattling through two-thirds of his to-do list, purchasing two new household items from Amazon, deciding which workout to do next (per the report of his fitness app), yearning to achieve all the goals he’s set.

Yes, it’s a trick question: they are both bored. A 2004 essay from philosopher Michael Hanby, “The Culture of Death, the Ontology of Boredom, and the Resistance of Joy,” can help us understand how the second man, seemingly so active and normal, is actually suffering under the malaise of modern industrial life and unable to rest. As a result, Hanby’s article can provide us with a set of diagnostic tools so we can take stock of our own hearts and actions, and, along the way, find something of a way out.

Culture of Death

Hanby (along with others) views our modern Western culture as a “culture of death.” He sees the presenting symptoms of our culture’s illness as abortion and euthanasia, of course, but also as terrorist violence, secular materialism, hedonistic reveling in self and entertainment, and a “frenetic orgy of consumption” (184). In a culture of death, nothing can satisfy us. The things of our world have become exclusively means—means of our self-directed projects of building and securing worth, goodness, and meaning—and thus are no longer meaningful, good, worthy ends in themselves.

Acres of land are “vacant” until they are purchased, cleared, and built on. Trees are merely raw materials for human use in that construction enterprise, or else perhaps “valued” by some, but only as symbols. A human life is “worth” something only if he or she can perform a set of functions. The world must be made controllable—or at least entertaining.

At bottom, underneath all the seeming hedonism, our culture of death contains a subtle but radical belief about the nature of reality. The above symptoms arise, Hanby believes, because of a “more fundamental pathology”: boredom (184). His point is less about the feeling we have at an interminable baseball game and much more about our underlying view of whether baseball, its players, the green grass, and the sky above are empty or full, thin or thick, always mute or already eloquent.

Ontology of Boredom

The nature of things (ontology) is at issue here because boredom, like many emotional reactions we have, is a judgment. In the past, Christians have spoken about the sins of ennui (listlessness) and acedia (sloth). These were moral failures because, as responses to the world God made, the person failed to be moved, compelled, and delighted by God’s work, which is inherently good, meaningful, and compelling. Boredom adds one more failure to these two sins: “a failure of the world to be compelling to a subject ostensibly entitled to such an expectation” (184, my emphasis). Boredom is thus, as R.J. Snell says, a “double noughting” of everything: the judgment that neither world-the-object nor I-the-subject is compelling or compelled, with no intrinsic goodness, beauty, meaning, or worth.

When nothing that I see could possibly communicate real goodness to me, when nothing is in itself compelling, then my created desire for goodness never finds a place to rest. Thus, like Adam and Eve, I will seek to control and make my own “good.” I will use tools like science to “subordinate vulnerable life routinely and fatally to the machinery of social and economic efficiency” (188). As a result, we have become a people restless, dissatisfied, discontent, wasteful, always seeking for the new and most efficient instrument to manufacture a blip of pleasure. We are a people “without sleep or Sundays, where such inefficient persons [like the unborn, the handicapped, the elderly] have no place” (189).

Hanby’s most pointed diagnosis of our malady of boredom alludes to Nietzsche:

A world that is “beyond good and evil,” in which nothing is either genuinely good or genuinely bad, and no truth, goodness, or beauty are revealed, is a world in which nothing is either intrinsically desirable or detestable. . . . Boredom is therefore the defining condition of a people uniquely in danger of losing their capacity to love, that is, a people uniquely in danger of failing to grasp “the mystery of [their] own being” and losing its very humanity. (187)

This is why Hanby claims the culture of death is not the result of hedonistic excess. “We lack the souls to be good hedonists, which, in present circumstances, would be a moral achievement” (192).

What would happen if we really believed and lived by the biblical claims that “God is good” and that “everything created by God is good,” indeed “very good” (Psalm 73:1; 1 Timothy 4:4; Genesis 1:31)?

Resistance of Joy

The Bible teaches that the cosmos and everything in it is good because God, the Creator, is Good. God is not merely “the best thing around,” but he is Goodness itself, infinitely, perfectly, and eternally. Stars, trees, and all human beings are his creatures, and thus each one, with its own analogous goodness, proclaims that God is gloriously worthy and good. This theology of God’s infinite goodness and creation’s creaturely goodness dovetails precisely with Christian Hedonism. If all the earthly things we encounter communicate goodness to us, we can enjoy them for what they are in themselves and for how they direct our attention to our ultimate and highest enjoyment—the Ultimate and Highest Good, which is God himself.

Consistent with this long-standing Christian view of the world, Hanby’s proposed antidote to our culture’s pervasive boredom is, strangely enough, Joy.

But this is not joy-as-mere-feeling. Hanby’s proposal is for Joy undergirded by a biblical view of creation and sustained in a culture. “If boredom names a relationship between self and world, or rather a failed relationship, so too does joy, the simultaneous delight and rest in another” (192). Where boredom is the “double noughting” of the world and self, Joy is the double affirmation of them.

Joy is our echo of God’s initial speech in creation. Whereas God created all things and spoke his all-powerful word over them—“Good!”—we receive all things from his hand and echo his word with our claim of discovery: “Amen!” Where boredom makes us into mere users and consumers of things, perpetually dissatisfied, Joy restores us to the place of lover: one who is moved by the goodness of things and surrenders himself enough to rest in them. Rather than always desiring a new and better phone, appearance, or spouse, rather than always needing to make a “better” version of a place or oneself, Joy treasures them all as they are and can delight that they are. Joy can do this because all things bear the imprint of their Maker: “All genuine joy, all delight that recognizes intrinsic goodness, will reflect Trinitarian bliss” (197).

Precisely for this reason, Joy can be our resistance to the culture of death all around us. Joy refuses to look at unborn children, an aged great-grandmother, and the uncultivated prairie meadow as problems to be solved. Rather, people who live in a culture of joy can receive them as gifts because they can see the Giver—and his Goodness—in them. Such people can be restful and gentle, precisely because they presume that God beckons to us through each unique creature’s beauty and goodness, and yet, each thing is “not reducible to my pleasure” (193). In doing this, we will be imitating our joyful triune God.

A Way, Not a Solution

What Hanby proposes here is not, importantly, a solution. There is no pill, no candidate, no policy that can solve the problem of our boredom. What he commends to us is the “culture of joy” as the “only genuine form of resistance to the culture of death.”

First, the antidote is a culture. It is a way: a way of living and viewing and deciding. It is not simply a new proposition. It behooves us to see this because boredom has nurtured a culture of death. Boredom is not simply an idea but a way of going about one’s day, year, lifetime as if there is nothing intrinsically good or bad in the world, as if there is no delight and rest to be had—even in God himself. To counter this takes a culture, a communal way of life.

Second, the culture of joy is a resistance, not a solution. It may be that your actions do much to solve this culture-wide malaise, and you live to see it happen and rejoice. However, it may be that you and I are simply small, faithful bit characters in a drama that stretches well before and beyond our earthly lives. Most likely, we will be required to be like Tolkien’s Galadriel, who down through ages “fought the long defeat,” or like Leif Enger’s Rainy, who humbly lives out, “I cheerfully refuse.”

Hanby’s is a call to Christian fidelity—no matter what we think we can divine of the trajectory of culture and history. It is a way of living daily, annually, lifelong as a community of those whose Lord calls us to take up our cross in love for the joy that is set before us. One day, his happy ending will arrive, despite all our losses along our ways, and God will reaffirm and renew the goodness of his creation.

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