Are We Building an Advance Boredom?

Lately I have been working on the Vitruvian Man problem with a fellow co-worker; the problem of how the human fits into a circle and a square, while still accounting for all static and dynamic anthropometrics. During our research and geometrizing we encountered the question of creating a measurement system (like Le Corbusier's Modulor, as well as Albrecht Durer) from our proportioning system. We ultimately decided we would leave that for ergonomists.

Now ergonomics is a study of human measurements, i.e. anthropometrics, in relation to everyday products, such as a chair, or a door knob, or a bottle of water, and even buildings, airplanes, and cars. Ergonomics is a study the roots back to ancient Greece, simply because the ancient Greeks had enough time to just sit around and think about things.

What else did the Greeks think about? Well, philosophy was a profession, on par with farming, governance, teaching, and construction. They invented numerous subjects of study (that is any kind of -ology), many of which we still use today : economics, politics, physics, metaphysics, rhetoric, grammar, ecology, biology, et cetera. It may be safe to say that the Greeks were one of the most bored civilizations in ancient history.

I believe the peak of their boredom hit when they built the Parthenon, the temple to Athena on the Athenian Acropolis. The Greeks recognized that due to visual perspective that objects appear smaller as they recede into space. So if one looks at a wall head-on (perpendicular to the wall) the left and right sides of the wall begin to curve back in space away from the viewer. This is because the flanks of the wall are farther away than the center of the wall. So when they built the Parthenon everything on the facade was curved outwards, and curved upwards towards the top of the structure. So when one looks at the facade head-on the curved edged are corrected by optical perspective, and so appear straight. The columns all have a slight bulge to them known as entasis. If the curve of the columns on the Parthenon are considered the arc of a circle, and the arc is continued downwards, the trough of the circle will be one mile underground.

Yes, the Greeks, indeed were some very bored people.

It appears the whole structure of civilization and society is based on being incredibly bored, so one just fills their time with thinking and coming up with activities that in no way directly encourage the survival of our species. I say "directly" with emphasis, because some bored person at some point felt like studying fungi and invented penicillin (I know this isn't exactly how the discovery of penicillin happened, it's call hyperbolization of narrating).

Just think of all the useless things we do to fill up our time from the day we are born to the day we die; things we make sound important and pertinent to our lives : football, The Cooking Channel, figuring out how to trisect an angle, golf, starting a band, or writing a blog posting on the boredom of civilization. In the case of the latter, I was bored and trying to work out dynamic anthropometrics of the body, and found my self bored again, so I began thinking about being bored. I was meta-bored. At some point in history (the Greeks) someone was bored and starting thinking meta- things, like metaphors, metacognition, meta-language, and meta-meta-whatever. One of my favorite books, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, was devised by Charles Dodgson to keep his three girls from being bored while they traveled from Cheshire to Oxford.

We play and fill our time with activities of no practical value to the survival of our species. There is another name for that : domestication. Dogs don't have to survive, they have human masters to pamper them from birth to death. So most dogs play and beg for attention, which is nothing practical for their survival, save that their owner continue to take care of them. We don't survive, we play golf, do yoga, and talk about wines and cheeses. We are not all that different from the very animals we take care of. A bored dog wants to play fetch as much as a successful Wall Street CEO wants to play eighteen holes.

Anytime we start considering truth, beauty, peace, and love we are within the confines of domestication. Nature is ambivalent, both caring and deadly, peaceful and dangerous, beautiful and ugly.

A music theory teacher of mine once told me : "Boredom is self-satisfied ignorance." This has a good deal of truth to it. But then again, if the advancement of society is based on boredom, then is the advancement of society the augmentation of stupidity? That may be a fallacy, but it has a good deal of truth to it.

Then again, the irony of it all is : the advancement of civilization was founded on boredom, and this boredom birthed a civilization that has become dependent on the products of its boredom. So the survival factor has inherently resurfaced : if we don't maintain the products of past boredom, while also producing new products as a result of further boredom, then society will fail.