THE HUMAN CONDITION / WHY WE ARE BORING : The Dull: Droning in Their Own Fears

As August languishes, thoughts turn . . . yawn . . . boring.

Life seems lackluster.

Some of it we can talk about. TV reruns bore us to tears. Long, hot days sap us. Presidential candidates lull us with soporific . . . sigh . . . recitations . . . of the same ol’ same ol’.

But some of it we can’t talk about. Heaven forbid we tell visiting friends that they bore us to death. Or a boring hostess that her yawn of a patio party makes our eyes glaze over, our throats ache for more oxygen.

And here comes Cousin George, the emotional 2-by-4 just dying to show us more color slides from his trip to the Grand Canyon. Uh-oh. How do you tell him the sheer force of his dullness has knocked everyone within earshot into a somnolent stupor?

You can’t.

“They’re fighting words. Probably the worst thing you can tell someone in this culture is that they’re boring,” says Alan Caruba, director of the unlikely Maplewood, N.J., outfit known as the Boring Institute.

So you say nothing as George drones into his second hour: “Here . . . we . . . are . . . at . . . the . . . trail . . . head . . . “ He doesn’t notice the drowsy nod, the frequent glances at the wristwatch, as he presses inexorably onward, talking about his motel. . . .

Heaviness hangs in the air.

Cousin George has managed, as Samuel Johnson put it, to be not only dull, but the cause of dullness in others.

*

“Since the American mythology is essentially egalitarian--no one has to listen to you because you’re royalty or nobility--we feel a personal obligation to be interesting to others,” says Dan Melia, associate professor of rhetoric at UC Berkeley.

To not do so is to commit a cultural crime: being boring. It saps the life from romance, ends political careers, kills the thrill of learning, pulls the plug on otherwise congenial gatherings of decent, conversation-loving people.

What’s worse, “the truly boring person has no idea he’s boring,” says Barbara Cadow, a USC psychologist who teaches professors how to liven up their classes.

Since people don’t know they’re doing it, and no one will tell them, boringness grows, unchecked, across the land--but always in other people, never us.

In truth, it’s as American as Wonder Bread.

It happens, behaviorists say, when people are inhibited or uncertain, and so cling to conventions--of dress, speech, thought, habits, social organizations--like non-swimmers to the side of the pool.

The result: Boring.

“It’s a dominant motif in middle-class American life,” says Mervin Freedman, a San Francisco State University psychologist and an expert on personality. “There’s a measure of security in not standing out.”

*

At some point, the daily practice of not standing out takes its toll. Cousin George is so worried about what other people might think of him that he’s afraid to show any personality at all. He becomes caked over with limitation. He doesn’t think or feel much for himself. He wears the same white shirt because to try yellow would be to take a chance. He talks only about himself. Or his particular interest. Of his trip to the Grand Canyon and how it relates to him and to all his other trips to the Grand Canyon.

Because to venture into the world of ideas, of spontaneous communication--of fun--could be to drown.

“It’s sad when you see someone trying to be un-boring and they don’t know how to do it,” says Cadow. “You think of Dana Carvey on ‘Saturday Night Live’ doing an animated George Bush. You know that someone has told them--’Gee--maybe you should move your hands around, or do something animated with your body.’ Someone told them they were boring and they don’t know how to fix it. But they try.”

(An 11-year-old who heard President Bush in the Rose Garden recently put it this way: “He kept going and going and going, just like an Energizer Bunny.”)

At the heart of it, boring people are so self-conscious that they can’t engage other people or pick up on their signals--the body language, the stifled yawn, the glassy smile, the wooden “How interesting” while the feet move toward the sushi table in the other room.

In rhetorical theory, it’s called having--or not having--a sense of audience.

Says Berkeley professor Melia: “You have to know what moves people.”

Which isn’t to say that rational numbers or DOS loading or protozoan traveling habits are inherently boring. What matters is what you do with them.

“It’s not boring if you can relate it to the rest of the world and what matters to people,” says Harriet Swift, a Bay Area writer who covers popular culture. “You can just imagine Carl Sagan getting hold of the mating habits of the tsetse fly--’The Lives! The Loves! The Agony and the Ecstasy!’ ”

Conversely, an inherently boring teacher can make sex or gossip incredibly dull.

Heaven help students of such a pedagogue who revels in the technical: “An LCD might be conducive to longer working hours but a high refresh rate blurs it so VGA is better if your CPU is faster . . . .”

Technocrats, misguided messengers of the Information Age, might well feel passion for their LCDs and VGAs. “But interpersonally, they may be so limited, that they can’t engage other people in that interest,” says Freedman.

*

Which is why boring is so deadly in politics.

Ask people what they want, says Melia, and they tell you--on paper, at least--Paul Tsongas. Give them Tsongas in the flesh, and they nod off.

Or take Jimmy Carter and Mike Dukakis--”two of the most boring public speakers in memory,” according to University of Iowa historian Ken Cmiel.

“They were stilted. They didn’t know the conversational style, as Reagan did, and as F.D.R. did,” says Cmiel, who has written a book about American modes of public discourse. “They were adept at another 20th-Century style--the technical style. They could recite all the facts and figures about B-1 bombers, about welfare, but they had no way of moving from the technical into the conversational--into something people could relate to.”

And then there’s the bureaucrat, who has turned being boring into job security. In the mouth of the bureaucrat, “angry voters” becomes “public input expressing divergent viewpoints,” and “going broke” becomes “possessing a long-term need for revenue augmentation.”

What’s missing is any inkling of what Cmiel calls the conversational style. Whether over cocktails or on the podium, it’s where people do more than exchange information. They exchange moments: glances, asides, humor, body language, context.

“They’re almost exchanging personalities,” says Cmiel. “When you adopt a technical mode--which is how you write for technical journals--you’re consciously taking yourself, the emotion, out of it.”

Not surprisingly, there’s a biological basis for all this.

The human brain seems to have a physiological need for stimulation, for something to process. “In the most boring environment there is--sensory deprivation--we create stimulation by hallucinating,” says David Stewart, a USC consumer psychologist. Which is not unlike what happens when eyes glaze and mind wanders when Cousin George corners us.

In the end, boring is far more than August’s yawn. It’s a slight on our basic human needs.

So take action; abandon protocol. Tell someone they’re boring. What’s the worst that could happen?

Cousin George will never send you another post card.

Aww. Shucks.