How can a generation of dull and bored adults be a source of inspiration for young people?

Giuliano Ferrara was right, with his usual flair, to introduce into the often cloying debate on youth unrest – expressed in ways that range from mildly acrimonious to violent – a word that few of us had touched upon until now: boredom. It is simply that perhaps we – those nourished by Baudelaire and Eliot, by Musil and Svevo – are not content with facile, off-the-shelf sociological analyses that merely repeat outdated patterns. We carry in our ears and in our hearts the warning that opens Les Fleurs du Mal, the 1857 collection of poems by the aforementioned Baudelaire: addressing the reader, the poet tells his ‘fellow and brother’ that the worst vice we have is ‘boredom’. He calls the boredom of us ‘modern’ people a ‘vice’. And he says that this vice ‘would swallow the world in a yawn’.

Boredom as a vice manifests itself in futility, greed, impatience, and confusion of ideas and plans; it consists in no longer feeling the world, which has been swallowed up and vanished from its true reality behind a veil of ghosts and behind the thicker veil that is the constant emphasis on the will of the self. The opposite of boredom is not, as so many self-styled lovers of so-called young people tritey claim, the ability to dream. ‘Dream, lad, dream,’ the adults repeat, along with Vecchioni and his song to today’s young people, as if ‘dreaming’ were a verb in the imperative mood. A bored person may well dream a great deal, sitting amidst swirls of smoke, but that does not set their life in motion. It is not dreams that set things in motion, but ideals. The word ‘ideal’, from its Greek root, does not denote a phantom, an abstract idea one chases after, but rather something beautiful that one has seen, which one looks to in order to make one’s own life more beautiful and true.

I see boring adults telling bored young people: ‘Come on, dream’. But where? Which adult today can a young man or woman look up to and want to be like, to live ‘like’ him or her? Perhaps some distant role model? Perhaps some hero or saint from the past? The presumption that we can solve young people’s problems with a few demands on the state, a few legislative measures and a trite invitation to dream is the ultimate way of shirking true adult responsibility. To be ideal role models for young people—people who are neither boring nor bored. In Italy, we have had educators who have inspired an idealistic fervour, from St Francis to Don Milani, from Montessori to Don Giussani.

Adults who are not boring, nor bored with life and the commitment required to tackle the ever-changing yet ever-same problems of every generation – perhaps looking to them, learning to be adults like them, unburdened by calculations and ideologies, is the contribution we can all try to make towards an alternative made up of boredom and anger.