Abstract
David Foster Wallace’s last novel, The Pale King,1 revolves around the administration of the federal income tax. Wallace’s portrayal of this system, for all its hilarity and incisiveness, might ultimately seem a bit banal because he emphasizes that the tax system is boring; surely we all knew that. Yet the portrayal of boredom in The Pale King is nuanced and provocative, recalling a long tradition of thinking about modernity and boredom. Most notably, Kierkegaard diagnosed modernity as an age beset by a particular form of boredom. In the modern age people have more and more leisure, but less and less guidance as to how to lead one’s life either through religion or the rigorous patterns of agricultural life, and thus modern people have found themselves bored in a new way. This insight was picked up on by many and was most developed by Martin Heidegger. What can one learn about tax from learning more about boredom? Within the novel it is observed that a new notion of the “interesting” arose along with the new modern kind of boredom. One needs to find something interesting to fend off boredom. Looked at in this way, the most profound way to alter our engagement with a tax system that is boring would not be to make it interesting, but to make it neither boring nor interesting. What would such a tax system look like? Wallace suggests that it would be a system soberly administered by adults, much like the other key parts of the apparatus central to modernity.
I. Introduction
The scale of our tax system is vast along every dimension. In 2010, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) collected almost 2.4 trillion dollars and employed about 95,000 employees. 2 The Internal Revenue Code is thousands of pages long, while the role of taxation in our political culture is perhaps even more outsized. The political importance of taxes is not inappropriate given the fact that the United States in particular has chosen to conduct a large percentage of its social policy through the tax code. Observing all of this churn involving taxation is a sizable number of academics and policy wonks; a major question that they consider is how the tax system can better achieve some external goal, say efficiency or justice. But what is it like to be a bureaucrat inside this dreaded bureaucracy, administering this complicated law while trying to achieve lofty goals and all the while pushed to and fro by politics?
David Foster Wallace’s novel, The Pale King, revolves around the administration of the federal income tax, and, in particular, around events at a tax return processing center in Peoria, Illinois in the early 1980s on the verge of the great tax reform act of 1986. It is a unique and extraordinarily fruitful attempt to wrestle with the phenomenon that is our tax system in a way that has not been attempted before.
We should note at the outset that The Pale King is an unfinished novel, published posthumously, after David Foster Wallace’s suicide. And “unfinished” is not quite the right word, as the selection and organization of the novel we have is largely a product of the work of its editor, Michael Pietsch. 3 This article will not dwell on the work’s uniquely sad provenance, except to observe that the passages central to this discussion are rather polished and several key sections were already published in Wallace’s lifetime. 4
A key – arguably the key – section of the novel involves a long interview with IRS examiner Chris Fogle. The interview is supposed to focus on how Fogle, who is an exemplary employee, found his way into the Service. Fogle’s path to the IRS was not straight; he describes himself as a “wastoid” during the period after high school and during college before the epiphany that calls him to serve the IRS (154). This wastoid period is generally characterized by Fogle as “like [being] dead or asleep without even being aware of it” (158). Fogle has jobs during this period, like working on a production line, but they were “unbelievably boring and meaningless” (155). Aside from using drugs and neither working nor studying regularly, Fogle describes what might be called wastoid rituals, 5 such as watching a spinning electric sign (for a podiatrist) and deciding whether to drink or study on a given night based on the final direction the sign pointed when it was turned off at the end of the day (the sign was a giant foot) (163).
Then Fogle has an epiphany in the midst of another wastoid ritual, watching the soap opera As the World Turns while “spinning [a] soccer ball in an idle, undirected way” (221). During the show, the network announcer periodically reminded the audience that “You’re watching As the World Turns” (222), but on this day the anodyne reminder hits Fogle “more and more pointedly each time . . . I suddenly realized that the announcer was saying what I was literally doing . . . . which was, of course, nothing, just slumped there like something without any bones, uninvolved even in the surface reality of watching Victor deny his paternity to Jeanette . . .” (223).
Fogle’s insight during this moment of interrupted boredom gets quite involved: “That I drifted and quit because nothing meant anything, no one choice was better. That I was, in a way, too free, or that this kind of freedom wasn’t real – I was free to choose ‘whatever’ because it didn’t really matter. But that this, too, was something I chose – I had somehow chose to have nothing matter . . . through making this choice, I didn’t matter, either” (223).
The completion of Fogle’s epiphany required him to make a choice, to matter through becoming less free (in a way). This occurs when, instead of attending a final exam review for a course in American Political Thought, Fogle accidentally attends a review for a class in Advanced Tax, perhaps because he was so absorbed in the Federalist Papers (215) and/or absorbed in thinking through the insight gained while watching As the World Turns a few days before (223). The (Jesuit!) instructor for this Advanced Tax class happens to be a substitute, physically precise and upright (217). At the end of the review, “[h]e stood very still – noticeably stiller that most people stand when they stand still” (225). And then the substitute delivers a remarkable summation: I wish to inform you that the accounting profession to which you aspire is, in fact, heroic . . . Enduring tedium over real time in a confined space is what real courage is . . . . True heroism is you, alone, in a designated work space. True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care – with no one there to see or cheer. This is the world . . . You have wondered, perhaps, why all real accountants wear hats? They are today’s cowboys. As you will be. Riding the American range. Riding herd on the unending torrent of financial data. . .” Gentlemen, you are called to account (228–33).
Fogle is ready to hear this call and to make a choice; he gets a haircut, buys a suit and eventually joins the IRS (233). The religious language of epiphany is appropriate given that Fogle himself connects his experience to a religious conversion narrative he had earlier scoffed at (228). 6
Wallace gives us a taste of the “terrain” of the boredom the substitute spoke of (85), with, for example, three pages of narrative such as “Howard Cardwell turns a page. Ken Wax turns a page . . . Ellis Ross starts to turn a page . . .” (310–13). In one memorable sequence, one IRS examiner (Lane Dean Jr.), confronted by “boredom beyond any boredom he’d ever felt” (377), follows IRS advice and imagines a “warm pretty beach with mellow surf” (376), but “[a]fter just an hour it was a winter beach” (376). Not long after, the beach “had solid cement instead of sand” (380).
Is there a fundamental difference between the boredom of watching a soap opera (what Fogle fled) and the boredom of examining tax returns (what Fogle is called to)? Or is it all about the choice, that one can just as well be a hero of watching soap operas as one can be a hero of analyzing tax returns? This review will argue that there is a significant difference that Wallace is describing. There is a proper way to choose a career in tax in a way that it cannot be proper to choose soap operas.
Ultimately, our tax system is not just a convenient backdrop to Wallace’s novel. Wallace contributes to our thinking about modernity and boredom through his treatment of taxation. Indeed, I maintain that Wallace offers a nascent philosophy of taxation. There are, in fact, many important works relating philosophy to taxation – but Wallace’s novel resembles none of these. Typically, an argument in the philosophy of tax will begin with philosophy and specifically with an argument about what a philosophical value – say justice – demands of us. 7 For instance, one might ask: how much should those of us who are better off provide to those who are worse off?
We might say that such philosophy of tax uses the “of” as an “objective genitive.” To take a classical example, 8 let’s consider the phrase “fear of the barbarians.” Is it we who fear the barbarians (the object, hence objective genitive) or are we discussing the fear that the barbarians themselves feel (as subjects, hence subjective genitive)? The phrase “fear of the barbarians” is ambiguous on its own. The standard “philosophies of tax” start from what we have arrived at philosophically and impose this philosophy on its object – our tax system. But what of philosophy of tax where the “of” is a subjective genitive, where the philosophy is that which emerges from tax? What would it mean to consider tax as having its own philosophy?
One way to proceed to find tax’s philosophy is to explore the life of taxation, which is precisely what Wallace does in The Pale King. It turns out that the philosophy of tax is tied up with boredom, with a particularly modern boredom, a boredom recognizable to Wallace’s great predecessors in thinking about boredom, such as Kierkegaard and Heidegger, though the philosophy outlined in The Pale King is something different. Heidegger’s analysis of boredom is generally seen as representing the philosophical high point of thinking about boredom, and, as we will see, Wallace’s portrayal of boredom manifests structural (and terminological) similarities to Heidegger’s account. Accordingly, we will read Wallace along with Heidegger, as they are mutually illuminating, but we are ultimately striving to learn something about tax from reading Wallace.
And so what does Wallace teach us about the philosophy of tax? In short: that we have allowed our tax system to become boring is an indication that we have become boring to ourselves. It is hard not to view this as a problem and one that is to be solved through action, through taking control of our tax system and, by extension, ourselves. This reviewer is doubtful as to whether this is the stance that we should embrace after a careful reading of The Pale King. Rather, it could be, paradoxically, that the proper response to the boredom of our tax system is to let it be boring.
II. Context: Boredom and Tax
Philosophers, novelists and psychologists have long argued that there is something particularly boring about modernity. 9 Typical arguments maintain that “boredom becomes widespread when traditional structures of meaning disappear,” 10 structures such as religion. The same period in the Eighteenth Century (in the West) also, significantly, saw the concomitant rise of leisure and bureaucracy. 11 Both phenomena, obviously, could be seen as conducive to boredom. Now, one may well doubt that certain people in early modern Europe “discovered” boredom – did people everywhere not always know the tedium of waiting for something to happen? 12 Nevertheless, we will work within the tradition of thinking about boredom as somehow symptomatic of modernity for several reasons. First, though this is not the place to assess sweeping claims about history and culture, this hypothesis clearly has intuitive appeal, especially as concerns a certain kind of boredom (as we will see). Indeed, the analytic connections at the heart of this intellectual tradition, particularly between boredom and meaning, have received empirical support in our more empirically minded age. 13
Furthermore, as already briefly indicated (and will be explained in greater detail), this tradition of thinking about boredom is central to The Pale King and so we must engage with it to understand the novel. For example, let us return to IRS examiner Lane Dean, trying to fight crushing boredom by imagining a beach, but, in the face of this boredom, a beach now made of cement. Dean falls asleep at his desk and is awakened by a ghost named Garrity known to visit other examiners (315–16). The ghost begins: “They don’t ever say it, though. Have you noticed? They talk around it. It’s too manifest . . . It would be as if saying, I see so-and-so with my eye. . . . [C]onsider it, the word. You know the one . . . Word appears suddenly in 1766. No known etymology. The Earl of March uses it in a letter describing a French peer of the realm . . . In fact the first three appearances of bore in English conjoin it with the adjective French (382–3).
The ghost continues with an etymology of boredom, including a reference to Kierkegaard. About this sudden appearance of this word, the phantom articulates a theory: [C]ertain neologisms arise from their own cultural necessity . . . When the kind of experience that you’re getting a man-sized taste of becomes possible, the word invents itself (384–5).
In case you are wondering, the ghost’s account of boredom, even the snarky reference to the French, accords well with that of the Oxford English Dictionary and contemporary academics. 14
The ultimate reason to accept that there is something special about the phenomenon of boredom in modernity is that the phenomenon of writing about boredom, especially as a new phenomenon, is certainly typically modern.
15
This self-awareness about boredom is itself part of the tradition and is on display in The Pale King, as we have already seen in the account of Fogle’s epiphany and the musings of Garrity the ghost. This point is at the core of Heidegger’s famous account of boredom, an account that we will soon make use of in understanding Wallace: [W]hat does the fact that these diagnoses of culture find an audience among us . . . tell us about what is happening here? . . . Why do we find no meaning for ourselves any more . . . Must we first make ourselves interesting to ourselves again?
16
Why must we do this? Perhaps because we ourselves have become bored with ourselves?
17
Now that we have said a bit about intellectual context, establishing the traditional thinking about boredom in which Wallace partakes, we should also consider how this relates to the history of taxation, which also plays a role in the novel, though rather schematically. Wallace’s characters ponder shifts in the “economy and society” (142) and note a shift in the attitudes of citizens to their taxes (139). More broadly, Wallace’s IRS was in the midst of being reconceived “as a business – a going, for-profit concern type of thing . . . [i]t would be difficult to over-emphasize the consequences of this shift in philosophy and mandate for those of us on the ground of the effort” (112–13). In fact, many of the key steps to increased automation at the IRS had already occurred before Wallace’s novel begins, but there is little question that these trends continued and accelerated in the 1980s.
18
Thus, by 1984: [T]he NCC [National Computer Center] computer scored each return in the nation based solely on an automated comparison between the information entered into the data fields designed by computer programmers and the output of an algorithm that was also created by programmers. In 1969, the Service had begun developing a computer algorithm called the Discriminant Income Function (DIF) to decide which returns to classify for further examination. The computer program tagged returns that produced a high enough DIF score. Only those returns would be pulled for further review by employees in the Service Center.
19
In The Pale King, the rise of the new efficient IRS, built on a “market model,” coincides with the decline of an older model of tax administration more oriented to “social justice and civic virtue” (82, 32). 20 Wallace’s characters discuss civic virtue at some length, describing a past America with citizens who thought of themselves as “makers of the pie” rather than “eaters of the pie” (136), as a “true community” (141) – and in so doing they make explicit reference to de Tocqueville. Such ethical concerns with the increased automation of the IRS were (and are) not unknown to the actual IRS or to prominent contemporary commentators on the federal income tax. 21
Indeed, somber historians of tax also describe the American tax system in the nineteenth century as Tocquevillian in that small, dispersed communities were given enormous power to tax themselves (through the property tax), even at a manifest cost in efficiency.
22
Even the early administration of the federal income tax was a relatively communal affair, with “personal contacts between government employees and taxpayers within small geographic subdivisions.”
23
This personalized system did not last, and in part because of its inability to cope with the dramatic increase in the number of citizens required to pay the federal income tax,
24
but it could also be because, per the argument attributed in The Pale King to de Tocqueville, that: [D]emocracies and their individualism . . . by their very nature corrode the citizen’s sense of true community . . . [it’s] in the democratic citizen’s nature to be like a leaf that doesn’t believe in the tree it’s part of (141).
The level of civic involvement that de Tocqueville observed and celebrated has disappeared, as it was always destined to do. 25 In that loss it is easy to see why the tradition – and Wallace – sees the creep of boredom. We are no longer engaged with the deepest issues facing us as a community.
In thinking about the move away from the world of de Tocqueville, it is instructive to note that taxes in a democracy could be made more interesting than they were in the nineteenth century, not less. Tax policy in the first democracy, Athens, was anything but boring. 26 For instance, wealthy citizens were called upon to provide certain public services (called “liturgies”), such as maintaining a warship or sponsoring a major festival. 27 Such a wealthy citizen could claim that another citizen was in fact wealthier and should bear the burden instead. The dispute was resolved by a remarkable procedure called an antidosis – “exchange.” 28 Here, roughly, is how this worked. An Athenian official would announce that Citizen A, on account of his wealth, was required to equip a ship for the Athenian navy. Citizen A would claim that Citizen B was wealthier and should therefore provide the ship. To prove his case, Citizen A would offer to exchange all of his property with Citizen B. If Citizen B really thought Citizen A was wealthier – and therefore should bear the burden of the liturgy – then Citizen B should agree to the exchange. If Citizen B did not agree, then it must be because Citizen B knew he was wealthier and therefore Citizen B should – and would be required to – bear the burden of providing the ship. This was a very dramatic means of pursuing (some) progressivity in taxation. 29 There could also be collateral consequences to shirking on liturgies, as the issue could be held against one in collateral litigation, and wealthy Athenians tended to have a lot of such litigation. 30
The larger socio-legal context is important to note here for at least two reasons: First, if there was not general compliance with the imposition of liturgies, then this informal system of public financing would have broken down. Athens could not have used liturgies as a major revenue source if each liturgy resulted in an antidosis lawsuit. The potential of a lawsuit remained in the background. Second, we should remember that general compliance with liturgies was part of a larger institutional superstructure that placed a very high premium on citizen involvement at all levels – and did so with dramatic success along multiple registers. Josiah Ober has recently collected much of the evidence that points to Athens’ success 31 ; he also recounts the numerous means by which Athenian citizens aggregated and coordinated their efforts so as to achieve this success. 32
Athenian democratic rhetoric and practice was, accordingly, also far more forceful in reminding citizens of their place in a collective.
33
And so we have the great Athenian democratic statesman, Pericles, reported to have said the following: [W]e do not say that a man who takes no interest in politics is a man who minds his own business; we say that he has no business here at all. We Athenians, in our own persons, take our decisions on policy or submit them to proper discussions . . .
34
It is hard, for this modern at least, to imagine a similarly intense demand that citizens attend to their polity even when presented with Ober’s compelling evidence as to the potential of Athenian direct democracy. This imaginative failing illustrates (in part) the vast gap between our situation and that of Athens. 35 And, looked at from the other side, even Tocquevillian democracy, which seems almost as unimaginable as Athenian democracy, might have seemed boring to an Athenian, much less the system we have now would seem boring, especially the part of the system that is the subject of The Pale King – the federal income tax. The federal income tax did not become a “mass tax” until the emergency of World War II, and has stayed so since. With the advent of a mass tax there came the need for a massive bureaucracy, a bureaucracy charged with measuring income. 36 We do not need to rely on an income tax, and certainly not one as complicated as the one we currently have, but we do. This means that the large bureaucracy in charge of collecting the income tax must be master of extraordinary arcane knowledge. Wallace’s repeated suggestions that the IRS is a sort of a priestly class builds from this observation.
Wallace’s novel is loaded with the (often hysterical) details of this bureaucracy; its many divisions, divisions within divisions, and strange internal rituals. The headquarters of the IRS is known as “Triple-Six because of the address” and the three top officials of the IRS were known as the “Three-Personed God” (108). The IRS has its own seal – featuring Bellerophon slaying the Chimera – and motto (in Latin, and this is Wallace’s translation) – “He is the one doing a difficult, unpopular job” (244). All employees of the IRS receive a new social security number for life – “[t]he Service knows its own, always” (66n.1). Rote examiners are called “wigglers” (68 n.3) and the members of the temporary support staff are called “turdnagels” (305). Not all of the details are obviously false – the details of whether or not a taxpayer must report a state tax refund as income strikes this observer as being built on actual understanding of the issue (326–7), even if the dramatic setting in which the issue is discussed is clearly fictional. 37
III. Philosophy of our Tax: Boredom and Adolescence
So a mass income tax requires a massive tax priesthood. This in itself is an insight about the tax system explored by Wallace and yet, though these IRS priests have an almost occult knowledge of what constitutes income, this does not explain why they do what they do or why we taxpayers want them to go on doing what they are doing. In other words, there is not yet an animating philosophy.
However, as we already saw in passing, Wallace does loosely articulate an evolving philosophy for the IRS (and for us who are governed by it). Certain characters, particularly those associated with the way the IRS used to do things, have a sense that what the IRS is doing is enforcing civic virtue, that is, as agents, they are working as minders of their fellow citizens as the collective strives towards true community.
The Pale King’s IRS has a newly emerging philosophy that is economic, “[t]he point is efficiency and economy” (327). The novel hints at a new regime where the soul-crushing work of the IRS examiners will be replaced by calculating machines using algorithms. Ultimately, it appears that the novel was to feature a contest between a set of quirky human examiners and machines. It is unclear what the outcome might have been, but the arc of the novel implies a victory – at least bureaucratically – of the machines. 38
And why not? Why shouldn’t machines do a mechanical job aiming at a mechanical aim? How could a small band of remote priests impose civic virtue on such a mass? Especially since the mass does not want civic virtue. Civic virtue is a vestige, it is not the philosophy of tax – not for our tax system anyway. But the emerging philosophy of tax is not just about efficiency. Wallace’s examiners see their (new) role a bit more broadly: [W]e [Americans] hate [the government] for appearing to usurp the very civic functions we’ve ceded to it . . . It’s like [we] expect the government to be the parent that takes away the dangerous toy, and until it does [we’ll] go right on playing with it (135, 138).
So the IRS, like the government generally, takes on an increasingly parental ethos of efficiency as a complement to our communal “regress[ion]” to a sulky adolescence (135). 39 We have a deep desire to be free to rant and rave about the government, and especially its revenue collectors, but ultimately we want to be taken care of by that same government. The philosophy that emerges from our tax system consists of a cynical dance between a knowing, but hated, bureaucracy and a childish population. This is neither a system governed by civic virtue nor simply one governed by efficiency.
Note that either as enforcers of civic virtue or as stern parents, the role played by an IRS examiner is ethical in a manner that making the choice for As the World Turns cannot be, and this is precisely because this choice involves one in service to other people. This is a venerable and intuitive point 40 and I will not dwell on it except to note that Wallace has illustrated the specific way the IRS serves others – even if seemingly in spite of what the others want. It is also the case that the role of IRS examiner comes with its own constraints; in hearing the call of accounting one is limiting one’s freedom, which, as Fogle observes, is paradoxically the only way to be free.
IV. Philosophy of Our Tax: Boredom and Transcendence
1 Classifying Boredom
Might we learn something further about our system and ourselves? An individual can make a proper choice and adopt the role of a tax examiner, but note that this role is, at least in the novel, increasingly the role of a babysitter. But why does our philosophy of tax so resemble babysitting? Why do we need to be babysat by the officials we ask to manage our society’s revenue function? The Athenians did not require this. Even now, we do not ask our water engineers to treat us in this way. One interesting path to consider is whether I have used “boredom” consistently. Is the boredom that Fogle freed himself from the same as the boredom described by Dean? What about the boredom that we, as citizens, experience in pondering our tax code? This last kind of boredom, boredom with the entire system, is central to Wallace’s narrative in at least two ways. First, Wallace tells us that we as citizens feel a kind of boredom vis-à-vis the tax code (83), which is inherent to why the IRS must treat us as sullen children. We don’t want to know or understand, just whine. Second, the ease with which we, following Wallace, assume that the work of the IRS is deadly dull is itself an indicator of this peculiar aspect of our culture, namely that we find how we fund our government unbearably tedious. The work of an actual IRS examiner is likely not particularly boring, as it involves exercising significant intellectual judgment and discrimination. 41
Heidegger’s famous lectures on boredom introduce and analyze key distinctions between different kinds of boredom – all of which are to be found in The Pale King. Indeed, The Pale King’s descriptions of boredom parallel those of Heidegger, as do many of the novel’s implicit conclusions.
The first kind of boredom accords most with the dictionary definition. This is the boredom we experience when we sit in a waiting room for a doctor or a plane; this boredom is unpleasant, “oppressive.” 42 We are bored by the waiting room because the plane we had expected to take is not there. 43 Wallace’s description of the clocks in the examiner’s room would seem to capture the boredom of being confronted with objects that resist what we would like them to do: “The rule was, the more you looked at the clock the slower time went. None of the wigglers wore a watch . . .” (377).
Though it may seem that this is the kind of boredom afflicting Wallace’s examiners, Heidegger’s second type of boredom is also apt. This is the boredom of time somehow poorly spent, being bored with a situation. Consider Lane Dean again. He is waiting for a break. Once the break arrived, he imagined himself “running around . . . and shouting gibberish and holding ten cigarettes in his mouth like a panpipe” (379). But “he knew what he’d really do on the break was sit facing the wall clock in the lounge and despite prayers and effort sit counting the seconds tick until he had to come back and do this again” (379).
Not surprisingly, Dean’s situation is a much more evocative description than Heidegger’s example of this second kind of boredom. Heidegger’s example is of going to a pleasant party for the evening – “we come home quite satisfied . . . and then it comes: I was bored after all this evening” even though nothing in particular was boring at the party. 44 The party example is helpful. We went to the party just to pass the time, just as Lane Dean has joined the IRS because this is what he must do to support his family. Nothing further is sought from the party or from one’s job, which, for Heidegger, means we are slipping away from ourselves, our proper (eigentlich) selves. 45
The two kinds of boredom are connected. In the first there is a determinate boring thing, not so in the second, 46 but the key is that our time is brought to a standstill before us. 47 We are enchained to the present moment 48 and yet we, as human beings, do not just live in the present. It is not proper to who we are to act as if we do only live in the present – to act, as Heidegger will ultimately suggest, like an animal. 49 Animals live only in the present. We all have a past that formed us and have a future that we are always heading into, even if, at certain moments, indeed most, we are absorbed in the present, such as at a party or at a job, and not absorbed with . . . what? About this we are not yet sure, but the intuition is clear. Just as my limited time can be obliterated by being bored in a waiting room (the first kind of boredom), so too can it be obliterated by constant activity, even pleasant activity (the second kind of boredom). We are all familiar with the phrase “no time for myself,” where what I would do with that time is not so much the point so much as that my time is being filled from without.
2 Heidegger on Profound Boredom
When Heidegger describes the final form of boredom, profound boredom, it is a mood 50 not only with no object, but also with no subject. This is the special form of boredom that best characterizes modernity in general – including our collective boredom with taxes. The phrase Heidegger uses to describe this mood of profound boredom is “it is boring to one.” 51 More colloquially, we might just say that it is boring to anyone. Heidegger’s example of this is the boredom of walking “through the streets of a large city on a Sunday afternoon.” 52 The background here is that all the stores are closed and have been closed all day, as, of course, have all places of work. There is no one around a place designed for many people, no way to access spaces that are designed to otherwise be accessed. There is an element of power to this form of boredom – or rather powerlessness 53 – the stores are closed. They are all closed, and as closed we, in our walking through the closed city, are indifferent to them all equally. 54 In such a situation one is, as Heidegger puts it, “suspended.” 55
Wallace gives us a richer example. Let us return to the wastoid Fogle watching As the World Turns. He is not bored in the first sense; the show is on as expected. Certainly he seems in part bored in the second sense insofar as he is filling his time up, but what Fogle describes is not a life made busy with the mundane, but an indifference to all possibilities. Nothing seems to matter. In our ordinary way of thinking we might say that Fogle is lucky to be born into the privilege of having nothing matter – the child of a subsistence farmer could never achieve such a state. And yet this peculiarly modern state is also terrifying. As Heidegger puts this point: “[W]hat oppresses us most profoundly and in a concealed manner is the absence of any essential oppressiveness . . .” 56
Heidegger emphasizes that this refusal of the world around us to yield meaning can have profound results. 57 In refusing to grant us meaning and direction, in refusing to fill up our time (as at a pleasant party), this kind of boredom announces that we have meaningful possibilities, that we need not watch As the World Turns.
Heidegger is not describing a choice one makes to stop watching. This would be freedom as a simple choice among options – since at least Kant 58 this is not what has been meant when a thinker like Heidegger refers to freedom. Rather, moving from the couch and into a different life is in response to a call (Anrufen) one hears 59 ; one is impelled by virtue of the “moment of vision” granted by deep boredom. 60 In the end, Heidegger concludes “Only those who can truly give themselves a burden are free.” 61 Fogle, mired in boredom, hears such a call (literally) and, indeed, he makes a similar observation about freedom, that somehow he could only be free by making a choice to stop being free.
Heidegger describes boredom as a fundamental mood, one crucial for allowing us to think. We cannot dwell too much on the details of his argument here, but the upshot is that one first must be profoundly bored, must be faced with a world in which meaning has receded, before one can hear the call that will restore meaning through, paradoxically, experiencing freedom through the taking on of a burden. One result of this paradox is that the profound boredom of modernity can be the precondition to profound freedom. Note that this profound freedom cannot be characterized as burying oneself in frenetic activity of the type that characterizes the second type of boredom. 62
This might seem mysterious, but it need not. When we walk through the closed city, it is closed through no action of our own. Yet what better opportunity to reimagine the city than walking through the city when it is quiet and when one is not absorbed in everyday activities. Or there is Fogle’s story; it is a story in which he is one of many who is oppressed by not being oppressed. If Fogle himself had the power to choose something else, then he would not have been bored in Heidegger’s sense to begin with. But if he had not been bored, he could not have heard a call and assumed a burden – or such is the arc of Wallace’s narrative.
3 Tax and Our Profound Boredom
By definition, we cannot simply will the moment of insight that Fogle experiences. Furthermore, we may be skeptical of the philosophical import of such epiphanies. Nevertheless, we can dwell with what boredom reveals, even if what we learn is less exalted. 63 Boredom is a kind of precondition for criticism – or, as Heidegger puts it (and Wallace echoes), the withdrawal of meaning characteristic of boredom is a calling that indicates our proper possibilities. 64 What is profoundly boring is not arbitrarily so, but is a specific aspect of ourselves that we can learn from. Our tax code is not a small part of who we are – asking why our tax system is boring is asking about ourselves.
And our tax code is boring; we find not only examples of this, but many reasons why this is so in The Pale King. We get a clear sense of the scale of the endeavor and of the analytic conundrums that must be wrestled with imposing an income tax. We are given to understand that “we,” the citizens, do not want to understand how we are taxed and that politicians (of many kinds) have an incentive to keep the system as opaque as it is, and perhaps to increase it. 65 All of these elements of Wallace’s narrative find support in the traditional tax literature, and so he is hardly indulging in a “mere” fiction.
Why have we let tax become boring? It is tempting to suggest that this did not have to happen, that even now we can still take control of our tax system, that we can counter our boredom through greater political involvement, at least of a Tocquevillian sort. For example, our system need not be so complicated and we can resist attempts that seem to make it more “hidden.” Perhaps this is so, and there are suggestions that it is the lost civic virtue of the older examiners that we should be pursuing or at least should be nostalgic for (84). 66 Yet I do not think this is all that Wallace suggests.
Perhaps, despite its importance, tax does not necessarily have to become interesting for we, ourselves, to become interesting. Or, more precisely, we only need to find ourselves “interesting” because of the rise of its opposite, finding ourselves “boring.” Perhaps overcoming boredom requires not so much our becoming interesting, but our becoming neither boring nor interesting, of our finding meaning in some new (old?) way. Perhaps, as regards to tax, it is not that we should make tax interesting but figure out how to leave it alone. After all, even a limited world can be infused with meaning. A different IRS examiner recounts the following: We had us a big dog that my daddy would keep on a chain in the front yard. A big part German shepherd. I hated the chain but we didn’t have a fence, we were right off the road there. The dog hated the chain. But he had dignity. What he’d do, he never go out to the length of the chain . . . Out of dignity, this dog pretended like he chose this one area to stay in that just happened to be inside the length of the chain. Nothing outside of that area right there interested him . . . So he never noticed the chain. He didn’t hate it. The chain. He just up and made it not relevant. Maybe he wasn’t pretending – maybe he really up and chose that little circle for his own world. All of his life on that chain. I loved that damn dog (117).
But why might we see tax as a chain that ought not to be fought? Let us return again to Fogle’s story. Fogle’s father, perhaps as a precondition to his son’s epiphany, 67 dies partially as a result of “a major tax-policy boner [committed by the State of Illinois], which actually could have been easily prevented if anyone in the State Treasurer’s Office had bothered to consult with the Service . . .’’ (194).
Note that Wallace’s narrative indicates not only that tax can be deadly serious, but that expert tax theorists can reveal dangerously foolish tax policy. What would the IRS have told the state officials? “[T]he average taxpayer will always do whatever the law allows him to do in order to minimize taxes” (195). In other words, what the IRS would have supposedly shared was a piece of wisdom about human nature applied to the efficient collection of taxes.
And what did the State of Illinois try to do? The State wanted to make the sales tax “progressive” in order to “raise state tax revenues while not inflicting harm on the state’s poor . . . The idea was the more you bought the more paid” (194). In other words, the State was trying to make its tax system more just (at least according to one approach to justice) – much like the Athenians with their exchange procedure. However, the problem with having the sales tax rate increase with proportion to each sale was that now taxpayers had incentive to consummate lots of little sales and not just one big one. The threshold for the lowest rate was $5.00 and so “retail chaos” ensued: So, at the store, you suddenly had everyone buying under $5.00 worth of groceries and running out to their car … and running back in and buying another amount . . . Supermarkets’ checkouts started going all the way to the back of the store . . . gas stations were even worse . . . (195).
The final thing to note about this hysterical failure to make a tax system more just is that, though the attempt founders on human nature, it does succeed in getting citizens to pay attention to their taxes – indeed, it succeeds in making taxes rather interesting.
So how might our taxes be like the dog’s chain? Let’s return to the forces that have made taxes (and much else!) boring, such as the scale of our society and our government. Even if we want things to be otherwise, can this reality be changed such that an Athenian or Tocquevillian system of taxation – certainly not boring – could then return? Since we are bored we can take a moment to ponder this. Could a state even loosely resembling ours be funded without a massive tax bureaucracy? If it could, even in theory, what are the cultural preconditions? If we can scarcely imagine an Athens with social insurance and universal education as a possibility for us, then does it matter if there is some abstract theoretical possibility? Is it not more dignified, like the dog, to accept that the modern tax system is boring and must remain so? And perhaps then the adult thing is to let the tax system be boring, but also to let it be excellent in its boredom, avoiding catastrophes like the one that befell Fogle’s dad. The irony could be that in finding that modern tax is properly boring then we will have opened the door to finding our proper selves, to assuming a proper burden.
Leaving our tax system as a tool to be manipulated by experts, even experts who have heard a call, might seem to be childish, but is it more childish than to rant and complain about a system we do not understand and on some level do not want to change? If we did leave the structure of the system to experts, perhaps we could then have adult conversations about what it is we should like the system to achieve. Even in democratic Athens, highly suspicious of the oligopolistic tendencies of rule by experts, there were mechanisms by which expert opinions could be aggregated and acted upon. 68 There have been similar contemporary institutional reforms proposed to aggregate expert knowledge, including expert tax knowledge. 69 In such proposals, the philosophy of tax (objective genitive) is left to the democratic citizenry. It is they who decide how much redistribution there will be, if any. Yet such proposals allow the philosophy of tax (subjective genitive) to become one of thoughtful expertise and not sullen babysitting.
I will end with the words of the David Foster Wallace who is a character in his final work: Of those parts of life that are and must be dull. Why this silence? Maybe it’s because the subject is, in and of itself, dull . . . only then we’re right back where we started, which is tedious and irksome. There may, though, I opine, be more to it . . . as in vastly more, right here before us, hidden by virtue of its size (85).
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Brian Galle, Tom Grey, Sarah Lawsky, Ethan Leib, Philippe Nonet, Stephani Shanske, Shalini Satkunanandan, Lawrence Zelenak, and an anonymous reviewer for Law, Culture and the Humanities.
1.
New York: Little Brown and Company, 2011. All parenthetical references in the text are to the novel.
2.
Internal Revenue Service, 2010 Data Book, Tbl 29.
3.
See Editor’s Note to The Pale King.
4.
See id.
5.
Fogle calls the watching of the foot a “ritual” that he (and his roommate) believed made them appear “nihilistically wastoid and hip” (163).
6.
Fogle is also later described as a “low-level True Believer on whom the Service depended on so heavily . . .” (271 n.17).
7.
The modern philosophers most appealed to in this regard are Rawls, usually opposed by Nozick. Compare John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1971), p. 277 (“[The] task [of the distribution branch of government] is to preserve an approximate justice in distributive shares by means of taxation and the necessary adjustments in the rights of property”) with Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974), p. 169 (claiming, with little qualification, that “[t]axations of earning from labor is on par with forced labor”). The early modern philosophers most commonly appealed to are Kant (seen as an inspiration by Rawls, supra at 251–7) and Locke (seen as an inspiration by Nozick, supra at 9). Examples of the application of these philosophies to tax are extraordinarily numerous. See, e.g., Miranda Perry Fleischer, “Theorizing The Charitable Tax Subsidies: The Role Of Distributive Justice,” 87 Washington University Law Review 505 (2010); Neil H. Buchanan, “What Do We Owe Future Generations?,” 77 George Washington Law Review
8.
The example is not arbitrary, as this is an important part of understanding ancient Greek grammar. See, e.g., Herbert Weir Smyth, Greek Grammar (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1920), §§ 1330–31.
9.
See generally Lars Svendsen, A Philosophy of Boredom (London: Reaktion Books, 2005), pp. 20–21; Patricia Meyer Spacks, Boredom (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 1–30.
10.
Svendsen, A Philosophy of Boredom, p. 153; see also Meyer Spacks, Boredom, at pp. 21–2.
11.
See id.; see also Peter Toohey, Boredom: A Lively History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), p. 150; Barbara Dalle Pezze and Carlo Salzani, “The Delicate Monster: Modernity and Boredom” in Barbara Dalle Pezze and Carlo Salzani, eds., Essays on Boredom and Modernity (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009), pp. 12–13.
12.
Cf. Toohey, Boredom, pp. 168–9 (finding it implausible that simple boredom was ever “discovered,” but noting that what he calls existential boredom, which does seem to have a later provenance, might have emerged only recently); see also generally Elizabeth S. Goodstein, Experience Without Qualities: Boredom and Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), pp. 18, 28, 406–7 (arguing that the inability to understand one’s own boredom as historical is itself part of what it means to be bored in modernity).
13.
See, e.g., Wijnand A. P. van Tilburg and Eric R. Igou, “On Boredom and Social Identity: A Pragmatic Meaning-Regulation Approach,” 37 Personal & Social Psychology Bulletin 1679 (2011) (finding connection between boredom and meaning manifested in evaluations of ingroups versus outgroups; boredom, apparently through undermining one’s sense of a meaningful place in the world, tends to increase hostility towards outgroups); see also Joseph Boden, “The Devil Inside: Boredom Proneness and Impulsive Behavior” in Dalle Pezze and Salzani, Essays on Boredom and Modernity, p. 203.
14.
2 Oxford English Dictionary 413 “This [word] … arose after 1750; etymology unknown . . . The phrase ‘French bore’ naturally suggests that the word is of French origin”); Meyer Spacks, Boredom, at pp. 13–14. Indeed Meyer Spacks articulates a similar theory about words emerging from a kind of cultural necessity, id., pp. 10–12. I do not know if Wallace read Meyer Spacks’s book (published in 1995), but it seems likely to me.
15.
Cf. Spacks, Boredom, p. 272; see also Goodstein, Experience Without Qualities, p. 13.
16.
Note that the ghost (Garrity) that appears to Dean observes that the word “interesting” appears in English only two years after “bore” (385). The implication being that one cannot be found interesting until one can be found to be boring. Once again, Meyer Spacks makes the same point. Meyer Spacks, Boredom, pp. 113–16.
17.
Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, William McNeill & Nicholas Walker trans. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995), p. 77 (emphasis in original). Note that Heidegger, in this same passage, writes that an “indifference yawns at us out of all things,” another description strongly reminiscent of Fogle’s situation. Heidegger then makes it clear that, in fighting this indifference, we must find a role for ourselves – again, just like Fogle. We should observe that just because Heidegger (like Wallace) partakes in the traditional account of boredom does not mean that his account of boredom remains grounded in historical details – to the contrary. See Goodstein, Experience Without Qualities, pp. 332–3.
18.
Bryan Camp, “Theory and Practice in Tax Administration,” 29 Virginia Tax Review 227, 251 (2009) (“In 1982, the Service began planning for an automated exam program to remove the human element”).
19.
Camp, “Theory and Practice in Tax Administration,” p. 249.
20.
This battle between the efficiency and virtue also, according to Wallace, mapped onto an operational battle in the IRS “over human v. digital enforcement of the tax code” (82). This is not to say that Wallace accurately describes actual battles within the IRS. Lawrence Zelenak, “The Great American Tax Novel,” 110 Michigan Law Review 969, 971–5 (2012).
21.
See generally, e.g., Camp, “Theory and Practice in Tax Administration,” and Lawrence Zelenak, “Justice Holmes, Ralph Kramden, and The Civic Virtues of a Tax Return Filing Requirement,” 61 Tax Law Review 53 (2008).
22.
See, e.g., Glenn W. Fisher, The Worst Tax? A History of the Property Tax in America (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1996), p. 102.
23.
Camp, “Theory and Practice in Tax Administration,” p. 234.
24.
Camp, “Theory and Practice in Tax Administration,” pp. 238–43.
25.
I think this is a fair, though terse and insufficiently qualified, gloss on de Tocqueville given his famous concern with democratic individualism. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop trans. and eds. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2000), pp. 482–4, 643–5.
26.
Cf. Isis I. Leslie, “From Idleness to Boredom: On the Historical Development of Modern Boredom” in Dalle Pezze and Salzani, Essays on Boredom and Modernity, pp. 35, 42 (also finding in democratic Athens an illuminating contrast to modernity).
27.
Douglas M. MacDowell, The Law in Classical Athens (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978), pp. 161–4. Liturgies may have been wholly voluntary at one point, but the social and legal means of ensuring such voluntariness became part of the machinery of the mature Athenian democracy. Josiah Ober, Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 199–205.
28.
Ober, Mass and Elite, pp. 199–205.
29.
Cf. Nicholas Kyriazis, “Financing the Athenian State: Public Choice in the Age of Demosthenes,” 27 European Journal of Law and Economics 109, 125 (2009) (“The citizens of ancient Athens . . . participated actively in decision-making in the field of finance and economics . . . Athenians evolved an elaborate structure of decision-making but also types of revenue for the budget that have a very modern character, like progressive income-property taxation . . . Today’s representative democracies have strayed from the old Athenian (and that of other Greek city-states) ideal of participative democracy.”). The exchange was also a method that leveraged local knowledge to achieve a fairly precise result. Josiah Ober, Democracy and Knowledge (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), pp. 129–30.
30.
Adrian Lanni, “Social Norms in the Courts of Ancient Athens,” 1 Journal of Legal Analysis 691, 704–5 (2009).
31.
Ober, Democracy and Knowledge, pp. 37–8.
32.
For instance, the agenda for the Athenian Assembly was set by a Council of 500 composed of an equal number of representatives from each political subunit of Athens. Ober, Democracy and Knowledge, pp. 142–3.
33.
And there is a lot more to be considered here, including that the Athenians (accurately) perceived their polis to be in fairly constant mortal peril, with the result that there was not much debate about the import of defense expenditures or the need to be unified in the face of the enemy. Ober, Democracy and Knowledge, p. 100.
34.
Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War § 2.40.
35.
This gap is also illustrated by my recoiling, as a normative matter, from the intense demands for social conformity that this type of social organization would seem to require.
36.
And indeed this change has been persuasively argued to itself be a partial result of a shift in political philosophy. See Ajay K. Mehrotra, “Envisioning the Modern American Fiscal State: Progressive-Era Economists and the Intellectual Foundations of the US Income Tax,” 52 UCLA Law Review 1793 (2004). But note that this is a shift in philosophy as imposed upon tax, and not the philosophy that emerges immanently from the tax system.
37.
See generally Zelenak, “The Great American Tax Novel,” p. 980 (concluding that “[t]he abundance and sophistication of all three types of factual assertions [in The Pale King] – accurate, fabricated, and mixed – indicate that Wallace must have undertaken a prodigious amount of self-education on substantive tax law, tax administration, and tax policy”).
38.
One reason for the confusion, aside from the facts that the novel is incomplete and anyway is dense with ambiguity, is that Wallace himself seems to have envisioned the character who is the strongest advocate for efficiency coming to a somewhat mystical understanding that, in fact, humans, aided by “a certain set of numbers” could “concentrate better” – and perhaps be more efficient than machines. See Notes and Asides 546.
39.
Or perhaps even regression to a fierce baby. In The Pale King, the David Foster Wallace character (a wiggler temporarily with the IRS) encounters such a baby and, after the baby clears its throat and says “well,” Wallace realizes that he “deferred to the baby . . . granted it full authority and . . . waited . . . in the knowledge that I was, thenceforth, this tiny white frightening thing’s to command, its instrument or tool” (393).
40.
See, e.g., William McDonald, “Kierkegaard’s Demonic Boredom,” in Dalle Pezze and Salzani, Essays on Boredom and Modernity, p. 70 (explicating Kierkegaard).
41.
Zelenak, “The Great American Tax Novel,” p. 979.
42.
Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, pp. 93, 99.
43.
Id., p. 105.
44.
Id., p. 109.
45.
Id., p. 119; the German text is from 180 of the German edition. Martin Heidegger, Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik, Gesamtausgabe Band 29/30 (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klosterman, 1983). Heidegger uses striking language in this passage, making it clear that we are justified (berechtigen) in letting our proper self slip away, indeed that we have done nothing unjust (Unrecht) or harmful (Schaden) to ourselves in so doing. Perhaps even the opposite. One thinks here again of Lane Dean, who has joined the Service explicitly to support his wife and child (380). Wallace provides us with an extraordinary passage about Dean’s initial decision to stay with the girlfriend he had gotten pregnant (36–43).
46.
Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, p. 114.
47.
Id., p. 127.
48.
Id., p. 125.
49.
Or perhaps like a kind of mystic. Ultimately, this is why I am not focusing on Shane Drinion, a strikingly successful examiner whose concentration is so extraordinary that he actually levitates (469). In the primary scene we have featuring Drinion, he slowly levitates as he listens to a long monologue given by a character depicted in the novel as exceptionally boring (489), though, in fact, we readers may well find the monologue fascinating. In any event, Drinion seems to suggest the possibility of literally transcending boredom by becoming spectacularly boring oneself, as he is represented in the scene as largely affectless (448, 460–61) and thus open to complete immersion in the present. This representation is itself consistent with the tradition of boredom; boredom is an experience that is somehow “without qualities” and which produces people without qualities, and such people are somehow not properly human because they are shorn of a meaningful past and future. See generally Goldstein, Experience Without Qualities (following Musil). Drinion is thus not a template for “escaping” boredom but is the physical manifestation of what it means to be profoundly bored. I am indebted to Professor Zelenak for a valuable exchange about Drinion.
50.
And so not a one-time experience, but a state one finds oneself in and which might be difficult to get out of.
51.
Id., p. 134.
52.
Id., p. 135.
53.
Id., p. 136.
54.
Id., p. 137.
55.
Id., p. 140.
56.
Id., p. 163.
57.
Id., p. 143.
58.
See, e.g., id., p.166 (248 of German edition) – this is the difference between Freiheit and Willkür. See also Shalini Satkunanandan, “The Extraordinary Categorical Imperative,” 39 Political Theory 234, 245 (2011).
59.
Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, p. 143.
60.
Id., p. 151.
61.
Id., p. 166.
62.
Id.
63.
Cf. Svendsen, A Philosophy of Boredom, pp. 153–4.
64.
Nietzsche puts the point this way: “For thinkers and all sensitive spirits, boredom is that disagreeable ‘windless calm’ of the soul that precedes a happy voyage and cheerful winds.” Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1887, trans. Walter Kaufmann 1974), § 42.
65.
For example, Wallace’s IRS examiners are aware of Reagan’s theory of tax cuts and the notion that the cuts were supposed to result in more revenue (107). They link the tax cuts, which result in less revenue, to the imperative that a new efficient IRS close the tax gap; this was a way to cure the failure of the theory (and resulting giant deficits) without actually raising taxes (110–13, 148).
66.
I think this reading, for example, is plausible: “[T]he Initiative [to further automate the IRS] marks the turn from the model of the IRS as simply a tax-collecting service to one of a for-profit corporation; from assuring general compliance to pursuing only the most profitable audits. What Wallace casts as a sort of recession from the Service’s civic responsibility into a state of moral ambivalence would be, in a completed version of “The Pale King,” the novel’s eminent crisis.” Ryan J. Meehan, “Wallace’s Unfinished Novel Assesses Metaphysical Accounts,” 
. Relatedly, Dreyfus and Kelly read the excerpts from The Pale King as suggesting that the only cure for modern boredom is a kind of willful overcoming. Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly, All Things Shining (New York: Free Press, 2011), pp. 22–57.
67.
We only know about this incident as related by Fogle in his mini-Bildungsroman about his joining the Service.
68.
Ober, Democracy and Knowledge, pp. 118–67.
69.
See, e.g., Ethan J. Leib and Christopher S. Elemendorf, “Why Party Democrats Need Popular Democracy and Popular Democrats Need Parties,” 100 California Law Review 69, 100–107 (2012).