Courtesy Farrar, Straus and Giroux
|
Web-Exclusive Book Review
Doing Nothing: A History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers, and Bums in America
By Tom Lutz (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Review by Allan Fallow, August 2006
|
Nothing could be simpler than doing nothing.
Or so you'd think.
In this energetic overview of indolence, literature professor Tom Lutz claims that choosing not to work can be a complex form of social dissent. He neatly severs the supposed link between individual industry and personal worth. Less successfully, for my money, he tries to prove that certain freeloaders are essentially free thinkers—and that their inertia is a stinging critique of the hollow hurly-burly of modern life.
Lutz kicks things off with a refreshing corrective. Whereas work in America today is "perhaps our prime moral imperative," for millennia before that it was nothing to write home about. Indeed, the vast bulk of humanity's brief time on Earth has been a case study in antipathy to toil. Expelling Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, God condemned the pair to a life of hard labor: "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread." To the historian in Lutz, "The necessity to work for survival is thus, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, the original curse, the punishment for the original sin."
This aversion to exertion held strong in classical cultures, which viewed work as the enterprise of "mortals in a fallen world, the province of slaves, or punishment for decadence or debt. There was no work ethic as we know it, only forms of coercion." Pick a cradle of modern civilization, says Lutz—the Tigris-Euphrates Valley, classical Greece, imperial Rome—and you will find an outlook that honored work "only to the extent that it made possible the vita contemplativa, the higher life of the mind."
Roman philosopher Cicero, for one, saw downtime as crucial to the creation of art or literature. He called it otium cum dignitate, or "leisure with dignity" (as opposed to negotium, or crass commerce). Yet in doing so, Lutz suggests, Cicero stitched a blanket excuse beneath which generations of later scholar-slackers would justify their lives of disso— er, contemplation.
Doing Nothing makes mincemeat of the cherished Western precept that work has intrinsic merit. Not until the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century, we learn, did an internalized work ethic take shape in the West. Until then, "there could be no slackers in the modern sense—people whose identity involved their refusal to believe in the value of work—because everyone, in a way, was already against work. Everyone, we might say, was a slacker."
Lutz's story gains traction in the 1770s, a time when Enlightenment giant Benjamin Franklin was "helping to invent the work ethic as we know it." As Lutz points out, "It is Franklin who first said 'Time is money,' and this brief phrase frames the American understanding of work from then on." (Franklin also admonished the public that "Sloth…shortens life.")
But did Franklin practice his preachings? Uh, "not entirely," in today's weasel words. In fact, Lutz presents Franklin as the embodiment of a naughty little truth about the work ethic: "Its loudest champions are often its most reckless violators."
Indeed, since its birth in the Industrial Age, the work ethic has always nurtured a shadowy doppelgänger—call it the shirk ethic. Armed with the knowledge of this double standard, the modern reader may not share future president John Adams's shock at the work habits of a certain fellow delegate to Paris in 1778:
'I found out that the business of our commission would never be done unless I did it…The life of Dr. Franklin was a scene of continual dissipation…It was later when he breakfasted, and as soon as breakfast was over, a crowd of carriages came to his levee…some philosophers, academicians, and economists…but by far the greater part were women... He came home at all hours.'
Throughout Doing Nothing, Lutz the compleat academic takes pains to defend the queer blend of static activity that has always made "writers, intellectuals, and professionals, all those whose work isn't of the more obvious, physical kind," appear to be wastrels and layabouts to the energy-afflicted among us. Yet some diehard intellectuals did struggle mightily to get up off the couch. New England nabob Nathaniel Hawthorne, for one, joined the Transcendentalist commune Brook Farm, which was founded in 1841 and lasted some six years. Hawthorne lasted four months. On first exchanging pen for pitchfork, the author of The House of the Seven Gables trumpeted his prowess at chopping wood and turning a grindstone "all the forenoon": "It is an endless surprise to me how much work there is to be done in the world; but, thank God, I am able to do my share of it—and my ability increases daily." That was in April. By August Hawthorne was lamenting physical labor as "the curse of the world," and he quit the commune two weeks later.
Countless other historical figures fare just as poorly when their behavior is refracted through the Lutz prism. You and I may revere Theodore Dreiser as the mastermind responsible for An American Tragedy, but here he is a washout at every traditional job he tried: onion weeder, dishwasher, store clerk, studio assistant, railyard worker, real estate salesman, bill collector. (Dreiser even failed at embezzling.) You and I may celebrate Theodore Roosevelt for his visionary expansion of the National Park System, but in the Lutz canon he "helped institutionalize a space for legitimized slacking." And George W. Bush is "likely [to] go down in history as our slacker president."
Is it mere vindictive glee to expose the nation's busy beavers as slugabeds? I would have said yes on first reading Doing Nothing. Comb the text a second or third time, however, and Lutz's true aim—to reveal the lounger lifestyle as the "pathological flip side [of] workaholism"—starts to make sense. Bringing his narrative into the present, Lutz admiringly profiles a wealth of creative types who feign to be flâneurs yet qualify as founding members of Workaholics Anonymous. Among them is Douglas Coupland, the novelist who nailed the slacker demographic with his eponymous Generation X. (He also coined the terms "McJob" and "Microserf" and branded office cubicles "veal-fattening pens.") Coupland, by contrast, is an acolyte of accomplishment, having churned out three zeitgeist-defining manifestos—Generation X (1991), Shampoo Planet (1993), and Microserfs (1995)—in four short years.
AARP: Lifestyle Information for People 50 and Over
The entertaining and informative content on AARPmagazine.org is just one of the many benefits of AARP membership—only $12.50 a year. Join or renew online today!
Or take Richard Linklater, the inventive director whose Slacker (1991) Lutz extols as "the definitive film on the slacker ethos at its height in the early 1990s." (Lutz likewise consecrates Ferris Bueller's Day Off and the little-known but legendary Office Space.) Linklater resists the media mantle of generational standard-bearer, insisting instead that Slacker portrays "an ageless rejection of the societal pressure to work in traditional ways." Yet as Lutz remarks, what would Linklater really know about loafing? The many years he spent apparently "doing nothing" actually constituted a full-immersion apprenticeship in filmmaking, so Slacker is the antithesis of a genuine goof-off screed: "Writer/director/producer Linklater, at 45, has his 15th movie in production.… Real slackers would be, logically, too slack to write their own history."
These divided loyalties exert a tidal pull on Tom Lutz. "I aspire to be a complete slacker," he would have us believe. He then attempts to cast himself as a couch potato—a social critic whose profession demands a lot of sitting on the sofa, studying such cultural effluvia as books and blogs, magazines and newspapers, movies and websites, broadcast and cable. Yet in common with Coupland and Linklater and other idlers manqués, Lutz betrays himself to be a prisoner—nay, a willing slave—of a labor compulsion "that digs its dominatrix heel into my back and rarely lets me up."
I see myself as overly concerned with my work, my success, my status, my accomplishments or lack thereof.… I hop out of bed feeling already behind, and caffeine keeps me going late. I edit my prose on the treadmill at my gym. I read articles in the professional journals while I'm editing film clips to show a class.
Like its nonloafing author, there is precious little that Doing Nothing does not strive to do. The book is exhaustively researched, cleverly constructed, eloquently argued, and—with a few trivial exceptions—expertly edited. (A shout-out to Farrar, Straus and Giroux for advancing industry standards.) Readers of the book therefore have a right to expect it to perform some concrete critical service. It might, for example, have pinpointed how—aside from the random foosball table installed in the game room of software start-ups—labor-force refuseniks have materially altered the complexion of work today.
Lutz verges tantalizingly close to that topic, but Doing Nothing never really answers its own hard-working questions. Merely by posing them, however, it is admirably doing something.
Allan Fallow, managing editor of AARP Books, wrote this review on his "days off" in July. His quest continues to convince his wife that Doing Nothing is not a chronicle of the Fallow family.
Read Allan's review of Blow the House Down
|
