Go to the ant, thou sluggard.
If any would not work, neither should he eat.
The used key is always bright.
Sloth makes all things difficult, but industry all easy.
Biblical chidings (the first two) and Poor Richard's proverbs (the second two) are enough to inspire any industrious worker to seek relief in a few hours of honest slacking. But start listening to the opposition:
"Work is the province of cattle" (Dorothy Parker).
"I think that there is far too much work done in the world" (Bertrand Russell).
"Hard work has a future. Laziness pays off now" (anonymous bumper sticker).
It is difficult to say that the company of these preachers would be any more companionable or satisfying. But as the evidence accumulates in Tom Lutz's new book, Doing Nothing: A History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers and Bums in America, slackers are often closet workers. Bertrand Russell's collected papers, after all, take up 34 volumes.
The preachers of work may have also been closet loafers. John Adams, who came to know and loathe Benjamin Franklin -- whose Poor Richard maxims Mark Twain once blamed for ruining every boy's childhood -- said that Franklin's life was "a scene of continual dissipation."
So if we can't trust anyone's word, what is all this debate about? It is not a casual question: Urgent issues seem to rest on whether it is better to lie on a beach or work incessantly on improving the world and one's own prospects within it. Arguments about the need for a "work ethic" have led to welfare reform (of which Lutz disapproves); descriptions of indolence have come up in discussions about the past of US President George W. Bush (of whom Lutz also disapproves). Last month Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton even suggested that young Americans believe that "work is a four-letter word."
Lutz was himself drawn into the debate when he found himself infuriated by his 18-year-old son, who decided to take off a year or two before college and was spending his time lying on his father's couch watching television. Lutz is tempted to suggest that he lacked the sense of calling that Max Weber ascribed to the Protestant ethic. But Lutz also chastises himself, acknowledging a "pathology that I share with many people" of the countercultural generation in his confused attitudes toward labor and idleness.
After all, when he was not much older than his son is now, he too engaged in doing nothing: He rode freight trains and hitchhiked, imagined becoming a latter-day Kerouac and took large quantities of drugs. But he also worked as a carpenter, cook, factory hand, piano tuner, landscaper, lumberjack, bartender and musician. "The Way of the Loafer," he writes "is steep and hard."
If the stock market is a battle between bulls and bears, Lutz's historical survey suggests that much of cultural life is a tug of war between workers and slackers (though it is often difficult to figure out who is which). At the same time, for example, that Franklin was setting down the principles of hard work and good fortune, Samuel Johnson, in England, was publishing The Idler, and suggesting possibilities latent in the lounger. Just as the Industrial Revolution was transforming working life, Lutz points out, the Romantic poets became what he calls "poets of indolence": Wordsworth wandered in England's Lake District, Byron's first poetry collection was called Hours of Idleness, and Keats wrote the Ode on Indolence. (Keats had also been described by a fellow student as "an idle, loafing fellow, always writing poetry.")
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