Idle worship is the the flip side of the work ethic

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BY L. KENT WOLGAMOTT/ Lincoln Journal Star

Tomorrow Americans will celebrate work with — what else? — a day off. That Labor Day is a holiday reflects the duality that has been present in American working life since the days of Benjamin Franklin: the split between the Protestant work ethic that drives business and industry and slackers, the most recent term attached to those who’d rather not work and instead prefer to do as little as possible.

In “Doing Nothing: A History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers and Bums in America,” writer Tom Lutz details the history of that duality from Franklin through “Clerks,” telling a story of the flip side of the hard-working American myth and arguing that slackers will always be around.

“Every work ethic needs a slacker, so he appears everywhere that the industrial work does,” Lutz writes. “The stronger the work ethic, the more vibrant the slacker culture.”

Using Lutz’s book as a takeoff point, Sunday A.M. takes a look at the work ethic and slackerdom, providing a little history, a listing of loafer literature, the most recent highlights of slacker cinema, and a look at a slacker church.

So, in honor of the slacker in all of us, we invite you to sit down and read these brief accounts. They don’t require too much expenditure of energy. After all, there’s no reason to work on Labor Day weekend.

A history of the work ethic

The work ethic is ingrained in American culture and it is often proclaimed that it is rooted far back in history.

But an examination of attitudes toward work since the dawn of civilization finds something far different.

“From a historical perspective, the cultural norm placing a positive moral value on doing a good job because work has intrinsic value for its own sake was a relatively recent development,” writes Roger Hill in his “History of Work Ethic.”

“Work, for much of the ancient history of the human race, has been hard and degrading. Working hard — in the absence of compulsion — was not the norm for Hebrew, classical or medieval cultures. It was not until the Protestant Reformation that physical labor became culturally acceptable for all persons, even the wealthy.”

In a fact, the term “Protestant work ethic” wasn’t coined until 1904. According to German sociologist Max Weber, who coined the term, the 16th century French theologian John Calvin introduced the theological doctrines which, combined with those of Martin Luther, conveyed a significant new attitude toward work.

According to Calvin, all men must work because work is the will of God, and because men are God’s instruments on earth the earnings from that work should be reinvested in further ventures. So selection of an occupation and using it to earn the greatest amount possible became a religious duty for Calvinists.

That view of work fit perfectly with the demands placed on workers in industrial societies. By 1748, Benjamin Franklin had written “Advice to a Young Tradesman,” a document Weber selected as the example of the spirit of modern capitalism. Franklin’s advice goes beyond business tips, Weber noted. Franklin sees poor handling of money as a dereliction of duty, something Weber called an “ethos.”

“Since Franklin, that ethos has been preached, usually to the converted, over and over again, from the pulpits of the nineteenth century to the business bestsellers of the twenty-first,” write Tom Lutz in “Doing Nothing.”

But, as Lutz demonstrates in his “History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers and Bums in America,” there have always been those who took the other side of the work ethic argument.

In Franklin’s time, the spokesman for the other side was English writer Samuel Johnson, who introduced “The Idler” to the world in 1758. Johnson argued, tongue at least somewhat in cheek, that the Idler was the natural man.

“It has been found hard to describe man by an adequate definition,” he wrote. “Some philosophers have called him a reasonable animal; but others have considered reason as a quality of which many creatures partake. He has been termed likewise a laughing animal; but it is said some men have never laughed. Perhaps man may be more properly called the idle animal; for there is no man who is not sometimes idle.”

Johnson, Lutz points out, quickly admitted that even the most dedicated idlers had to do something to get enough money to live on. But idler, like his descendants throughout history, never worked too hard or too much.

Being an idler wasn’t entirely praiseworthy for Johnson, and Lutz argues that some of Franklin’s writings about moral perfection and the work ethic probably were intended to be read ironically. After all, irony and humor have long been the literary tool of the slacker.

There’s also plenty of irony to be found in the biographies of Franklin and Johnson.

After championing the work ethic, Franklin retired in his early 40s, conducting his famous experiments as a man of leisure and frustrating the likes of John Adams with his laziness during the Revolutionary War.

Writing about the idler was far from Johnson’s only literary effort. An industrious writer, Johnson wrote books and essays and compiled the first comprehensive dictionary of English.

Not exactly slacker work. But slackers who don’t work don’t get noticed. Which very likely is the point.

Slackers throughout history have been embraced and rejected by the culture, sometimes simultaneously — a reflection of our ambivalence toward work and not working.

“How can we be both of these things?” Lutz writes. “How can we be the laziest and the most driven people in history at the same time? The slacker is a figure that exists smack in the middle of these questions. … The figure of the slacker needs to mean different things to different people at different times in order to serve its complex function as a goad to examining our relation to work, as a role to adopt while finding our relation to work, as a critique of our culture’s twisty relation to work and to leisure and as a celebration of the same.”

Slackers shine on the big screen

Slackers have been present on the screen since the earliest days of cinema.

Among the most famous of the early slackers was Charlie Chaplin’s little tramp. In the ’50s, “Rebel Without A Cause” and its imitators captured a generation of slackers, and “Easy Rider” did much the same thing for the hippie generation of the ’60s.

But slacker cinema has flourished over the last two decades.

Here are some of the most representative recent slacker pictures. If you didn’t see them on screen because you were slacking, you can find most if not all of them in the video store. If going out is too much work, you can download many of them from the Web.

“Slacker” — Director Richard Linklater spent all of $23,000 to make this 1991 film that is essentially a day of wandering around Austin, Texas, talking to eccentric characters, most of whom have little obvious employment.

“Clerks” — Kevin Smith spent $4,000 more than Linklater in making his 1994 slacker classic about a convenience store clerk, his buddy who works at the video store next door and a pair of small-time drug dealers, all of whom mostly just hang out and do nothing. He followed it up this summer with “Clerks II” with the clerks having moved on to a Mcjob flipping burgers.

   Office Space” — This one trails off dramatically at the end. But the first half or so is a textbook example of the slacker in cubicleland.

“Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” — A slacker’s manual for the high school set, Ferris inspired a generation to blow off school, go somewhere and goof around.

“The Big Lebowski” — Let’s see, the main character is a pot smoker who lies around in a bathrobe. Call him a prototypical aging ’60s slacker.

“Wayne’s World” —  They still live in the basement, hang out with each other and achieve fame through public access cable. Slackers for sure.

“Ghost World” —  A slacker comic book comes to life.

“High Fidelity” — Record store clerk is one of the classic slacker jobs. Jack Black plays it to perfection.

“Kids” — Larry Clark’s harrowing film about teens in New York presents a dark side of youth doing nothing.

“Reality Bites” — Recent college grads do as little work as possible and discuss the meaning of life. A depiction of Generation X at its laziest.

Loafers of literature

Loafers have been literary characters since Herman Melville wrote about Bartleby the Scrivener in 1853.

We asked A Novel Idea book maven Cinnamon Dokken to scan her shelves and come up with some more representative volumes with slackers on the page.

Here’s her list, in chronological order of the year the books were published, and her comments on each:

“Madame Bovary” by Gustave Flaubert (1856) — “She wants everything and she won’t do anything.”

“The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925) — “Gatsby sort of turned himself into a slacker, acquired wealth and positioned himself in society to live the life of the rich and idle to attract the woman he loved when he lacked wealth.”

“Lolita” by Vladimir Nabokov (1955)  — “Humbert Humbert: total slacker. He just hung around checking out the little girls. That’s the worst kind of slacking.”

“On The Road” by Jack Kerouac (1957) — “Abandoning your wife and child to go on the road with your buddies. That’s a pretty slacker thing to do.” Kerouac writes about doing even less in 1958’s followup “The Dharma Bums,” which recounts a summer he spent manning a fire lookout station in a forest.

“The Last Picture Show” by Larry McMurtry (1966) — “There’s a great slacker character in this one. She was played by Cybill Shepherd in the movie.”

“Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values” by Robert Pirsig  (1974) — “The journey of slack.”

“The Autumn of the Patriarch” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1975) — “He’s kind of a doddering dictator. He would qualify.”

“Less Than Zero” by Bret Easton Ellis (1985)  — “Drug kid slack.”

“Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture” by Douglas Coupland (1991) — “He captures the slackers of his generation in all his books.”

“Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” by John Berendt (1995)  — “That’s a whole slacking society.”

“The Beach” by Alex Garland (1996)  — “This one turned into a bad Leonardo DiCaprio movie.”

All Jimmy Buffett books. — “Tropical slack.”

Church of the Subgenius irresistible to slackers

If you’re a true believer in slack — and believe that slack is synonymous with fun — check out the Church of the Subgenius.

Founded in 1980 by Rev. Ivan Stang of Cleveland, Ohio,  this “religion” worships a character named J.R. “Bob” Dobbs. In the church’s publications and on its Website, Bob is represented by the smiling face of a Dick Van Dykelike late ’50s/early ’60s successful suburbanite, smiling broadly with a pipe coming out of his mouth.

Repeatedly assassinated and resurrected, Bob spends his time battling the Conspiracy — that is, anything that hinders fun. That, of course, includes the low-level jobs held by many of the church’s members.

This religion disguised as a joke or joke disguised as a religion has flourished with the rise of the internet. Membership is cheap. You can become an ordained minister for all of $30.

That makes the Church of the Subgenius almost irresistible to slackers who have too much time on their hands and can delve into its deliberately confusing, often nonsensical doctrines and ramble away on blogs and message boards.

If you’re curious, go to www.subgenius.com.