Add one more item to Ben Franklin's long list of accomplishments. In Doing Nothing: A History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers and Bums in America, Tom Lutz explains how the man who invented the lightning rod, among other breakthroughs, was also partially responsible for a much less dynamic phenomenon, the slacker.
Oh, there may have been lazy cavemen and feudal serfs who shirked their duties, but the slacker, Lutz asserts, is an essentially modern specimen. "Before the Industrial Revolution, the slacker as an identity, as a kind of person, did not exist." That's because he lacked a context in which to operate. In earlier cultures regular toil was no source of honor or dignity, nor a path toward the good life—it was the fate of slaves and servants, and thus universally reviled. "Antipathy toward labor, we might even say, has been the norm since the beginning of time," Lutz concludes.
In the mid-1700s, however, Ben Franklin, the New World's most prominent citizen, began touting industry and diligence in his various literary endeavours, and soon, the Industrial Revolution gave people plenty of opportunities to practice what he preached. Even in its meanest, most soul-deadening permutations, work was now considered a virtue, fundamentally good—and finally the slacker had a purpose. It was his job to oppose the idea that what we do to pay the bills is the primary organizing principle of our lives, the shorthand we use to define ourselves.
Franklin's contemporary Samuel Johnson was the first to name this new figure and outline his philosophy. Writing under the pseudonym of The Idler, he argued that indolence, not as Lutz puts it, "Franklinian striving toward accumulation and achievement," represented man's true nature. Anyone who has ever felt the pinch of the clock can relate, and thus, for the last two and a half centuries, the slacker has never been unemployed. His title changes regularly—from "lounger" to "loafer" to "beatnik," among others—but his utility never wanes.
Indeed, the more we strive, the more we long to slack—and vice versa. Franklin's colleagues complained about his torpid work habits. Johnson championed idleness in an extremely productive fashion. View a striver from a slightly different angle, and you can usually glimpse the familiar contours of the slacker, as well. And perhaps inevitably, this dual nature characterizes Lutz's book, too.
In Doing Nothing, he undertakes an exhaustive march through the canon of slackerdom as he aims to identify every aimless figure loitering in the margins of the last 200 years. For the most part, he's an able tour guide, a graceful stylist with a dry wit, but ultimately, in Doing Nothing's comprehensive, wide-ranging 320 pages, there's too much to see, too much to contemplate. Look, there's Karl Marx's son-in-law! Look, there's Jeff Spicoli! At times, Lutz's apparent inability to leave no data point unmentioned lends his narrative all the charm of an encyclopedia entry.
And while writing a book about the history of slackers may be hard work, reading one never should be. When Lutz lingers on, say, the mostly forgotten 19th-century essayist Joseph Dennie, whom he dubs "the first truly American slacker," he achieves the sense of unhurried saloon raconteurship his subject all but demands, and one wishes there were more of that. The irony of Doing Nothing is that Lutz's painstaking, diligent scholarship—the list-making, the synopsizing, the cross-referencing—begins to feel like busywork, a slacker's clever evasion of the real challenge at hand. Had he put more effort into making his book half as definitive, it might have been twice as engaging.