How to be Idle

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HOW TO BE IDLE

Tom Hodgkinson is doing what he has always done, which is a mixture of editing magazines, writing articles and putting on parties. He was born in 1968, founded the Idler in 1993 and now lives in Devon.

Preface

It’s good to be idle. The purpose of this book is both to celebrate laziness and to attack the work culture of the western world, which has enslaved, demoralized and depressed so many of us.

Doing nothing, however, is hard work, as Oscar Wilde pointed out. There are always so many people around trying to make you do things. This is why I have tried to create a kind of canon of idle writing, from the philosophy, fiction, poetry and history of the last three thousand years, to give us idlers the mental ammunition we need to fight the fight against work. The sheer number of great idlers in history proves also that we are not alone.

Being idle is about being free, and not just being free to choose between McDonald’s and Burger King or Volvo and Saab. It is about being free to live the lives we want to lead, free from bosses, wages, commuting, consuming and debt. Being idle is about fun, pleasure and joy.

There’s a revolution brewing, and the great thing is that to join it all you have to do is absolutely nothing. So join us, Liberty Lads and Liberty Girls. This should be the most enjoyable revolution the world has ever seen.

8 a.m.

Waking Up is Hard to Do

Let us be lazy in everything, except in loving
and drinking, except in being lazy.

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–81)

I wonder if that hard-working American rationalist and agent of industry Benjamin Franklin knew how much misery he would cause in the world when, back in 1757, high on puritanical zeal, he popularized and promoted the trite and patently untrue aphorism ‘early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise’?

It is a sad fact that from early childhood we are tyrannized by the moral myth that it is right, proper and good to leap out of bed the moment we wake in order to set about some useful work as quickly and cheerfully as possible. In my own case, it was my mother whom I remember very clearly screaming at me to get out of bed every morning. As I lay there in blissful comfort, eyes closed, trying to hang on to a fading dream, doing my utmost to ignore her shouting, I would start to calculate the shortest time it would take me to get up, have breakfast and go to school and still arrive with seconds to spare before assembly started. All this mental ingenuity and effort I expended in order to enjoy a few more moments of slumber. Thus the idler begins to learn his craft.

Parents begin the brainwashing process and then school works yet harder to indoctrinate its charges with the necessity of early rising. My own personal guilt about feeling actually physically incapable of rising early in the morning continued well into my twenties. For years I fought with the feelings of self-hatred that accompanied my morning listlessness. I would make resolutions to rise at eight. As a student, I developed complex alarm systems. I bought a timer plug, and set it to turn on my coffee maker and also the record player, on which I had placed my loudest record, It’s Alive by The Ramones. 7.50 a.m. was the allotted time. I had set the record to come on at an ear-splitting volume. Being a live recording, the first track was prefaced by crowd noise. The cheering and whooping would wake me, and I’d know I had only a few seconds to leap out of bed and turn the volume down before Dee Dee Ramone would grunt: ‘one – two – three – four’ and my housemates and I would be assaulted by the opening chords of ‘Rockaway Beach’, turned up to 11. The idea was that I would then drink the coffee and jolt my body into wakefulness. It half worked. When I heard the crowd noise, I would leap out of bed and totter for a moment. But what happened then, of course, was that I would turn the volume right down, ignore the coffee and climb back to the snuggly warm embrace of my duvet. Then I’d slowly come to my senses at around 10.30 a.m., doze until twelve, and finally stagger to my feet in a fit of self-loathing. I was a real moralist back then: I even made a poster for my wall which read: ‘Edification first, then have some fun.’ It was hip in that it was a lyric from hardcore punk band Bad Brains, but the message, I think you’ll agree, is a dreary one. Nowadays I do it the other way around.

It wasn’t until many years later that I learned that I was not alone in my sluggishness and in experiencing the conflicting emotions of pleasure and guilt which surrounded it. There is a wealth of literature on the subject. And it is generally written by the best, funniest, most joy-giving writers. In 1889, the Victorian humorist Jerome K. Jerome published an essay called ‘On being Idle’. Imagine how much better I felt when I read the following passage, in which Jerome reflects on the pleasures of snoozing:

Ah! how delicious it is to turn over and go to sleep again: ‘just for five minutes.’ Is there any human being, I wonder, besides the hero of a Sunday-school ‘tale for boys,’ who ever gets up willingly? There are some men to whom getting up at the proper time is an utter impossibility. If eight o’clock happens to be the time that they should turn out, then they lie till half-past. If circumstances change and half-past eight becomes early enough for them, then it is nine before they can rise. They are like the statesman of whom it was said that he was always punctually half an hour late. They try all manner of schemes. They buy alarm-clocks (artful contrivances that go off at the wrong time and alarm the wrong people) … I knew one man who would actually get out and have a cold bath; and even that was no use, for afterward he would jump into bed again to warm himself.

Self-confessed slumberer Louis Theroux, writing in the magazine which I edit, the Idler, recalls one such stratagem, developed by his friend Ken. ‘It went like this: keep a cold mug of coffee and two Pro Plus pills by your bedside. Set the alarm for 8.20 a.m. – half an hour before you actually want to get up – and when it goes off, in the instant of lucidity that the alarm clock triggers, knock back the coffee and the pills, then go back to sleep. Half an hour later you spring awake in the grip of a massive caffeine rush.’

Sleep is a powerful seducer, hence the terrifying machinery we have developed to fight it. I mean, the alarm clock. Heavens! What evil genius brought together those two enemies of the idle – clocks and alarms – into one unit? Every morning, throughout the Western world, happily dreaming individuals are rudely thrust from sleep by an ear-splitting ringing noise or insistent electronic beeping. The alarm clock is the first stage in the ungodly transformation that we force ourselves to endure in the morning, from blissed-out, carefree dreamer to anxiety-ridden toiler, weighted by responsibility and duty. What is truly amazing is that we buy alarm clocks voluntarily. Is it not absurd to spend our own hard-earned cash on a device to make every day of our lives start as unpleasantly as possible, and which really just serves the employer to whom we sell our time? Yes, there are some alarm clocks that dispense with the alarm and instead wake us with the chatter of early-morning radio DJs, but are these any better? The oppressive cheerfulness of the DJs is designed to get us into a good mood for the day ahead, or to distract us from our deep woes with daft jokes. I find it simply irritating. There’s nothing worse than the banal chirpiness of another human being when you are in a state of deep, heavy, existential reflection. As my friend John Moore, the laziest man in the world, says when his wife tries to wake him up: ‘I’ll get up when there’s something worth getting up for.’

In the UK, the highbrow version of this national wake-up call is Radio 4’s Today programme, which discusses the calamities of the day with great seriousness and concern. Most countries have a serious news show first thing in the morning. This has the effect of stimulating such emotions as anger and anxiety in the listener. But a certain type of person feels it is their duty to listen to it, as if the act of merely listening is somehow going to improve the world. Duty, oh, what a burden you are! Isn’t there room for a news-free radio station? When I listen to classical music on the radio, for example when driving, there is nothing worse than having my reverie and dream-flow interrupted by the tedious reality of news headlines.

So: for most of us the working day begins in torment when, wrenched from the nectar of oblivion, we are faced with the prospect of trying to become dutiful citizens, ready to serve our masters in the workplace with gratitude, good cheer and abundant energy. (Why are we all so desperate for ‘jobs’, by the way? They’re horrible things. But more on this later.)

After the alarm clock, it is the turn of Mr Kellogg to shame us into action. ‘Rise and Shine!’ he exhorts us from the Corn Flakes packet. The physical act of crunching cornflakes or other cereals is portrayed in TV advertising as working an amazing alchemy on slothful human beings: the incoherent, unshaven sluggard (bad) is magically transformed into a smart and jolly worker full of vigour and purpose (good) by the positive power of cereal. Kellogg himself, tellingly, was a puritanical health-nut who never had sex (he preferred enemas). Such are the architects of our daily life.

For all modern society’s promises of leisure, liberty and doing what you want, most of us are still slaves to a schedule we did not choose.

Why have things come to such a pass? Well, the forces of the anti-idle have been at work since the Fall of Man. The propaganda against oversleeping goes back a very long way, over two thousand years, to the Bible. Here is Proverbs, chapter 6, on the subject:

6 Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise:

7 Which having no guide, overseer, or ruler,

8 Provideth her meat in the summer, and gathereth her food in the harvest.

9 How long wilt thou sleep, O sluggard? when wilt thou arise out of thy sleep?

10 Yet a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep:

11 So shall thy poverty come as one that travelleth, and thy want as an armed man.

In the first place, I would seriously question the sanity of a religion that holds up the ant as an example of how to live. The ant system is an exploitative aristocracy based on the unthinking toil of millions of workers and the complete inactivity of a single queen and a handful of drones. The voice of God goes on to admonish the poor ‘sluggard’ for sleeping and then warns that poverty and hunger shall be his rewards if he continues to lie in bed. Idleness is sin, and the wages of sin is death (and the wages of hard work are £22,585 p.a. with London weighting).

Christianity has promoted bed-guilt ever since. This passage from the Bible is used as a bludgeon by moralists, capitalists and bureaucrats in order to impose upon the people the notion that God hates it when you get up late. It suits the lust for order that characterizes the non-idler: don’t waste time! Better to be busy than doing nothing!

In mid-eighteenth-century London, Dr Johnson, who had nothing to be ashamed of as far as literary output goes, is to be found lacerating himself for his sluggardly habits. ‘O Lord, enable me … in redeeming the time I have spent in Sloth,’ he wrote in his journals at the age of 29. Twenty years later, things haven’t improved, and he resolves ‘to rise early. Not later than six if I can.’ The following year, having failed to rise at six, he adapts his resolution: ‘I purpose to rise at eight because though I shall not yet rise early it will be much earlier than I now rise, for I often lye till two.’ Johnson, deeply religious and of a melancholic temperament, felt ashamed of his sloth. But did his sloth cause any pain to others? Did it kill anyone? Did his sloth force people to do things they would rather not? No.

In the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, it suited new avatars of Progress to promote a culture of early rising among the working classes. In 1755, the Rev. J. Clayton published a pamphlet, ‘Friendly Advice to the Poor’, in which he argued that early rising would keep troublemakers off the streets: ‘The necessity of early rising would reduce the poor to a necessity of going to Bed betime; and thereby prevent the Danger of Midnight revels.’ The Methodist John Wesley, who himself rose every morning at 4 a.m., wrote a sermon called ‘The Duty and Advantage of Early Rising’ (1786), in which he claimed that lying in bed was physically unhealthy, and used comically quasi-scientific terms to drive home his argument: ‘By soaking so long between warm sheets, the flesh is as it were parboiled, and becomes soft and flabby. The nerves, in the meantime, are quite unstrung.’ In 1830, the original ‘bluestocking’, Hannah More, published the following lines on ‘Early Rising’:

Thou silent murderer, Sloth, no more

My mind imprison’d keep;

Nor let me waste another hour

With thee, thou felon, Sleep.

This is very strong language. More sees Sloth, the seventh deadly sin (although the original seventh was sadness), as a murderer of time, who keeps the lazy man’s mind imprisoned. He must be fought against; there must be a manly battle of wills. This is, of course, palpable nonsense: sleep is a friend, not a felon. Everyone knows that the mind, far from being imprisoned, is actually at its freest when we are lying in bed dozing in the morning, and we will come back to the creative benefits of that delicious in-between state later. Creativity, though, was definitely not a buzzword for the new capitalists. The architects of the Industrial Revolution needed to convince the masses of the benefits of tedious, disciplined toil. And the best-selling Victorian author Samuel Smiles’s books were titled Self-Help (1859), Thrift (1875) and Duty (1880), and were packed with homilies like the above. Cleanliness, order, good housekeeping, punctuality, self-sacrifice, duty and responsibility: these self-denying ‘virtues’ were communicated by a sophisticated network of moralists, writers and politicians.

If we think we are free of this sort of thing today, then look at our magazines and the ‘sort your life out’ features which proliferate. Patronizing self-help books regale us with various bullet-pointed strategies to become more productive, less drunk and more hard-working. Many of these strategies involve spending a lot of money. Men’s and women’s magazines employ body anxiety to send us to that modern torture chamber we call the gym. We toil all day and then pay for the pleasure of running on a treadmill! Adverts for electronic personal organizers imply that the gadget will help us to achieve robotic perfection; the writer Charles Leadbetter recently noticed that the fantasy schedules which appear in ads for ‘Organizers’ (as if the mere purchase of the device will magically organize your life) invariably start with the line: ‘7 a.m. Gym.’

Not only is early rising totally unnatural but I would argue also that lying in bed half-awake – sleep researchers call this state ‘hypnagogic’ – is positively beneficial to health and happiness. A good morning doze of half an hour or more can, for example, help you to prepare mentally for the problems and tasks ahead. This was the view of one of my favourite philosophers, Lin Yutang. A Chinese-American writer of the early twentieth century, he spent much of his time trying to persuade striving Americans of the validity of the laid-back philosophy of ancient China, which, he says, encouraged ‘freedom and nonchalance’, and a ‘wise and merry philosophy of living’. In his book The Importance of Living, published in 1938, he devoted a whole chapter to the art of lying in bed. Here he advises the student of good living to resist early rising:

What does it matter even if [a man] stays in bed at eight o’clock? A thousand times better that he should provide himself with a good tin of cigarettes on his bedside table and take plenty of time to get up from bed and solve all his problems of the day before he brushes his teeth … in that comfortable position, he can ponder over his achievements and mistakes of yesterday and single out the important from the trivial in the day’s programme ahead of him. Better that he arrive at ten o’clock in his office and master of himself than that he should come punctually at nine or even a quarter before to watch over his subordinates like a slave-driver and then ‘hustle about nothing,’ as the Chinese say.

This idea that lying in bed half awake could actually make the idler’s life more efficient came up when I interviewed the poet John Cooper Clarke. He uses his morning slumber time, he said, to plan what he is going to wear that day. His mind ranges freely and pleasurably through his wardrobe, weighing up various combinations of styles, colours and materials. Dressing after this little mental workout, therefore, is a doddle, nowhere near as tedious and burdensome as the prospect first appears.

The humane, truculent and brilliant journalist G. K. Chesterton was another writer who attacked the notion that early rising is morally good and staying in bed is morally bad. He instead took a libertarian view: the time we rise should be a matter of personal choice. ‘The tone now commonly taken towards the practice of lying in bed is hypocritical and unhealthy,’ he writes in his 1909 essay ‘On Lying in Bed’. ‘Instead of being regarded, as it ought to be, as a matter of personal convenience and adjustment, it has come to be regarded by many as if it were a part of essential morals to get up early in the morning. It is upon the whole part of practical wisdom; but there is nothing good about it or bad about its opposite.’

Greatness and late rising are natural bedfellows. Late rising is for the independent of mind, the individual who refuses to become a slave to work, money, ambition. In his youth, the great poet of loafing, Walt Whitman, would arrive at the offices of the newspaper where he worked at around 11.30 a.m., and leave at 12.30 for a two-hour lunch break. Another hour’s work after lunch and then it was time to hit the town.

So what can we do? In my own case, my life improved dramatically when I got rid of the alarm clock. I found that one can train oneself to wake up at roughly the correct time – if, indeed, you are unlucky enough to have a ‘correct time’ to wake up at – without it. This way, one wakes slowly, naturally and pleasurably. One leaves one’s bed when one is ready, and not when someone else wants you to. Gone is the daily agony of being wrenched from delicious sleep by the mechanical noise of the bell. It helps also, of course, not to have a job and to be one’s own master. But even if you are yoked to employment, I suggest you try it. It works. And it could be your first step to idleness.

Of course, it’s not always easy to tower into sublimity from the comfort of your own bed when the people around you are toiling. Sometimes the dedicated slugabed is rudely awakened by the yelling of builders, the bustle of housemates, the entreaties of toddlers or even dawn’s rosy fingers coming in at the window. These impediments to sleep must be blocked out if you are to enjoy your morning doze. So may I offer another practical tip? Simply invest in earplugs, black-out blinds and eyeshades. With these simple devices, you can extend your doze time. In the case of young children, the earlier they can be trained to get themselves up and prepare their own breakfast, the better.

I asserted at the beginning of this chapter that Benjamin Franklin’s ‘early to rise’ dictum was not only misery-making but also false. How so? Well, when I think of people who are healthy, wealthy and wise, I see amongst their ranks artists, writers, musicians and entrepreneurs. It is well known that none of these types are early risers. In order to have ideas and then to plan how to realize those ideas, creative people need thinking time, away from the desk, away from the telephone, away from the myriad distractions of everyday and domestic life. And morning snoozing is one of the best times to do this.

As to how on earth going early to bed could automatically guarantee riches and happiness, I suppose nothing can be proved, but I’m with Dr Johnson who confidently asserted: ‘Whoever thinks of going to bed before twelve o’clock is a scoundrel.’

No, the early risers are not healthy, wealthy and wise. They are frequently sickly, poor and stupid. They serve the late risers. If you don’t believe me, look at the drawn, desperate faces around you on the underground systems in the major cities of our great industrialized nations – London, Tokyo, New York – between eight and nine in the morning. Healthy? Certainly not. Wealthy? No, or they would not be on the underground trains at that time. In fact, the lowest-paid workers tend to be the ones who are travelling the earliest. Wise? How can they be, if they choose to commute in this way? If you want health, wealth and happiness, the first step is to throw away your alarm clocks!

9 a.m.

Toil and Trouble

I wander through each charter’d street,

Near where the charter’d Thames does flow,

And mark in every face I meet

Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

William Blake, ‘London’ (1794)

Nine a.m. is surely the most brutal and feared of all the hours in the idler’s day, for it is the time when someone, somewhere, decided that work should start. Just before 9 a.m., buses, trains, trams and roads heave with grim-faced toilers as they lug themselves from one part of town to another. Lifts sigh with large-jeaned marketing executives, office girls with lots of make-up clatter through reception, recent immigrants with hard hats arrive at the building sites, city boys charge up on coffee, retail workers wait outside the shop for the boss to arrive with the keys, escalators take us from an airless underworld and deposit us in equally airless offices. We read newspapers and become anxious. We have a job. A job! Our reward after years of education! We worked hard in our youth in order to work hard again in our adulthood. A job! The summit of our lives! The answer!

The idea of the ‘job’ as the answer to all woes, individual and social, is one of the most pernicious myths of modern society. It is promoted by politicians, parents, newspaper moralists and leaders of industry, on the left and on the right: paradise, they say, is ‘full employment’. One key index to the success of a country is the size of its unemployed population. The more people have jobs, the better, we are told. ‘Job’ is rarely defined with any precision to the teenager or to the student as they make their journey towards it, but the myth suggests to us that a ‘good job’ will offer us ample money, a social life, status and work which we will find ‘rewarding’. It’s actually astonishing how little we pause to reflect on these terms when at school or college. And even though, as children, we hear our parents complaining every night about their bosses or co-workers, it doesn’t put us off the world of work. We think it will be different for us.

As is commonly the case with such controlling ideas, there is a vast gap between the promise of the job and its reality. When we enter the ignoble world of work, we are soon shocked at the humiliations we encounter there. The worst job I had was working as a researcher on a tabloid magazine, near Chancery Lane in London. Two years previously, at university, I had been reading novels, running magazines, playing in a hardcore punk band and getting up when I felt like it. On the whole, I had been master of my own time and had done things I wanted to do. I was now calling the press office at Asda to check the price of baked beans eight hours a day. I was habitually late in the morning, my friends all seemed to be more successful, and I resented being asked to go to the garage to collect the editor’s car or go on the – accursed term – ‘coffee run’. The master at 21 had turned into a slave at 22.

So: no fun. It was certainly not rewarding, financially, emotionally or intellectually. The only true pleasure it provided was the negative one of sitting in the pub at the end of the day with co-workers complaining about the bosses. The money was lousy, so I did not even have the compensation of spare cash. I seemed to have only enough money to get to work and back, buy a cheese sandwich at lunchtime and pay my rent. I was there for nearly two years and I would say that the whole experience was a complete waste of my time, apart from revealing to me how grindingly dull and joyless an office can be. I learned that far from fun, satisfaction and money, my only reward for being a slave was misery, penury and resentment. And the terrible irony is that when our current job turns out to provide neither much money nor much fun, we think we can solve the problem by getting a better job. So it goes on: an endless cycle, a miserable set-up, as satirized brilliantly in the UK sitcom The Office.

In defence of our strictly regimented work life, people will say, ‘Oh, but people enjoy work for the social interaction.’ There is the persistent myth of the lottery winner, who, despite never having to work again, keeps their minimum-wage factory job. I have never believed this. No, people enjoy the social interaction despite the unpromising conditions in which that social inter action takes place: the dismal grey surroundings, the people you have not chosen to be with, the dispiriting canteens, the laws against smoking and drinking, the patronizing ‘mission statements’ on the walls. Does anyone really suppose that if we didn’t have jobs, all social interaction would cease? Most human beings are sociable creatures; we are quite capable of seeking out interaction without the help of an employer. Do we not have family, friends, the pub, the cafe, the bar, the market?

And in any case, pleasure at work is often frowned upon. My boss at the magazine used to tell us off for talking to each other. In Nickel and Dimed (2001), her superb undercover study of low-wage life in America, Barbara Ehrenreich reports that workers in cheap restaurants and cleaning companies were frequently admonished for what they called ‘gossip’, for idle chit-chat.

The English historian E. P. Thompson, in his classic book The Making of the English Working Class (1963), argues that the creation of the job is a relatively recent phenomenon, born out of the Industrial Revolution. Before the advent of steam-powered machines and factories in the mid eighteenth century, work was a much more haphazard and less structured affair. People worked, yes, they did ‘jobs’, but the idea of being yoked to one particular employer to the exclusion of all other money-making activity was unknown. And the average man enjoyed a much greater degree of independence than today.

Take the weavers. Before the invention in 1764 of the spinning jenny by the weaver and carpenter James Hargreaves, and of the steam engine in the same year by James Watt, weavers were generally self-employed and worked as and when they chose. The young Friedrich Engels noted that they had control over their own time: ‘So it was that the weaver was usually in a position to lay by something, and rent a little piece of land, that he cultivated in his leisure hours, of which he had as many as he chose to take, since he could weave whenever and as long as he pleased,’ he wrote in his 1845 study The Condition of the Working Class in England. ‘They did not need to overwork; they did no more than they chose to do, and yet earned what they needed.’

In addition to this autonomous and leisure-filled life, the weavers were also in control of the whole manufacturing process: they produced the cloth and sold it to a travelling merchant. It was a simple, unsophisticated existence; Engels maintains that they had little knowledge or even interest in what was going on in another village say five miles away. But they were not enslaved to a job; they were task-orientated, rather than being bound by a nine-to-five (or its yet more brutal ancestor, the dawn-to-dusk). They worked as much as they needed to and no more. Time was not money, as Benjamin Franklin was later to assert. E. P. Thompson, in Customs in Common (1991), quotes from a description of Mexican mine-workers of the early twentieth century to give a sense of pre-industrial work patterns. These strong-willed Mexicans were ‘willing to work only three or four days a week if that paid for necessities’. They preferred to work on the basis of a project rather than on the hours they put in: ‘Given a contract and the assurance he will get so much money for each ton he mines, and that it doesn’t matter how long he takes doing it, or how often he sits down to contemplate life, he will work with a vigour which is remarkable.’ Presumably because the quicker they got the work done, the sooner they could go to the pub.

Our happy pre-industrial Mexicans and pre-1750 peasants did not see the need to work longer hours than were necessary to furnish them with meat and ale. Thompson writes: ‘The work pattern was one of alternate bouts of intense labour and of idleness, wherever men were in control of their own working lives.’

Work and life were intertwined. A weaver, for example, might weave eight or nine yards on a rainy day. On other days, a contemporary diary tells us, he might weave just two yards before he did ‘sundry jobs about the lathe and in the yard & wrote a letter in the evening’. Or he might go cherry-picking, work on a community dam, calve the cow, cut down trees or go to watch a public hanging. Thompson adds as an aside: ‘The pattern persists among some self-employed – artists, writers, small farmers, and perhaps also with students [idlers, all] – today, and provokes the question of whether it is not a “natural” human work-rhythm.’

England, then, before the invention of the dark satanic mills, was a nation of idlers. But this chaotic approach troubled contemporary moralists, who believed that people must be kept busy to keep them out of mischief. In 1820, the middle-class observer John Foster noted with horror that agricultural labourers, having finished their work, were left with ‘several hours in the day to be spent nearly as they please … They will … for hours together … sit on a bench, or lie down on a bank or hillock … yielded up to utter vacancy and torpor.’ And early architects of the Industrial Revolution such as Matthew Boulton and Josiah Wedgwood are often to be found in letters complaining of the laziness of their workers.

But the new Protestant work ethic was successful. The Industrial Revolution, above all, was a battle between hard work and laziness, and hard work won. Machines stole the process of production from hands and minds. Workshops became ‘manufactories’; the self-employed became the employed; families began to live on wages alone and to buy in the groceries that perhaps they had grown themselves in previous generations. They might have been earning more money, but a terrific blow was dealt to their quality of life. Joyful chaos, working in tune with the seasons, telling the time by the sun, variety, change, self-direction; all this was replaced with a brutal, standardized work culture, the effects of which we are still suffering from today.

In other words, the job was invented in order to make things easier for those at the top. The people were stripped of their independence in order to service the grand dreams of a socially aspirational mill-owner who believed in hard work – for other people. As G. K. Chesterton put it in What’s Wrong with the World (1910):

The rich did literally turn the poor out of the old guest house on to the road, briefly telling them that it was the road of progress. They did literally force them into factories and the modern wage-slavery assuring them all the time that this was the only way to wealth and civilization.

For what is Progress? Clint Eastwood’s preacher in Pale Rider puts the matter elegantly. When told by a local town fat cat that a group of independent gold miners who refuse to move off their land to make way for his company are ‘standing in the way of Progress’, Clint simply asks: ‘Yours or theirs?’

The ascendancy of the dock and the machine tore us from nature. This is how the contemporary French academic Thierry Paquot, author of The Art of the Siesta (1998), mourns the loss of the natural way of life:

The wandering countryman, given to siestas and dreams but also ready to work, will no longer be able to organize his daily activities according to his mood. He will have to obey an externally imposed regime, completely foreign to his way of life. Work in the fields has for a long time evaded the ticking of the clock, permitting country dwellers to harmonize their time with that of nature …

How did the bloody-minded and freedom-loving Brits allow themselves to become servants of capitalism, a ‘Slave State’ as Bertrand Russell put it, in his 1932 essay ‘In Praise of Idleness’? The great problem of the Industrial Revolution was how to transform a population of strong-willed, independent-minded, heavy-drinking, party-orientated, riot-loving, life-loving Englishmen into a docile, disciplined, grateful workforce. In 1835, a prominent moralizing philosopher – today we call them management gurus – called Andrew Ure wrote a book called Philosophy of Manufactures, aimed at the new bosses, in which he wrote of the difficulty of dealing with a nation of idlers and gave advice on brainwashing. He spoke of the problem in terms of a conversion:

… it is found nearly impossible to convert persons past the age of puberty, whether drawn from rural or from handicraft occupations, into useful factory hands. After struggling for a while to conquer their listless or restive habits, they either renounce their employment spontaneously, or are dismissed by the overlookers on account of inattention … [there is] a need to subdue the refractory tempers of work-people accustomed to irregular paroxysms of diligence … it is excessively in the interest of every mill-owner to organize his moral machinery on equally sound principles with his mechanical, for otherwise he will never command the steady hands, watchful eyes, and prompt cooperation, essential to the excellence of product … there is, in fact, no case to which the Gospel truth, ‘godliness is great gain,’ is more applicable than to the administration of an extensive factory.

God was ruthlessly brought in by the capitalists to control the minds of the masses. Crucially, the new, joyless creed of Methodism was preached to the labouring poor in church on Sunday. At church, they were bombarded with the idea that they were sinful, that all pleasure was wrong, and that the path to salvation lay in quiet suffering on this earth. God was reinvented as a sort of Big Brother figure, and it was His will that you worked hard. Thompson writes: ‘Not only the “sack” but the flames of hell might be the consequence of indiscipline at work. God was the most vigilant overlooker of all. Even above the chimney breast “Thou God Seest Me” was hung.’

The founder of Methodism, John Wesley, was particularly keen on terrifying and controlling small children. ‘Break their wills betimes,’ he wrote. ‘Let a child from a year old be taught to fear the rod and to cry softly; from that age make him do as he is bid …’ Children were assaulted by terrifying images of the burning flames of hell, of the evil demons who would pursue you if you were naughty. These images were burnt into the imagination of the small child, and would help to forge the cowed, obedient mindset of the later adult.

A good reserve weapon, if fear of God failed to convert the rural slackers into urban drudges, was hunger. Another management philosopher of the nineteenth century, the Rev. Andrew Townsend, argued that to use mere force of law to impress the new work ethic on the workers ‘gives too much trouble, requires too much violence and makes too much noise’. Better and easier, he maintained, to keep them hungry. ‘Hunger, on the contrary, is not only a pressure which is peaceful, silent and incessant, but as it is the most natural motive for work and industry, it also provokes the most peaceful efforts.’ The philosophy of low wages was also enthusiastically followed: the lower the wage, the harder the proletariat would toil. The same philosophy is today followed in the fast-food industry, where the production of food has been industrialized and deskilled in the same way that the production of cloth was industrialized in the nineteenth century. Fast-food workers suffer the lowest wages in the US and perform the same tedious tasks all day. Again, the dogma of hard work – which is deeply embedded in contemporary notions of what it means to be American – is what keeps us toiling and keeps us happy to be exploited in this way.

Around the same time, the thundering polemicist Thomas Carlyle did much damage in the nineteenth century by promoting the notion of the dignity or even the romance of hard graft. ‘Man was created to work, not to speculate, or feel, or dream,’ he wrote, adding: ‘Every idle moment is treason.’ It is your patriotic duty to work hard – another myth, particularly convenient to the rich, who, as Bertrand Russell said, ‘preach the dignity of labour, while taking care themselves to remain undignified in this respect’. Or as the late, great British writer Jeffrey Bernard put it when I went to interview him: ‘As if there was something romantic and glamorous about hard work … if there was something romantic about it, the Duke of Westminster would be digging his own fucking garden, wouldn’t he?’

Indeed, in the early Middle Ages, those who worked – the ‘laboratores’ – were looked down upon by society. At the top were the idle – the clerics and the warriors. Warriors, indeed, according to Tacitus, held it to be lazy and spiritless to get by working what they could get by blood, and in between campaigns they spent their time eating, drinking, sleeping and shagging.

Ignorance, of course, was another weapon in the armoury of the capitalists. It was important to keep the working classes in a state of stupidity so they were unaware of how wickedly they were being exploited. ‘Use your senses much and your mind little,’ wrote Carlyle’s disciple James Froude. ‘Think little and read less.’

Faced with this formidable attack, it is not surprising that most of us just carried on digging or spinning and kept our heads down. But there was also resistance to this injustice. There were a few renegade writers at the time who could see clearly what was going on. William Blake, of course, was an early critic of the ‘cogs tyrannic’, and later Paul Lafargue, Karl Marx’s French son-in-law, published a pamphlet entitled ‘The Right to be Lazy’ (1883), in which he demolished the gospel of work in magnificent, visionary style:

A strange delusion possesses the working classes of the nations where capitalist civilization holds its sway. This delusion drags in its train the individual and social woes which for two centuries have tortured sad humanity. This delusion is the love of work, the furious passion for work, pushed even to the exhaustion of the vital force of the individual and his progeny. Instead of opposing this mental aberration, the priests, the economists and the moralists have cast a sacred halo over work. Blind and finite men, they have wished to be wiser than then God; weak and contemptible men, they have presumed to rehabilitate what their God had cursed … Our epoch has been called the century of work. It is in fact the century of pain, misery and corruption.

There was also widespread popular agitation against the new Protestant work ethic at the time among those whose lives it was destroying. The Luddites of 1811 to 1813, routinely caricatured in our schools as unthinking clot-heads and daft enemies of progress, were in fact breaking the machines because they correctly predicted that they would destroy the old ways of life and strip men and women of their independence. E. P. Thompson lists more acts of revolt: ‘In 1817 the Pentridge Rising; in 1819, Peterloo; throughout the next decade the proliferation of trade union activity, Owenite propaganda, Radical journalism, the Ten Hours Movement, the revolutionary crisis of 1831–2; and, beyond that, the multitude of movements which made up Chartism.’ But Progress, steam and the factory triumphed. Work and life were rent asunder; the joyful swain became a downtrodden slave.

Looking back at the horrors inflicted on the people in the Victorian Age, it is all too easy to feel grateful for the slight improvements in working conditions that the trade-union movement has achieved against heavy odds in the last 100 years. It is also easy for us to marvel at the credulousness of the populace when oppressed with Methodist doctrine. How could they fall for it, we wonder?

But are we so free today? As the academic Juliet Schor points out in The Overworked American (1991), things only look good when compared with recent times:

The claim that capitalism has delivered us from excessive toil can be sustained only if we take as our point of comparison eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe and America – a period that witnessed what were probably the longest and most arduous work schedules in the history of mankind.

Nickel and Dimed

Capitalism has promoted the job as a religion; but so too, tragically, has socialism. The left have been brainwashed with the socialist dream of ‘full employment’. But wouldn’t full unemployment be better? A world where everyone is free to create their own life, their own work, their own money. In his great essay ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’ (1891), Oscar Wilde pointed out the absurdity of the idea of full employment: ‘It is to be regretted that a portion of our community should be practically in slavery, but to propose to solve the problem by enslaving the entire community is childish.’

We need to be responsible for ourselves; we must create our own republics. Today we hand over our responsibility to the boss, to the company, to government, and then blame them when everything goes wrong.

Let us be clear also that work, particularly at the bottom end of the scale, is highly dangerous. Worldwide, the mania for consumer goods has created a deadly culture of overwork. A recent UN report stated that work kills two million people per year: that’s an amount equivalent to two September 11 disasters every day. Yet I see no ‘War on Work’ being declared by governments around the world. In fact, the story went widely un-reported. In the UK it did make it into the Guardian, but was granted only a few paragraphs on page 17.

Newspapers aren’t much help to those pursuing an idle life. They present themselves as independent, but since they are funded by advertising, they do much to promote the work-and-consume ethic. Newspapers offer a problem and a solution. The problem is presented in the news pages and consists of stories of war, starvation, political corruption, death, famine, scandal, theft, abduction, paedophilia. In short, they promote anxiety. The solution to this anxiety is presented in the magazine sections, and consists of editorial about – and, of course, advertising for – fridges, lighting systems, cars, sex advice, burglar alarms, loans, insurance policies, recipes, rugs, scented candles and various cultural products such as music, film and books. Problem: anxiety. Solution: money. Method: work.

If you want religious justification for your refractory habits, then remember that parts of the Bible, so often quoted by pro-work propagandists, argue against toil. Work is a curse, caused not by God but by the serpent in the Garden of Eden. He led Adam and Eve to fall from the work-free state of paradise by awakening material desire in them, thereby condemning them to toil and pain. If you want nothing, you don’t need to work. If you are full of desires, then you will have to work in order to get the money to fulfil those desires. Jesus said, ‘Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these’ (Matthew 6:28–9). God himself, argues Paul Lafargue in ‘The Right to be Lazy’, set a good example: after working for six days, he rests for all eternity.

At the bottom of it all is fear. Fear paralyses us. Be fearless, quit your job! You have nothing to lose but your anxieties, debts and misery! Or follow the lead of those brave proto-idlers who have elected to work a three-day week, a bona fide social trend. There is an immense psychological benefit to knowing that your days of free time each week outnumber your days of time sold to another. It makes the work more bearable and it leaves four days in which to pursue your own projects. There is certainly a financial knock, but most find that the loss of income is easily compensated for by the extra time.

Time is not money! Work and leisure can join once again! This was the dream of D. H. Lawrence, who, in his poem ‘A Sane Revolution’ (1929), wrote that if self-directed and fun, work need not be a burden. It is time to take control, to bring work and life back into happy harmony.

For do we not still feel trapped? And do we not still wonder sadly, with the nineteenth-century poet Charles Lamb:

Who first invented work – and bound the free

And holy-day rejoicing spirit down

To the ever-haunting importunity

Of business, in the green fields, and the town –

To plough, loom, anvil, spade – and oh! most sad

To that dry drudgery at the desk’s dead wood? (‘Work’, 1819)

Tom Hodgkinson

HOW TO BE IDLE

PENGUIN BOOKS

Contents

THE BEGINNING

HOW TO BE IDLE

Preface

8 a.m.

Waking Up is Hard to Do

9 a.m.

Toil and Trouble