Sherry Chandler

Why Work?

As you may have gathered, I’m looking for inspiration in a book called Doing Nothing (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), in which Tom Lutz explores American attitudes toward work in everything from Walden to Ferris Buellar’s Day Off (and I’m still reading the first chapter).

Although the book is about slackers and bums in the United States, one of the first things Lutz mentions is flying to Great Britain to talk with Chris Davis. Davis is “one of the early mainstays” of Why Work?, home of CLAWS (Creating Livable Alternatives to Wage Slavery). Davis is a proponent of the Idle Theory of Evolution:

“All living creatures have to work to stay alive. Some have to work harder than others. Those creatures that need do little work to stay alive are more likely to survive periods of difficulty than those who must work harder and longer. …survival of the idlest.”

Which seems to be a way of saying that creatures eking out a marginal existence will go first, and that makes sense. Still, much as I’d love to be one of the idle class, this argument seems to say that, once George W. Bush has destroyed western civilization, he is among the more likely to survive, and I don’t think I like that idea at all. I was more taken by Davis’s quarrel with Darwin:

“Freud isn’t what he was twenty-five years ago, but Darwin! I just love taking shots at Darwin. …Because he sees nature as a war. This idea has permeated our whole society, and it’s profoundly destructive, devisive, not just because it’s racist—and he is racist—but because the culture is permeated by the idea that skirmishing for survival is natural. The idea is a menace! War is the opposite of everything I’m trying to get to.”

I will be reading on and probably talking more about all this. I think, though, that British idlers probably have one great advantage over those in the United States: the National Health.

1. Work Ethic?
2. Peace Work
3. I Would Prefer Not To
4. Bored at work?
5. Dorothy Sutton

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