Hard work was a prime Victorian virtue, and Sherlock Holmes, good Victorian that he was, was an exceptionally hardworking guy. Holmes was a person “who, when he had an unsolved problem upon his mind, would go for days, and even for a week, without rest, turning it over, rearranging his facts, looking at it from every point of view until he had either fathomed it or convinced himself that his data were insufficient.”1 True, Holmes didn't work all the time. When he had no interesting cases to absorb him, he frequently would fall into “fits of the blackest depression,”2 “and for days on end he would lie upon the sofa in the sitting-room, hardly uttering a word or moving a muscle from morning to night.”3 At such times, Holmes was, by his own admission, “the most incurably lazy devil that ever stood in shoe leather.”4 All in all, though, Holmes was an extraordinarily industrious man.
Can we go further and say that Holmes was a workaholic? I think we can, but in Holmes's case, this wasn't such a bad thing. In fact, in exceptional cases like his, there is a kind of heroism and nobility in being a career-obsessed, intensely hardworking individual.
A workaholic is a person addicted to work—someone who works long hours, thinks about work all the time, and has little interest in other things. According to work therapist Bryan Johnson, there are several trouble signs of being a workaholic.5 These include:
Thinking obsessively about work.
Having few friends and a troubled personal life.
Being obsessively perfectionist in one's work.
Having health concerns due to stress and poor care of one's physical and emotional health.
Holmes meets each of these four trouble signs.
First, as we've seen, when Holmes was working on an interesting mystery, he would go for days “without rest, turning it over…, looking at it from every point of view” until he had either solved it or decided he needed additional evidence. In his more intense moments, he wouldn't eat and would sometimes faint “from pure inanition.”6 These are signs of a work-obsessed individual.
Second, Holmes, sounding more than a little like Rousseau (if not Sartre), loathes “every form of society with his whole Bohemian soul,” has “an aversion to women,”7 has no friends other than Watson,8 and is disinclined to make new friends.9 All emotions, and particularly love, are “abhorrent to his cold, precise…mind.”10 He dismisses all “the softer passions” as “distracting factor[s] which might throw doubt upon all his mental results.”11 At one point Watson, newly smitten with the girl he would soon marry, is so shocked by Holmes's emotional coldness that he calls him “an automaton—a calculating machine.”12 Clearly Holmes cares nothing about a work/life balance.
Third, Holmes is a perfectionist, having “a passion for definite and exact knowledge”13 and being “the neatest and most methodical of mankind”14 in his professional work. Though untidy and eccentric in some of his personal habits,15 Holmes fully agrees that—in detective work at least—“genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains.”16
Finally, like many workaholics, Holmes often allows his passion for work to affect his health. Though capable of great muscular effort and an excellent amateur boxer, Holmes looks on all “aimless bodily exertion as a waste of energy, and seldom bestirred himself save where there was some professional object to be served.”17 “I am a brain,” he once says to Watson. “The rest of me is a mere appendix.”18 “The state of his health,” we're told, “was not a matter in which he himself took the faintest interest.”19 His failing health because of exhaustion led to a doctor-prescribed holiday in “The Devil's Foot”: “It was, then, in the spring of 1897 that Holmes's iron constitution showed some symptoms of giving way in the face of constant hard work of a most exacting kind.”20 We have seen how Holmes would sometimes faint from hunger when he was absorbed in a knotty mystery. Far more serious is Sherlock's use of drugs such as cocaine and morphine when he had no interesting cases to work on. After a months-long drug binge, Holmes is warned by Watson that such chronic abuse might “leave a permanent weakness”21 and impair the great powers with which he has been endowed. In light of Sherlock's aversion to romance because of its potential to blunt his cognitive apparatus, one might think that Watson's appeal would have been persuasive. To this Holmes replies, “Give me problems, give me work…and…I can dispense then with artificial stimulants. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation.”22 This is the very credo of the hardcore workaholic.
When Watson speaks of Holmes as “the best and wisest man whom I have ever known”23—borrowing a line from Plato's Phaedo—he was clearly expecting his fellow Victorians to agree. The fact is that Holmes's supercharged work ethic was widely admired by Conan Doyle's Victorian readers. To see why, we need to take a brief look at how attitudes to work have evolved.
For most of Western civilization, work was seen more as a curse than as a fulfilling and dignified activity or vocation.24 In the Old Testament, Adam is condemned to eat bread “in the sweat of [his] face” because of his disobedience to God.25 Ancient Greeks like Xenophon and Aristotle dissed manual labor and working for money; they believed that such work, whenever possible, should be done by slaves. Early and medieval Christians rejected the pursuit of wealth and stressed the importance of contemplation over work. All of this changed with the Protestant Reformation and the rise of modern capitalism. Influential Protestant thinkers like John Calvin (1509–64) taught that work was a calling (beruf) and that worldly success was a sign of God's saving grace. Work was seen as a kind of worldly asceticism. It trains the soul in godly virtues such as diligence, competence, thrift, forethought, and responsibility. It promotes bodily health and mental sharpness. It protects us against the dangerous fruits of idleness, boredom, and pleasure seeking. (“The devil finds work for idle hands to do.”) It enables humans to fulfill God's command to “fill the earth and subdue it.”26 It makes possible great achievements that redound to the glory of God. And it fuels economic prosperity and provides means for charitable giving and the support of one's family. This was the origin of what Max Weber famously labeled the Protestant work ethic.27 Its most notable attitudinal and behavioral features include a high valuation of hard work, frugality, efficient use of time, shunning of leisure and ostentation, self-reliance, and delay of gratification.28
After the Reformation, the Protestant work ethic took hold throughout northern Europe, including England and the American colonies (particularly in the Puritan Northeast). In Conan Doyle's time, the religious motivations for an ethic of hard work had largely waned, and researchers today have found no correlation between religious affiliation and work-oriented values.29 Nevertheless, paeans to hard work were common in Victorian novels and sermons, and many of Conan Doyle's contemporaries would have agreed with Thomas Carlyle, “the prophet of the religion of work,”30 when he wrote, “There is a perpetual nobleness, and even sacredness, in work…. Know what thou can't work at; and work at it like a Hercules!…Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness.”31
It is plain that the old Protestant work ethic is now declining in America and other industrialized nations. Business leaders increasingly complain about how hard it is to find employees with strong work values. So-called millennials—young people aged eighteen to twenty-nine—are the only generation of Americans in the twentieth century not to pick “work ethic” as an identifying characteristic of their cohort.32 Since the 1980s, tens of millions of Americans have been inspired by the voluntary simplicity movement to work less and simplify their lifestyles. In England, it is estimated that 20 percent of employment disability benefits are fraudulently claimed by people who are able but unwilling to work.33 In October 2010, a government proposal to raise the retirement age from sixty to sixty-two led to weeks of rioting in France. Nor is a declining work ethic limited to paid employment. Studies show that the amount of time American college students spend studying has fallen by over 40 percent since 196134 and that the average college student spends only 7 percent of his or her day studying (compared to 51 percent socializing).35
There are obvious downsides to an eroding work ethic. Who wants to live in a world with greater numbers of inattentive waitresses, lazy car mechanics, slacker students, welfare frauds, and slothful public servants? On the whole, though, it is good that people are rethinking older attitudes toward work and leisure and seeking a healthier work/life balance. As philosophers have pointed out, it's generally bad for the self, for society, and for the environment when individuals become obsessed with work and overvalue material success.
Henry David Thoreau's Walden (1854) offers a classic analysis of the toll a “living to work” attitude takes on the self. As Thoreau traveled about his native New England, most of its inhabitants appeared to be “doing penance in a thousand remarkable ways” and living lives of “quiet desperation”:
I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of…. Who made them serfs of the soil?…How many a poor immortal soul have I met well-nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it a barn seventy-five feet by forty, its Augean stables never cleansed, and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing, pasture, and wood lot!…By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal. It is a fool's life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before.36
The problem with such a work-obsessed lifestyle, Thoreau believed, is that it leaves us “with no time to be anything but a machine.” We become “so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked.”37 Among these finer fruits, Thoreau thought, are the pleasures of friendship, the pursuit of knowledge, personal growth, and communion with nature—in short, to be “rich, if not in money, in sunny hours and summer days.”38
Other philosophers have noted the high social costs that result from an overvaluation of work. In Leisure, the Basis of Culture (1952), Josef Pieper notes that the wise and creative use of leisure lies at the very basis of Western ideals of cultural excellence, educational attainment, and individual development. More recently, critics in the voluntary simplicity movement have argued that in modern consumer-driven capitalist economies an overvaluing of work has contributed to a condition of “affluenza,” an oppressive social condition of stress, overwork, envy, waste, and dangerous levels of indebtedness that results from efforts to keep up with the Joneses.39
Finally, many philosophers have noted the serious environmental harms that result when people around the world are encouraged to work hard precisely in order to achieve Western standards of consumption and affluence.40
In short, bad things happen—to the self, to society, and to the environment—when huge numbers of people are convinced that they must work extremely hard to achieve prosperous, high-consumption lifestyles. Realizing this, more and more people around the globe are downsizing their career and lifestyle goals, choosing to work less and simplify their lives in exchange for greater freedom, less stress, more quality time with family and friends, and more leisure time to do the things they truly enjoy. This is all well and good. But how does all this apply to Holmes? Holmes worked incredibly hard—but not for the money or for a lavish lifestyle. He greatly enjoyed his work, he wasn't particularly stressed by it, he had no family to neglect, and he worked for a noble cause (righting wrongs and putting dangerous criminals behind bars). This raises the question: Is being a work-obsessed person always such a bad thing?
First, a personal disclaimer: By most definitions, I am a workaholic. I typically work fourteen- or sixteen-hour days doing the things college professors do: teaching, preparing for class, grading papers, serving on committees, doing research, and writing books and articles. I've written six books, and I generally publish five or six articles or book chapters a year. I work year round, including summer and Christmas vacations. (A good bit of this chapter, in fact, was written on Christmas Day.) I rarely watch TV or go to movies, I have no real hobbies, and I long ago gave up watching sports (which I enjoy) as a distraction from work. Aside from household chores, yard work, and chauffeuring my fifteen-year-old son around town, my one real break from work is running (I am a competitive long-distance runner). I work pretty much all the time, think about work all the time, and always look forward to getting back to work after some down time. Hearing this, most people probably would consider me a workaholic—though I hasten to add that I have good personal relationships, am in excellent health, and otherwise lack most of the warning signs of workaholism noted earlier.
The thing is, I'm happy and frankly rather proud to be a workaholic. I enjoy my work, place great importance on being a good teacher and mentor to my students, and take pleasure in contributing, through my scholarly work, to my discipline and the academic reputation of my college. I'm not terribly interested in making a lot of money or living an affluent lifestyle. Though I work hard, I don't neglect my family, my friends, or my obligations to my colleagues or my community. I am, in short, what I would consider a benign workaholic. And Holmes in certain respects was too.
What distinguishes a benign workaholic from a pathological one? There are two major differences.
We've seen that experts have identified a number of warning signs of workaholism. Often workaholics have poor personal relationships, suffer from stress or other work-related health problems, and are overly controlling or perfectionistic in their work habits. Pathological workaholics tend to suffer from these problems, but benign workaholics do not. Benign workaholics know when to say when. As Holmes said, the “supreme gift of the artist” is “the knowledge of when to stop.”41
Some things are worth working hard for and some are not. If you work yourself to a frazzle because you want a gaudier Rolex than your neighbor, that's pathological. On the other hand, if you work assiduously to become a world-class violinist or cyclist, that's admirable. Benign workaholics are motivated by worthy ends, whereas pathological workaholics often are not.
How does Holmes measure up by these standards? We've seen that Holmes displays all the major trouble signs of workaholism. He works frenetically, thinks about work obsessively, lacks all but a few strong personal relationships, is very much a perfectionist in his craft, and suffers health effects due to overwork. In these respects, he is clearly a pathological workaholic. As I argue in my other chapter in this book, Holmes is too monomaniacal and sacrifices too much for the sake of his career.
On the other hand, Holmes's motivation for working hard was altogether good. Much like Batman, Holmes consecrated his life to a single, wholly admirable purpose: fighting crime and achieving justice. All his mind, heart, and training were devoted to this end. In this respect, Holmes was like Ignatius Loyola, Mother Teresa, and other great women and men of history who, at great personal sacrifice, consecrated their lives to achieve some single, great good. He was more motivated to fulfill his sense of destiny than merely to advance in a job. There is, I suggest, a kind of heroism and grandeur in such a life, however pathological it may be in some respects. To paraphrase Billy Joel: Holmes may be a little crazy, but he just may be the sort of lunatic we're looking for.
1. Conan Doyle, “Man with the Twisted Lip,” 240. Elsewhere, Watson tells us that “nothing could exceed [Holmes's] energy when the working fit was upon him.” Study in Scarlet, 20. All references to the Sherlock Holmes stories are to Arthur Conan Doyle, The Complete Sherlock Holmes (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1930).
2. Sign of Four, 97.
3. Study in Scarlet, 20.
4. Ibid., 27.
5. Quoted in Tory Johnson, “You Might Be a Workaholic If…,” Good Morning America, June 14, 2007, http://abcnews.go.com/CleanPrint/cleanprintproxy.aspx?1290268761061.
6. “Norwood Builder,” 505.
7. “Greek Interpreter,” 435.
8. “Five Orange Pips,” 218.
9. “Greek Interpreter,” 435.
10. “Scandal in Bohemia,” 161.
11. Ibid.
12. Sign of Four, 96.
13. Study in Scarlet, 17.
14. “Musgrave Ritual,” 386.
15. Ibid.
16. Study in Scarlet, 31.
17. “Yellow Face,” 351.
18. “Mazarin Stone,” 1014.
19. “Devil's Foot,” 955.
20. Ibid., 914.
21. Sign of Four, 89.
22. Ibid., 89–90.
23. “Final Problem,” 480.
24. For a concise overview of Western attitudes toward work, see Joanne B. Ciulla, “From Curse to Calling: A Short History of the Meaning of Work,” in Honest Work: A Business Ethics Reader, ed. Joanne B. Ciulla, Clancy Martin, and Robert C. Solomon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 5–10.
25. Genesis 3:19.
26. Genesis 1:28.
27. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Charles Scriber's Sons, 1958).
28. Ibid., 48–52.
29. Michael J. Miller, David J. Woeehr, and Natasha Hudspeth, “The Meaning and Measurement of Work Ethic: Construction and Initial Validation of a Multidimensional Inventory,” Journal of Vocational Behavior 59 (2001): 3.
30. Josef Pieper, Leisure, the Basis of Culture (1952; New York: Random House, 1963), 30.
31. Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present (1843; New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1918), 226, 228.
32. “The Millennials: Confident, Connected, Open to Change,” Pew Research Center, February 24, 2010, http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1501/millennials-new-survey-generational-personality-upbeat-open-new-ideas-technology-bound.
33. Steve Doughty, “Benefits ‘Wrecked the British Work Ethic,’ New Study Finds,” Daily Mail, October 8, 2009, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1218873/Benefits-wrecked-British-work-ethic-new-study-claims.html.
34. Stephanie Findlay, “The Decline of Studying,” Macleans.ca, September 5, 2010, http://www2.macleans.ca/2010/09/05/the-decline-of-studying/.
35. “Report: First Two Years of College Show Small Gains,” USA Today, January 21, 2011, http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2011-01-18-littlelearning18_ST_N.htm?loc=interstitialskip.
36. Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854; Roslyn, N.Y.: Walter J. Black, 1942), 28–30.
37. Ibid., 30.
38. Ibid., 218.
39. See, for example, Clive Hamilton and Richard Denniss, Affluenza: When Too Much Is Never Enough (London: Allen & Unwin, 2006).
40. See, for example, Louis P. Pojman, Global Environmental Ethics (Mountain View, Calif.: Mayfield, 2000), 1–17.
41. “Norwood Builder,” 510.