Wasted Lives by Zygmunt; Bauman

Wasted Lives by Zygmunt; Bauman

Author:Zygmunt; Bauman [Bauman, Zygmunt;]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2011-03-17T04:30:00+00:00


4

Culture of waste

In the convoluted history of the production and disposal of human waste, the vision of ‘eternity’ and its present fall from grace have played a crucial role.

Only infinity is fully and truly all-inclusive. Infinity and exclusion are incompatible; and so are infinity and exemption. In the infinity of time and space everything may happen, and everything must happen. Everything that was, is and yet may come into being has its place. It is only the idea of ‘no room’ that has no room in infinity. The idea that infinity absolutely cannot accommodate is that of redundancy – of waste.

This is what Joseph Cartaphilus of Smyrna, the hero of a Jorge Luis Borges story, The Immortal, found out in the City of the Immortals:

Taught by centuries of living, the republic of immortal men had achieved a perfection of tolerance, almost of disdain. They knew that over an infinitely long span of time, all things happen to all men. As reward for his past and future virtues, every man merited every kindness…The most fleeting thought obeys an invisible plan, and may crown, or inaugurate, a secret design…No one is someone; a single immortal man is all men.1

In infinity nothing can be devoid of meaning, even if that meaning appears illegible and inscrutable to human beings, who due to their limited lifespan have no access to the kind of time needed to decipher it or to witness its revelation. In infinity, everything is recycled no end as in the Hindu idea of eternal return and reincarnation, or forever existing as in the Christian idea of a linear progress from the earthly habitat of mortal flesh to the netherworld of souls where the true meaning of human deeds is fathomed, judged, and rewarded or punished accordingly. In infinity, individual humans may disappear from the view of mortals, but no one sinks irreversibly into nothingness, and every judgement, except the last one, infinitely remote, is premature and a testimony of fraud or sinful conceit if it is claimed to be final.

‘Infinity’ is of course but an abstract construct, a mental extrapolation from the experience of the long term; an extrapolation prompted by the incapacitating brevity of bodily life and the vexing incompleteness of life’s labours. The idea of infinity stands for an imagined extension of the present in which the sense of all past, current and future moments will be revealed and everything will fall into place; all labours will bear their benign or poisonous fruits, merits will be rewarded and vices punished – or, rather, deeds will be classified as merits or vices depending on their as yet unknown aftermath, that is, on their far-reaching, genuinely ultimate consequences. It is because the consequences are not open to experience and cannot be known in full when the chain of events is set in motion that whatever happens, matters – must matter. In infinity, there is nothing that happens of which you may say that it is redundant, attached to the flow of events



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