Customer Reviews

Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts

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I haven't had time to catch up with all of the amazing number of books that Bauman has been writing in his 70s, but the others aren't likely to be any better than this one. Here is a great scholar, a passionate critic, and a deeply committed humanist--someone with lots of now-possibly-outmoded virtues--writing with the freedom of an old man and the fire of a youth, tackling the character of life in the last stages of its transformation by the universal market. It is a dark picture of fragmentation and the collapse of meaning, and of the hubris of a drive towards order that suffocates on the disorder it manufactures. Bauman's argument passes seamlessly from the plunder of globalized capitalism through international refugees, urban ghettos and banlieus, and closes with some surprising connections with the world of speed dating and "Survivor." Some of the keenest bits of insight and social criticism are tossed in as parentheticals, and along the way there are extended excurses addressing even larger considerations.

It is a visionary text rather than a piece of social science; Bauman's citations are more commonly to Cavino or Borges than they are to Durkheim or Parsons. (His picture of a contemporary world aestheticized by commodities is quite close to my own account in chapter 7 of "The fiction of a thinkable world," a book nobody would call sociology.) It's all the better for that. One comes away from this book with a book of one's own taking shape in thought.

Dystopian science-fiction visions of the future are nothing new. Non-fiction treatises of an uncertain but almost certainly unpleasant future awaiting humanity are nothing new. Zygmunt Bauman, at first glance, seems to be just another sociologist who happened to write some books about the effects of modernity on human beings. What makes his reading so vitally relevant is that there are few people in the world who can so seamlessly unite sociology, economics, politics, psychology, ecology, geography, history, and anthropology the way Bauman does. All of these fields are of course related, and yet they are usually studied rather separately. Few people can claim expertise in all of them, and a person who can think, speak, and write authoritatively on all these subjects at once in a manner that is quite lucid and understandable by any "average" person is among the most precious of treasures of humanity.

Bauman's ability to convey his vivid ideas concisely makes him yet more valuable. This book is less than 150 pages long, but easily contains more key ideas than most books two or three times as long. The book reads quickly, but the ideas stay with you long after the reading is done. Bauman is a man of ideas, and has that most rare and precious gift of non-fiction writers: The ability to come up with a new idea on nearly every page and thus write a book full of ideas, instead of doing what most contemporary non-fiction writers do, which is very nearly the opposite: Come up with one good idea and somehow pad it out to fill a 300-page book.

I've read several books by Bauman, and almost everything he has written is of surpassing importance, but this book is arguably the most important he's written, and therefore probably my favorite among them. What, after all, could be more important for us as human beings than the sustainability of human existence and human society, having a place and a culture where we can actually belong, where our lives are meaningful rather than irrelevant?

The core ideas trotted out throughout this book--that the planet is overpopulated, that people need to cut down on waste, that the modern market economy dehumanizes individuals and thus in turn whole societies--are not new, but part of what makes Bauman so important is that he is neither a fanatic waving his arms around and screaming about how the end is near, nor does he try to pacify our concerns. His writing is consistently intelligent, analytical, and informed, and while it's clear that Bauman is not totally unbiased, neither does he go for the easy out of trying to rouse people to some vague cause; at every turn, Bauman simply admonishes us to think and be aware.

Like all of Bauman's work--and perhaps like most, if not all, thoughtful discourse--this book is quite tangential, beginning with a lengthy reminiscence on the nature of "waste" itself and the reasons why waste is an integral part of modern society, and indeed, any "planned" or "designed" organization before moving on to the more pressing issues of how waste is impacting our present-day societies, cultures, and ecology. The book contains occasional excursuses which dwell on a specific idea which is not intrinsically related to the subject matter at hand, but which helps to illuminate the mindset that Bauman is approaching the surrounding ideas with.

My only criticism of the book is that Bauman offers little in the way of solutions. Indeed, the book openly acknowledges the seeming impossibility of finding locally-generated solutions to global problems. Is our future genuinely hopeless? This idea, always a possibility, maintains an undercurrent of dread throughout the entire book (and indeed, almost everything that Bauman has written), but it's clear that as terrifying as our fear of the unknown future may be, the consequences of ignoring that future are probably even more disturbing. I wholeheartedly give this book my highest recommendation to anyone who is tired of nervous hand-wringing and ready to confront the uncertain future of the human race with both wisdom and courage.