Wasted Lives (ePub)

The production of 'human waste' - or more
precisely, wasted lives, the 'superfluous' populations
of migrants, refugees and other outcasts - is an inevitable
outcome of modernization. It is an unavoidable side-effect of
economic progress and the quest for order which is characteristic
of modernity.

As long as large parts of the world remained wholly or partly
unaffected by modernization, they were treated by modernizing
societies as lands that were able to absorb the excess of
population in the 'developed countries'. Global
solutions were sought, and temporarily found, to locally produced
overpopulation problems. But as modernization has reached the
furthest lands of the planet, 'redundant population' is
produced everywhere and all localities have to bear the
consequences of modernity's global triumph. They are now
confronted with the need to seek - in vain, it seems -
local solutions to globally produced problems. The global spread of
the modernity has given rise to growing quantities of human beings
who are deprived of adequate means of survival, but the planet is
fast running out of places to put them. Hence the new anxieties
about 'immigrants' and 'asylum seekers' and
the growing role played by diffuse 'security fears' on
the contemporary political agenda.

With characteristic brilliance, this new book by Zygmunt Bauman
unravels the impact of this transformation on our contemporary
culture and politics and shows that the problem of coping with
'human waste' provides a key for understanding some
otherwise baffling features of our shared life, from the strategies
of global domination to the most intimate aspects of human
relationships.