On waste

Another restatement.

keristor said that there are ethical absolutes "on which all rational beings would agree," and defined one of them as "if you waste resources you won't have them when needed." I would rather define this as a statement of demonstrable fact, from which the ethical absolute would be "wasting resources is bad," or (as Spider Robinson put it) "Thou shalt not waste."

And, of course, thus redefined by me as an ethical absolute, I completely disagree with it. (But then, I never seriously claimed to be a rational being. Nobody ever reads these bits in brackets, do they?)

Waste--the consumption of time, energy and resources to no necessary or practical purpose--is utterly central to our existence and development as intelligent beings. All the most important advances in culture, art, science and technology can be traced back to someone wasting something, doing something which at the time was unnecessary, right back to the first caveperson (probably a woman) who sat staring into space when there was work to be done, wasting time. If everybody had done only what was necessary, we'd still be back there.

With hindsight, of course, we can see that it wasn't waste at all, that there was a grand plan that resulted in the invention of the left-handed sprocket flange or whatever, but at the time waste is what it was.

Music grew through composers wasting time and effort and music paper writing tunes that would never work, instrument makers adding unnecessary twiddles to a trumpet or making a viol that fitted under the chin. Perspective, I'd wager, was discovered by someone who was supposed to be doing something other than sitting and staring down the street. This golden thread of waste runs through all our history and has inspired us to all our greatest achievements.

And in our daily lives too, waste is all-important, so much so that our need for time to waste is enshrined in employment law, till they abolish it. We can talk about the need to de-stress and the work-life balance and so on, but this is simply to restate the fact that one of our most basic needs is the need to have enough of everything--time, food, space, energy, money--to waste some. That is the spur that drives us to compete; not mere survival, but survival and a bit more. Survival and enough to waste.

As resources become scarcer, that margin will vanish. The "solutions" to the problem of diminishing resources--recycling, conservation and so on--are not solutions, merely deferments, and the logical end, or the beginning of the end, unless we can find an actual solution, is that nobody will be allowed more food or energy or spare time than they need for mere survival. At which point, I believe, human advancement will come to a stop, and the long regression will begin. Because unless we have time, and energy, and space, and resources to waste, we have no room to grow.

Again, disabling comments, because I don't want an argument, and I want to have the choice not to have one.