Are We Naturally Wasteful?

Georges Bataille, the automation of labour, and the pointless “Hallelujah”

Isn’t it paradoxical that wealthy countries are stockpiling Covid vaccines instead of donating them to poor countries, going as far as to throw away the expired ones rather than help end the pandemic by sending them abroad?

The US threw away fifteen million doses between March and September 2021. Thousands of expired doses were wasted in Canada. Partly, that’s just because of the logistics of persuading enough people in any population to be vaccinated.

But as the BBC points out, there are concerns that over 240 million doses will be wasted because of over-purchasing by rich countries. “According to Human Rights Watch, 75% of Covid vaccines have gone to 10 countries. The Economist Intelligence Unit have calculated that half of all of the vaccines made so far have gone to 15% of the world’s population, the world’s richest countries administering 100 times as many shots as the poorest.”

The evolution of the Omicron variant from South Africa, from a country with only around a 35% vaccination rate (as of Nov 2021), is a predictable outcome of that hoarding.

If the rich countries were as informed, pragmatic, and technocratic as they might like to think they are, surely they’d have prioritized the battle against the pandemic rather than protecting the patents and profits of large drug companies. They’d have donated more vaccines to poorer countries and helped administer them.

Natural Profligacy

There’s probably a complex array of causes involved, as there is of any social phenomenon. But if you happen to be familiar with the writings of the French philosopher Georges Bataille, you might be thinking the vaccine hoarding is a glaring example of unconscious, holy wastage.

Bataille saw wastage as natural. Contrary to the Darwinian stereotype of the scarcity of resources, nature isn’t frugal but extravagant in its energy expenditures. The ancients presumed that nature was governed by a stern taskmaster in the sky, so they thought the universe stretched not far from our planet. Why would a human-like deity waste his time creating other worlds when he had to battle the forces of chaos just to put together the perfection of terra firma?

We now know the universe is unimaginably vast and old and full of virtually every possible combination of matter and energy. The sun wastes incalculable amounts of potential fuel, spewing it into the void. Life on earth collects a tiny portion and puts it to use.

But our irrational impulses are likewise reckless. We waste our time on petty grievances, futile pursuits, and vain hobbyhorses. We stand up on our soapbox and speak our mind even when no one’s listening, no one cares, or in any case when nothing will change.

And collectively in our economies, we coalesce into hierarchies that seem sinister and counterproductive in the selfish hoarding that happens at the apex. Rich countries have been hoarding goods long before the 2020 Covid pandemic. That’s just how capitalism works. Think of the untold food supplies that are thrown in the garbage because rich countries have more food available than their citizens could possibly consume. We’re oversupplied with food while hundreds of millions of poor people are living off scraps in the southern hemisphere.

Many large office buildings keep their lights on all night. According to the Australian Museum’s blog, light pollution isn’t just for cleaning, security, and avoiding plane crashes. The blog found a study that showed that “lack of motivation” is largely to blame.

Or note how Amazon destroys returned goods rather than recycling or donating them. The surface explanation is the neoclassical economic one, which rationalizes selfishness: Amazon does this to maintain its profit margins. Throwing away the goods costs less than making use of them, and long-term or intangible benefits fall outside the economic models. Morality doesn’t enter the picture because greed is good, and so on and so forth.

But perhaps the bigger picture is closer to the one Bataille drew. Perhaps rich countries are only channeling natural, universal profligacy, hoarding and wasting goods to unconsciously celebrate the universe’s amoral creativity. Maybe in letting poor people starve and waste away, or more generally in lording it over those who are subordinate to us, we feel we’re on solid ground because divinely wasteful nature has our back.

The “lack of motivation” to be more efficient would apply only to our conscious reasoning or to how we deceive ourselves to maintain our reputation. If we don’t care enough to shut off the lights to avoid wasting electricity and adding to the city’s light pollution, what do we care about? As therapists understand, we don’t often treasure what we say we do because we don’t know ourselves so well. We think we’re motivated mainly by X, whereas our irrational side is preoccupied with Y.

The Unnatural Efficiency of Labour’s Automation

Think of how most civilizations maintained their productivity for thousands of years. They propped themselves up with the institution of slavery. Whether they were wholly owned property, peasants tied to the land, or indebted wage slaves, most societies were built and maintained by that incalculable waste of human potential. Most people who ever lived in large societies performed manual labour as though they were just physical tools to be used by their royal masters.

Of course, farming and other drudgeries were necessary to maintain the large populations. But think of what those slaves and peons could have done for culture if they’d been raised to be social elites. Again, the obvious economic explanation presents itself: ancient societies couldn’t afford to educate everyone equally or to have all their members living like kings. Clearly, that’s a factor.

But in the larger picture, societies evidently evolved in the wasteful, solar manner: a feudal society is a collectivity that works only when a tiny population of elites finds a way to exploit the masses, to convince the latter to toil away their lives to maintain the luxuries of the top one percent. In nature, a star wastes its astronomically high potential energy. Likewise, the average human society wastes most of its anomalous human potential creativity.

That was the norm, at least, until the Industrial Revolution which began replacing slaves with actual machines. Here, then, is a question Bataille might have posed (or perhaps did pose somewhere): As efficient as the automation of labour might be, will the rich elites be satisfied for long with fewer opportunities to flaunt their plenitude by wasting their riches at the expense of those who can’t directly participate in the natural norm of such obscene wastage?

As immoral as the rich’s sadistic domination of the poor may be, this dynamic would amount to proof of the upper class’s relative potency, just as Friedrich Nietzsche theorized with his contrast between master and slave morality. That is, only when your commitment to nature’s amoral creativity is tested, when you can choose to donate your goods to the poor or to dump them in the garbage bin, and you deliberately waste them have you demonstrated you’re no better than a dumb solar mass, venting its extravagance for no higher reason.

Climbing Aboard the Train to Nowhere

This is in line with the evolutionary handicap principle. The more extravagant an organism’s self-imposed handicap, the stronger the signal of its genetic fitness. Fitness to what? To reproduce within a conducive environment for no greater purpose. As far as the rest of the universe is concerned, the sun’s outpouring of energy makes no difference. The evolution of life seems just as pointless from the cosmic perspective.

We do our little mating dances, prostituting ourselves in acts of conspicuous consumption to start a family and to help raise the next generation. Again, we tell ourselves we do so to honour God’s commandment to be fruitful and to multiply or because we hope our species will one day redeem all our efforts and progress to the point of dominating the galaxy like in a utopian space opera. Such stories are our rationales. They help us sleep at night and they motivate us to get out of bed in the morning.

But what if we’re also being natural? What if we can’t help ourselves in contributing to nature’s pointless drive onwards to nowhere? What if only saintly lunatics can fully resist these natural impulses?

In any case, the madness of this cosmic venture is also its majesty. The universe picked itself up by its bootstraps, as it were, and produced all of this by itself with no intelligent guidance. The universe will plunge into the nothing from whence it came. Life emerged from nonlife and will return to the state of living-death which is that of all energized configurations of matter. Our conscious awareness of what’s happening seems like a brief window on a farce that wasn’t supposed to be viewed.

The sun can’t celebrate its extravagance or its stubborn, Stoic persistence despite its ultimate lack of purpose. That option falls to intelligent organisms like us. As far as we know, we alone can understand the sacredness of this existential comedy. We can marvel at the sun’s colossal power. We can take secret joy in our small, pointless pleasures and in our tribal regressions that make a mockery of our civil pretensions.

Yet will there be joy in the human dominance of machines? Won’t we have to enhance their artificial intelligence, to turn our machines into humanoid slaves to lay the conditions for that test of our extravagance? Only when the aristocrats could have been kinder to their underlings, when the slaves could have appreciated such kindness, would the superiors have proved they were lost in their self-exaltation. If machines can’t feel betrayed, where would the glory lie in being a masterful human in the natural mold?

Humanist Revolt and the Pointless Hallelujah

Think of Leonard Cohen’s famous song, “Hallelujah”:

And even though it all went wrong I’ll stand right here before the Lord of song With nothing, nothing on my tongue but “Hallelujah”

The word “Hallelujah” means “Praise the Lord!” And why do religious people praise God with their mantras? On the surface, it’s to please or to honour the Creator or the Source.

But it doesn’t take much mental effort to think it through. The praises would have to be pointless, and not just because God would see through everything and couldn’t be swayed one way or the other. You praise someone to encourage the person to improve or to keep it up. What’s the benefit of abasing yourself before that which can’t be improved because it’s already perfect? Sure, instilling humility might be wise, but there’s little sense in stating the obvious, namely that a perfect being would be praiseworthy.

No, even if praising the Maker reassures us in our smallness and lifts our soul, we could only be fooling ourselves in the face of such a transcendent, necessarily inhuman foundation. Indeed, we might turn the praise of God into a mantra to gaslight ourselves into overlooking the world’s flaws.

Ultimately, the shouting of “Hallelujah” must be just another biproduct, a venting of excess enthusiasm. Even though it all went wrong, says the poet Cohen, he’ll stand there shouting nothing but “Hallelujah.” And he says twice in the song that this will be a “cold” and “broken” Hallelujah.

This is pure Bataille and Nietzsche. What else is there really, finally, or cosmically than such meaningless spewing of matter and energy?

But that line of thinking slips easily into crude social Darwinism and into a lazy failure to distinguish between what’s normal and what’s right. We may be compelled unconsciously to erupt with Dionysian excesses, but that doesn’t mean that behaviour is worthwhile. However futile our reining in of natural tendencies may be in the long run, those existential revolts are real alternatives.

We can observe how nature works and choose to oppose even the mighty sun by exploiting our knowledge and by building something else. We can’t destroy the sun, of course, nor should we wish to, but we can wear sunglasses or choose to sit in the shade. Maybe one day we’ll build a Dyson sphere to optimize our harnessing of solar energy.

In smaller and larger ways, we’ve evidently constructed an artificial stratum to facilitate our noosphere. We live largely in our heads and in our cultures, using tools and other technologies to enable us to flourish with dignity as people rather than in unknowing servitude as animals.

We should beware, though, the signs that we’ve reverted to the rank conservatism of playing the role of nature’s avatar. When we’re oblivious to other people’s suffering and we make excuses for squandering our resources and our privileges, our very personhood may be an appendage of primal forces.

Nature’s avatar wails a cold and dark Hallelujah, overflowing with self-indulgences. But a hero is estranged from nature, lost in thought and in bemused awareness of the material world’s absurdity, and curious about the potential for unnatural niches, for the next frontier to conquer. What’s the extent of nature’s reign? Just how far does the territory of mindlessness extend, and can intrepid agents establish a forward operating base on the outskirts, a home for wayward, alienated creators?