Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts

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





As long as large parts of the world remained wholly or partlyunaffected by modernization, they were treated by modernizingsocieties as lands that were able to absorb the excess ofpopulation in the 'developed countries'. Global solutions weresought, and temporarily found, to locally produced overpopulationproblems. But as modernization has reached the furthest lands ofthe planet, 'redundant population' is produced everywhere and alllocalities have to bear the consequences of modernity's globaltriumph. They are now confronted with the need to seek - in vain,it seems - local solutions to globally produced problems. Theglobal spread of the modernity has given rise to growing quantitiesof human beings who are deprived of adequate means of survival, butthe planet is fast running out of places to put them. Hence the newanxieties about 'immigrants' and 'asylum seekers' and the growingrole played by diffuse 'security fears' on the contemporarypolitical agenda.





With characteristic brilliance, this new book by Zygmunt Baumanunravels the impact of this transformation on our contemporaryculture and politics and shows that the problem of coping with'human waste' provides a key for understanding some otherwisebaffling features of our shared life, from the strategies of globaldomination to the most intimate aspects of human relationships.