Wasted Lives

The production of 'human waste' - or moreprecisely, wasted lives, the 'superfluous' populationsof migrants, refugees and other outcasts - is an inevitableoutcome of modernization. It is an unavoidable side-effect ofeconomic progress and the quest for order which is characteristicof 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'. Globalsolutions were sought, and temporarily found, to locally producedoverpopulation problems. But as modernization has reached thefurthest lands of the planet, 'redundant population' isproduced everywhere and all localities have to bear theconsequences of modernity's global triumph. They are nowconfronted with the need to seek - in vain, it seems -local solutions to globally produced problems. The global spread ofthe modernity has given rise to growing quantities of human beingswho are deprived of adequate means of survival, but the planet isfast running out of places to put them. Hence the new anxietiesabout 'immigrants' and 'asylum seekers' andthe growing role played by diffuse 'security fears' onthe contemporary political 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 someotherwise baffling features of our shared life, from the strategiesof global domination to the most intimate aspects of humanrelationships.