Rubbish, entropy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics
PAUL JOHNSON ne of the secrets of the universe is buried in the word rubbish. The word itself is secretive: no one knows its precise provenance. The big OED says: 'Of obscure origin app. related in some way to rubble.' But if you look up rubble, it says: 'Of obscure origin, app. related in some way to rubbish.' Dirt is matter in the wrong place. Rubbish is matter in the wrong place but on a larger scale. Getting it into the right place is beginning to perplex governments as never before. The earliest general attempt in English history to deal with the problem can be found in the Parliament Roll for 1392-93: Vu nulle . . . gene ne mette . . . ascuns fymes, ordures, mukes, rubbawe,s ou lastage in la dite doe entre les liewc sus dite,s.' Leaving aside the dreadful legal French, the law is hopeless because it merely tells you where not to put it. What should you do? Burn it? Bury it? That is what we have been doing, not so much ourselves, but by delegation to local authorities. All very well for Edmund Blunden to write: By mysterious law each place Where nature looks most gentle and glad Attracts the rubbish dumping race But in fact the entire human race has this propensity, and always has had, as archaeologists know to their delight.
One way of looking at it is to use physics, or more particularly the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This lays down that the entropy of a closed system can never decrease. In practice this means the energy is conserved but degraded into less ordered and convenient forms. Rubbish-creation is a form of entropy. Consumption goods are produced, marketed, bought and even used in an orderly fashion. Then the products of use and what remains unusable become disorderly — rubbish. It is a fact of nature that it is much easier to find ways to convert order into disorder than vice versa. The point is powerfully made in the neat Australian use of the verb 'rubbish': to tip a surfer off a high wave.
A huge and to some extent successful effort is now being made by authority to reverse the entropy of rubbish disposal. We are being made by law and the threat of fines of up to £1,000 to sort our rubbish and put it in the right places whence it can be reordered into useful matter. It is said that in a decade New Labour has created over 100 new crimes and over 1,000 new misdemeanours. Many of these deal with physical issues, such as smoking and rubbish, never before tackled radically by law, as well as metaphysical ones, such as opinion, now in many cases identified as 'hate crime'. It is notable that throwing down a cigarette butt may now be punished more severely than theft, and expressing hate, as defined by law, can be a more serious crime than physical assault (or may aggravate the assault exponentially).
This stress on the peculiar heinousness of growing categories of offences, to treat them not just as crimes but as sins, with moral resonance, shows that we now face the phenomenon of a rapidly spreading new religion, what I call scientific pantheism or `scipan'. Since human beings need to believe (as well as to know) and to condemn (as well as to praise), it was inevitable that the decline of traditional faith would lead to a huge vacuum, to be filled by a secular system of beliefs, virtues, vices, rewards and punishments. Central to it is the notion of a crime or sin against the planet, and if the scipans have not yet created new notions of hell and purgatory, they are engaged in an effort to reverse the entropy caused by humans, and not just on the issue of rubbish either. Towards the end of the Middle Ages, the number of sins identified by moral theologians surpassed 10,000, and was constantly increasing. Within Christendom efforts were made to back the spiritual sanctions of the Church by law, but they usually failed. For brief periods and in particular places — in Savonarola's Florence, for instance, or in Calvin's Geneva or the New England of the Pilgrim Fathers — sins were, in general, punished by law. But the drift of secularism inexorably took the sin dimension out of crime, leaving the priests only with their echoing pulpits.
Now, by contrast, the new scientific pantheism is secular from the start, fuelled by the democratic process and the popular media. What it designates as sin is automatically transmuted into legal offences and enforced by all the resources of the state. In this sense all Western states are becoming theocratic, as the punitive side of scipan begins to bite. I doubt if it will work better than any other theocracy in the long term. There is already confusion in its basic theology. Rubbish, for instance, has always raised confusion, another form of entropy. As Cassius says in Julius Caesar, 'What trash is Rome,/ What rubbish, and what offal!' That is his opinion, the rubbish to be reordered by Caesar's murder. Once you begin on this path you run into problems of conflicting opinion, that is, politics, at every turn. When Locke, in his Essay on Human Understanding, writes of 'removing some of the rubbish that lies in the way of knowledge', by what right does he judge?
It is orthodox Christianity to regard no one as rubbish. The point was put elegantly by Tennyson in In Memoriam: That no one walks with aimless feet That not one life shall be destroyed Or cast as rubbish to the void, When God has made the pile complete.
Do the scientific pantheists believe this? Do they accept that humans come before nonhuman things, or do they regard the distinction as meaningless? In a pantheon, everything, from humanity to inert matter, is a continuum. Some Christians have always distinguished between the flesh and the spirit (valuable) and the world (rubbish). Thus John Donne in his Progress of the Soul (1612) asserts, 'What fragmentary rubbish this world is, thou know'st.' Many, from St Augustine to Newman, would agree. Indeed in a certain frame of mind, honest scientists are bound to agree too. The entire universe is undergoing entropy, moving from primal order to growing disorder. Unimaginably huge quantities of celestial rubbish are produced every second by the process of heat loss and its consequences. In one sense the universe is a gigantic rubbish pit or incinerator, both now regarded as unacceptable by the prevailing scipan wisdom. But the way in which the universe creates and deals with its rubbish problem is beyond the power of man. We cannot control even its comparatively minor activities on earth. A single major volcano can generate more 'emissions' than humanity in its entire history. The earnest ecologists who claim to be 'saving' the planet and/or the universe remind me of Sydney Smith's Mrs Partington trying to deal with the Great Storm of Reform by sweeping the water with her broom from her doorstep.
But that is not going to stop the enthusiasts from trying. We are in for a rough time. They will soon discover that they cannot deal with the consequences of consumerism — rubbish — without trying to control the thing itself. I foresee an infinite number of laws ordering what we may produce, buy and use. Just as the notion of the 'hate crime' is the beginning of the end of free speech, so rubbish control will end freedom of purchase and much else. The notion that human freedom will indefinitely expand is out of date. For those in authority now, freedom is disorder and must be reversed if the world is to be 'saved'.
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