What a waste!
Utilitarianism is diminishing the value and beauty of everything.
As we enter a somber time of waiting and preparing for the birth of Christ, I’ve been seeing a lot of ads selling me products for Christmas. Still, more than that, they’re selling development for my children, efficiency in my home, luxury, and above all, every product boasts how useful it is.
In my post about K-pop Demon Hunters, I talked about how utilitarianism, among other things, has driven out the beauty in our culture. At the time, I wanted to say more on this point, but didn’t to keep the post focused. So, here I am to revisit the issue of beauty and how it’s going extinct.
What is utilitarianism?
Utility, AKA usefulness, as a measure has valid but narrow applications, yet we’re applying it to everything. HR professionals should hire the most useful employees. We read nutrition labels, trying to avoid anything that isn’t of use to the body. We streamline all our supply chains, and anywhere a human can be replaced with a program, we do it.
Defining a person, item, or idea by its usefulness makes practical sense. But it’s not the way God measures value.
Christian life, especially within a family, is often a lot like the woman who poured oil on Jesus and was told it was a waste (Matthew 26: 6–13).
The utilitarian approach
Judas speaks up, citing an argument Catholics are used to when others criticize our lavish cathedrals: “Why this waste? For this could have been sold for a large sum and given to the poor.”
Even the poor, in this context, are invoked in a utilitarian sense. They’re useful toward his argument, but Judas had no real plans to help the poor. It was virtue signaling at best.
We’ve come to a place where if something is useful, it’s good, and if it’s not useful, throw it out.
Like I said in my other post, we don’t see a reason to put gargoyles on buildings anymore. We don’t add ornate carvings to our wooden furniture. We paint everything beige, make it a rectangle, and then look for ways to be more productive in our beige box.
For example
One of the most obvious ways I’ve seen utilitarianism take over is AI. Yes, here I go criticizing AI. But hear me out.
Most of the men I know work in the tech space and were among the first to jump on the AI bandwagon. I remember at the time, bringing up concerns. What about it being used for fraud and trafficking? What about artists’ rights? How are people going to use it badly, and what safeguards should we have in place before rolling it out for public use? And I got the same response over and over: “But I could use it for [insert every use for AI under the sun].”
If it’s useful, then full steam ahead. Concerns of virtue and culture? Irrelevant because AI is useful.
In a lot of ways, AI is diminishing the value of the things it produces. If we can mass-produce music with the right prompt, what’s the value? If we can replace an employee with an AI program, what’s the value of that employee?
This is how we end up with huge corporations attempting to operate on a skeleton crew, with artificial customer support, and no recourse when your particular need or problem doesn’t fit their algorithm.
I’m not trying to disparage my tech-savvy guys. I’m pointing out how ubiquitous this thinking has become. We almost can’t see things any other way.
We even measure human life this way now. Instead of God-given dignity, we have our usefulness to society, our productivity, our output. The sickest, oldest, and poorest among us become disposable because they’re not useful. No wonder we’re burnt out and disconnected.
Life is messy
I’ve never experienced anything more wasteful than Christian family life. There is nothing efficient about it. We waste time, food, and energy constantly. I’d get a lot more done if my husband didn’t crave quality time at the end of a stressful day. If you’ve lived with a toddler, you know that they can be starving one second and then decide a single chicken nugget is filling after you’ve made them five. And reheating the other four later? Poison, as far as the child is concerned.
The tasks of family life sound simple, but each one is a nesting doll within a larger one. “Go get dressed” becomes a scavenger hunt for a particular pair of socks that “feel right with these pants,” and you may even find yourself trudging back upstairs for a new outfit once everyone’s buckled, because someone tripped in the mud right in front of the house on the way to the car. Getting kids organized is like holding a handful of water. They are the enemy of efficiency, and that’s GOOD. There’s nothing useful about a baby. I vowed to love my husband for better or worse. If he becomes less ‘useful’ to me due to illness or life circumstances, my vows don’t disappear.
This applies to friendship, too. I’ve been on many a ‘wasteful’ errand with a friend, simply because it’s time spent together.
I’m not advocating for intentional waste. I’m saying it’s just a fact of life. In fact, the most precious moments of my life come from this inefficiency. Wasting away an afternoon on a hike with my kids, baking an experimental loaf of bread so my husband can lovingly laugh at me when it fails, and hours of sleep lost to holding a precious baby; these are the moments I treasure, not that afternoon I finally caught up on emails.
We can often only measure the sum total of our life at its end. The deathbed examen is the most important, and it will be the inefficient, useless, but beautiful moments that will have brought us the most grace.
How did Jesus respond?
“Why are you bothering this woman? She has done a beautiful thing for me.”
Notice how he said beautiful?
God doesn’t measure our use. He made plenty of useful things, but he made them for us. He gave us a beautiful world to enjoy and cultivate, and the work of beautification is God-honoring.
Where do you find beauty in the waste?
Talk to you soon,
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