What does it mean to be efficient? I’m often asked if I work in an efficient way? Which I guess is a subtle way of squeezing more work out of me. After all, I’m little more than a biomechanical engine that produces energy that someone else puts to good use. I use the money I earn to maintain my short existence with food, water and shelter and to care for my developing children who spend their time working out what they are supposed to achieve too.
Efficiency is also the latest buzzword of the environmental movement. If our stuff is efficient then our planet will be better off and so will we. But to what end? And is it really true? I’m not so sure.
Human relationships, whether they be local, international or environmental are primarily about trade. Despite our best rhetoric we are not driven by altruistic love for all people and the land. The motivation is what’s best for ourselves and our families. Most people do not work for their employers out of sheer love. They work because they need to. Employers don’t tend to employ people because they want to help others do well in life; their interest is to build business and income. In this sense “other” people are a means, not an end. Most of our relationships are about trade of some sort.
I’m not suggesting that this is the way it should be. It’s merely an observation of what is. Thus, when the word efficiency is mentioned I am suspicious because efficiency is really the prize of the powerful and the curse of the powerless. Efficiency means more income for less work. Less work means more unemployment. Yet, ironically, efficiency also means less income because there are fewer breakdowns. Efficiency pre-supposes less maintenance and longer life, which in turn means fewer sales.
It might be cynical, but successive governments spend most of their time shifting apparent inefficiencies from one place to another in order to seem efficient. Inefficiency is a fundamental requirement of our ongoing trade. In a strange way we need it to survive.
Beauty and creativity are not efficient, cheap, reliable or durable. Their value is intrinsic not monetary. The human capacity to be creative and recognise beauty in the natural world means we are not merely biomechanical entities struggling toward efficiency. We are living creatures with an inherent design to love, relate, reproduce, create and celebrate. If efficiency is the mantra of productivity and trade, then inefficiency is a constant reminder of our humanity.
Taking time to dream, paint, sit in silence, wander aimlessly or make music may not seem like good use of time. Running in a marathon is hardly efficient use of energy. But this is what makes us human.
The Bible says that in the beginning the earth was without form and then God bought shape into being. Function came later. It’s quite possible that, from time to time, the most efficient thing you can do is to be completely inefficient – remembering who and what we really are.
Digby Wilkinson 2009