The merits of Inefficiency

Surely any self-respecting, unconscious conservative should read those words and move on.
Good riddance.
John Ralston Saul talks a lot about our obsession with efficiency. I think he has a point.
We have an obsession that things be done faster, cheaper, to perform better.
These are all worthy attributes. They are the engines of economic growth.
But are they, in themselves, a meaningful end? Or are they just a means to an end that needs to be first defined?
There's this article I read about two weeks ago. In the National Post. It was about this young writer, who's name I can't remember, and he's written some novel I also can't remember but I'm sure you could find it in the front display of chapters and coles.
We love young novelists.
Anyways, he said that he wrote about 2000 pages to come up with his novel. His novel was about 400 pages.
And it made me wonder, can beauty be efficient? Can creativity be efficient? And, of course, can writing be efficient?
This opens up a whole can of worms. Because I think it really puts to question the value that we place in our society on efficiency.
That which is most beautiful has many layers. It arises and exists in a web, textured, confusing, often with a structure so subtle that it might not even be detectable.
Efficiency, on the other hand, is all about being linear. Achieving an end as directly as possible. With time as the crucial component.
This writer, of whom I still can't remember the name of, he said something like 'you can take the most direct route, using a map, to get from here to there, or you can take the route intuited by your senses, and that route is maybe all over the place and full of dead-ends, but it may be also be full of a beauty you would otherwise never find.'
So yeah, if we were more inefficient we'd miss out on growth. And our corporations wouldn't make as much money and all those stock operators wouldn't get so rich.
But I wonder what else we'd find?
- posted by Sigurd2/11/2007 01:46:00 PM