![]() ![]() 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. ![]() 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’. 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). 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 said that in a decade New Labour has created over 100 new crimes and over 1,000 new misdemeanours. 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. The point is powerfully made in the neat Australian use of the verb ‘rubbish’: to tip a surfer off a high wave.Ī huge and to some extent successful effort is now being made by authority to reverse the entropy of rubbish disposal. It is a fact of nature that it is much easier to find ways to convert order into disorder than vice versa. Then the products of use and what remains unusable become disorderly - rubbish. Consumption goods are produced, marketed, bought and even used in an orderly fashion. In practice this means the energy is conserved but degraded into less ordered and convenient forms. This lays down that the entropy of a closed system can never decrease. One way of looking at it is to use physics, or more particularly the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Prince Harry’s legal defeat will be particularly painful All very well for Edmund Blunden to write:īut in fact the entire human race has this propensity, and always has had, as archaeologists know to their delight. 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. The earliest general attempt in English history to deal with the problem can be found in the Parliament Roll for 1392–93: ‘Qu nulle …gette ne mette …ascuns fymes, ordures, mukes, rubbawes ou lastage in la dite eloe entre les lieux sus dites.’ Leaving aside the dreadful legal French, the law is hopeless because it merely tells you where not to put it. Getting it into the right place is beginning to perplex governments as never before. ![]() Rubbish is matter in the wrong place but on a larger scale. related in some way to rubbish.’ Dirt is matter in the wrong place. related in some way to rubble.’ But if you look up rubble, it says: ‘Of obscure origin, app. The big OED says: ‘Of obscure origin app. The word itself is secretive: no one knows its precise provenance. One of the secrets of the universe is buried in the word rubbish. ![]()
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