The Usefulness of the Useless

Usefulness of the Useless, by Nuccio Ordine — a professor of Literature at University Calabria — is a fun read through the history of some well-known and not so well-known thinkers organized around the topic of uselessness, something near and dear to my heart.

It’s long been my contention that humans, thanks to our ability to cooperate and crowd-source our survival needs (courtesy of empathetic brains and language), have the unique ability to pursue useless activities. And by useless, I mean activities that don’t contribute to the preservation and good health of the individual or the species. Art, creativity, reading for pleasure, ambling, cloud spotting — in other words, all the pleasant, nonessential things that make it so delightful to be a human — are useless in the evolutionary scheme of things.

Rather, it is a defense of uselessness as a source for the useful, which was engaging but a bit disappointing. Ordine weaves together snippets of writing about knowledge and usefulness ranging from the ancient Greeks to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, from Petrach to Dante. He builds the case that we need unstructured, unfocused, un-monetized time to think and create and teach and research and pursue science, so that great discoveries can be made and great works of art can be created.


I certainly enjoyed his writing, and his clear command of the greats from across history, especially this lovely sentiment from Baudelaire:

“Commerce is essentially satanic.”

Or this, from Theophile Gautier (whose book I purchased just to read his now famous “Art for Art’s Sake” preface):

“The only truly beautiful things are useless, everything useful is ugly, because it is the expression of a certain need, and man’s needs are ignoble and disgusting, as is his wretched and infirm nature. The most useful place in the home is the toilet.”

Usefulness of the Useless is a charming, timely and important book, and great fun to read, but ultimately I found it far too useful.