The Value of Convenience

The Value of Convenience: A Genealogy of Technical Culture

Thomas F. Tierney, State University of New York Press, 1993. ISBN 0-7914-1244-X

Tierney examines the ways that modern technology and technological culture affects individuals. It is his claim that modern technical culture " . . . renders them techno-fetishists." (p. 4) In other words, people are so entranced with technical solutions that they seek them even when the problems themselves are caused by technology. It is his express desire to break that enchantment, which he refers to as the desire for convenience.

What is convenience? Tierney explains by examining Arendt's view of the body. He concludes that Arendt had a fundamental dislike for the limits that the body places on action. He shows a change in people's view of the body from Greek times to the present; whereas the Greeks planned how to satisfy the body's demands, modern life (aided and abetted by technology) consumes technological devices that allow people to avoid or overcome the body's limits.

Tierney opposes the Marxist preoccupation with production as diverting attention from consumptive activity. He distinguishes between Marx's views and those of later Marxist who downplay consumption and the consumer society. He uses the example of the settlement of the American West to show how a consumer society was built. The need to make land productive quickly in order to pay for it spurred demand for more convenient, more suitable plows, axes, reapers, and other tools.

Another form of convenience that was furthered by technology is the desire for rapidity of movement. The development of roads, canals, steamships, railroads, andthe auto were all a result of the consumer's desire for convenience in movement. The wide expanses of America encouraged and strengthened this value of convenience.

To explain the origin of this value of convenience, Tierney turns to Weber's views of Protestantism and capitalism. Weber claimed that the rise of capitalism was largely due to the Protestant view of earthly activity as a positive good to be engaged in actively with rigor. Tierney examines the writings of Luther and Calvin to show how this viewpoint came about as a reaction to the rejection of the Catholic sacramental view.

While the Protestant ethic helped encourage the rise of capitalism and the value of convenience, the growth of secularism helped the shift to 'frenzied consumption'. Tierney employs the perspective of Nietzsche to flesh out this theory. Briefly, he asserts that as modern individuals ceased to practice their callings as an expression of their faith in God, as God 'receded from the modern world', the need for a God remains. Thus a new drug is needed to assuage the need for God, namely, convenience, as evidenced by consumption of technology.

Tierney concludes with a call for a new form of asceticism which values the body and its limits, which does not seek to change the body but to satisfy its demands with thought and care.