The Spiritual Cost That Comes With Convenience
(REVIEW) We live in the future: Instant communication across the globe, huge swaths of music, film and TV available whenever the fancy strikes; two-day delivery, one-day delivery or even same-day delivery for items too numerous and varied to attempt to list; devices that fit in a pocket or a backpack with astounding computing power.
It’s an era brimming with technologies of convenience that would seem, at first glance, to have made life easier and better. Yet somehow all these purported solutions have created new problems.
Gabe Bullard’s new book “Against Convenience” addresses some of these problems and argues “not against an easier path, but against the idea that the paths in front of us are truly any easier.”
More a critique of how “technology piles up as new inventions attempt to fix the mess the last inventions caused” than the polemic implied in the title, “Against Convenience” ranges widely across contemporary life (including dating apps, porn, self-checkout, streaming services, social media, fast fashion, personal computers, smartphones and rapid obsolescence) and history (including the Luddites, who were not what the current usage of the term implies) in calling for a new direction in developing and using technology that would “fulfill the optimistic predictions of the past” and “[complete] the work of progress.”
It’s a thorough book, drawing on interviews with and research published by contemporary academics as well as thinkers of the last century (such as Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, Neil Postman and John Berger) in addressing the numerous areas convenience technologies touch — moral, environmental, psychological, economic.
“Against Convenience” does not take a religious perspective, but the issues it reports, when considered together, adumbrate the profound spiritual problems posed by convenience. One such problem is the way many technologies remove “social friction” to “limit our interactions to the strictly transactional.” A moral relation among people is thus replaced by a consumptive relation between an isolated individual and products. Even the designation “social friction” is predicated on the idea that other people are obstacles to be surmounted on the way to consumption rather than ends in themselves.
This vision of people as either means or impediments—as places of “friction”—inverts every major religion’s moral code, which, in their varied ways, propose that every person is imbued with a portion of God or the divine and therefore deserves a measure of dignity. That even Bullard argues in favor of reintroducing more “friction” to our “increasingly smooth world” without questioning the term and what it implies shows how ingrained this understanding is and how necessary a reconsideration of how we ought to relate to others.
A second of the numerous problems of convenience lies in how it defines the individual’s place in the cosmos. In nearly all religious and moral systems, there is a core belief that humanity, though prone to folly, can develop its higher faculties and approach the divine through discipline.
As C.S. Lewis wrote in “The Abolition of Man”, this conception of humanity understands the problem as “how to conform the soul to reality,” with “knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue” (what might be broadly called a spiritual practice) as the solution. The ethos of convenience reverses this relation, seeing the problem, to quote Lewis, as “how to subdue reality to the wishes of men,” with the putative solution sometimes entailing “things hitherto regarded as disgusting and impious.”
This seems an apt description of the convenience conception of the individual, which is probably best encapsulated by the word “consumer”. Bullard sometimes glimpses what it means for a person to become a consumer, noting how, with respect to the short lifespans of most devices, “[disposability] reorders our relationship with the world around us” and how, in the context of music, “[streaming] turned different types of listeners into the same type of consumer,” but the book doesn’t ever confront the problem of the consumer fully.
“Against Convenience” offers a variety of suggestions on how to remediate the damage of convenience, but a brief episode late in the book intimates the role spiritual traditions might play in resisting convenience’s pernicious influence and rejuvenating modern life.
In February 2024, Bullard reported a chord change on the John Cage piece Organ2/ASLSP (As Slow As Possible), which has been playing on an organ in a medieval church in Halberstadt, Germany for 25 years and will conclude in 2640.
People came from all over the world to hear the chord change. Bullard describes first thinking of the event as “a silly story about a group of eccentrics,” but, upon arriving, notices how his “body seemed to resonate with the sound” and feels as if he is “frozen in time, living a single second stretched to infinity.” When the chord changed, many cheered; some cried.
Bullard describes the response this way: “It was a perfectly reasonable reaction, though I can’t really explain why. It has to be felt, and it can only be felt through the work of going.” Although Bullard doesn’t describe the experience with reference to God or the soul, or even with the catch-all term “spiritual”, the chord change seems to have been a religious experience. That the venue is a centuries-old church is no coincidence.
The chord change, and the glimpse of “infinity” it afforded, allowed those present to experience what used to be a normal part of human life — a temporary departure from linear machine time into the eternal time of God — that is increasingly difficult in this age of convenience.
As Bullard remarks throughout the book, convenience as such is not intrinsically bad —since even the division of labor and possibility of buying rather than making things such as soap are conveniences — but “not all conveniences are equal.”
Perhaps the solution to the many problems of convenience is, more than any legislation, to reclaim, in the midst of modern life, the orientation toward the eternal — not in the sense of an afterlife, but as a conception of existence to determine how we relate, directly and through technologies of all kinds, with each other and with the world (and the wider cosmos) we inhabit.
Eric Vanderwall is a writer, editor and musician based in Arizona.