The Amoral Nature Of Convenience

With the conveniences and genuine practical benefits of modern life comes a barrage of assertions that the technology that grants this convenience erodes patience, reducing people to a state of having little ability to make it through small difficulties or the absence of expected conveniences.  In one sense, it is not surprising that conservatives can tend to agree with this due to the inherent emphasis on tradition in how their ideas relate to life: many of the most helpful conveniences of the present day are quite recent in the grand scope of history.  Particularly when it comes to technology, Christians in America, who often align with conservatism despite its logically fallacious foundation and conflict with Biblical morality, might endorse a kind of technological legalism that views patience as an enemy of convenience.

Wanting to make your life more convenient is not a sinful goal.  For some reason, people who condemn convenience as a blemish on modern society seem to think that inconveniences of the distant past that have been overcome can be legitimately sidestepped, while more contemporary advances for convenience have gone too far.  This arbitrary division between one amoral type of convenience and another can be easily pointed out by anyone who believes that modern civilization has a moral obligation to stop evolving in ways that make convenience more and more accessible.  For those seeking examples of just how arbitrary this is, the ways this can be pointed out are thankfully plentiful.

Anyone who does not wish to travel by horse to the nearest store, send written messages by using trained pigeons, use hand-lit lamps for light after sunset, retrieve water from a well hundreds of feet from their home, or let various sicknesses pass on their own already is actually fine with convenience.  They just might not be fully aware of their own beliefs.  For them to suddenly say that the potentially immediate communication of text messages or the delivery of basic items conventionally bought at a store in person robs people of patience would be a petty mistake.  In addition to this, patience is not automatically cultivated or maintained by living inconvenient lives for the same reason impatience is not developed by living convenient lives.

Some people are naturally patient, content to wait through various trials or delays.  Other people might be naturally impatient and find themselves struggling to endure the most trivial kinds of inconveniences.  Technology cannot be validly credited with shaping either kind of person's involuntary attitude.  However, both the accomplishments and technical difficulties that can be attributed to technology could possibly affect a person's natural level of patience, even if the person himself or herself is what ultimately decides how that inner attitude will manifest.  No one can blame technology for "making" some moderners unable to handle setbacks, obstacles, and waiting periods in daily life.  Technology and whatever convenience it provides are amoral.

Technology makes human life objectively more convenient, whereas the so-called negative consequences of technology are either misunderstood benefits or misuses of something that is not harmful on its own.  This is inevitably the case no matter what kind of technology or what kind of convenient application of technology one focuses on.  If in prescribing patience the Bible meant that we should oppose ease and comfort in our lives, it would have said so (Deuteronomy 4:2).  There is only gratuitous difficulty to gain from living as if anything else is the case.  Patience can be virtuous without making an intentional refusal to embrace convenience beneficial or morally good.  The Bible says nothing that does not perfectly align with this very conclusion.