The decay of social and public goods is not a net loss within the device paradigm. Mutual trust and interdependence, for instance, provide a sense of warmth and acceptance, but they are burdensome too as we have seen in Chapter 17 when we considered the emergence of insurance. Public and social goods are never as strictly available as commodities. But it is not really their public and social character that makes them uncertain. Some of the goods whose deterioration and demise Hirsch rightly laments are really no more public or social than some goods that are now flourishing vigorously. When 85 million people watch an event such as the Super Bowl, it would be hard to deny that they are enjoying a public and social good. What makes that spectacle so successful is the intricate and efficient machinery which guarantees a pleasurably consumable commodity.39 What makes educational systems and public parks relatively precarious is the lack of such a machinery. The goods whose welfare concerns Hirsch are distinguished by their relatively pretechnological character. Hirsch uses as one illustration of the commercialization and privatization effect which erodes the “public and social” goods a phenomenon that has always had eminently private character, namely, sex.40 Commercialization and privatization, in short, disburden people from responsibility for the maintenance of certain goods and free them from the dependence on other people, from their varying moods and strengths, and from the demands that they will make at unforeseen or inopportune times. Such gains may be thought to outweigh the losses of pretechnological social comity and public amenity.
But Hirsch’s master argument has a generality not met by pointing out that commercialization (the device paradigm in our terminology) has successfully and with some net benefit taken over pretechnological areas. Hirsch’s argument contends that when we attempt to define certain goods, such as education or military achievement that used to be understood and secured in a social morality, strictly as commercial goods (as commodities) and thus try to dispense with the social morality, the commercial good may turn out to be a faint and useless or even harmful fragment of the real thing. No attempt to remedy incomplete instructions with another set of regulations can be finally successful. If anything the regulatory hierarchy will collapse under its own weight. For commercialization to be successful locally it requires a global morality which orients, directs, and rights the commercial system as a whole. I agree that not every device will reliably procure the intended commodity; far less can the totality of devices at any time be expected by itself to attain or maintain a balanced and benign state. Some undergirding human understanding is needed. But it need not be moral in the sublime or demanding sense of that word. It is probably sufficient when people have that implicit grasp of the distinctive pattern of their world and of their approach to it which tells them that the consumption of commodities requires them to do their part in the construction and maintenance of the supporting machinery.41 Technology has its unloved laborious side. But as suggested in Chapters 15 and 17, people’s understanding of technology and their allegiance to it are sufficiently strong to sustain the technological society. Without affection but with enough acceptance we obey traffic laws, put in the hours at work, and pay our taxes. Superficially, the loss of the pretechnological social fabric can lead to the decline of sociability and friendliness which Hirsch and Scitovsky note.42 But it can lead as well to the smooth and affable handling of people by receptionists, executives, and party goers which totally baffles and misleads one from a relatively pretechnological setting. What distinguishes technological life is not surliness but its division into surfaces, rough or pleasant, and concealed, inaccessible substructures. Perhaps it is this divided character of our lives that leaves us unhappy.
To pursue that suggestion we must recollect and elaborate the ways in which we have divided our lives according to the device paradigm. And again the realm of analysis should be the one where the benefits of the device were to be finally enjoyed, i.e., the realm of leisure. By the device paradigm the texture of pretechnological life was divided in two directions. Our emphasis has been on what may be called the horizontal division. It occurs when the full significance of a thing is reduced to one function which is then secured as a commodity on the basis of some machinery. Thus in Chapter 9 we considered the fireplace whose function came to be seen solely as one of producing warmth, a function then taken over by more and more efficient and hidden machinery, so that finally the consumer faces a pure commodity that rests on an implicitly understood but specifically impenetrable machinery. When such an incision is made in a phenomenon that is woven into the larger fabric of life, it is inevitably severed from neighboring phenomena as well, from the commerce with nature, the organization of the home, the relations of the family members one to the other. In the same chapter we looked at the ways in which technology unraveled the context of a pretechnological work world. In Chapter 17 we saw how familial and neighborly trust and charity are taken to procure security in the face of unexpected adversity; and once this function was severed from its context, it could be taken over by the device of an insurance industry. The tissue of family life might have healed of course and become whole again. In fact, however, the progress of technology has led to more and more separation of functions, i.e., to vertical cuts in the web of pretechnological culture. This has finally resulted in the availability of largely free-floating commodities which are assembled into fashionable styles of life as was pointed out in Chapter 10.
The primary context of pretechnological life that suffered decomposition function by function was the household. The common view that such a household consisted of an extended family and constituted an economically self-sufficient unit is in error, but only by degrees.43 Though father and mother were normally the only adults in a premodern household, there were also young servants or helpers, apprentices, and sometimes journeymen; and relatives who could be counted on for help were always close by. The village, the typical wider setting of premodern life, was a kind of extended family in its own way. It is also true that towns and even villages had butchers, bakers, blacksmiths, and so forth who disburdened households from producing all of their goods. But many economic activities remained centered in the household, and the husband’s work was equally so, or it was at least within the family’s proximity and experience. A family nourished, educated, trained, and entertained its children in a tradition that was alive in the parents’ competence and represented to the children in the parents. Thus the parents commanded rightful authority, which made possible that unity of discipline and love whose decay Christopher Lasch has analyzed.44 The first and most traumatic disruption of the pretechnological household was the transformation of work into a mere means of production whose outward manifestation was the establishment of factories, the urbanization and proletarianization of people, and the consequent destruction of village life. Technology, as remarked in Chapter 8, touched most people’s life first in its brute laborious and mechanical aspect. For a while in the nineteenth century the family became a refuge and counterforce to the disruptive and cruel reality at large. But it is the family that is the “haven in a heartless world.” The family is less than the household, and the continued attenuation of our social substance became apparent as scholarly and common concern was narrowed from the family to marriage and finally to companionship.45
As the technological machinery became established and productive, the surrender of household functions to technology took on the pleasant appearance of liberation and enrichment. The housewife was to be freed of the burdens of baking, putting up food, sewing, hauling water, and tending the fire. Other burdens such as washing and cleaning were lightened. The husband, though the frequently authoritarian head of the family, exercised power on the basis of extrinsic attributes, the paycheck and physical force. The family, severed from the work world, was no longer a place where he could prove and enact genuine competence and resourcefulness. The family more and more became a mere setting for consumption, and since consumption makes no demands of skill and discipline, there was less a
nd less of substance to which the parents needed or were even able to initiate their children. This created, if not a vacuum, at least a great deal of emptiness in the family with which we are trying to cope to this day.
The attempts at coping have numerous and intricate aspects of which two are helpful for our concerns. The first is the belief that for every problem there is technological expertise which can take over the burden of solution. Thus a host of professions sprang up to tell parents how to feed, clothe, and treat their children. Much of this work was mystification and trivialization since there was nothing of substance within the family that required the aid of “the helping professions.”46 The problem was not that the advancement of technology burdened the family with new tasks to which the parents were unequal; rather the tasks that once gave the family weight and structure and the parents genuine power were one by one taken over by the machinery of technology. There are of course real strains and overt crises in the modern family for which social work is eminently desirable.47 These difficulties arise from the uneven conquest of the family by technology. Technology has undermined the authority of the parents but not entirely disburdened them of nurturing and educating their children. When parents act as if they were largely freed of responsibility for their children, neglect or abuse are the results. The typical middle-class family, however, continues to function well at the level of health and comfort and yet is disfranchised from the shaping and maintenance of the world.48 The consequent sense of impotence is only heightened when professionals make parents believe that their confusion, resulting from the loss of world appropriation, is an indication of parental incompetence.
The other aspect of the family’s fate that brings out the dubious character of leisurely consumption is the predicament of the housewife in the progress of technology. In one sense her power increased in the middle and late nineteenth century. The husband, as was said, became more and more of a privileged guest in his house since the world of his work and competence lay outside. The housewife, on the other hand, continued to perform or supervise tasks in the house that were vital for the welfare of the family. Moreover, the home that she managed and presided over constituted a realm of order and serenity, comparing favorably with the often ugly and disruptive developments of maturing modern technology. But when in the twentieth century the household was reduced to a terminal for commodities, male chauvinism and the requirements of technology conspired to reduce the housewife to a manager of consumption.49 The vacuity of consumption was covered up by unreasonable demands of fastidiousness, styled up to a new ethos of wifely and motherly duty by advertisers whom Ruth Schwartz Cowan aptly calls the “ideologues” of the 1920s.50
Yet even today home and family retain through the work of the housewife comparatively many pretechnological features of stability, tradition, warmth, and engagement. They are deeply appreciated by husbands and children. But they stand outside the ruling paradigm and fail to have its sanction.51 We enjoy profoundly a meal that has been carefully prepared, invokes a family tradition, and responds to our personal tastes and foibles. But such a meal is a tenuous weapon in a struggle between husband and wife since one can always heat a frozen dinner or go out to eat. And so the housewife has the worst of two worlds. As the stewardess of pretechnological practices her position is weak; as a citizen of the technological society her position is infected with doubt, if not contempt, since she is largely confined to the realm of technological ends, to the side of commodity and consumption of which we are anything but proud and confident. We like to rest our case in the penultimate area of means, on the side of machinery where husbands have their place as laborers; and the seriousness of their contribution is indicated by the paycheck. As stewards of the means of technology they are given the decisive power of the means to all means, namely money.
This profound inequity explains the bitterness with which Lillian Breslow Rubin, for instance, speaks of “the deadening and deadly quality of the task of the housewife.”52 It explains the confusion of many housewives as to what society expects of them.53 And finally it explains the prima facie curious move into the labor market on the part of those housewives who do not have to work to be financially secure. A housewife who takes a job as a secretary or saleswoman exchanges a position where she can largely organize her own work, has a good amount of free time, is able to acquire and exercise many skills, works for people whom she knows intimately and loves well for a position with little skill, no responsibility, and much regimentation. But the latter position has the sanction and respect of the ruling paradigm, and the former does not.54
The varied evidence, so far presented in this chapter, suggests that the consumption of commodities appears flawed at the center when we measure it against standards of excellence and undertake it to attain happiness. This evidence must now be capped by a closer and descriptive look at the experience and pleasure of consumption. Consumption, defined generally as the uptake of commodities, occurs in the background of technology as well as in its foreground. The machinery of labor not only procures commodities for final consumption; it is itself designed, produced, and maintained by forces that have commodity character. Computers provide drafting power, stamp mills procure crushing power, backhoes furnish digging and excavating power; and these various forces have the instantaneity, ease, and, ideally, the safety of commodities. The loss of skill, initiative, and responsibility that follows upon the spread of productive commodities was discussed in the preceding chapter. But as a rule we have used commodity in a narrower sense which is clearest in the case of final consumption.
Between productive and final commodities are, as we have seen, intermediate ones, called defensive products, regrettable necessities, or negative benefits.55 These are goods that displace discomforts and harms, as warmth replaces cold, health supersedes illness, insurance takes the place of precariousness. The harms may be natural conditions, but they can also be, as Hirsch points out, unintended side effects of technology. And as Hirsch also shows, a device that procures a luxury in one setting provides a mere necessity in another. The first introduction of these intermediate commodities undoubtedly provided great relief, pleasure, and a burst of happiness, less so where the benefits were indeterminate in space and time, as with vaccination and insurance, and dramatically so on such definite occasions as the arrival of electricity or the early and first purchase of a car. These were archetypal moments of technological liberation of which we can capture echoes today when electricity has been restored after a breakdown, when the phone is finally installed in a new house, or when at last we have our car back after a lengthy repair. In the period of deprivation, our world is dark and confined. Our dignity and freedom seem threatened when we must laboriously attend to tasks that are normally a matter of course. However, it is also a common experience of people whose technological liberty and mobility were curtailed by heavy snow or the loss of electricity that life assumed a calmer pace and more vivid colors. Still, the return to technological normalcy is greeted with relief and as a surge of power and freedom. This is also the experience of people who move from the North to the Sun Belt. There seems to be an accrual of dignity when one is freed from the “wicked labor” of having to dress when one wants to venture outside, of having to prepare the car for winter and still see it break down, of having to battle snow and frost. The move to the Sun Belt is a technological advance.
But as remarked before, the great defensive devices that protect us from hunger, cold, disease, darkness, confinement, and exertion have been in place for at least a generation now; they constitute the inconspicuous periphery of normalcy that we take for granted, especially so since most of us have been born into this setting. Technology now mimics the great breakthroughs of the past, assuring us that it is an imposition to have to open a garage door, walk behind a lawn mower, or wait twenty minutes for a frozen dinner to be ready. Being given riding lawn mowers, garage door openers, and microwave ovens, we feel for a moment the power of wielding the magic wand. The r
emembrance of strain and impatience, of relative powerlessness, yields to a sentiment of ease and competence. We seem to move with the effortlessness of youth, with the vigor of an athlete, with the quickness of the great chef. But it is an entirely parasitic feeling that feeds off the disappearance of toil; it is not animated by the full-bodied exercise of skill, gained through discipline and renewed through intimate commerce with the world. On the contrary, our contact with reality has been attenuated to the pushing of buttons and the turning of handles. The results are guaranteed by a machinery that is not of our design and often beyond our understanding. Hence the feelings of liberation and enrichment quickly fade; the new devices lose their glamour and meld into the inconspicuous periphery of normalcy; boredom replaces exhilaration. As long as we remain enthralled by the promise of technology, we will try to discover remaining burdens and seek and welcome devices that will disburden us. But there are barriers to this pursuit. Extensively, regarding time and space, the social and physical limits to growth make it impossible for nearly everyone to have second homes in the mountains and third ones by the sea or to vacation in Greece this year and in Italy the next. Intensively, regarding the daily and domestic sphere, disburdenment leads to more and more frivolity and clutter and to a worsening balance between means and ends where a sophisticated machinery is required to procure a commodity which is as quickly attained by a simple mechanical tool. Electric pencil sharpeners and can openers, automatic bathwater dispensers and doors that open on voice command are examples.56 To be sure, we have not reached the extensive and intensive limits of liberation and enrichment. Given our infatuation with technology there will be continued movement toward those limits in spite of the diminishing returns.
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