Too often, we’re urged to be passionate at all times. All actions at all times must be accomplished in over-drive, we’re told. High energy and high speed are valued, regardless of accuracy: as witness the old (probably apocryphal) report from a trainee aviator: “I’m lost–but I’m making record time.”
The slow-moving, the deliberative, the ‘cunctator’ (delayer)–all these are subject to derision. But why? It’s not just that, as Gandhi is quoted as saying, “There is more to life than simply increasing its speed”. It is that, but it’s more than that. It’s not just the long-established principle that haste makes waste, either
What’s at issue is that if everything is done at breakneck speed, necks, inevitably, get broken. Individual people, families, and societies lurch from crisis to crisis. Crises, by definition, are situations in which normal brakes, controls, and processes are useless. Heroic efforts are necessary–but heroes are always going to be in short supply, since heroes are defined as those with more than normal human capacities. And anyway, a society that depends on heroism is not a sustainable society. Much of what heroes do is not good behavior. Responses to crises, too often, force short-term thinking. Activities used to ‘fight’ fires, for examine, can be justified only by the fact that fires, unchecked, will (probably) do more damage. But the fact that ‘controlled burns’ so often get OUT of control is one warning that letting things go until they reach crisis is an inadvisable practice,
And in the meantime, ordinary maintenance is falling by the wayside. What does maintenance comprise? There will always be needed improvements. This is not because people today are more inventive or better educated than people in the past. There’s no reason to believe any such thing. People in the past were inventive–and people in the present also are. And constant change is not beneficial. But parts will always need to be replaced–and when they are replaced, it’s always worth considering improvements.
So maintenance will always include innovation–but what’s important is that it can’t, and shouldn’t, include repeated demolitions and complete replacements. Old systems and technologies should not be replaced, but should be integrated into newer, backward-compatible systems. And there should always be people who are working on NON-emergency maintenance and observation of ‘infrastructure’, because although accidents and natural disasters are inevitable, with proper preparation, matters should not rise to the level of crisis.
This is where phlegmatic temperaments become beneficial. People of sanguine, choleric, or bilious temperament are usually not temperamentally suited to taking time to research things thoroughly and assessing how they SHOULD work. Hastiness of spirit is too often ill-assorted with thoroughgoing detailed attention to how things work.
In practice, of course, it’s not possible to know how things work. Maps (even the huge plat maps which cover entire tabletops), for example, are necessarily simplifications. If they included everything that could be seen by walking over, flying over, imaging, and taking samples of a given plot of land (and the subsurface appertaining), they would not only be to scale, they would be unreadable.
Likewise with any other summary or abstract. They necessarily simplify. The pertinent question becomes ‘when does simplification become oversimplification?’.
In a sense, ANY simplification is oversimplification. When using descriptions of objects, locations, etc for predictive purposes, there have been approximations and workarounds developed to make it possible to make at least a probabilistic prediction of what would be most likely to happen, along with likely variances.
The problem is that, too often, these approximations have become petrified. Their approximate nature becomes forgotten, and people begin to take them as absolutely predictive,
In such situations, a phlegmatic person, who tends to do thorough, careful research, has an advantage–if this advantage is permitted to be exercised. Such people can figure out how much to rely on standard approximations, and when to collect new data. This is something that can NOT be done by people who don’t take time to work things out for themselves.
For example, someone who relies on averages and precedents might think that desert communities need no protection against floods. In fact, deserts are more prone to floods than almost anywhere else. The floods are rare–but they are extreme. So in terms of protection, there need to be facilities able to handle large amounts of water in a very short period of time.
Or to take another example, when ice dams form (as they often do when large amounts of snow and ice melt rapidly), the only possible way to prevent massive floods is to find some way to slowly breach the dams, before they break on their own. But to do this, there need to be preparations made, so that the locations where ice jams would most likely form is known, and so that the dams can be slowly dissolved–or prevented from forming at all.
This sort of thing is not heroic work. It’s not exciting work. It’s not quick work. But it is essential, nevertheless. And perhaps if more attention is paid to these unromantic planning and maintenance tasks, the need for heroes will become significantly reduced.
For today’s less easily researched question: I’ve been taught since childhood that one of the main causes of exhaustion is eyestrain (assuming, of course, that there are no more obvious causes, such as long periods without rest, or prolonged physical effort). But finding out how this works seems next to impossible. How about some research on this, guys?
treraia 