Thinking in an Emergency (Norton Global Ethics Series) by Elaine Scarry

Author:Elaine Scarry
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2011-02-01T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Three

THE PLACE OF HABIT IN ACTS OF THINKING

The rejection of procedures and constitutional guarantees, this book has so far suggested, comes from three sources: first, the belief that action requires putting aside thinking; second, the belief that action does in fact normally require thinking but that rapid action requires putting aside thinking; and third, the belief that thinking requires setting aside habit. In the first two, thinking is rejected in the name of action. In the third, habit is set aside in the name of thinking. This third error is as grave as the first two. We have seen that habit is everywhere visible in effective emergency preparation. In turn, thinking—as the section below will show—is profoundly visible in the lineaments of habit.

It is not hard to see why the kind of deliberative act connected to an emergency has some features that make it hard to recognize as an act of deliberation. Deliberation normally inhabits a temporal space close to the action which is its outcome. If one deliberates about the best book to read, that is usually followed by reaching for the book. If one chooses the best horse to ride, that is usually followed by mounting the horse. The same is true of group decisions; a faculty that debates a rule change will usually take a vote and institute the decision soon after the deliberations. But in the case of emergency procedures, there is apt to be a long temporal break between the deliberation and the actual enactment, which must wait for the emergency. There is a long pause between figuring out CPR procedures and the moment one is called upon to use that knowledge. There is a long pause between designing and building the shelter system of Switzerland and the moment of its use. There is a long pause between the debates on the best constitutional procedures to protect a country on the threshold of war and the moment forty, or one hundred, or two hundred years later when the crucial test of the braking power of these procedures comes.

The mystification that is caused by the distance between the deliberation and the action is compounded by a second problem. Not only must the procedure be made habitual, but it must be inscribed as habit in the most highly self-conscious way. In ordinary life, the more useful a habit is the stronger it will grow, simply because each day will provide the occasion to practice it. There is no need to set aside a few days a year to practice reading or driving a car; life keeps putting in front of us daily problems that occasion the practice of those actions. But emergencies do not occur often, and therefore there is no naturally arising occasion on which the appropriate procedure can be practiced. The habit must instead be acquired by a highly willed act of internalization and may seem to be an artificial exercise without an object. Emergency procedures may come to seem the empty offspring of the space of waiting and the place of drill.

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