Undergoing Maintenance

“We have remarked that one reason offered for being a progressive is that things naturally tend to grow better. But the only real reason for being a progressive is that things naturally tend to grow worse. The corruption in things is not only the best argument for being progressive; it is also the only argument against being conservative. The conservative theory would really be quite sweeping and unanswerable if it were not for this one fact. But all conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change. If you leave a white post alone it will soon be a black post. If you particularly want it to be white you must be always painting it again; that is, you must be always having a revolution. Briefly, if you want the old white post you must have a new white post.”

—G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

I’ve written before about how an increasing portion of my time is spent simply updating entries on the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas (EOA). Just recently, the environmentalist Joe Nix passed away, the Arkansas Ethics Commission has been the subject of a hiring freeze, and Arkansas Business published a front-page story on the tenth anniversary of the demolition of the old Broadway Bridge (great fodder for an entry bibliography). Every day, I’m updating some entry or another, even if it’s just adding an article or book or dissertation to an entry bibliography.

And I sometimes lament, too, just how much of my time is taken up with maintenance. If only stuff didn’t happen regarding our older entries, I could spend more time trying to get newer entries online. Maintenance literally lacks novelty. It’s a chore, something to be done so that I can spend more of my time on “the good stuff.”

But over the many years I’ve been doing this, I’ve come to see things a little bit differently. It gradually developed in my mind that there sure is a lot of maintenance in all the jobs human societies require. The cop walking the beat is maintaining law and order. The teacher with yet another new crop of students this year is maintaining certain standards of education for coming generations. The doctor works to help patients maintain certain standards of health. The farmer is working overtime to maintain our food supplies.

Are there even any jobs that aren’t centered upon maintenance? Perhaps an exception could be made for the arts, the metanarrative of which is the figure of the artist “creating” something new rather than trying to maintain what has been handed down. But the more I contemplated this, the more I began to see the specter of maintenance here, too. After all, in “creating” his new plays, Shakespeare was maintaining the language and traditions of theater handed down to him. He gave them a fresh coat of paint, to be sure. If nothing else, any successful artist maintains the role of the artist in our society.

And the same can be said for other forms of employment long dubbed “higher” or “greater.” Aristotle famously maintained that contemplation is the most excellent employment of one’s time “since nothing results from it beyond the fact of having contemplated; whereas from all things which are objects of moral action we do mean to get something beside the doing them, be the same more or less.” But by elevating the role of the contemplative, Aristotle maintained the place of contemplation within our own civilization, so much so that, across the more than two millennia hence, we have accorded a place in our societies to those trained in different schools of thought, whom we might seek out for advice on—among other things—how to maintain the institutions upon which we depend.

Anyone in a long-term relationship knows that maintaining the relationship often takes more work than getting it started. Anyone observing their government crumbling into tyranny suddenly appreciates how much time they should have spent shoring up their own civic institutions. Any facilities manager knows that constructing a new edifice is nothing compared to maintaining it.

As Chesterton noted, if you want something to stay like it is, you have to work hard to fight back the torrent of change. Right now, the EOA is useful to the people of this state and beyond. If we want it to remain useful, we cannot simply let it be. It will need to continue to grow, for it only remains useful insofar as it continues to expand the scope of Arkansas history and culture. And if we want it to remain useful, we also have to keep each individual entry renewed with a fresh coat of paint, to ensure that the material remains up to date.

Maintenance is a lot of work. But maintenance is also the only work there is.

Guy Lancaster is the editor of the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas.