Temperance

What Temperance means in a networked world

You open a fierce argument about a proposed library change. Twenty replies later, you know the combatants’ favorite insults but still have not read the proposal. Each new retort promises the satisfaction the last one failed to deliver. You stop refreshing, open the proposal and decide whether you have a question worth contributing. Your appetite had ordered a debate and eaten only the sparks.

Temperance moderates the appetite that makes conflict attractive for its own sake. Disagreement can teach, test an idea and defend something important. Its intensity can also become a reward that draws you back after those purposes have disappeared. Notice what you are seeking from the next reply. A fitting limit can be a change of activity, a return to the question or a decision to leave the thread. The point is to give attention to what you value, including vigorous discussion when you can take part with a purpose.

Temperance gives…

Attention can sustain an argument long enough to understand it. Moderation leaves room to read, formulate a reason and hear an answer, so participation becomes more than the pursuit of another emotional jolt.

Finding the balance

In ordinary life

A stream of retorts

Before opening the next response, name what it could help you understand. If all you want is another clash, choose a stopping point.

An absorbing interest

Enjoy a music exchange, then leave room to play what it introduced you to. Pleasure can lead into an activity instead of indefinitely postponing it.

Nearby virtues, different work

Self-Command

Self-Command restrains a particular harmful impulse. Temperance shapes the appetite that repeatedly draws you toward the next conflict.

Attentiveness

Attentiveness notices what is claiming your interest. Temperance judges how much room that appetite should receive.

Recognizing a counterfeit

Performative detachment counterfeits Temperance when looking unruffled becomes more important than attending to a serious question. Moderation can include committed, energetic disagreement.

How to cultivate Temperance

• Name your purpose before returning to a recurring argument.
• Notice whether intensity has become the reason you keep reading.
• Choose an activity that develops the interest beneath the excitement.

Try it today

When a heated thread draws you back, pause before joining. Name the question you want to understand and one way to pursue it: read the proposal, ask a relevant question or leave the exchange for now.

Questions worth returning to

• What am I hoping the next reply will give me?
• Does this level of involvement serve the subject?

Choose your practice

These pages offer ideas for reflection and character practice, not professional advice. Choose practices suited to your circumstances and abilities. You may adapt, pause, or skip an exercise; putting yourself or someone else at risk is not proof of virtue.

Quotations and further reading

Seven selections to return to through the week. Follow a source link to read the surrounding passage.

1. As if the main object were to talk fast and not to talk sensibly.

   Henry David Thoreau, Walden
   Economy, paragraph discussing the magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas

   Thoreau challenges the assumption that faster communication improves its purpose. In a heated thread, the pace of replies can similarly outrun the question they ought to serve.

2. which disputatious turn, by the way, is apt to become a very bad habit, making people often extremely disagreeable in company by the contradiction that is necessary to bring it into practice; and thence, besides souring and spoiling the conversation, is productive of disgusts and, perhaps enmities where you may have occasion for friendship.

   Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography
   Autobiography, arguments with John Collins

   Franklin describes argument becoming an appetite with costs beyond the disputed point. The intensity can take over from the reason for the conversation.

3. A Victory, or a Defeat, are equally agreeable to them. The shutting of a Cardinal's Mouth pleases them one Post, and the opening of it another. They are glad to hear the French Court is removed to Marli, and are afterwards as much delighted with its Return to Versailles.

   The fictional projector, in Joseph Addison, The Spectator
   No. 452, Friday, August 8, 1712

   Addison’s would-be publisher describes readers equally delighted by opposing updates. The joke exposes an appetite for the next turn regardless of what the news means.

4. If you are dazzled by the semblance of any promised pleasure, guard yourself against being bewildered by it; but let the affair wait your leisure, and procure yourself some delay.

   Epictetus, The Works of Epictetus
   Enchiridion XXXIV; printed p. 392; scan leaf 416

   The promised pleasure of a quarrel can be a reason to pause. A little delay lets you ask whether joining will serve anything you value.

5. And when you come away, do not discourse a great deal on what has passed, and what contributes nothing to your own amendment. For it would appear by such discourse that you were dazzled by the show.

   Epictetus, The Works of Epictetus
   Enchiridion XXXIII; printed p. 391; scan leaf 415

   A spectacle can occupy the conversation after it ends. Ask what the retelling contributes before giving the dispute another round of attention.

6. They get victory sometimes, but they never get good will, which would be of more use to them.

   Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography
   Autobiography, Governor Morris and disputatious company

   A victory can leave a conversation poorer in goodwill. The pleasure of a decisive reply is only one part of what the exchange produces.

7. 'To elevate and surprise' is the great art of quackery and puffing; to raise a lively and exaggerated image in the mind, and take it by surprise before it can recover breath, as it were; so that by having been caught in the trap, it is unwilling to retract entirely—has a secret desire to find itself in the right, and a determination to see whether it is or not.

   William Hazlitt, Table-Talk: Essays on Men and Manners
   ESSAY XIV. ON PATRONAGE AND PUFFING

   A forceful description can catch the mind before it has examined the thing described. The excitement of a quarrel can work the same way: the appetite arrives ahead of the question.

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