Spelman questions the motives behind repairers and destroyers in chapters 6 and 7, making me wonder what the differences between these two groups really are. What I have taken from Spelman is that there are two kinds of people in this world: the kind that want to fix everything and the kind that don’t. The first group will fix anything they can get their hands on, even if it’s past the point of being salvaged. These people are the repairers, the Fred and Willie’s of the world, the people who try and fix things not only for themselves, but for the ones in their lives as well. “So, even if good repairers do not exercise creativity by bringing new things into existence, they are by the very nature of their work called upon to exercise creativity in keeping things from going out of existence or in putting broken connections among humans back together” (Spelman 128). Repairers take time to assess the damage and not just toss it to the side. If a car breaks down, they don’t buy a new one, they look at what they can do to restore it to a form of its former self. Both destroyers and repairers are creative in their own way, the latter being a little bit more than the other. Destroyers must think of new things to evolve which does take some sort of imagination yet repairers must find a way to make something old work again which in itself is a whole new kind of creativity. I think repairers have the harder job since being able to fix something requires patience, time, and a lot of creativity.
The people who don’t repair are the ones who replace. The ones who throw things away instead of finding the time to fix something. Unfortunately, a lot of things are discarded to the side, left abandoned and broken, instead of looking at it from a different view and putting some work into it. No one said that repairs were easy but no one said that we had to give up either which I think destroyers have done in some sense. Whether it be a strained relationship or a broken car, some things are just too far gone to be repaired in their eyes, making it ok to simply toss it. However, destruction isn’t always a bad thing either. Take an old building for example. It has been sitting vacant for years, filling with dust and nothing else, and taking up valuable space. If the building were demolished, not only would it free up that space but it would be a new opportunity to evolve into something better. When something is destroyed, we hope it is because it has to be but sometimes that is not always the case. I think of it that repairers are the optimists, taking something and finding a better purpose for it, while destroyers are the pessimists, seeing something, finding no more use for it, and starting over. These aren’t bad treats, simply traits that define their roles in society and the way it changes. Repairers and destroyers do have one thing in common with each other: they are both either destroying or repairing to ultimately “fix” a situation. “To think about repair requires us to recognize our own failures and imperfections and those of the world we live in, to take seriously what we may unreflectively be inclined to regard as the necessary but uninventive and uninspiring work of repairing the damage due to such flaws” (Spelman 138). The human race hates looking at its own failures. The two kinds of people in this world take that failure and either try to hide/repair it or get rid of it altogether. In that sense, they have the same goal and the same incentives as to why they are doing what they’re doing.
A repairer wants whatever they are trying to repair, to continue on. The whole point of repairing is so something can remain alive and intact. A destroyer wants something to disappear, to discontinue from existence. They are different and I think what Spelman is trying to get at in Chapter 6 and 7 is that the world needs a little bit of both in order to continue on. When we destroy, we start over. We build up again and we learn from mistakes. With repairs, we salvage the known, the pre-existing object or relationship that is worth fixing. Too much destruction would result in the world never evolving while too much repairs would involve an overabundance with no room for growing. In order to find a middle ground, we first have to find a balance between the two.