Reflective Resilience - A Perspective On How Resilient Societies Could Come To Be
Motivations for Resilience
Every once in a while an event takes place, an event powerful enough to freeze entire nations in astonishment, fear and confusion. Throughout my life, I’ve experienced some of this types of incidents in the form of earthquakes, hurricanes, wars, acts of terrorism and now, a pandemic. These situations have, as one of their greatest forces, their outstanding capacity to push civilizations to their limits, they are episodes that put in clear evidence the absolute best and worst of humanity.
Times like this are times in which, a careful analysis of our response to emergencies and tensions, makes us quickly realize that we are still ill equipped and vulnerable to these types of scenarios. Thus, our logic, with great ease, navigates into the concept of resilience. We imagine the emergence of a resilient society that is capable of enduring adversity in a way in which the loss of lifes, disequilibrium, panic and suffering are all kept to a minimum.
Resilient societies, communities, ecosystems, governments, corporations and technologies are all ideas that sound indubitably compelling, instinctive and worthwhile. I consider that they have the potential to become ideas that truly improve the way in which our world functions. However, in order for them to reach their expected potential, I regard that it is important to mull over a clear path that outlines resiliency in a holistic manner.
In order to entirely comprehend its implications and consequences, the idea of a resilient society must be carefully distilled and analyzed with the cooperation of varied perspectives. When it comes to a society, how is resilience defined? Why do we need a resilient society? What does it mean to have a resilient society? Resilient to what? Resilient for whom? Resilient at what expense?
All of the above are questions that should be clearly and collectively answered in order to expose the complexities underlying such an ambitious and maybe dubious concept. In the following paragraphs, I aim to give a personal perspective on how resilient societies could come to be, the challenges that they might have, the values that they should embrace and some of the pitfalls that they might hold.
Defining Resilience
The word resilience (from the Latin resiliens) was first used in the 1600s with the meaning of “rebounding or recoiling”. Later, in the 1800’s, it was used to describe the mechanical property of ‘elasticity’. Finally, through the 1900’s and 2000’s, the word became referenced by conversations in the worlds of psychology, economics, politics, design, engineering and business.
As an engineer, I was formally exposed to the word “resilience” in one of my second year’s material science courses. Within the world of metals, crystals and ceramics, resiliency, formally noted by the modulus of resilience, describes the amount of energy that a certain body can absorb before reaching its elastic limit. The elastic limit is the limit to which a material can be stressed without having permanent alterations to its structure. This means that the higher resilience a material has, the higher the amount of energy that it can absorb without undergoing permanent fracture to its structure.
In theory, a big portion of the resilient behavior of materials is governed by Hooke’s Law due to the fact that, as long as the elastic limit remains unreached, a material’s strain will remain proportional to the stress being applied on it. This fact allows us to visualize and model resilient behavior in time with periodic functions (eg. Plotting the length of a spring on a spring-mass system). In practice, these types of models are used to assure equilibrium, continuity, robustness and integrity of a material or system in time.
As previously mentioned, the “mechanical” origins of the word resiliency have not stopped it from being used by a diverse range of seemingly unconnected fields. The word is normally used as a positive adjective or characteristic that an entity, be it a person, a system or a collective, should strive to have. Engineers design resilient systems, businessmen seek resilient business models, ecologists praise resilient ecosystems, and so forth.
Within the context of the societies of the future the goal of resiliency is to create adequate living and co-existing scenarios, considering environmental and social realities that will allow us to, vaguely stating, maximize what we value most and minimize what we might fear the most as a collective. A worthy goal that should not be pursued without caution.
Reflective Resilience
As outlined above, resilience, in practical engineering, is used to understand and model equilibrium, with the goal of maintaining integrity of a material or a system. This means that the material or the system, after receiving a certain amount of stress, is desired to go back to its original form. Materials, clearly, do not have the power of introspection, therefore, they are not capable of analyzing in any form their past, present or future states. Resiliency will only “bounce them back” to their previous state. Whether the previous state was better or worse does not matter.
These obvious claims might not be very relevant to the concept of resilience in material science but their understanding is crucial when applying resiliency to society. The “bouncing back to normality” is a trap that should be earnestly avoided. An immediate bounce back could blind our civilization from the understanding of the wrongs that brought the stress upon in the first place. Such a scenario could set “progress” on undesirable paths or halt it all together.
As a society, we must ensure that our resilience does not come without collective introspection, this is something I define as reflective resilience. Reflective resilience is the type of resilience that analyzes, questions and acts upon the stress in order to arrive at a new form. A form that embraces the positive aspects of the past state but challenges the negative ones and aims for a future without them. In other words this is a form of resilience that is kind and moldable, not deterministic, predictable and authoritarian.
While awfully hurtful, times like the one in which we are currently living, do offer us hope embodied in time to think and reflect about the things that we, as humans, are doing right and about the things that we are doing terribly wrong. It is here, where I find that the concept of reflective resilience turns into one of the most valuable assets in the conceptualization and formation of resilient societies.
Caveats for Resilience
As we extend the meaning of societal resilience, through the practice of reflective resilience, it is crucial to bring into attention ways in which resilience could be harmful for us. To remark on such cases I will illustrate current realities which are able to clearly highlight ways in which resilience can be put to use in a negative way.
Dictatorships and absolutist presidents are a form of resilient governments. They manage to aggregate a wide range of mechanisms to maintain power and oppression. Current dictatorships use resiliency to perpetuate a “strong and stable” government. Patriarchy, classism and racism are all systematic schemes that follow the same rules as the previously mentioned examples. If the science of resilience in the context of society is to be further developed, it is imperative that considerations and ideas on how to prevent this type of resiliency, become widely available and actionable.
The crisis that we are living nowadays shines light on another one of the shortcomings of resiliency as a concept. Arguably, we can state that a part of the world’s population is being highly resilient to the COVID19 pandemic. There are many persons that are able to safely practice social distancing within the grace of having a roof, food supplies, ways to entertain and exercise themselves, and a job that allows them to work from home. This is certainly not the reality for the majority of the world’s population.
By migrating from resilient politics into resilient technologies, we can find another example of resiliency only being available to a few. In 2017, Mexico City and surrounding states were hit by a strong earthquake. The result? 331 lives instantly ended, most of them, of people that did not have the means to afford modern antiseismic houses. Needless to say that post recovery followed identical distributions of inequity. If taken seriously, resiliency should be considered a right and not, as is today, a privilege.
This caveats for resiliency justify the importance of why the answers to the questions of Resilient to what? Resilient for whom? Resilient at what expense? Need to be answers that go above and beyond to assure that they are considering a diverse range of realities and perspectives. Realities and perspectives that many times will have highly contrasting values.
A Road to Resilience
So, how do I see us taking the next steps towards the construction of resilient societies? How will we manage to define a common idea and turn it into a reality? I believe that a solid first step is to define the values that a resilient society must have in order to maintain the positives and limit the negatives. Below, I enlist some of the values or characteristics that I consider to be essential to such societies:
Humility
Moldability
Modularity
Equitability
Solidarity
We must be humble enough, as a society, to recognize that we cannot foresee every crisis or tension that could possibly happen in such a complex world, let alone universe. We must therefore be prepared to increasingly become better at smartly recovering than preventing. As C.S. Holling brilliantly puts into words:
“Resilience rests on the recognition of our ignorance; not the assumption that future events are expected, but that they will be unexpected… Resilience does not require a precise capacity to predict the future, but only a qualitative capacity to devise systems that can absorb and accommodate future events in whatever unexpected form they may take.” -C.S. Holling, 1973
I understand that the claim can be taken as naive and foolish but I will give an example to contrast recovering versus predicting. For this I will use the issue of floods in coastal cities, an eminent threat due to climate change;
The predictive approach would start by forecasting (X city is likely to be flooded by 2030), it will then plan and asses (Collect data, and create a contingency plan), concluding by executing a preventive measure which, from examples of cities that are already doing this, would probably look like a gigantic concrete barrier on the shoreline. What happens 45 years after? “Guys we need to build a taller barrier!”
In contrast, a recovering approach would start off by acknowledging a problem and monitoring it (Sea levels are rising world wide), it would then go immediately into the recovery or responsive mode by answering questions like: Why are sea levels rising? What can we do now to stop them from rising? What do we need to give up individually for the greater good? With the answers they will change their behaviors (the last couple of months are proof that the world can drastically change behaviors and systems in the blink of an eye) and the behavior change will lead to a resilient rebound which would be noticed when sea levels stop rising.
The fact that society has proved that it can change its normal ways of life for the greater good is a lesson that “the novel virus” has brought upon us and that must not be forgotten. This is what I refer to as moldability.
If we manage to agree that we are ignorant and that future scenarios will hold unexpected crises and tensions we must prepare with the right tools for us to react in the best manner possible. Here is where modularity takes the spotlight. I’ll illustrate with the use of one of my favorite tools, the swiss army knife. The beauty of the swiss army knife relies on the fact that the creator does not know, in any way, all of the uses that it will have in its lifetime. The tool is not created with a specific problem in mind, rather, it is created with the goal of it being adaptable, to many unknown problems, by the creativity and necessity of its user.
This is the way in which we need to design the tools, whether they be technological, political or economical, that will be used within resilient societies. The goal would be to design with the aim of combining humanity’s creativity and necessity along with challenges, not with the goal of solving a specific problem.
Modularity and tools that acknowledge the power of creativity and necessity perfectly lead me into the next characteristic, which is equitability. This one is very straight forward but it is much easier said than done. As highlighted in the caveats for resilience, resilience is useless and could become worryingly dangerous if it is not equitable. Equitability not only embodies purely monetary terms but also equity in access to information (We might need to reconsider the entire sense of intellectual property). Considering that only an elite group of people are capable or sufficiently qualified to deal with our world’s problems puts us in a greatly undesirable path.
Lastly, one of the most beautiful attributes that we have shown as a species is solidarity. A resilient society will have it clear that the greater good is exceedingly more important than the individual benefit. If we manage to start seeing the levels of cooperation, selflessness and union that are typical in times of crisis, within our everyday lives, I am sure that the future will be brighter for us and for our planet.
A Friendly Reminder
As stressed above, the way in which we will be able to build resilient societies is by having an immense array of perspectives and opinions on the topic. I encourage every reader to question, debate and remix the ideas presented in this text. There is no absolute truth that will let us know the perfect path for the future but I’m a firm believer that the closest thing that we have to an absolute truth is a slowly thought out, debated collective consensus. I am well aware that I am speaking from my own bias and subjectivity, and fully value and respect the differences that might emerge from a diverse group of people reading my perspective.
By: Andres Rico