Side Note: the roots — and enduring romance of resilience
By: Ruben Diaz-Plaja
Tags: Resilience, Efficiency, Efficacy, Social Evolution, Crises

Resilience is back — if it ever went away. Our current pandemic predicament is only intensifying our embrace of this concept. Crises — and the pandemic certainly isn't the only one we're dealing with — remind us of the desirability of being resilient. More fundamentally, it's about trading off the ability to do things well — being efficient — versus being able to do things at all: efficacy.

Which is preferable? The answer — of course — depends on what it is you're trying to do and what situation you're in. Efficiency requires assumptions to hold — but when faced with crises and sudden shifts, you are suddenly no longer able to "take a punch".

The thing is, there is nothing new about this dilemma. Reading James C Scott's Against the Grain — a provocative essay challenging longstanding narratives about the origins of the state in agricultural societies — I was struck by how this efficiency-efficacy trade-off is very old indeed.

Scott evocatively contrasts the difference between nomadic hunter-gatherers and settled farmers. The former, even today, possess a wealth of knowledge of the natural world, and learn to conduct a whole range of activities to gather food: "hunting and collecting, fishing, picking, making traps and weirs" depending on what is available when and where. Each requires different skills and tools. They are walking repositories of orally transmitted knowledge about botany, weather and other natural phenomena. The hunter-gatherer is a poster-child for efficacy — and resilience. They can do a lot — and hence survive.

Farmers — on the other hand — have to focus on a very narrow set of tasks geared to the cultivation of one or two crops. As settled individuals, they are part of more complex divisions of labour, exchanging with nearby settlements and cities. As such, they are more productive and efficient— in an Adam Smith sort of way. But they are also more vulnerable to crop failures, or worse. As settled individuals, Scott observes, they have had to through "something of a deskilling", and undergo a "contraction" in the ability to read and understand — and survive in — the natural world.

In reading Scott's account I cannot help but think that resilience has always had something of a romantic shine attached to it; indeed, it has only grown as we have become ever more specialized in our societies and economies, in the pursuit of a higher quality of life but also more efficiency. Indeed, it is arguably a theme that recurs in thought and literature; Rousseau's Noble Savage is but one example among many.

This romance of resilience comes through in a variety of ways; whilst we enjoy our efficiency-enhanced lifestyles, we still take pains to take on some skills that might be useful "just in case". For instance, the continued cultivation of "hunter-gatherer" style skills. Scouting or orienteering for children can be seen as a form of this. Then of course there are first aid courses, which "ordinarily" we would not really need.

At a wholly different scale, we have adults who engage in “zero-waste" or "prepper" lifestyles: consciously trying to fight back against a kind the kind of dependence and learned helplesness that being a consumer in modern society encourages. Of course, you will never be able to build a toaster from scratch… but then that's the whole point — not to be able to rebuild all the functions we need in our life but to reproduce the essentials to survive.

Perhaps more subtly, the fact that we, as societies, still place a high social premium on knowing how to cook and make some things ourselves — even though from an efficiency/optimisation point of view it would be quite rational to outsource all this entirely.

Or how can we explain the enduring fascination of books, films, series, and podcasts that go through some kind of civilizational collapse? Often these involve some kind of resourceful heroine or hero who knows lots of things that might have been seen as "uselesss" in a peaceful modern society.

Perhaps we enjoy these stories because they secretly speak to our anxieties about the inherent fragility of our complex economies and societies.

And maybe they are not entirely unhelpful, reminding us of the possibility that black swans can and do occur — and that sometimes it pays to be prepared, and that efficiency is not the only yardstick for knowledge and skills.