Resilience has nothing to do with good or bad. Resilience is about the ability of a system to achieve its goals. Goodness and badness are value judgments about those goals. They do not tell us about the resilience of the system.

The words above, or something very close to them, came out of my mouth when I was advising a student about a thesis he is writing related to resilience. There are many examples of social systems that most people would consider "bad", but which appear to demonstrate very strong resilience. This is especially obvious in politics. For example, I would guess that across the globe there are very few people who hold positive sentiments toward the political regime of North Korea. However, that regime has exhibited extraordinary resilience against efforts by many of the most economically and militarily powerful countries in the world to encourage it to change its ways. While less extreme, tensions between the political right and left in many countries shows how each demonstrates a degree of resilience when out of power that is often seen as frustrating to their opposition.

In the context of communities, the resilience of poverty, and related to that malnutrition and homelessness, demonstrates another system that many people would like to end, but which seems to be stubbornly resilient to effective change (Allison & Hobbs, 2004).. It is a self-organizing system, made up of numerous subsytems that benefit from a poverty regime and adapt with great flexibility to changing government policies and sociodemographic conditions.

To me, the presence of highly resilient, yet morally "bad", systems seems so obvious. To understand resilience, one must understand that it applies to both "good" systems and "bad" systems. I would guess that these are structurally the same, and that in many cases what is good to one person or group of people is bad to another. In addition, in many instances the resilience issue is one of how the "bad" system relates to the "good" system. This is seen in the case of left and right wing politics, cited above, but also in the case of natural hazard disasters and community resilience to deal with them. It is even hard to use the words "good" and "bad" here, as they are simply two systems occupying the same space.

Take for example, human settlements and major weather events, which appear to be increasingly in conflict with one another. Natural events (typhoons/hurricanes, as well as earthquakes and tsunamis) only become disasters when people are harmed by them. People are harmed by them when they settle in locations or build structures in ways that largely ignore the potential damage that may ensue. Climate change is the same. In both of these instances, there is a lack of understanding by the human system of the natural system, which then results in a human disaster. One cannot exist without the other.

Similarly, when we try to assess the resilience of a community's tourism system, we are not making judgments about how environmentally sustainable or socially conscious the system may be. Instead the focus should (in my opinion) be on the ability of the system to effectively navigate or manage the adaptive cycle in response to any perturbations that may arise. Environmental conservation and social equity are (again in my opinion) sustainable development issues, not resilience issues. (See: Sustainability Driven and Resilience Driven Societal Development.) And they can also be highly contentious political issues, where people disagree on what is good action and what is bad action -- and we can assess the resilience of each of those positions.

So, why is it that an online search on "the resilience of bad things" shows only articles and links about how to be resilient against bad things, including "when things go wrong", "bad times" and "strength in the face of adversity"? These results were mostly related to psychological resilience, and appeared on both Google and Google Scholar. The only thing that came close to the concepts that I am discussing here were two articles on the resilience of US Southern culture and on US Southern religion. I am not sure what to make of that! When I changed the search to include the word "community", the results were somewhat more nuanced. There was still a strong emphasis on resilience to bad events, but there were also some critiques of the concept of resilience. Most of these suggest that resilience is poorly defined, and government resilience policies tend to support neoliberal and power elite agendas. (See, for example: What Resilience is Not: Uses and Abuses.)

Many of the proponents of the systems theory approach to community resilience have long claimed that it is non-normative (neither good or bad), and is primarily a descriptive science (Brand & Jax, 2007). I believe that this is true from a systems approach, which is what I am arguing here. When we describe the resilience of a system, and how it maintains (or loses) that resilience, then the normative issues of good and bad are mostly irrelevant. Resilience becomes normative when we try to make a system more resilient. In that instance, we immediately bring in values and, as a result, politics. (See, for example: What to Save? The Normative Dilemmas of Resilience.) This is what the critiques of resilience are focused on, which is a perfectly valid argument because so much of the discussion these days is on how to make communities more resilient, especially to climate change. I also admit there there are some value judgments made in selecting variables to assess the resilience of a system, but again, this is not necessarily a characteristic of resilience, but rather of the epistemological biases of the researcher.

The possibility of neoliberal tendencies in the application and practice of resilience is a topic that deserves attention from sociology of science perspective. Beyond that is the large gap in organizational resilience literature on the resilience of bad (or undesirable) systems, as well as the relationship of bad systems to good systems, however those adjectives might be defined. I think these same issues may apply to psychological resilience (Berkes & Ross, 2013). Most things in life are a balance between preferred and non-preferred options, which can be conceptualized from a variety of ways, including a resilience systems approach.

This story also shows the value of graduate students. Whether purposefully or not, they can force us to think more clearly about the conceptual frameworks and assumptions that we take toward our research. And I am sure that I am not the first person to express the ideas in this blog. However, it is clearly not a very common perspective, and I would suggest is a largely unseen phenomenon. Perhaps putting this out in my own words will help to move this important discussion further along. Comments are, of course, welcome. :)

​Allison, H.E. and Hobbs, R.J. (2004). Resilience, adaptive capacity, and the “Lock-in Trap” of the Western Australian agricultural region. Ecology and Society, 9(1):3. <https://www.ecologyandsociety.org/issues/article.php/641>

I have been reading Modern Buddhism, by Geshe Kelsang Gyatso (2013). The central message in the first part of this book is the section titled "Training in Ultimate Bodhichitta" (starting on page 101). That chapter is about emptiness (or non-existence), which is possibly the single most difficult teaching of the Buddha for most people to grasp (including me). The chapter may be the best explanation that I have personally come across. It may be that is speaks to me because I can see connections to systems science, which is an area of interest in my day-job.

Systems

I was recently explaining to a student how important it is to clearly define the spatial and social boundaries of the systems that one is researching, because that will tell you what variables are relevant and valid to measure and what variable are not. In this student's case, there are four geographic (spatial) systems that are fairly easy to define. Three of them are small, separate islands, and the fourth is the combined group of three islands, which is administered as a single "village" government. These all exist as subsystems in a spatial hierarchy that extends to the country and the globe.

There are, of course, many alternative ways that one could divide the geography of this place, such as coastal and inland, higher and lower elevations, settled and unsettled areas, different types of landforms or vegetation, and more. Each of these is a distinct system in itself. The data variables that one collects must at at the scale of the system that is being studied. If it is not at the same scale, then it is describing a different system. In the case of my student, data that only describes one island should not be used to describe all three islands, and data that describes all three island should not be inferred as descriptive of only one of the islands. (There are ways to extrapolated data to larger and smaller scales, though this must be done with caution to maintain validity.)

In addition, there are, however, social systems that also need to be defined within the spatial systems. Examples of possible social systems that could be studied are: government, religion (maybe different kinds), businesses/livelihoods (both all and grouped into different types), residents (maybe of different social classes and ethnic or language groups), physical infrastructure (utilities and roads/paths), the NGO/civil society (which can have multiple interests), and more.

In my opinion, there are an infinite number of ways in which both spatial scale and social scale could be defined, meaning the potential systems than can be studies are infinite. How we define the best systems to study depends on the nature of the research question that is being asked (and its theoretical foundations), and the types of responses or results that the research question and methodology anticipates. In turn, the research questions and methods adopted are driven by the literature that has been consulted and established in the researcher's mind in preparing the study.

Emptiness

"The instant you speak about a thing, you miss the mark." - Wumen Huikai (Chan Buddhist Monk, 1183–1260)

Recognizing that I may miss the mark, here is how I currently understand the Buddhist concept of emptiness, based on the book Modern Buddhism. Emptiness is the essential nature of all things -- everything. What struck me is that the author explains this in a similar way as I describe what a system is. Every object that we think is real, is actually a system of component parts that only has meaning because we (individually and collectively) give it meaning. We do this because it is more convenient for our non-awakened (or 'non-enlightened', or 'gross level') awareness.

He uses a car as an example (p.105). If we try to understand exactly what part of the car is the car, we cannot do it, because the car is not found in any of its parts. Nor is it found in all of its parts piled together. It only exists as a system of parts that are connected to each other and operate together in a certain way. We "know" a car when we see it because we have been taught that when these feature come together in this configuration, then it is called a "car". This system-building process is also true for each component that goes into making a car -- each has it own name -- down to the smallest screw, which also is made up of particles, none of which is a screw in itself.

In the opposite direction, we define the car a a system that is separate from the roads, driveways, parking areas, fuel supply, brand name and image, color scheme, surrounding air molecules, owners, vehicle taxes, dead bugs on the windshield, and innumerable (infinite) other components to which it is almost always, or very often, connected. That is because we have drawn a system boundary around the "car", based on our social conventions.

This path of logic applies to everything that we see as materially existing, including the human body. They are all systems composed of finer elements that are independent systems in themselves. And they are also deeply connected to components that, within our normal conceptualizations of them, are usually considered external them. In reality, there is no car and there is no body without the mental constructs that we hold of their existence.

Another possible way of thinking about this comes from a story told by Oliver Sax in his 1995 book, An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales. It is about a man who was blind for 50 years and whose sight was restored through an operation. Upon seeing for the first time, all he saw was a mass of colors and lights that had no organized structure. It was not until a doctor spoke that some of those colors and lights came together to form a human face. Because of his age, his brain was never able to fully conceptualize, or structure, the mass of visual information that he was now exposed to. (Apparently this story was made into a movie in 1999, titled "At First Sight".)

This story point to two things. The first is that there is definitely a real and useful evolutionary biology in us that seeks to structure the world into simpler systems than actually exist. The second is that structures do not exist in reality until we form them. While this example is related to visual reality, Buddhism says that this is true of all reality.

With this in mind, it is possible to conceive of a civilization that is equally intelligent as ours on another planet, but which constructs its reality systems in an entirely different way than we do on Earth. This would make for significant challenges in communication, as it already does on our planet between the subtle (and maybe not-so-subtle) differences that exist between different cultural (and political) groups today.

Because everything that we perceive as reality is a mental construct, there is nothing real in reality. As a friend of mine often says, "there is no there there". For Buddhism, the only thereness is emptiness (or the awareness of emptiness/non-existence) because emptiness is all that is left when the mental constructs (the systems) are taken away. As ephemeral as they may be, once we have defined a system at our gross level of awareness, we have also defined the variables that we use to test it and to understand it, just as with the systems defined for social science and physical science research, described above.

"Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth." Alan Watts (1915-1973)

Lessons

As I said above, emptiness is the essential nature of all things -- everything. In Buddhism, the awareness or experience of emptiness is the ultimate happiness and satisfaction, free of the vicissitudes of our emotions and attachments. System science has some theoretical considerations that come fairly close to that. In general systems theory, all systems are subsystems of other systems and complete independence (a closed system) does not exist (Klir, 1969. Approach to General Systems Theory). In addition, systems are in constant flux reacting to and in unison with their larger context. System boundaries, therefore, do not exist as fixed entities except in our minds, usually based on assumptions. If we did not have a preconceived idea of what the boundaries "should" look like, they would not be there. Phenomenology, as a social science research approach (as I understand it), seeks to reduce preconceptions by fully recognizing them, and then investigates social phenomenon with an openness to all possibilities and without prejudice. Emptiness, however, is not quite within the realm of system science -- except maybe quantum physics (see link below)....​

So, I am posting the original version of this to both my Buddhism blog and this Community Resilience blog. The reason I wrote this was mostly to think things through in my own mind, and I will update it from time to time, since the topic is big and an important on in both my gross-level working life and my slightly less gross life. The version on this blog site is likely to get more systems science-related updates (see below).

Rice paddy fields, Shan State, Myanmar

UPDATES

14 November 2016: "One of the most important quantum [physics] insights is that the nature of change itself changes. We are living through such a “change in change.” Worldwide connectivity in all its forms—transportation, energy, communications—is the change emerging from within the system that ultimately changes the system itself."

​18 November 2016: - Another perspective on non-existence from Modern Buddhism (page 120), which also has significance for systems building:

"If all the necessary atmospheric causes and conditions come together, clouds will appear. If these are absent, clouds cannot form. The clouds are completely dependent upon causes and conditions for their development; without these they have no power to develop. The same is true for mountains, planets, bodies, minds and all other produced phenomena. Because they depend upon factors outside themselves for their existence, they are empty of inherent, or independent, existence and are mere imputations of the mind."

22 November 2016: - So I like the Sutra part (first 1/3) of the book, Modern Buddhism (2013, available free online), which is what my discussion above is all about, However, I am not so crazy about the Tantra part (remainder) of the book, which feels too much like "religion" for my tastes. I have also been reading about the author, Geshe Kelsang Gyatso, and the controversies related to his New Kadampa Tradition, which I find somewhat disturbing. You can find out more by searching online about this.

This post is based on conversations that I recently had with at a workshop on sustainability and resilience in rural communities, held in Taipei, Taiwan. I am not sure if I believe what I wrote or not, but I am putting out for thought and discussion.

Some propositions:

​A system is a mostly independent, learning and self-organizing entity. A human social system is a collection of individuals working together toward some goal(s). For the purposes of this discussion, resilience is defined as the capacity of a system to behave in a way that maintains a sense coherence through changing conditions, while sustainabilityis defined as a system's behavior that can be considered environmentally, socially and economically ethical.- I think my definition of resilience is fairly standard, although the activities that I believe could fall under this definition (below) might differ from what some resilience theorists say. Sustainability's definition is more complicated. I build upon the thinking of many resilience authors who consider sustainability as a normative practice, with resilience being a non-normative descriptive characteristic of a system. I extend the idea of "normative" (a "common ideal") to mean a "morally ethical goal" because that is how I read most of the recent UN 2030 Sustainable Development Goals. I realize that there are other definitions of sustainability.

A RESILIENCE-DRIVEN APPROACH TO SOCIAL SYSTEM DEVELOPMENT

All systems have some degree of resilience, which is exhibited in their self-organizing effort to survive (system survivability). This might also be considered as their resistance to extinction. Examples of (mostly) extinct societies from the past are evidence that not all social systems are resilient over the long term. ("Long" is, of course, a relative measurement, as is, to a degree, "extinct".) Some form of social organization appears to be a natural state for all social systems, although what that form of organization is can vary considerably.

Sustainability, on the other hand, is not a natural state of behavior, because most of the time it needs to be imposed by government policies. Instead, it is a normative (ethical) goal that many social systems seek to achieve. (While some argue that there is a normative element in resilience, many more authors suggest that normativity is one, if not the main, difference between sustainability and resilience.) Whether sustainability is natural or not, and whether all social systems seek it or not, are questions that are open to debate. However, assuming sustainability is not intrinsic to human social systems, then it is also true that not all social systems are sustainable. (This might depend on one's definition of sustainability, but by most definitions it is fairly safe to say that many societies are not currently environmentally sustainable.)

Based on propositions 1, 2 and 3, we can define sustainability as the effort to make a resilient system more normative. Normative here is defined as environmentally ethical, socially ethical and economically ethical. The goal then becomes to create system resilient first, and then make it sustainable (ethical).

Examples of this would be strongly centralized and bureaucratically complex organizations, including countries and most large business enterprises. Their resilience is based on the power that the social system gives to their central leadership, and the diminished voice that it it gives to average members in shaping policies that direct the system overall.

The above scenario is a Resilience Driven Approach to Social System Development. Resilience is the base line upon which all other other actions, including sustainability, are then undertaken. I believe that this is how most social systems around the world function. This, for example, has been the argument made by developing countries (such as China and India) to allow them to have higher rates of greenhouse gas emissions than more developed countries (like the US and Europe) in global climate change discussions, which will strengthen their resilience first, after which they can focus more on sustainability.

A SUSTAINABILITY-DRIVEN APPROACH TO SOCIAL SYSTEM DEVELOPMENT

An alternative approach could be to make sustainability (ethics) the primary goal of the system, with resilience a secondary goal. The system could self-organize (a resilience action) around sustainability (ethical) objectives.

This might also be a smart resilience move, as sustainability arguments often claim greater long-term system survivability (such as the conservation of natural resources). There is also evidence from the past suggesting that non-resilient societies (those that became extinct) were also environmentally unsustainable.

Economic sustainability is important for the overall quality of life of a social system, but is less clearly tied to the complete collapse of a social system (resilience). The demise of communism as practiced in the Soviet Union and Maoist China might be examples of economic system collapses. In both cases, however, the systems were able to reorganize and continue in a modified form.

Social sustainability (social ethics) is certainly a laudable goal, but may be the least crucial in terms of the complete collapse of a social system. On the other hand, social sustainability, depending on how it is defined, can be a major factor in building system resilience responses to fast and slow variables that put pressure on a system to change.

As opposed to highly centralized and complex systems, participatory social systems might be an example of a sustainability approach to societal development. The social system is made socially ethical by allowing members to have some kind of voice in the selection of their leaders and in the adoption of policies that define system relationships and behavior. The system’s resilience is primarily based on the greater perceived legitimacy of the selected leaders and policies.

CONCLUSIONS

Based on these propositions and examples, a system’s resilience is lower in the short run under a sustainability driven approach, and higher in the short run in a resilience driven approach where fewer ethical considerations need to be made. Socially sustainable participatory social systems are more susceptible to short term influences (public opinion shifts), making them potentially less resilient if legitimacy issues arise.This might be seen in the recent vote by UK citizens to succeed from the EU.Citizen satisfaction levels, however, may be higher over the long term in sustainability driven systems because members have a greater sense of empowerment than in resilience driven systems.

Spatial scales (both geographic space and social space) and temporal scales ​need to be considered in this discussion. The spatial scale of the social system can range from a neighborhood organization, to a country, and to the entire planet Earth. Discussions of "short term" and "long term" changes should be clearly defined each time they are used, as they can vary considerably from one person's perspective to the next.

Finally, people tend to want both a resilient social system that is able to maintain a high degree of recognizable self organized structure through a fast and slow changing world, and a sustainable social system that leads to more ethical and harmonious relationships with our environment and other people.To achieve this, I think it is important to be aware of the differences between resilience-driven and sustainability-driven policies and actions, because without proper attention, it is possible to have one without the other. Balancing the two approaches may be the major challenge that human societies face.