John F. Kennedy once told an Indiana audience that “when written in Chinese,” the word “crisis” contains the characters for “emergency” and “opportunity.” It doesn’t. But ever since that 1959 speech, politicians and motivational speakers have invoked Kennedy’s mistaken language tutorial to talk about the importance of persistence, creativity, and, these days, that favorite buzzword, resilience. Resilience is everywhere, its popularity cresting with the setbacks that afflict us: climate change, unemployment, broken public infrastructure, and more recently, COVID-19. Resilience is designed for a world in constant crisis, where instead of benefiting from the repair or prevention of disasters, we are asked to make the best of these circumstances. As Andrew Zolli, author of a book on the topic, put it in a 2012 New York Times op-ed, “Where sustainability aims to put the world back into balance, resilience looks for ways to manage in an imbalanced world.”
The most literal meaning of the word is “elasticity,” or an object’s ability to retain its original shape after being bent or compressed, like a trampoline bouncing back after a child jumps on it. This isn’t how you usually encounter the word, though; instead, resilience is invoked metaphorically, to describe an elusive quality of cities, nations, age cohorts, and individual psyches — in short, anything that can experience a trauma. Local governments and foundations often deploy it as a synonym for disaster-preparedness. Schools and universities teach it to students. A widely quoted definition by psychologists from the American Psychological Association calls it “the process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats or significant sources of stress — such as family and relationship problems, serious health problems, or workplace and financial stressors.” A San Francisco psychotherapist and “executive coach,” whose website features the old saw about “crisis” in Chinese, offers advice on building resilience during the pandemic. Self-help and parenting books offer lessons in boosting it in yourself and your kids. Google “resilience” and you’ll have more listicles and books offering you three, five, or seven steps to make yourself more resilient than you could ever muster the resilience to read.
No one doubts that determination and toughness are worthwhile character traits, but a problem arises when we build our political system around the need to endure hardship. Resilience can be an idea well-suited to an era of budget cuts and inequality, according to sociologist William Davies, author of The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being. “It is founded on an ideology that the political and economic world is never going to change, so people have to change themselves so as to cope with it better,” he tells Teen Vogue. “Therefore people need to have certain character traits, so as to be capable of living in a world that ultimately won't look after them.”
The idea of resilience as a policy tool and character trait to be cultivated raises some uncomfortable questions: Why are some people asked to be more resilient than others? How much should people be expected to “bend” before they break? And why don’t we just stop bending people?
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