This was a session at the August 2018 Resilient Communities Mini-Unconference. It was combined with Systems science and Can we make resilience look more smooth and avoid collapses? but Ben has made an effort to separate the subjects into their own pages.
Attendees
Draft list of ingredients
- Air, water, food, clothing, shelter
- Children
- A place for elders
- A shared approach to life and how the community ought to work
- Trust in each other and the community as a whole
- Respect for all community members
- A way to respond to violations of core rules
- The ability to pull together and rise above big challenges
- Science and religion (shared sources of truth and wisdom)
- Preservation of knowledge
- As few dependencies as possible on things outside the community
- No dependence on nonrenewable resources
- A clinic, a library, and a storehouse
- A "map" of all community members and their skills, available tools and other assets
Discussion
- Steve: Resilience is persistence over time
- Judy: Resilience is bouncing back
- Steve: One ingredient of resilience in community is people having a shared approach to life and how the community ought to work
- It may be important to define the amount of required agreement, and it may be that there can be less of that in larger communities
- Example arising from the political argument*: Agreement around what counts as sexual misbehavior
- Judy: Children can pull a community together
- We lived in a neighborhood with a babysitting co-op that pulled together the parents of young children, but no one else who lived there
- People gravitated to each other on political grounds, by contrast with the religious grounds that unite Hasidic communities e.g. in New York
- Children are also obstacles to community-building because they're so exigent, e.g. when they're tired you have to take time to put them to bed
- Judy: Another ingredient is a place for elders
- Kibbutzim do this well
- Have a built-in way for young people, focused on themselves and their tasks, to tap the wisdom of elders
- Shawn: I've always thought a good model is for people who are retiring from work to participate in childcare (?)
- Shawn: A key ingredient is trust in each other and the community as a whole
- Steve and Judy: How to balance this with diversity? How do we learn to trust the other?
- Shawn: Give opportunities to trust each other
- I'm working with Better Angels to bring Democrats and Republicans together to do a workshop; another similar group is having them share meals
- *Argument over The Righteous Mind and the morality of Republicans
- Judy: See also the Oregon Conversation Project
- Unfortunately, not many conservatives show up
- Shawn: This may be because conservatives are more likely to be low on the personality trait of openness to new experiences
- Steve: Religion and science as ingredients
- Shawn: Shared source of truth
- Judy: We need wisdom, and there's some of that in religion, but often magical thinking leads to unwisdom
- E.g. Jehovah's Witnesses building Kingdom Halls as windowless fortresses against collapse
- Vs. Jewish principle of Tikkun Olam, taking personal responsibility for continuity and caring for the world
- Vs. Mormons, who have a wise practice of storing a year's worth of food that we would do well to learn
- It takes critical thinking to choose among these sources of “wisdom”
- Judy: Another ingredient is respect
- Extending to the notion that the value of everyone's life is equal
- Meaning that everyone has a right to water, food, healthcare, education, etc
- Shawn: The ability to make that work depends on the size of the community
- Steve: And availability of outside resources
- Shawn: Every dependency the community has on something outside itself is a strike against its resilience, e.g. if transportation breaks down
- Steve: The community should have a way to respond to violations of core rules such as respect for everyone
- Shawn: Is property a necessary ingredient?
- Steve: I need some control over my physical situation, e.g. having access to pants when I need them, but collective ownership can work, so I'm nervous about elevating property too high in a pantheon of values
- Judy: Transition Town neighborhood map: People and their skills, available tools and other assets
- If we made maps of mile-square areas and handed them out to every household (and kept them up to date), it would be highly valuable for resilience in emergencies
- And also help people feel needed and therefore good about ourselves
- Shawn: We do a similar thing with Portland's Neighborhood Emergency Teams, mapping who's in it and who has caches of basics, whether there's a school, etc
- Judy: Map available land to use for farming
- Steve: Preservation of knowledge as an ingredient
- A Canticle for Liebowitz is a post-nuclear-apocalypse novel where a priesthood is protecting knowledge in a time where knowledge is viewed with suspicion because “it's what blew up the world,” e.g. storing books in buried barrels
- Max Headroom includes a character living in dystopian urban area who points out that books are a more resilient, “nonvolatile” storage medium
- Electronic media are definitely less resilient
- Storing info in our heads isn't very resilient either
- Judy: The idea that there is objective truth has been lost
- I agree that truth is subjective in some ways, but if an event happens and you say “that didn't just happen...”
- Shawn: My philosophy is that life is an embodiment of cosmic knowledge (see later session)
- Steve: I'm skeptical about “the plant knows how to grow” being the same kind of thing as “I know how to sew a button”
- Judy: Knowledge we need to preserve: numeracy, literacy, encouragement of critical thinking and imagination, while also teaching the distinction between those two
- Related to separation of church and state?
- Shawn: Emotional intelligence is also important
- So are ethics!
- Religious people don't feel they can trust atheists because they don't think people can be moral/ethical without a god
- Judy: We went to services by the Washington Ethical Society, a church without a god
- Steve: I think ethics are mostly shared across religions, while stories are not
- Judy: Counterexample: abortion
- Steve: Another one: jihadis who claim to love death rather than life
- Steve: One “source of knowledge” is the wise leader, e.g. Chairman Mao, but I'd prefer to organize a resilient community that's not based on a cult of personality
- Corporate organizations are resilient because everyone can be replaced
- Ben: But some of them might be lost without their current leaders
- Shawn: The Pope is another good example of a replaceable leader, while the leader of the Rajneeshis was not
- Judy: How do we replicate the resilience of America to the Depression and World War II? The ability to pull together and rise above this?
- Is it associated with a leader like FDR? A philosohpy or religion?
- Shawn: I think people were more self-reliant back then
- Steve: Nondependence on nonrenewable resources as an ingredient
- Judy: A clinic, a library, and a <s>grocery store</s> storehouse as ingredients
- Is a market needed?
- Judy: But not implying a money economy as necessary?
- Shawn: Adam Smith says what's needed for an economy is information flow about supply and demand
- Air, water, food, clothing, shelter
- Ben: In some places, clothing isn't necessary