Source: Identifying the core ingredients of resilient communities
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*This was a session at the August 2018 [Resilient Communities Mini-Unconference](/Resilient_Communities_Mini-Unconference). It was combined with [Systems science](/Systems_science) and [Can we make resilience look more smooth and avoid collapses?](/Can_we_make_resilience_look_more_smooth_and_avoid_collapses?) but [Ben](/Ben) has made an effort to separate the subjects into their own pages.*
### Attendees
- Steve (convener)
- [Ben](/Ben) (note-taker)
- [Shawn](/Shawn)
- Judy
### 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](/Philosophy_of_life_as_knowledge,_panspermia,_and_the_simulation_hypothesis))
- 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