Introduction
If we are to hope for the flourishing of all beings, every level of society, from the person to the family, from the neighborhood and municipality on up to the community of nations, must change.
—Stephanie Mills, 2021
Sometimes it seems we are all riding a roller coaster without brakes. While this may be exhilarating for a few, for most it is stressful and destabilizing. The speed of technological change, the rising rate of information flow, the increasing human impact on planetary processes, along with many other accelerating trends, create a context where flourishing is elusive. As large-scale threats multiply, fear and anger become commonplace, and dystopian stories abound. For many, the sense of decline is palpable. In a time of great change, we cannot assume that the skills reinforced by our culture will be best suited to our future. We try to change the world to make it conform to our preferred way of life, but the roller-coaster ride diminishes our sense of control. The less control we have over our circumstances, the more control we must have over ourselves—the more we need to adapt our character to the world as we find it.
The central argument of this book is deceptively simple: We face a distinctive set of challenges and opportunities during the first half of the twenty-first century, which I am calling the “age of climate change.” Some character traits that are reflected in our cultural norms are ill-suited to our challenges. No matter what anyone else does, we will each increase our chances of flourishing in our times if we cultivate clusters of character traits that are in tension with strong cultural norms and hence underdeveloped. If many of us cultivate these traits, our likelihood of approaching sustainability increases tremendously, which will further enhance our flourishing. Thus, from a purely self-interested point of view, we should work on cultivating such traits, and if we care about the flourishing of others, we should redouble our efforts to strengthen these traits.
As a first step in unpacking this argument, I should explain what I mean by a few key terms. The age of climate change is characterized by an interlocking set of environmental, social, and economic challenges that reflect our rapid approach toward planetary boundaries. Environmental decline, reflected in biodiversity loss, ocean acidification, and climate disruption, is a major driver of the dynamics of this age, but income inequality, technological disruption, political polarization, rising threats of violence, and increased mass migration are salient features. Others have talked of the Anthropocene or the great acceleration, which are equally good candidates for naming the central dynamics of our times. I choose to highlight climate change in my characterization of the first fifty years of the twenty-first century, because it is more salient than other drivers of environmental decline. Its ecological and social impacts strongly influence other features of the period. I am not suggesting, however, that climate change is our most important issue or that if we solve it, we put an end to this period of ferment. Historians talk of the Gilded Age in late nineteenth-century America without implying that ostentatious wealth was its central issue.
To understand the age of climate change, we must understand the feedback loops between our rapid approach to planetary boundaries and our increasing social and economic volatility and conflict. Although we often experience this as an age of cultural decline, we need to see clearly the opportunities that characterize this period, as well as the challenges. This is the task of chapter 1, where I introduce resilience theory’s adaptive cycle, which helps us to see how our challenges are interrelated and why we can expect more turbulence, whatever we do, as we “dwell on the edge of release.”1
Flourishing through Emphasizing Different Skillful Habits
What would it mean to flourish in this age? Martin Seligman’s account of flourishing is an excellent starting point for any discussion. He identifies five key elements of flourishing: positive emotions, deep engagement, strong relationships, a sense of meaning, and achievement.2 All of these are involved in someone thriving or living well. Flourishing is not just being happy. Happiness is typically associated with subjective states such as the balance of positive and negative emotional states or the quantity of life satisfaction.3 Flourishing, by contrast, is more closely connected with objective features that make life worth living. Aristotle’s theory, according to which one achieves eudaimonia by developing human excellences, is an early example.4 The capabilities approach to well-being is a more recent version.5
People are diverse enough that it seems unlikely that we can specify a unique set of defining characteristics of a flourishing life. Flourishing, then, is best understood as a cluster concept. We can specify a cluster of features of a life that are associated with flourishing across many contexts, and we can be confident that if one has enough of the features in this cluster, then one is flourishing.6 Seligman’s list includes subjective elements like positive emotions, but it also contains objective features like strong relationships. I would augment Seligman’s list with three other elements. To flourish, we need to have our basic needs met, such as food, shelter, and bodily security.7 We also must have the capability to be self-directed. Lastly, we must have some understanding of the forces shaping our lives and some reasonable confidence in our capacity to navigate those forces. This last element is especially germane to my claim that we need to strengthen key skillful habits that help us to flourish in our times.
We could continue to add elements of flourishing to the list, but most would specify further features identified abstractly above. Individuals could flourish without any one feature listed, but unless they are quite unusual, their flourishing decreases if they lack multiple features on the list. Prudent people will try to understand both the local and global contexts that are likely to shape their lives. They would then try to develop their capacities to flourish in the likely range of contexts they may face. If my central argument is right, for most of us such prudence requires significant change in our dominant character traits.
But why focus on character? Isn’t the best way to foster flourishing to shift our policies and adopt better technologies? About fifty years ago, the deep ecology movement was given its classical formulation in Arne Naess’s famous essay “The Shallow and the Deep, Long Range Ecology Movement. A Summary.”8 Naess juxtaposed a shallow, technological and anthropocentric approach addressing environmental problems with a deeper approach that required fundamental ethical change. At the time, Julian Simon and others argued that free markets and technological changes were sufficient to deal with resource depletion and waste. Many environmentalists focused on policy changes and economic incentives, but deep ecologists went further, maintaining that we need to change our sense of who we are and our relationships to the biosphere.
Naess was primarily focused on the question of what changes were necessary to create a positive relationship between humans and nature and to reverse environmental decline, not on the question of how we can individually flourish. But he thought his solution to environmental decline would enhance individual flourishing. My priorities are the reverse. I emphasize the question about individual flourishing but argue that my answer will be necessary to address our other significant challenges. Deep ecology is rarely talked about in today’s environmental circles, but the issue Naess raised about how deep our changes need to be remains very much alive. I have reservations about the specific changes he recommended, but I agree that we must change who we are, how we see ourselves, and how we relate to others. Throughout the book, I will show why shallow changes are unlikely to be sufficient for either our individual flourishing or our global approach toward sustainability.
Character and Flourishing
The connection between character and flourishing has a long history. In the West, Aristotle, Stoics, and Christians saw cultivation of character as a crucial part of a flourishing life. In the East, Confucianism and Taoism arrived at similar conclusions while focusing on rather different traits. Today, positive psychology shapes global discussions of ways in which character is linked with flourishing. Peterson and Seligman provide an overview of twenty-four character strengths that are integral to living a good life.9 I agree that many elements of character are linked to flourishing, but I suggest that the systems dynamics of our context and the cultural norms we inherit determine which elements are sorely in need of development. I will focus on four clusters of traits that are underemphasized in the US and other Western countries and that are particularly important for our flourishing now. Two of these, humility and frugality, are normally considered character traits, but the other two, systems thinking and collaboration, are more often thought of as sets of skills.
A character trait is a relatively stable pattern of thought, feeling, and action that is seen as part of one’s identity.10 Many common character traits, like honesty, courage, and generosity, descend from theories of virtue and vice inherited by our cultures. We often lack terms for elements of character that are distinct from that inheritance. We have no common names for many stable clusters of skillful habits that are part of our identities and that otherwise perform the function of character traits. Virtues as classically understood are not just dispositions to think and act in various ways; they involve many skills, including subtle judgments about what a virtue requires in a situation and how that is affected by other relevant virtues. I will typically use “skillful habit” for the elements of character I am recommending we cultivate, thereby emphasizing that we are really looking to develop skills that become a part of who we are—cognitive skills, emotional skills, and behavioral competence.11 To be clear, I am examining very general skill sets that are deemphasized by a culture, not specific skills that might be in demand in a twenty-first-century marketplace, given economic trends.
Speaking of some character traits as skillful habits has several advantages. Skills are typically individuated much more finely than character traits, so talk of skillful habits multiplies the elements of character, which expands our sense of who we are. Furthermore, skills are usually learned by breaking them down into subskills, which we can practice individually. To become a better writer, I might focus on specific skills, for example paragraph construction or sensitivity to audience. Similarly, becoming a more collaborative person might involve honing subskills that are underdeveloped. Not all skillful habits, however, are broad and significant enough to be aspects of character—think of the skillful habits involved in riding a bicycle. Moreover, not all character traits involve skills; some are just dispositions to behave in certain ways, like being crass. Both dispositions and skills are important for the kinds of traits I am discussing. If I am a highly collaborative person, for example, then I am not just inclined to be collaborative; I am also good at it.
Each of chapters 2 through 5 describes a cluster of skillful habits that we need to strengthen if we are to flourish and if we are to approach sustainability. Chapter 2 explains why strengthening the three collaborative skills of empathy, trust, and hope is particularly important amid the conflicts of this period. We often think of these three as matters of affect rather than skill, yet the skills they involve are crucial capacities for working together to create livable communities now. Our culture’s strong emphasis on competitive skills makes it hard to reinforce collaborative skills. Nevertheless, competitive skills remain important. I argue we should achieve a kind of “binocular vision” that integrates the use of collaborative and competitive skills while emphasizing the former.
When competitive skills dominate a culture, social norms reinforce conviction rather than humility. But humility is crucial for learning about the dynamics of our age and working together to moderate their effect. Chapter 3 describes how powerful “conviction conveyor belts” in our culture turn ordinary beliefs into hardened convictions. By cultivating humility skills, we can resist this tendency. In times of rapid change and novel challenge, humility skills are necessary for the learning mindset we need to flourish.
We live in a time of abundance unimaginable to our ancestors, and yet we do not appear to be much happier than they were. A history of technological achievements leads us toward a faith that technology will solve most of our problems, which reduces our motivation to pursue the cultural changes more likely to make us happier, including development of frugality skills. Chapter 4 builds the case for a broad set of frugality skills that are necessary in an age of increasing resource constraints and system dysfunction. Such skills enable us to reduce our consumption without loss of well-being, which is crucial for approaching sustainability.
Chapter 5 argues for remediating deficits in our cognitive skills that make it harder for us to fully grasp the dynamics of our times. I describe a cluster of systems-focused skillful habits that must be strengthened if we are to confidently navigate these dynamics. Our contrasting individualist cognitive habits, which served us well enough during a period of massive growth, now make it harder to effectively meet our large-scale challenges. In each chapter, I am recommending a change in emphasis and expertise regarding underdeveloped skillful habits, not the wholesale repudiation of contrasting skills. Figure 1 illustrates these changes.
Figure 1. The shifts in skillful habits that will increase the odds of flourishing in the age of climate change.
Cultural Change and Sustainability
I will call my four clusters of skillful habits “resilience” skills or traits because, taken together, they strengthen both personal resilience and the resilience of our communities. Here resilience means roughly the ability to successfully navigate a wide range of challenges.12 The salience of trauma and adversity has made research on psychological resilience a major growth industry. Numerous skills have been associated with enhanced individual resilience,13 only some of which are encompassed by the four clusters I emphasize. Personal and community resilience are often treated separately, but I think it important to focus on the feedback loops between them. As we will see, finding groups that are characterized by these resilience traits and that positively reinforce their further development plays an important role in flourishing.
In chapters 6 and 7, I turn to the challenge of how we can scale up cultivation of resilience skillful habits so they begin to be reflected in cultural norms that are necessary for us to approach sustainability. I provide a full account of sustainability as a social goal at the end of chapter 5 when we have reviewed the systems language that the account requires. In the meantime, we can say with Agyeman, Bullard, and Evans that sustainability “ensures a better quality of life for all, now and into the future, in a just and equitable manner, whilst living within the limits of supporting ecosystems.”14 So understood, sustainability clearly involves social and economic elements, not just environmental health. In particular, it requires justice both for humans and nonhuman organisms.
Major shifts in our cultural norms are necessary for us to approach sustainability, but they are certainly not sufficient. We also need technological, policy, and economic shifts. But without a shift in norms, these other changes are very unlikely to be effective and stable over time. This kind of major adaptation is very hard to achieve in the best of conditions. Many are resisting the requisite changes and cannot see how adapting our character is compatible with leading a fulfilling life. Sustainability is a long-shot goal, but even if we fail at this goal we can still flourish amid the resulting turbulence.
Caveats
Most readers will have a variety of questions and concerns about my project. For example, it might seem highly implausible that we can flourish during our transition. Perhaps the most we can do is to cope with the fallout and live minimally decent lives. Or perhaps flourishing will be limited to a few elites, whereas ordinary people living on the edge of survival cannot expect to flourish. These are legitimate concerns. Clearly people who cannot meet their basic needs cannot flourish. But my claim is that most people across the socioeconomic spectrum can flourish even in these times. Humans have flourished in a very wide variety of contexts, including those where things are going badly wrong. Without wealth and advantage, we can learn how to build strong, nurturing relationships. We can find ways to be deeply engaged in activities that enhance some corner of the world and give us meaning and accomplishment. We can find beauty and other sources of pleasure that stimulate positive emotions. And we can learn how to understand and navigate effectively local systems that directly affect our lives.
To be sure, if we do not rapidly move toward just sustainability, many more people will not flourish because their basic needs will not be met. Alas, many more of those who can meet basic needs may not learn how to adapt, because their cultures may thwart such learning. They too will suffer. Much more needs to be said regarding these concerns, and that is one aim of the book. I will address different versions of these concerns directly in chapter 6, which explores the barriers to developing the resilience traits individually and as a society. If these barriers are steep, then the chances of scaling up the requisite resilience traits are low. I argue that many of the barriers to individual cultivation are small, and I describe a range of stepladders that will help us surmount the barriers. This chapter also serves to clarify and augment the picture of how, on a personal level, each of us can buck social norms and strengthen resilience skillful habits.
The barriers to fostering widespread development of resilience skills are much higher and the stepladders more rickety, yet much is happening that suggests success is within our grasp. These skills have strong historical roots in our cultures that are motivating to conservatives and liberals alike. From indigenous peoples and communal enclaves to the social uprising that Paul Hawken calls “the movement that has no name,” we see groups that positively reinforce the relevant skills. What we need now is major institutions that can unify, expand, and make more visible the practices in these groups that cultivate the skillful habits we need.
In chapter 7, I argue that education, broadly understood, could provide the institutional support necessary for scaling up resilience traits, but to do so, it would need to change considerably. While some initiatives in K–12 and postsecondary education are moving us in the right direction, formal education alone affects a relatively small portion of society in the short run, the younger generations. We also need nonformal education, especially in businesses and religious organizations, to reach a broader segment of the population with offerings and cultural norms that reinforce resilience skills. Here again we see significant momentum among these institutions, but also polarizing forces that limit their impact. Culture change can occur with surprising speed if the conditions are ripe. We are justified in allocating a great deal of hopeful energy to this enterprise.
In the epilogue, I sketch two scenarios: one in which resilience skillful habits are manifested only in small enclaves within a world where deep conflict dominates, and the other in which they are widely embraced and conflict is managed more effectively. Some intermediate scenario is more likely, but my point in the exercise is to show vividly that in either scenario we are more likely to flourish if we have a strong set of resilience skills. While far from a panacea, these skillful habits enable us to better navigate the turbulence that we can expect on the edge of release.
Throughout the book, I liberally refer to “we” as if it were clear whom this includes. For two reasons, I will focus my discussion primarily on the range of people living in the United States, though much of what I say will apply with suitable modifications to people living in other postindustrial cultures. First, I know more about the United States than other countries. It is hard enough to generalize productively about the cultures of any large country given the fragmentation of subcultures in the modern world, but it would be even harder to generalize about larger groups of cultures across the globe. The data available about the United States have spawned a robust literature about US cultural character and its changes, which has guided my thinking. Second, the United States has played an outsize global role in the last century both economically and socially, which resulted in its exporting many culture norms. Moreover, many of the forces that have influenced general social norms in the United States such as capitalism, the Protestant revolution, and the evolution of modern science, have also influenced much of the globe in similar ways. Consequently, arguments I am making about US culture should resonate in many other cultures. The United States has been a laboratory for refining skillful habits associated with individualism, competition, conviction, and technological abundance. Our social norms strongly reinforce such skills and de-emphasize contrasting skill sets. The country can now serve as a different kind of laboratory in which we experiment with the large-scale cultural change necessary for widespread flourishing.
Some will still have doubts about how far we can generalize across the variety of subcultures in the United States. I am mindful that many subcultures do not fit my generalizations about our dominant cultural norms. Despite the tremendous diversity of people, values, and personal situations we find in the United States, we can see common themes that apply to large segments of the population and that affect how we as a whole national body respond to our challenges. Even if one inhabits a subculture characterized by norms that reinforce sustainable living, one is affected deeply by the norms that dominate the larger culture. Some are already on the path I am recommending, but we can all strengthen the skillful habits best suited to flourishing in our times and help others by contributing to changes in our cultural norms.
To see why resilience skillful habits are likely to enhance our own flourishing no matter what ultimately happens in the age of climate change, we need to understand the dynamics of our times. That is the task of the next chapter. We need to see the interconnections between various challenges and also the opportunities that these provide. Here we begin to see how the pursuit of individual flourishing, even if we think that we are screwed, can align with making progress toward sustainability.