Individual Flourishing Hurdles

The elitism barrier: Perhaps the most common concern I have heard is that cultivation of these underdeveloped skills is not realistic for most people, so even if these skills did increase the chances of flourishing, it will only be for the few. Thus, the result is elitist. Three reasons appear to provide support for the elitist objection. First, swimming against the cultural current is easier for people who already have a fair amount of cultural capital; they can afford to be rebels and often can get away with it. Marginalized people often cannot afford that risk. Indeed, they have to try harder to fit the current cultural norms in order to avoid running afoul of institutional expectations. Second, cultivating underdeveloped character traits takes time and resources, which many people do not have after working a full-time job (or two), taking care of an extended family, dealing with health issues, and so on. Third and more controversially, the detailed skills I have sketched seem to involve nuanced judgment that few can master, even if they are highly educated. It is not realistic to think that regular people will be able to develop these skills to a great enough extent to make a difference in flourishing. In short, this is a privileged approach to flourishing, which only works for those who are already well situated to avoid the worst consequences of the age of climate change.

The practical challenges outlined above are real and important. Working on skills does take time, and challenging cultural norms comes with risks. At the same time, it is doubtful that on average the barriers for non-elites are higher than for elites. Indeed, sometimes the barrier is likely to be greater the more privileged one is.

Our capacities to acquire resilience skills vary considerably, depending on our personalities, our situations, and our inclinations. People from many walks of life already have well-developed versions of the skills, but most of us need to strengthen them significantly. Our capacity to learn skills depends on motivation levels, life experiences, the subcultures we inhabit, as well as time and resources. Often people who are members of non-elite groups have motivations, experiences, and subcultures that enable them to deepen the resilience skillful habits more rapidly than elites. Privilege can diminish the motivation to acquire such skills. This is most evident in the case of frugality and humility skills.

People who live through economic hard times often acquire frugality skills out of necessity. They can find role models nearby. By contrast, those who are wealthy have a harder time motivating the acquisition of such skills. They have less need for frugality and less experience that cultivates the skills. Indeed, conspicuous consumption has been rewarded for this group. It is unlikely that marginalized groups are worse off with respect to developing frugality skills. If anything, it is likely that the balance tips in the other direction.

Similar arguments can be made about humility. Those who are well educated and accustomed to wielding power are often overconfident about their own views. They are more likely to be concerned about status and entitlement and less focused on the limitations of their perspectives. On average, those who have not been empowered often have an easier time listening openly to others and seeing their points of view. Few studies compare humility across populations, but in one suggestive study, African Americans and Arab Americans in the Detroit area scored higher on a humility scale than a comparable white population.¹ It is far from clear that the powerful have an advantage with respect to acquiring humility skills.

Some collaborative and systems-thinking skills do appear to be easier for elites to cultivate. For example, systems skills are typically taught, if at all, in college. Thus, one can argue that elites have an advantage there. Skills associated with trusting are likely to be harder to develop for those who have been repeatedly disadvantaged by people in power. Indeed, robust evidence shows that trust in others tends to be lower in groups with lower socioeconomic status.²

Empathy skills may not track trust skills, though. In one study, Michael Kraus and his colleagues tested the hypothesis that people in lower socioeconomic strata are more dependent on others in their group for support, and thus that they developed strong skills of cognitive empathy.³ They found that indeed individuals from lower-class backgrounds made more accurate empathetic judgments than people from upper-class backgrounds. They found some evidence that sensitivity to social context was a likely cause of this variance.

We definitely need more research on variables affecting acquisition of skillful habits. But both experience and our very limited data set suggest that differentials between elite and non-elite groups in the resilience skills are likely to be mixed at best. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, it seems reasonable to conclude that the barriers to acquiring resilience skills are not markedly different for the two groups. This is not surprising, given that most elites have learned how to play the culturally rewarded games well; that is, they tend to excel at skills reinforced by dominant norms. They may also excel at contrasting skill sets, but they often lack the motivation to learn them.

This leaves the third reason one might think elites have an edge in acquiring sophisticated resilience skills, namely that acquiring these requires a degree of nuanced judgment that is more likely to be mastered by groups that are highly educated. Perhaps anyone can acquire these skills to a limited extent, but for the skills to increase the likelihood of flourishing significantly, they must be well developed and integrated into effective habits. I would agree that the stronger the skills and more habitually used, the more effective they would be in enhancing flourishing. But I am not aware of any evidence for thinking that education is well correlated with the nuanced judgments involved in such life skills.

The research on cultivation of wisdom addresses how we develop our capacities for good judgment. In this literature, wisdom is distinguished from abstract reasoning capacity.⁴ Formal education does try to enhance reasoning and critical thinking, but it rarely focuses on developing context-sensitive judgments about how to balance conflicting goods that help refine skills like humility, empathy, frugality, and the like. Given the role of life experience in strengthening such judgment, it seems unlikely that elites have an edge here. Few studies have looked at differences in wise-reasoning capacity between demographic groups, but a study by Brienza and Grossmann found that on average people in lower socioeconomic status (SES) groups have stronger wise-reasoning capacities regarding interpersonal relations than people in higher SES groups.⁵ They suggest that this could be explained by the importance of fruitfully navigating relationships when resources are limited and other threats abound.

Individuals with strong resilience traits can be found among any group. I encourage readers to think of their own examples. One salient example for me was Carl Stoddard, a beloved security guard at Green Mountain College for almost thirty years. When he died in 2004, students and alumni from around the country told their stories about Carl and funded the creation of Carl’s Corner, a small monument where Carl had leaned on a wall as he watched over the college most nights. Carl had a high school education and grew up amid the rough-and-tumble slate miners around Granville, New York. Students loved him for his humor and compassion but also for his good judgment. They would seek him out to get advice on everything from relationships to growing vegetables. Security guards must find a balance between upholding campus rules and making judgments about what is in students’ interests. Carl was not shy about making such judgments and defending them before administrators who might be more rule-focused. He was not lenient; he just knew how to get people to behave when it mattered most. He read people well, knowing when they needed a hug and when they needed professional help. Perhaps more than anything else, Carl was loved because he could help students frame a problem differently so it was more easily solved. He had the kind of nuanced judgment that is required for strong empathy, humility, frugality, and systems skills.

The barriers to developing resilience skills are unlikely to vary in a systematic way between elite and non-elite groups, but they do vary widely. Lack of motivation and suitable life experiences, lack of role models and supportive friends can be barriers. We have already encountered stepladders for surmounting these. Like Benjamin Franklin, we need to integrate practice and reflection on the skills into activities we do as a matter of routine. We need to start where we have some motivation and experience, refining some skills we already have to some extent, and then building outward. We can create groups that support skills development in the process of doing other things that are fun or practical. Such groups can provide low-risk settings to explore skills that contrast with dominant norms. And we can work on the binocular vision that enables us to shift skillful habits as the context demands, avoiding risks of swimming against too strong a social current.

The “it depends on circumstances” barrier: The elitism concern suggests a deeper question about whether local circumstances play a strong role in determining which skillful habits tend to promote flourishing. In our increasingly diverse and pluralistic culture, some may be skeptical that it is possible to defend substantive generalizations about the broad skill clusters that promote flourishing. Just as situationists doubt that there are stable traits at all, these critics think that even if there are some stable traits, we would need to vary our emphasis on them depending on the circumstances.

No doubt having some degree of flexibility in the skillful habits we express in a context is important. That is a key reason why developing binocular vision regarding the contrasting skillful habits is important. Still, we can generalize across contexts regarding which traits are underemphasized and important for the challenges that affect all of us regardless of circumstances. The planetary boundaries we are approaching affect everyone, as do polarization, gridlock, and inequality. We would all benefit from finding jointly acceptable ways to make progress on these difficult issues. The skills we need to emphasize to make such progress would also benefit us individually in myriad ways as we navigate more local issues.

The stepladder we need here is to detach from our local focus and look at the larger systemic structures that will affect our flourishing. Organizations must do this as a matter of routine when they plan strategy: they must analyze trends at larger scales to decide which opportunities to pursue and risks to avoid. We should do the same. If we expand the scale of our vision for the purpose of planning and remove any ideological blinders that narrow our range of vision, most of us will find the interconnected challenges and opportunities that constitute the age of climate change. We may differ regarding specific approaches to addressing these challenges, but it will be easy to see that some skills are largely missing from our toolbox. How we would develop and use these would naturally vary according to circumstance.

The question of how far resilience traits can be applicable across contexts cannot be settled here. A strong case can be made that some traits are widely applicable, such as being honest with ourselves and our close companions. Though even here, with a bit of effort we can imagine situations where some contrasting traits (e.g., misdirection and obfuscation) are equally conducive to flourishing. Imagine a world in which most human interactions have the structure of a poker game. What we are looking for is traits that are conducive to flourishing across a wide range of circumstances in which we are likely to find ourselves. My position is that the traits associated with flourishing shift depending on where a culture is on large-scale adaptive cycles. Thus, I share a concern about generalizing about the applicability of traits to all circumstances; yet I resist the claim that no broad generalizations are reasonable at all.

The “flourishing now is immoral” barrier: Even if flourishing is possible during our times, it may be that we should not try to flourish as we destroy huge numbers of ecosystems and cause untold damage to human communities. Perhaps it would be intensely self-centered to pursue flourishing while contributing to massive global disruptions. Indeed, it could be argued that a profound lack of empathy would be required to flourish while our lifestyles are causing so much harm. If we are sensitive to the amount of pain that will surround us as climate disruption, loss of biodiversity, and deepening climate injustice accelerates, we should regularly feel anguish, and this seems incompatible with flourishing. A good person would feel consistently very bad about what is happening in the world. Anyone who flourished in this context would be a deeply flawed person.⁶

The concern here is reasonable. People should feel grief and anger when innocent people and other creatures are being harmed. It is a sign that someone is empathetic and has a sense of justice. It may seem natural to extend this point to feeling constant anguish when the harm is prolonged and systematic. But this second move is neither necessary nor morally required. Indeed, even in the context of climate catastrophe, constant anguish would not be wise.

The stepladder needed to surmount this barrier is the skill of allocating attention and emotional response to objects of grief and anger to the degree that it helps us to learn viscerally about the consequences of our actions, to motivate shifts in behavior, and to feel deeply enough about a harm that we can then psychologically move on to the rest of our lives. We may have a hard time developing the skillful habits that manage attention in this way, but over time deep deficits in this area may become mental health issues, not rational responses to crisis.

Continuous anguish, anger, and despair are not compatible with flourishing, but powerful episodic grief and anger are compatible. Indeed, it is hard to imagine flourishing without having such emotions, because of the ways they inform us and shape our future behavior. Remember that flourishing is not just happiness. Flourishing includes positive emotions, but it also involves other less subjective elements like close relationships and achievement. Someone may flourish without being happy much of the time. A person can flourish even if she experiences a great deal of pain—for example if her house burns down or she gets a terrible disease. But if this is so, then shouldn’t someone else be able to flourish while being acutely aware of that pain? The key is to avoid so much focus on the harm that it prevents us from accomplishing other meaningful goals and appreciating other gifts.

Of course, if we are a cause of the harm, then we should feel guilt, and we should try to shift our behavior accordingly. For example, if we are not trying to significantly reduce the indirect harm we are causing to others through our carbon-intensive lifestyles, then we are arguably behaving immorally. But cultivating the resilience skillful habits does aim to reduce such harm. Frugality skills most directly enable us to significantly reduce our negative environmental impacts. Systems, humility, and collaborative skills enable us to work effectively in groups to reduce harms. If most people cultivated such skills and thereby shifted cultural norms, we could more rapidly advance the just sustainability transition. Thus, attempting to flourish through cultivating resilience skills should reduce guilt while increasing empathy for those most burdened by injustice and unsustainability.

The stepladders we need to surmount this barrier involve developing an acute awareness of ways we cause harm to humans and nonhumans and making a serious attempt to reduce our own contributions to such harm. Sometimes we must recognize that harm results from all of the options we face, and thus that our choices are tragic. Guilt is appropriate, where purity is impossible. Fortunately, humans can flourish in a deeply tragic world.⁷

The “progressives’ values” barrier: Some will be concerned that I have misidentified the skillful habits that will help us to flourish in our times and that the skills currently dominant in US culture will actually be more useful than those I propose. This might be conjoined with the view that resilience skillful habits reflect progressive values, not a clear-eyed analysis of what flourishing requires. One version of this concern is that our dominant skillful habits are associated with “traditional masculinity”—habits like being able to compete aggressively, to act independently, and to command with conviction. Josh Hawley, in a keynote speech at the National Conservatism Conference in 2021, argued that the Left was trying to redefine traditional masculinity as toxic masculinity and to erode the virtues of “courage, and independence, and assertiveness.”⁸ The concern that the traits I recommend are anti-masculine or anti-conservative would be a barrier to a significant portion of the US population pursuing the culture change project. This would also suggest that polarization would make scaling up resilience skills into social norms unlikely.

The ideologies associated with individualism, competition, and conviction have been criticized by feminists and others on the political Left, which may be the primary source of this concern. I doubt, however, that resilience skills are consistently aligned with traditional gender roles, despite the stereotypes that are sometimes advanced. Indeed, many of these skills are neutral with respect to gender roles and political orientations, and others are quite mixed in their associations.

The systems-thinking skills seem gender and politically neutral. Although persistent myths attribute different cognitive aptitudes to men and women, extensive research shows this to be mistaken. For example, the view that men are better at quantitative thinking has been debunked by several large meta-analyses.⁹ Frugality skills seem similarly neutral. For example, the increased self-sufficiency that comes from reuse, repair, and repurposing skills seems neither masculine or feminine. Among collaborative skills, hope and trust seem neutral, though the hopeful ability to supercharge motivation under high-risk conditions is sometimes associated with traditional masculine roles. Affective empathy has been associated with traditional feminine roles, but cognitive empathy skills (the ability to read people’s emotions from behavior) are less clearly gendered, though there is some evidence that women have a small advantage in this area.¹⁰ Humility skills also seem mixed with respect to gender association. Decentering self is often attributed to feminine roles, though reflective skills are rarely seen to be gendered. Interestingly, unreflective conviction based on gut reactions seems associated with both masculine and feminine roles.

No doubt attempts to systematically cultivate some resilience skills would be politically polarizing. We have learned recently that almost anything can be politicized. The best response is to note that the whole package of skillful habits is largely neutral; any political associations are quite mixed. Nevertheless, with some audiences it would be unwise to begin a defense of resilience skills with critiques of contrasting skills that are quite politically charged (e.g., competitive skills). Concern about polarization is not by itself a reason for limiting our skillful habit toolbox, especially when some of those skills could address polarization.

A different rationale for doubling down on our dominant skills is a picture of the world that emphasizes danger and intractable conflict. If we think the future will be totally conflict-ridden, then my emphasis on collaborative and humility traits becomes a more doubtful approach to flourishing. If we descend into regular violence as a means of addressing issues, we may need more highly developed competitive skills. Trust will become a luxury confined to close friendships, and empathy broadly expressed will be a dangerous distraction from the need for self-defense. For some today, this picture characterizes the only world they know; that situation could become more common. If it does, then I have emphasized the wrong skills.

I have already argued against apocalyptic environmentalism and the level of conflict it suggests. If we believe the worst is on the way, it is more likely to occur, because we will not be able to act effectively given that pessimism. We cannot afford to be Pollyannas about adversaries we may face or future challenges, nor can we afford to be pessimistic Eeyores. We must develop the skills that enable us to hold firm between these two extremes. Some forms of release are probable, but the buffers we are strengthening will soften the impact of release, and our current pursuit of transformation is likely to accelerate the process of reorganization. No doubt some people will prefer to escalate violence rather than pursue transformations toward just sustainability; but for most that will be a last resort. Virulent competition for vanishing resources is a worst-case scenario, not a probable one.

The height of the above barriers depends on how caught up we are in the shrill fringes of contemporary political debates where crisis looms eternally and worst-case scenarios dominate our attention. For those in the large moderate middle, the stepladders useful here involve assembling a set of reminders about the structure of the flourishing project. First, we are not eliminating any skills from the toolbox. By further developing skills poorly represented in the toolbox, we would be adding capacity and flexibility. Furthermore, we can adjust our use of the skills in light of how well they are working in our contexts. Skillful habits are not mechanically activated and followed in a rote fashion. We must hone and adapt skillful habits in our local contexts while being mindful of the larger systems that influence these contexts. Second, we should focus on what the skillful habits achieve, not on their putative ideological associations. Start with skills that seem more inviting and useful and progress toward others that seem more foreign or ideologically vexed.

The “more important skills” barrier: Some critics may think that I have misidentified the most important skills for flourishing. They may agree that change of skills is crucial, but focus on other skills. Daniel Lerch in “The Six Foundations for Building Community Resilience” argues that courage is a crucial virtue we need to strengthen now.¹¹ We need courage to face our problems directly and to take responsibility for them. We need courage to collaborate with those with whom we deeply disagree. We need courage to try novel solutions amid great uncertainty. His explanation of courage includes the skills associated with persisting when challenges seem overwhelming. Angela Duckworth’s “grit”—passion and perseverance—is such a skillful habit.¹² Grit is often celebrated as a key to success in daunting enterprises. An increasing number of schools now try to cultivate grit. Hope overlaps considerably with grit and courage.

Adaptability is another skillful habit that might well deserve to be added to our list.¹³ Consider the following reasoning for its inclusion in resilience skills. It is naturally contrasted with a cluster of habits that are expressed in our attempts to control our environments. When our desires are not satisfied by the way the world is, we can either try to change the world or change our desires. The control orientation that dominates our culture fosters skillful habits that enable us to exert enough control over our environments that our desires can be satisfied. This orientation reinforces our emphasis on technological development skills that enable us to effectively manipulate the environment rather than on psychological skills that enable us to modify what we want. It has also encouraged prioritizing knowledge gained from controlled experiments, rather than knowledge associated with uncontrolled observation.

Despite the benefits of control skills, prioritizing them has costs that are not broadly appreciated. Many important kinds of knowledge, like the wisdom that comes with life experience, are not susceptible to controlled experiment, yet we cannot avoid making judgments that require such wisdom. We must sharpen our abilities to evaluate better and worse judgments without the benefit of control. Though we can modify much of the world, control is often an illusion, especially on larger scales. Human behavior is particularly difficult to control. In the late conservation phase of the adaptive cycle, the brittleness of control regimes reduces resilience and eventually leads to release. We need more adaptive management to prolong the conservation phase, but if release comes, we especially need the flexibility to survive the increased chaos and begin the process of reorganization. Rapid experimentation is crucial in this phase. We must become much better at adapting to what we cannot control. As Montaigne said, “Not being able to govern events I govern myself, and if they will not adapt to me then I adapt to them.”¹⁴ We need both adaptability and control skills, along with the kind of binocular vision that enables us to use them in concert.

Adaptability, courage, and grit will be important during this age; they are involved in resilience, and they are currently underdeveloped. I make no claim that the resilience skillful habits constitute the only underdeveloped traits necessary for flourishing in our times. I have chosen the four key resilience skillful habits for two related reasons. For each of them there is a large literature that justifies their importance for addressing our major challenges, and each skillful habit includes numerous important subskills that will assist us in flourishing. The resilience skills clusters include under their umbrellas skills that might have been placed within a different cluster or made into a major category. Alternate ways of clustering skillful habits may be more intuitive or useful for different people. I have described hope skills as a subset of collaborative skills, but others might well elevate hope to a major resilience trait and include grit, courage, and creative reframing of goals among the clusters of skills that contribute to hoping well.

Given that the core idea of this book is that we are unlikely to flourish unless we change ourselves, it might seem that adaptability is the core resilience trait. Indeed, I could have packaged many resilience skills under the general heading of adaptability, but I doubt a primary focus on adaptability skills would motivate development of the necessary range of specific skillful habits. A separate chapter on adaptability would overlap too much with the other chapters. We should not seek a unique best way of describing the skillful habits that will enhance our flourishing in these times. A degree of open-mindedness, pluralism, and flexibility about the framework for categorizing resilience skills provides the most promising stepladder for surmounting the other skills barrier.

The “no silver bullet” barrier: We may be disappointed if we try cultivating resilience skills and flourishing does not seem to follow quickly. The stepladder here is increasing clarity about the connection between character and flourishing. Strong resilience skillful habits improve our capacity to flourish in our times. They are one important contributor to flourishing, but there are others, some of which are beyond our control.

We need to keep in mind the objective list account of flourishing I sketched in the introduction, which includes the following: positive emotions, engagement, positive relationships, meaning, accomplishments, having basic needs met, having an understanding of the forces shaping one’s life, and reasonable confidence in one’s capacity to navigate those forces. Resilience traits directly influence some of these dimensions of flourishing, and act indirectly on others. Here are some of the connections we have explored: Systems-thinking skills increase our understanding of what is happening on multiple scales and provide insight into how we can effectively navigate the personal challenges that result from impacts at larger scales. They build justified confidence in our ability to adapt in a turbulent world. Collaborative skills help us to build stronger interpersonal relationships and to work effectively with different groups to achieve larger goals. Humility skills reinforce the positive impacts of systems thinking and collaborative skills and in particular help us to avoid myopic approaches to problem-solving resulting from hard convictions ill-suited to navigating a rapidly shifting world. Humility skills also help strengthen relationships by decentering the self and enhancing curiosity. Frugality skills increase our chances of having basic needs met and accomplishing much within the context of constrained resources. Together, the above impacts of resilience skills are also likely to enhance positive emotions and increase our sense that our lives have meaning in a world where much is going badly wrong.

Our situations, our resources, our past experiences, our health, our other skills, and our social networks, among many other things, affect our capacity to flourish. Trauma of many sorts makes it harder to flourish, but those who overcome trauma are often better situated to flourish in these times than those who have been too sheltered. The Stoics argued that if you develop the right character, you can flourish in any setting; I make no such claim. But I have argued that skillful habits play a crucial role in enabling us to make the best of the forces that are shaping our lives, to grasp the opportunities that lie within the challenges, and to acquire what we need to flourish now.

The loneliness barrier: For almost half of my graduate students, the sense of isolation in doing the work of moving toward sustainability is a significant barrier both to progress and to their flourishing. Many live in places where they find little acknowledgment of the challenges we face and little support for the changes required to meet them. The loneliness of their pursuit often makes their work less productive and deprives them of the joy of joining with others to make change. They have to create their own positive reinforcement strategies in order to fuel motivation, and often they find it easier to focus on other issues. Fortunately, other students find themselves riding a wave of social engagement in addressing injustices, climate change, waste reduction, and so on. They also find positive reinforcement and role models for the development of many resilience traits. There is no easy stepladder for the barrier of loneliness. We either find communities of support or we have to create them. This project is the first step in scaling up cultivation of the resilience traits.

Scaling up is not just an answer to loneliness—it is a requirement for promoting flourishing on a wide scale and beginning to approach sustainability. Scaling up can occur in many ways, but it typically begins in small groups that have come together in order to promote some goals that individuals alone cannot achieve as effectively. If successful, a group may have enough influence on a small place-based community or organization that it develops social norms that reinforce the ends. Sometimes leaders facilitate this, but often it occurs in a bottom-up fashion where an increasing number of people are attracted to the group without a clear leadership structure. When this occurs in geographically dispersed communities, we begin to talk in terms of a social movement that aims to change the culture at large. If conditions are ripe, key organizations push the goals at the cultural scale, and major institutions may provide support for spreading the norms. If a social movement is successful, the culture itself changes, leaving inevitable pockets of resistance fighting uphill battles to retain the hegemony of the earlier culture.

Barriers to Scaling Up toward Sustainability

The scaling-up process is happening, though not fast enough, to be sure. Despite the mainstream media’s gloomy tilt, we are seeing a seismic shift in the prevalence of practices associated with social justice and sustainability. Education and business increasingly play a leading role, but much of the impetus started with ordinary people trying to do something differently on a small scale. The nonprofit sector has been crucial in aggregating and accelerating solutions to issues and creating a larger audience inclined to action. This movement focuses primarily on overt behavioral practices, but it also involves the cultivation of resilience skillful habits. A fierce politically motivated resistance has expanded the culture wars to include this movement and succeeded in polarizing some proposed solutions. Though a just sustainability still seems a distant dream, it is becoming easier to find experiments in social norm shifting that are succeeding on smaller scales.

Paul Hawken’s Blessed Unrest provides a powerful overview of “the social movement that has no name” that has been galvanizing people around environmental and justice issues.¹⁵ More than sixty years of activism have illuminated the linkages between these issues. We have learned how empathy for marginalized others, human and nonhuman, can propel change, and how communities of hope can reinforce our motivation and skills for persisting amid determined opposition. To document this movement, Hawken and others at the Natural Capital Institute created a huge database of organizations in 243 countries and territories that are engaging communities in addressing humanitarian issues. Now dated, this time slice of the movement helps us to see vividly that we are scaling up culture change and in the process cultivating many of the skillful habits needed to approach just sustainability. Andreas Karelas provides a much more recent, though narrower, account of the advances in the climate change movement in Climate Courage.¹⁶ Both books powerfully illustrate how movements can scale up culture change. But significant barriers impede scaling up the cultivation of resilience traits.

The “culture change takes too long” barrier: After decades of inadequate action, we must now move very quickly to address climate change if we are to limit harm to manageable levels. Biodiversity loss, income inequality, racial injustice, and polarization have similar urgency. Some will be concerned that the process of scaling up resilience skillful habits to initiate a shift in cultural norms would probably take multiple generations. On this view, cultural change may piggyback on other sustainability initiatives, but it cannot be a primary driver of the sustainability transformation because of the need for speed.

We do need to act as quickly as possible, but we should not adopt quick fixes that fail to address underlying root causes. In the long term that will be less effective. Unfortunately, our cultural norms often do evolve slowly. This barrier is considerable, but we must find ways to climb over it, because we are very unlikely to be able to go around it by using other levers of change. We must find ways to accelerate culture change, and we must integrate such change into other actions that will have more immediate positive impact.

Just encouraging individuals to strengthen the resilience skillful habits is inadequate for accelerating cultural change; it depends on the action of too many diverse individuals. That would be a bit like trying to solve the litter problem by encouraging more people to pick up litter. It is very hard to leverage system change simply by aggregating individual actions. We need a social institution that can leverage change in resilience skillful habits on a massive scale. Education could do that.

Formal K–12 and secondary education have historically focused on cultivating skillful habits, communicating knowledge, and transmitting cultural norms to new generations. They have often played a key role in accelerating the spread of norm changes. Although much education has reflected the individualist and competitive norms of our larger culture, we have seen a groundswell of educational innovation over the last twenty years that is moving in a different direction. In the next chapter, I will provide an overview of such innovations and describe how education can be transformed to accelerate culture change toward an emphasis on resilience traits. Formal education is unlikely to play this role by itself; business, religion, the family, and the state must play supportive roles as vehicles for education broadly understood. Admittedly, achieving the speed of change necessary is a long shot. The barriers to leveraging change through education, which I sketch below, are considerable. But trying to surmount them is our best shot at addressing a root cause of our current challenges.

We have good evidence that shifts in cultural norms sometimes happen fairly rapidly. Often this occurs when some crisis forces the change. We saw that the Great Depression and the austerity that accompanied two world wars played a key role in motivating the return of many frugality norms in the early twentieth century. Arguably the COVID-19 pandemic has shifted norms regarding telecommuting for office workers and tele-health in the medical community. Education has played a key role in accelerating change in norms around use of technology and acceptance of diversity in the last thirty years. Even a deep cultural norm change regarding individualism has occurred fairly rapidly if Putnam and Garrett are right.¹⁷ Given the fractured nature of culture in the United States, we will need a focused effort and an effective lever to shift the emphasis from currently dominant norms to norms that reinforce resilience traits.

One stepladder for surmounting this “urgency” barrier is integrating use of resilience skills into short-term initiatives that make progress on our challenges. We should pursue policy and technological solutions in ways that complement culture change. We need rapid and sustained investment, incentives, and policy changes to accelerate the shift to renewable energy. We need to shift tax structures to address economic inequality. We need changes in policy and enforcement to reduce racial injustice. These along with many other immediate initiatives are necessary but far from sufficient to move us toward authentic sustainability.

Sometimes the tactics used by Hawken’s “movement that has no name” do not reinforce the resilience traits we need to cultivate. It is tempting to use the dominant cultural norms to achieve the above initiatives even if one supports alternative norms; this often appears to be the most rapid path to success. For example, the conviction conveyor belt is an attractive tool to galvanize supporters, as is formulating options in terms of binary choices that force people into opposing camps with competitive orientations. Sometimes complex system analysis gives way to solution slogans that obscure the deeper leverage points for change. This tactic is understandable because of the need to mobilize lots of people who do not understand the system dynamics, but it often makes forward progress harder.

As social movements intersect with politics, they become associated with the use of hyperbole and the tactic of demonizing opponents. This reinforces competitive skills and makes collaboration unattractive. The end result tends to be an appeal to force rather than the search for reasonable compromise, not just among politicians but also among many in the movements. Collaborative and humility skillful habits seem to signal weakness rather than wisdom in such contexts. Our mainstream media tend to amplify the appearance that movements aligned with both political parties are engaged in blood sport, which obscures many local collaborative achievements and pushes competition down into local arenas. If we pursue policy and technology changes by using the dominant norms that reflect one of the root causes of our unsustainability, we will impede the shift in cultural norms and may produce more short-term fixes that backfire.

Then how can we avoid competitive approaches if a determined opposition seeks to derail all short-term progress? It is very tempting to try to beat the opposition at its own game—countering mistaken hard convictions with our own hardened convictions, matching unfair competitive tactics with similar responses, and using force to avoid being forced in the wrong direction. Some of this is inevitable, but if it becomes the dominant response to opposition, then it reinforces skillful habits that make collaborative solutions impossible. It is foolish to try to collaborate with those who refuse to engage, but it is wise to use a two-pronged strategy, always seeking to create common ground, while steadfastly deterring aggressive responses. This is a balancing act that often makes one unpopular with both sides, who often think they have the strength to win a fight.

The polarization barrier: Many will worry that political polarization makes widespread norm change seem like a naive fantasy. Individual freedom and competitive politics are core elements around which polarization turns. We cannot expect the set of resilience skillful habits to avoid politicization. Even within this context, we can still work on strengthening resilience skills among portions of the population open to the enterprise. This positions us for norm shifts as conditions change. But the use of formal education as a lever for change becomes more fraught if it is seen as being used to inculcate the habits associated with one side of a politicized divide, as we have seen with concerns about teaching “critical race theory” in the schools.

This barrier to the use of education to accelerate culture change is potentially very high. Yet some stepladders can help us surmount it. First, focusing on skills development in education rather than on dispositions or beliefs that have ideological associations is much less likely to polarize. Teaching students how to collaborate effectively is not as easy to stigmatize as teaching them that competitive approaches to social problems have important limitations during the age of climate change. Collaborative and systems skills are demonstrably important for a wide range of careers, and they can be taught without reference to social critique. Humility and frugality skills may invite more critique, but again, these can be detached from perceived ideological viewpoints. Second, it is important to keep salient that the aim is greater binocular vision regarding contrasting sets of skills. We are not aiming to eliminate individualistic, competitive, or conviction skills. We are broadening the toolboxes that students can use in their own pursuit of flourishing.

Character education has not yet been highly polarized, even though it is making a comeback after almost a century of neglect. People on the left and the right have strongly supported an increase in character education, and the results have included a range of character traits that dovetail with our resilience traits. For example, Texas is implementing new statewide standards for character education, which include empathy, compassion, concern for the common good and community, fairness, freedom from prejudice, perseverance, self-control, and gratitude, many of which are elements of resilience traits.¹⁸ Texas includes a range of other traits in its list. It is too early to tell whether these standards will be implemented in ways that avoid polarization, but it is promising that the character education movement is both growing and avoiding polarization.

Inevitably, we will have debates about which skillful habits are most important to cultivate and which methods of cultivation should be used. These can be healthy and fruitful for a community. We should not expect agreement about answers, and we should be ready to learn from the debates. We will need an upswell of support for educational changes that focus on broad skills development, not just reading, writing, and mathematics.

The “risks to good education” barrier:¹⁹ Even if we can avoid polarization when using education to scale up cultivation of resilience traits, other barriers result from risks associated with problematic implementation of character education. Three risks are particularly troublesome. First, character education could violate the autonomy of students and their families by imposing acquisition of skillful habits against their wishes. Second, it could also result in the homogenization of a school’s student body and thereby reduce kinds of diversity that contribute to quality learning. Lastly, it could lead to undue moralization of common skills and a culture of shaming those who manifest contrasting skills. It is worth expanding on these potential issues here and indicating in general how these risks can be minimized. The real test of the requisite stepladders will be in the next chapter, where we will look at how education should change in order to cultivate resilience traits successfully. We will see that if curricula and pedagogy reflect the resilience traits they aim to cultivate, the risks will be manageable.

The first concern is that public schools will impose controversial skillful habits on students. The curriculum might indoctrinate students with views that support the skills, and students could be required to manifest such skills in order to progress. Many families have no choice other than the public schools; they would have a reasonable concern if nonstandard skillful habits are being required. Few would question imposing academic honesty or respect for community members in this way. In a Catholic school, one might expect some Catholic virtues to be cultivated in this way. But a school courts the charge of violating autonomy if it requires the cultivation of a skillful habit that is not widely accepted as being important for being morally decent, or being educated, or being a good citizen. Arguably most of the traits on the Texas list fit within these categories, and so do many resilience traits. But what about gratitude? Should a public school require that someone demonstrate gratitude sufficiently in order to graduate from high school? Alas, many teenagers would flunk out, and I would have flunked too. Requiring that graduates can write well seems much less invasive than requiring that they be appropriately grateful.

The autonomy barrier is constructed by raising concerns about imposing, indoctrinating, and requiring controversial skills. The problem here is the approach to teaching, not the content. The barrier shrinks considerably if a school seeks only to expose students to resilience skills, to highlight their uses, and to practice them enough for students to make an educated choice about whether to internalize them. The students can then choose whether to ignore them or make them into lasting habits that are self-defining (or something in between). In this approach, the school does not require such a choice for progress. Now the risks are minimal. Even if resilience skills were explicitly endorsed as norms at a school, this approach to cultivating them still avoids indoctrination. In most schools, contrasting skills would also be cultivated and represented in a diverse population of faculty and students, since they reflect dominant norms in the larger culture. In such contexts, the charge of violating autonomy seems specious.

The threat of homogenization emerges anytime a school builds a strong culture around its values. Suppose a school places a high premium on collaborative approaches to problem-solving, recruits students who are interested in learning the requisite skills, and downplays competitive skills. Imagine that it employs pedagogies that reinforce collaborative approaches to learning, and it celebrates its collaborative cultural norms. Over time, the school may come to lack diversity in approaches to social problem-solving within its community, which could decrease the scope of students’ skills toolboxes to their detriment. Strong school cultures tend to increase student learning, but schools should avoid the loss of diversity that can accompany such strong cultures. Homogenization verged on being a problem at Green Mountain College; in the next chapter, I will suggest how that problem could have been better addressed.

Fortunately, the content of the resilience traits supports the kind of balanced curriculum that promotes productive diversity. Humility skills require us to recognize the limitations of any single approach to social problem-solving, including collaborative approaches. They encourage familiarity with a diversity of skillful habits. Collaborative skills are best learned in a context where there is enough diversity to make collaborative processes difficult. Someone who is good at collaborating must know how to work with others who lead with competitive skills. They must be able to respect such people in order to effectively build collaborative relationships. Furthermore, to deeply understand the dynamics of the systems we inhabit, we must understand how different skillful habits shape people’s interactions, which is best done through experiencing such systems on smaller scales within a school’s learning community. The resilience skills serve as guardrails that prevent the homogeneity that critics fear and require diversity for their own cultivation.

The third risk applies to all educational programs that have a strong normative core. They can foster a sense of moral superiority in those who share the norms taught in the program, which can lead to shaming others who violate those norms. A school with a strong sustainability culture risks graduating students inclined to shame those who drive “gas-guzzling” pickup trucks, wear sneakers made in sweatshops, or enjoy fast-food burgers. We understandably resent the intrusion of judgments that imply the superiority of other lifestyles. This kind of moralization divides people and renders collaboration across groups more difficult.

Such feelings of moral superiority are incompatible with the full set of resilience traits, as is the practice of shaming. Humility requires one to acknowledge that we all fall short on some important skillful habits. Thus, recognizing a flaw in someone else does not warrant a sense of superiority. Also, since people may interpret or prioritize traits differently because of their own backgrounds or contexts, we must temper moral judgments about others with the recognition of all that we do not know about their situation. A humble person ventures moral evaluation with the presumption of mutual respect and care. The collaborative skills reinforce this approach. Basic respect is crucial for collaboration, and the practice of shaming tends to diminish respect. Insofar as collaborative people aim to build bridges between diverse peoples, they should avoid feeling morally superior to others. This does not mean collaborative people will not judge others, but judgments will reflect genuine understanding and charitable interpretation. Where resilience traits are reflected in a school’s culture, the risk of a censorious political correctness will be much diminished.

Each of the above risks would become a significant barrier to successfully scaling up resilience skills if the dangers are widely realized. Fortunately, the resilience traits themselves should minimize the likelihood of such dangers, as long as the methods of implementing resilience character education reflect the traits being cultivated. This approach to managing the risks requires us to keep in mind the dangers and to model the traits being cultivated. Good character education requires a series of balancing acts between protecting diversity and embodying strong norms, between emphasizing a set of skillful habits and requiring them, and between encouraging appropriate pride in students for their achievements in developing skillful habits and avoiding the moral superiority that leads to shaming.

Indeed, balance is a theme connecting the stepladders that help us to surmount a wide range of barriers to cultivating resilience traits. Balance has been a central element of virtue theory since Aristotle. It is embedded in his view that virtues are means between two extremes; for example, courage is a mean between rashness and timidity. Here a sense of balance is necessary to make good judgments about when we have achieved a mean between extremes. Valerie Tiberius argues that balance is itself a character trait that we have good reason to cultivate. She explains balance as “the capacity to appreciate the value of a variety of different projects or goals and the ability to focus on a project long enough to achieve the value that it has to offer.”²⁰ Her focus is on balancing different projects in a good life, but she might also have talked about the balancing of skillful habits necessary to successfully engage in our projects. I agree balance does significantly enhance our flourishing. It is a crucial element in the resilience traits. It must guide their development and the process of scaling them up into social norms.