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A MILLENIAL WORD

5/29/2021

106 Comments

 
Picture
​Virtues are not forever. As societies encounter new challenges or new opportunities they invent new virtues  - ne expectations, really - for their members. You can see that happening before your very eyes by using Google Ngram.
This site makes it possible to track the frequency, year by year, of words in books printed in English from early printing press days to the present.  So enter fortitude ,endurance, resilience  for the period 1800 to 2019 (the most recent year available). 

​The result will resemble the crude screen shot above.
 On the right,  in descending order you will see resilience, endurance, and fortitude. Around 2000 “resilience” takes off, outpacing old favorites. It’s a true millennial.
    It’s best not to rely too much on an Ngram, but this one helps explain why in an earlier posting on this blog  we found it so difficult to identify an equivalent in ancient Greek. There are good approximations for fortitude and endurance, but nothing  quite like resilience.  How could there be? The word and the concept behind it are almost brand new.   
Sometimes ordinary language senses and responds to change more promptly than pundits and scholars.  It’s worth paying attention, then, to shifts like the one shown in the Ngram.
    Resilience is a millennial word, a new name for a new virtue. It resonates in a time when the economy has a bipolar disorder, when racism seems here to stay, when climate change delivers punch after punch, when relationships have a hard time blossoming into love.  When stalemate, failure, rejection seem the norm, you have to learn to bounce back and learn from past setbacks.  Resilience  becomes the name of the game.
    Some of the momentum for talking so much about resilience comes, I suspect, from pop-psych.  But Harry Kavros has pointed out to me  in an email that it is now a favorite term in discussions of business management, for example Diane L. Coutu’s article “How Resiience Works” in the Harvard Business Review. for May 2002.  In such settings Thomas Edison becomes a paradigm – year after year trying different ways of developing a workable electric light bulb.  Fizzle. Try again. Fizzle. Try again. He had resilience even though he didn’t have a word for it.
    Edison may be a useful role model for millennials trying to escape from wage slavery, but is there anything in all this resilience talk of interest to the classicist or the historian? Here’s one line of inquiry – a route worth exploring:  So far most of the resilience-talk has been about individuals, as if it   applied only at the personal level.  Can the term also be useful in the study of institutions, communities, whole societies? Are there, for example, truly resilient  states, ones that  bounce back from defeat or disaster, and end up stronger than before, while others can’t pick themselves off the ground after a war or a revolution?
    What do you think?
May 29, 2021


106 Comments
Ellen Finkelpearl
5/29/2021 10:38:24 am

Why not Latin? Surely the popularity of fortitude in centuries past owed something to Latin models. And the word resurgo, common in the Aeneid seems to catch "resilience" in verbal form. Aeneas, I think, is resilent.

Reply
john Immerwahr
5/30/2021 09:05:13 am

Why is resilience becoming more fashionable. Here is an idea: if you don't think things will improve much, you don't need to be resilient (which was the attitude of most humans for most of the time). If you believe in progress and there is progress, you also don't need to be resilient. Resilience is for people who think the world should steadily improve but then find that it often gets worse. Resilience is called for when we need to bounce back from unexpected adversity -- and we've been having more and more of that lately.

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Calixtus
6/1/2021 10:56:15 am

"Can the term also be useful in the study of institutions, communities, whole societies? "

I’d say that’s a clear affirmative, wouldn’t you? Judaism, Mormonism… I suppose the concept applies to any religion that’s still around in any numbers after a long time. Ditto nation states after wartime losses and/or attempts at ethnic cleansing: Germany, Russia, Greece, Turkey…take your pick. Not all of them, of course. But certainly some.

Institutions are tougher (I’ve been thinking about your question since first reading it out on my walk an hour ago). The Catholic Church, definitely. Scandals and schisms slide off it like water off a sheet of glass. Though, that said, are institutions actually “resilient”? Or do they just purge heretics and circle the wagons? I certainly see the latter strategy often enough.

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