Anther lecture on "resilience:"
 .. lecture held by professor Michele Salzman (Riverside) on 16th July (10 am San Diego/ 7 pm Florence) “Resilience and Resurgence or Decline and Fall: Rome in the Fifth-Century”.
 
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Again.,  thanks to Jim O'Donnell for the  tip.

Jim O'Donnell has called or attention to an ongoing discussion of resilience in antiquity. The fina l session on July 16th sounds  interesting:
CHANGE & RESILIENCE IN ANTIQUITY
Exploring change and resilience in ancient individuals and societies.
Resilient Environments & Roundtable, 16th July 1-3 pm (UK)
At our fifth and final session, we will explore Resilient Environments and conclude with a Roundtable.

1. Erica Angliker (London): “Resilience, Memory and the Worshipping of Divinities at Abandoned Settlements on the Cyclades”
2. Luise Erfurth (Frankfurt): “If worse comes to worst, my neighbors come first”: Social identity as a resilience factor in areas threatened by sea flood”
3. Roundtable with Gil Gambash (Haifa), Rebecca Sweetman (St Andrews) and Kostas Vlassopoulos (Crete).

To attend, please register here: https://Universityofexeter.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJwtdumorT8qGtb90oWwTE7o98MUxGzQbN1d
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The Department of Classics at Princeton has decided to cut language requirements for majors. This raises two questions, I think:  First, what is the value of the classics for students in our time?  And, second, if the classics do have value for our students, to what extent does that value depend on their having knowledge of the languages?
 
I teach courses on leadership for mid-career executives in an MA program we offer.  I begin each course with a reading and discussion of the opening scene of the Iliad, in which Agamemnon acts out almost all the traits of a bad boss.  Most strikingly, he puts his interests ahead of those of his team, with consequences that could have been ruinous for the team mission. Most of my students have faced bosses with such defects, but they have been too close to their particular situations to identify what it is about bad bosses that makes them so bad. And we have all recently experienced a president who puts his interests ahead of those of the nation.  But the scene in the Iliad is so stark, so clear, so far removed from our politics, that we can see the issues clearly.  It’s a great way to begin, and my students thank me for it. This is just one example of how effectively the classics may be used in leadership education. I have written a book on the subject: reading fine works of history and literature from any culture is (I argue) an essential part of education (notice I do not use the word “training”) for future leaders. Parents who want their students to advance in life are mistaken if they think that the STEM disciplines suffice to prepare young people for success.  They are not. We need to get the word out that the humanities offer keys that our students may use to unlock happy futures.
 
I also teach year-long courses in world literature for first year students in an honors program. I devote the first semester to the literature of war.  We begin with the Iliad and end with the most recent novel I can find that deals with the aftermath of war. Last year I used On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong.  In between we ranged widely—some obvious Shakespeare plays and something much less obvious, the national epic of Vietnam, The Tale of Khieu,  by Nguyen Do. At the end of the year, at a pizza party, the students started talking about the books they had enjoyed the most.  The Iliad was at the top, tied with Vuong’s delicious and disturbing novel. Why? Simply, the Iliad tells its tale brilliantly, and it is a wonderful tale, in which the bloody, dehumanizing trauma of war is balanced by Achilles’ very human love for Patroclus and then, at the end, by his appreciating father-love in Priam as, he knows it from his own father. It helps, of course, that I used an accessible translation (Lombardo’s), book-ended the Iliad with an absolutely contemporary work, and balanced it with works from other cultures. And that’s a great way to use the classics.
 
That’s enough to give you the idea: my students find value in the classics.  Do they need to know Latin and Greek for this?  Certainly not. But someone needs to know the languages in order to produce accessible, contemporary translations.  And this need continues into the future.  So we need at least a few language scholars.  That said, for the reasons I have given above, I hope we do offer majors in classics that can attract larger numbers of students.  So, yes, I am happy to welcome majors in classical or Mediterranean civilizations that are not hedged around with tough language requirements.
 
Paul Woodruff is Professor of Philosophy and of Classics at the University of Texas at Austin.  

      After posting Bob Kaster’s insightful observation in this blog , I asked Brook Manville, a classicist now in the business world, how he thought such a consensus can be developed within a department. His answer: leadership.  It turns out Brook is co-author of the Harvard Business Review’s  Leader’s Handbook.
    Bob Kaster is right, Brook assures us, but - guess what?-  there’s a lot more to it. So I asked Brook, “Like what?”. His answer:
 "For example,  even with shared principles, it takes time to develop a shared set of goals--which usually begins with some kind of process of visioning. Thereafter, you need to develop an actual strategy to achieve the goals/vision--which in a turbulent world, always means exploring different options for a new direction (to keep one alive and vital), and then setting some capacity for testing and learning which might stick. There's also going to be a plan for developing networks of support and influence, to help the organization pivot in new directions, and some kind of agreed process to keep revising and reorienting, as the results from the strategy making and then implementing come in. One needs to think about a coherent and ongoing process, not just getting agreement "at the front end"--though of course that first step can indeed be helpful."
Helpful?  Sure, but  here’s the nagging question:  Do academic organizations  (esp. departments) require a different kind of leadership than businesses? If so, we’d expect different prerequisites for them to function well.  Most of us assume they’re different, but just how?
      The big difference, I think, is students. They must not be viewed  as consumers, but as individuals developing capacities they will need for a productive and rewarding life. A department that focuses on them will ask itself what   distinctive  contribution  a course  or a sequence of curses can make to that goal. Taking time to focus on that question, in my experience, can make all the difference both for student learning and for faculty satisfaction  with their work. ..
      Am I right? 

​The discussion of the most recent of these blog posts has played with the idea of resilience at the departmental level. Now  Bob Kaster points to one crucial condition:
“ I think one of the prerequisites of resilience is a more or less solid consensus that we are working from a set of shared principles toward a shared goal.  “
Is he right? How does one develop  that “solid consensus? Are there other prerequisites for a truly resilient department (or other organization)?

​Thanks to all those who posted comments and to other friends who  have written me about my blog post on the decision of the Princeton Classics department no longer to require its majors to study Greek or Latin.
These responses fall for the most part into two groups. Some shrug off the decision as a tempest in a very small teapot.  No one seemed about to follow Princeton’s lead. Nor seemed worried that the field was infected with terminal “whiteness,” or was about to capitulate to the demands of “cancel culture.”Nor did they seem demoralized by the fact that a  relatively large and well-endowed department  was having trouble maintaining  robust patterns of study in the field.  In some cases it was just the opposite, some  jubilation “We’re doing better than Princeton!”
These respondents report good things about the programs at their institutions,  often emphasizing the success of two track arrangements, one requiring the study of the ancient languages, the other not. The number of majors may not be large, they say, but their institutions also give weight to minors in the field.  The overall picture in these reports is, well, not so bad.
Whew!  If these responses sometimes sound like whistling in the dark, their reports, though no random sample, are reassuring.  Another group of respondents, however, took a broader and bleaker view, fearing, as one of them put it,  that  Classics was “the canary in the mineshaft,” gasping out a warning to other endangered fields of study. 
Mea culpa: Denis Feeney of Princeton corrected the mistake  I made in arguing that  the problem was really a humanities problem, not specifically one affecting Classics. It was more wide-ranging than I had thought. Feeney pointed out;
“  the “pure” sciences at Princeton and other Ivies were under the cosh just like the humanities: everyone always goes on about STEM, but they really only care about TE: pure science and maths don’t count, and students are avoiding them as much as they are avoiding us.”
It's not just the humanities, stupid, and it’s not just Princeton. When well-designed programs are available in fields with clear practical applications and good job prospects,, students move into them, often  in large numbers. A dean at another institution helped me gauge the magnitude  of the shift in majors, reporting that at his institution over the past thirteen years  the number of majors in computer science had gone from 100 to over 1,000.  Under such circumstances it’s hard to win the zero sum game of enrolling majors.
Denis Feeneythen  performed a virtuoso backward flip, tracing this movement back to something Dwight Eisenhower had observed in the famous speech he gave on leaving office in 1961.:
“Everyone always quotes his phrase “the military-industrial complex” from that speech, but this was only one of two main threats to freedom generated by the cold war, and the other was the threat to free and independent research (Section IV of his speech:. https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/eisenhower001.asp“)
 
In such a setting Classics departments because of their small size and high vulnerability are indeed the canary in the mineshaft. But just what is this canary singing?  Not, one friend reminds me, a lament for Western Civilization, which, he assures me, is “not over (yet).”
Could the song be Nil Desperqndum?,. Classics has been through rough periods before – the abandonment of its  privileged position  when colleges and universities required all  students to enroll in Latin classes, , and  again when the free-wheeling elective system, introduced at Harvard in 1885 by President Charles Eliot, spread to other institutions; or when the G.I. bill changed the scale and scope of undergraduate education. .  Faced with these and other changes the field of Classics has shown remarkable resilience (if I dare use that word after the discussion of it earlier in this blog.)   Classics adapted, and  in some respects bounced back stronger.  That required, to be sure, imagination and innovation.  An email from Jeff Henderson, the head of our profession’s Campus Advisory Service , called my attention to James Loeb’s comments in 1912 when the first Loeb volumes began appearing:
In an age … when men's minds are turning more than ever before to the practical and the material, it does not suffice to make pleas, however eloquent and convincing, for the safeguarding and further enjoyment of our greatest heritage from the past. Means must be found to place these treasures within the reach of all who care for the finer things of life. 
The rhetoric sounds old fashioned today, but don’t let that obscure the boldness of Loeb’s move.  We need, I am convinced, something of comparable  vigor today.
So, Nil desperandum. Let’s focus on resilience.

​The media are having a field day with the decision of the Princeton Classics department to allow undergraduates to major in the field without ever completing a course in the Greek or Latin languages.  “Flexibility,” the department proclaims; “Sell-Out,” sneer the critics.
 
      The decision comes at a time when the New York Times and other publications have been calling attention to the doubts of one of the department’s members   whether the field of Classics is so infected with ”whiteness“ that it does not deserves to survive.   
    Seen in this  light the department’s decision to abolish its language requirement  looks like the first step toward dismantling the field as a whole.  It would take a brave student to chose to major in a field so infected by its alleged “whiteness.”
    Self-destruction is certainly not what the department intends, as one can see from its website (  https://classics.princeton.edu/department/news/statement-community-undergraduate-concentration ).   It believes that persuasion can do more than compulsion can to bring students to the study of the ancient languages.  Is this whistling in the dark? Or could it actually work?  Yes! Says  the Atlantic for June 8, 2021, where  Graeme Wood suggests that this strategy is not so different from those used by drug peddlers, who start their clients off on  light stuff before moving them on to the heavy stuff.  
Time to step back and ask, “If ‘flexibility’ is the solution, what’s the problem?  Not, it seems, large numbers of students needing more flexibility” to find their ways through  the  rich smorgasbord of departmental offerings– from  Akkadian to contemporary Caribbean literature.. No, it’s Just the opposite, as an article in the Washington Free Beaco for  June 8 2021 pointed out,. It points out that the number of Classics majors  at Princeton  has fallen  significantly in  recent years  .  Seen in that light the new “flexibility” looks like a desperate survival strategy.
 What the Beacon doesn’t report, however, is that the numbers have fallen in almost all the university’s  departments in the humanities.  I no longer have any insider knowledge of Princeton’s affairs, but reports of humanities-wide decline seems to match a national trend. Although enrollment statistics are never up-to-date and always tricky to interpret, the National Center for Educational Statistics documents a steep decline in most   humanistic fields during the decade ending in  2019.  These statistics, however, do not provide a picture of  shifts within the fields, for example, in English Literature between courses based on contemporary popular culture  and social issues, and those based on traditional  authors, e.g.  Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton. Melville, Yeats etc.   In this respect Classics serves as a seismograph measuring the shift away from canonical authors and topics elsewhere in the humanities.
Why it matters: If a recent  decline in majors is not restricted  to Classics but is occurring throughout the humanities, then remedies specific to Classics, such as lowering language requirements, may not  deal with the real problem.  It’s a humanities-wide issue.  In that case a department must either lock arms with other humanistic fields to develop a humanities-wide strategy, or decide to go it alone, emphasizing the difference between it and the  others .  The Princeton situation, in other words, raises the question whether Classics have something  distinctive to offer, and if so, what is it?   
Sound familiar? What’s the story on your campus?
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PS:  Readers: I invite you to post your comments on these matters.  I am especially interested whether the same pressures are being felt on other campuses and how Classics departments are responding.
 
 
June  17, 2021
 

​    My post on Resilience as a Millennial Word has drawn a strong and smart response.  A few respondents posted directly on the blog (Thanks!) but here are a few excerpts from messages emailed to me.  They raise some interesting questions.
Rob Tempio of Princeton Press writes “It is THE word of the moment. I have been tracking it for a few years now and it’s amazing how prescient the zeitgeist was in starting to think about it.”
 
Gary Pence from the Lutheran Seminary in San Francisco points to the Oxford English Dictionary, which shows that the word has been around for a long time, at least since the 1620s. That makes the surge of usage in recent years  all the more dramatic.
 
Charles Nathan, a graduate student in political science at Duke,  thinks one passage really resonates with millennials: “ .. 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 ..”. 
Somme other respondents are cautiously optimistic in comparison to my bleak comments, for example former ambassador Bob Pelletreau: “ …  after the Trump election in 2016, I began using the word "resilience" in my various invocations, both secular and religious, to express my faith that the country would recover from this gigantic misstep.   …  to me the word went beyond "endurance" to include an implication of activism and even a little bit of revenge, much the same sentiments that are contained in the current administration's call to "build back better."
 
 
 
Nick Maki,  now in business  in the Pacific Northwest, and not so far from  a millennial himself, sends a salutary warning:
“ … the HBR article you linked gave an example of someone who showed resilience during a recession by taking the opportunity to find a new career. How is it that we can praise Edison for sticking with it in the face of failure at the same time we praise someone else for their resilience in swapping career paths? I think there's a risk here of making resilience just a proxy for eventual success.“ Good point, Nick. We need to look more closely into how resilience works.
 
 
 
Hunter Rawlings, man of many presidencies,  answered my question about whether the term applied at institutional or civic levels  by quoting the Corinthians’ characterization of the Athenians in the first book of Thucydides, especially  1.70.7: “ The deficiency created by the miscarriage of an undertaking is soon filled up by fresh hopes; for they alone are enabled to call a thing hoped for a thing got, by the speed with which they act upon their resolutions. “  
Adrian Badias, an artist in Puerto Rico,  notes an oddity inn the way resilience works: “…    resilience is something that one speaks about - safely, on the  rebound, from either side, but not really while caught …  in the midst of a traumatic episode. “  
Michael Fontaine and Ellen Finkelpearl have  posted  valuable comments on the site itself, both stressing, inter alia,  the emphasis on endurance in Latin texts, such as the Aeneid and Consolations, and similar works.  Fontaine, indeed, has “ just completed a translation of a Renaissance reconstruction of Cicero’s Consolatio. “That was the speech/philosophical treatise he wrote himself to pull himself out of grief after his daughter died. He used . arguments to pull back from the brink and try to get his life back.” Why not a closer look at resilience in Latin texts, after all, the word derives from Latin!
 Ellen Finkelpearl’s comment on the blog site points to another issue I glided over in my posting- women and resilience.  There’s some reason to think that women both then and now are more resilient than men.  Maybe they have to be, given the difficulties they have encountered over the centuries.  But if so, how? That opens an even wider question: Is resilience innate or can it be learned? .
And T. A. Barron, author of I don’t know how many books for children, has sent me thinking about the link between  resilience and story-telling, a.k.a. myth.  
Finally, Michael Lurie, now in Providence Rhode Island,  focused on the distinction I’ve been drawin between  resilience as endurance,  and as a leap forward: “ With the notion of 'strong resilience’ you are getting ‘dangerously' close to Nietzsche’s notion of the Greek ‘pessimism of strength’, which is obviously the term I’d prefer. “
Well, I can live with that!
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Enough for the time being. But don’t hesitate to  post comments on the blog itself. It’s easy and better than my excerpting.
Many thanks!
June 9, 2021

​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

Several friends have replied to my question whether there was an ancient Greek equivalent to “resilience”.  Some, like Gary Pence looked closely at Greek vocabulary:
 
 
“…  Among synonyms or near synonyms are strength, doggedness, perseverance, fortitude, grit, self-reliance. If resilience is nowhere to be found in LSJ, how about some of these synonyms? 
 
“There are words for perseverance like καρτερία, λιπαρία, μακροθυμία. When I look for fortitude I find εὐχέρεια, which combines “tolerance of or indifference to evil, danger, or hardship” combined with “ease, agreeableness, comfort” and “dexterity, skill (tho citation may be εὐχειρία).” Pretty close to resilience, but I wish I could find something more active, like πολύτροπος Odysseus, who could figure out how to manage any turn of events. Maybe the Greeks would encapsulate resilience in ἀνδρεία, brave manliness.
 
“Modern Greek for resilience is αντοχή, which in classical Greek meant adhesion or attachment, better ascribed to scotch tape than to people. But its related verb, ἀντέχω means “hold out against, withstand, endure, hold one’s ground.” It’s the same in modern Greek: be resistant, be hard-wearing, hold out, withstand.  Modern αντοχή is akin to υπομονή, “endurance,” which may be the closest we can get to resilience in NT Greek.
 
“ … And how about πολυτλήμων Odysseus in the Odyssey?”
 
Dan Caner thinks along similar lines:
”…  I know that several later texts (Christian Greek, but probably based on earlier Stoic tradition) use the combination "karteria kai hypomenē" - hard perseverence? which may come close.”
 
Comment: That reminded me of the modern Greek saying hypomone kai epimone Persistence and insistence.   That’s close to what I have trying to get  at – resilience not as a return  to the status quo ante, but as coming back stronger as the result of a setback.


 
Charles Pazdernik also turned to the Odyssey:
 

“My first thoughts, too, went to the Homeric polutlas Odysseus as well as to Achilles' speech on Zeus and the two jars. But the Iliadic emphasis is on the enduring heart, tlêtos thumos, isn't it, and I guess endurance. (Archilochus' tlêmosunê as pharmakon is a flintier quality than resilience.. …. Isn't Odysseus received by Cynics and esp. Stoics as an archetype of resourcefulness and resilience?”
Andrew Ford agrees:
 
“This is indeed a fun question. Chuck is right, of course. Where ‘we’ speak of resilience, the Greeks would speak of endurance and adaptability to ever changing circumstances in a world in constant motion. The difference seems to be that ‘resilience’ implies the ability to bounce back and regain control of one’s life, whereas the ability to endure and adapt is required in a world gripped by dark and destructive forces beyond one’s control and beyond one’s understanding. In texts like Archil. fr. 130 W., there is also no suggestion that the person, upended by the gods’ blow, could get back on their feet again by themselves; it is the gods who could one day raise them up again from the misery they plunged them into. In the meantime, one has to adapt and endure."
 
So we segue from lexical to mythological and to Greek tragedy:
 
James McCaughey asks from Melbourne
 “Can I suggest the closing sequences of the Heracles Mainomenos in answer to your question?”
This is a really important point and raises powerful questions about tragedy more generally: How often do these dramas depict strong resilience? But  for the moment Homer keeps stealing the show -  but which Homer?   I think we find two distinct types of resilience in these epics: Odysseus toughing it out , one. challenge after another, and pretty boy Achilles, sulking in. his tent, until  the one real devastation hits hin,  the loss of Patroclus. Odysseus’ long suffering (and delights along the way) ends in a blood bath, into which  the SOB drags his son.  He has endured, but he has not grown.  I hate that ending; no wonder some ancient  critics objected to it.
    What a contrast to Achilles, who finally, belatedly,  grows up and in the meeting with Priam becomes a real Mensch.  To me that is real resilience , more than endurance, the capacity to  come out on the other side of loss a better human being.
    I know, I know , there are other ways of  reading those endings, but when I think of resilience this rings true to me.
 
Michael Lurie writes with some reservations:  
 
 “Very much like your reading of both endings, but whatever happens to Achilles in Iliad 24 has, in my view, nothing to do with the English word, and the concept of, resilience, which implies resistance to change. Do we need the notion of resilience to understand Achilles and the ending of the Iliad? Achilles changes because he understands that you are not in control of your life, that unbroken happiness is not possible, and that suffering is the defining feature of human existence. This insight does make him a better human being, and a pessimist, but is it resilience?”

 Comment:
A lot depends,  I guess, on whether we think of resilience  as resistance to change or as the ability to learn from and adapt to setbacks; maybe I should call that “strong” resilience to distinguish it from endurance or  toughing it out.  It’s a rare quality, and a  crucial one, I think. I wonder if it can be learned.
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I better stop here, for the time being, but I can’t stop probing into resilience (and perhaps thereby into “tragic optimism”).  If you have thoughts on these concepts please let me hear from you.
 
May 22, 2021