Checks and Balances (or Why the Separation of Church and State is Important)

I actually have four possible titles for this post: "Checks and Balances", "Why the Separation of Church and State is Important", "Spheres of Influence", and "Overlapping But Separate".  I don't know which I like best, which is why I have started with listing them all.

This is actually an idea I have blatantly plagiarised from a lady by the name of Landa Cope (whose name I surprisingly remembered, despite the fact that I heard her speak 18 years ago – also, I feel old now).  She works with Youth With a Mission (YWAM).  Now, before you ragequit because I mentioned a Christian evangelism organisation, it's worth looking at the idea regardless of who said it (in fact, that is part of the point itself).

The concept, which she traces back to the Old Testament of the Bible, but which you can derive from any look into civics (among other things), is that a well-functioning society is one that has multiple spheres of influence, each responsible for a different key feature of a society.  If I recall correctly, she named seven distinct civil structures.  I will slightly expand on that list, as even within spheres of influence you still need to have checks and balances.

For anyone wondering, this is basically a logical extension of the doctrine of the Separation of Church and State, which some may find surprising was actually stated historically by a number of Christian thinkers.  All the Christians trying to marry the Church with the State today would do well to remember this... (!)  Arguably, Augustine was the originator in Christian thinking – he lived back when years on our calendar were only three digits long, that's how old this is – with the idea developed further by the likes of Martin Luther (as in the 13th and 14th Century German, not his now-more-popular namesake M.L. King Jr) and the Anabaptists.  The separation of Church and State said that "earthly" and "heavenly" powers should be separate, an idea that did not initially go down so well among the likes of the Holy Roman Empire and kings who claimed divine right to rule.  This doctrine of two-sphere separation is now enshrined in US law.

The concept that Landa Cope put forward was that we shouldn't stop there: in fact you have several areas of civic society that should maintain some independence of each other.  I think this is a very, very important idea.

Before I get into the why, this is my list of the spheres of influence in civic society today:

• Governance (Executive)
• Governance (Legislature)
• Judiciary
• Law Enforcement
• Military
• Business
• Education
• Healthcare
• The Welfare System
• Media
• The Church or religious organisation (more on this later, including analysis of whether or not it is necessary)
• Bonus category: the Environment

Through history, we can see various changes in how these functioned, or times when two or more were combined (the Holy Roman Empire mentioned above is an example).  Even today, we still get the occasional military coup displacing a government.  Smaller societies didn't always need all of these, and many areas have developed and changed over time (possibly one of the reasons why I have come up with a different list to the one that Cope developed from the Old Testament).  The media is in some respects quite a modern invention, at least as far as their functions for this concept is concerned, and some of the media's functions used to belong to the Church (more on that later as well).

The basic concept is that each "sphere of influence" or structure has a key role to play in any society that is working properly.  None should have too much or too little power.  None should be unduly pressured or controlled by another.  If any one is too strong, all of them suffer (including the one that is too strong).  I am imagining that most of us can already start to think of current examples of problematic power imbalances.  As it turns out, civil society is a difficult thing to do well.

So, a bit more detail on each one: what it is and why it is important.

Governance (Executive)

The Executive (for anyone like me who wishes there were more straightforward terms) is the part of a government who makes the decisions.  These are the people who choose things that will affect a whole country (or any size region really: these apply at any scale, including international – you will find all of them among the alphabet soup of the United Nations somewhere).  How much money will we put into healthcare this year?  What roads will be upgrade?  What will be required parts of the educational curriculum?  Will we send troops?  It should go without needing to be explained why it is critically important that this group are able to act without too much control by outside influences – but it is also extremely rare that they do, at least not entirely.  In a lot of places, we have business lobby groups pouring more total money than most entire countries make into getting someone to do what they want.

This is where one of my other alternative titles comes in: checks and balances.  In several countries (not New Zealand, but including the USA and UK) there are two different branches to their government.  In the US, this is the House and the Senate.  In the UK, it is the House of Lords and House of Commons.  The whole reason we have these is so that no one person or group holds too much power.  That is the fundamental underlying principle behind democracy itself: the more you can share power among different groups, the more likely it is that you have fair outcomes.  This rarely works well, and in some places in recent times it has not been working at all, but democracy is all about compromise (which, incidentally is why partisan politics – "I will back my team and oppose the other team no matter what" – is so destructive: entrenched positions are antithetical to compromise).  It is also part of why US politics has been such an epic clusterfail recently and NZ politics has been fairly tame in comparison: the US system forces a two-party partisan setup, but NZ's Mixed Member Proportional voting system deliberately sets out to have incomplete dominance by any one party and gives smaller parties sufficient strength to require coalitions.  The same happens in other countries like Germany (which is basically the system we borrowed for here in NZ).

Governance (Legislature)

My mention of two-house governments may have you thinking that's what I mean by the two Governance separations I am naming, but that is actually an example of the "separation" concept within a category, not of two different categories.  Legislature is the part of government responsible for making laws.  These are the people who draft up new laws for the Executive to act on.  In most countries that I know, this is predominantly done by the same people as the Executive.  I have split them because I think it is important to understand that there are two functions here, and this Legislative one will make more sense when I get on to Judiciary and Law Enforcement.

However, something that I have only learned while working for a government organisation is that most of the work of the creation of Legislation is not done by the elected politicians.  In fact, most laws are written by people that almost none of us could name.  These are the civil service, the "cockroaches of government" (a term I am stealing from the Doctor Who spinoff Torchwood; yes, I am a science fiction geek), the bureaucrats who do the actual work, many of whom survive between changes of elected party, or are at least re-hired by the next politician because they were good at their job.  Unless you have had some exposure to politics or law, you probably never realise quite how much work goes into writing laws nor how many different laws there are.  I don't want to get into the sea of terms and details that is political science, and I'm not really qualified to do so anyway, but sufficient for this discussion is an understanding that the people who write laws are not always the ones who enact them.

I will explain this by an example.  In NZ, some years back we had a Prime Minister get into some trouble because their cavalcade of vehicles was caught breaking the speed limit.  This might sound trivial, but there is a deeper issue here: those making the laws need to be different to those enforcing the laws, and no leader should be above the Law (capitalisation intended).  As a ruler, you cannot – must not – be "above the law".  That is dangerous territory, because a leader needs to be able to be held to account for their actions.  That is probably the key concept in all I am discussing here: no one should have too much power.

Interestingly, NZ has had a rare introduction to a civil servant in recent months in the form of Ashley Bloomfield, chief executive of our Ministry of Health.  Note here though that his title gives away the fact that he is, at least in part, a member of the Executive: the "do-ers" rather than the "writers".  Most places involve both, because Executive and Legislature very much do overlap, even though they are functionally distinct.

Judiciary and Law Enforcement

I am going to explain these two together as it makes things simpler.  Remember my example of the speeding Prime Minister?  Law Enforcement would be the ones catching them speeding (i.e. the Police) and the Judiciary would be the ones deciding whether or not they should be fined (i.e. the Courts system).  I can probably put my idea of splitting these two areas down to a comic book character of all things: Judge Dredd is named such because in the dystopian world he inhabits, he gets to be Judge, Jury, and Executioner.  It probably doesn't take much thinking to see why all those combined is a bad idea, but if you want a more realistic example, think of a Police officer who breaks the law: if there is no separation between Enforcement and Judiciary, the Police get to decide their own outcomes, and that is open to a range of abuses.  Again, everyone needs to be accountable somewhere.

Military

This is probably the area that needs the least explanation, as most of us are aware of history where militaries usurped power, or where despotic leaders used their military to exert pressure on their populace.  However, I think it is worth stating that I think your Police and Military should be separate.  One is concerned with keeping the peace internally and the other with keeping the peace externally (as thankfully most militaries today are not involved in direct strike operations).  The methods used to fight an enemy are quite different to how you should be treating your citizens.  There are some cases where we see blurring of these lines, where tactics and tools typically used by militaries are getting employed on normal people, under names like "counter-terrorism".  Protip: if the harm done in the name of "protecting our citizens" is worse than the harm they are being protected from, you're doing it wrong.  (Note: there certainly are cases where governments need to do things like counter terrorism, but the lines can get blurry).

Business

Ah, the almighty dollar, true deity of the Western world.

I jest, but only slightly.  Today, too much is done in service of the interests of big companies ahead of the interests of the citizens of those countries.  Some places are worse than others (let's just say I'm glad I don't live in America).  A good definition for the primary purpose of a government is that it is there to protect its citizens.  This sometimes means protecting the people from the government itself or from the predatory practices of corporations interested in nothing more than making money.

Business is the part of society focused on production.  If the business sector is doing well, then people have jobs, income, and purpose.^{Note 1}  If it is not doing well, all the other areas suffer because there is no longer sufficient revenue being generated to sustain them all.  This is probably one of the simpler cross-sector relationships to understand.  However, business can get too much power, and a world where corporations control everything from the governing Executive to what people are taught to who has access to healthcare to what gets said in the media is a classic science fiction dystopia.  It is a classic because it hits a bit close to home sometimes.

I would argue that, at least in somewhere like the USA, business is the area where we see one sector having too much power over the others.  How often do we hear governments deciding things based on what is best for this nebulous thing called The Economy™ instead of talking in terms of human welfare?  Of course, the reason for this is that measures of economic activity are closely linked to measures of human wellbeing: after all, who would rather live like someone from the Congo rather than like someone from Switzerland?  (GDPs of about $800 USD and >$80,000 USD per year respectively, with similar levels of quality of life).^{Note 2}  Of course, the dark side of this is that economic activity also tracks closely with things like environmental degradation: more production means more waste (it doesn't necessarily need to but the relationship is rarely avoided – I hope we can soon start to decouple standard of living and environmental impact, as we desperately need to).

As a current-events-related aside, business and government relationships to business are probably going to be the areas where we see the greatest changes in the coming months and years due to the effects of the COVID-19 outbreak.  I do not know what these are going to look like (and I doubt anyone truly does yet), but watch this space.  Most likely, the changes are going to be different, even drastically so, between countries and regions.

Education

Simple example time: Soviet Russia.  To use a weird (but in some circles popular) Internet meme: In Soviet Russia, you do not read book – book reads you.  We have all seen Government-engineered attempts to control the populace through educational means.  Many of these have not ended well.  However, the Government is not the only threat to a balanced, worthwhile education: Business and the Church can be threats too (and today, same for the Media).  Again, each area should be free from undue influence from the others and able to freely critique them.  A good education for a politically-empowered citizen should include understanding of concepts like how a Nation functions, and the critical-thinking skills to engage with the political and business spheres in their world – and, of course, the ability to critically analyse the Media in all its forms (this is, mind the pun, critically important in today's connected world).

Healthcare

This is one of the areas where it's hard not to get political.  I will try my best.

A great healthcare system is one where everyone who needs treatment, gets treatment, in a timely, non-frustrating, and affordable way.  One of the reasons that this is so rarely achieved is that some of these ideals stand in opposition to each other: if you want a fast, effective healthcare system, it is going to be expensive, and that needs to be paid for somewhere (whether by the government, insurance, having everyone be stupendously rich, whatever).

A great healthcare system also includes prevention, such as ensuring people have proper nutrition, access to exercise and clean air and water, etc.  Holistic health is important, so this cannot simply involve doctors, as important as they are.  We have all had a big reminder of this with the constant media about properly washing hands.

As you probably all know, Healthcare is an area that is constantly meddled with by Government.  Some of that is necessary: if the government is paying some or all of the bills, it gets the right to choose how that is spent.  In theory, a democratically-elected Government is also choosing things based upon the will of the people.

The Welfare System

I think I may have left the hardest sectors to last.  Like Healthcare, Welfare is a political hot potato, only more so.

However, a hopefully mostly-uncontroversial version is to say that everyone, regardless of income, ability, age, birth, race, gender, ideology, sexuality, etc, etc, should have access to essential food, water, air, shelter, and aid when they need it.  If you cannot agree with at least that definition, then I'm not sure I want to know you: it's human to have compassion on the weak.  Actually, I heard recently that a definition of when humans achieved "civilisation" was a broken and healed femur bone, because a lone individual cannot survive this without help.  In nature, an animal that breaks its femur is crippled and unable to move far nor fast.  In the wild, this is a death sentence, regardless of species.  If you find one that has healed, it means that individual had assistance to stay alive.  Cooperation and compassion are the very core of civilisation, and without them, we are no better than savages.  [Source]

Exactly what forms this welfare takes, how it is decided who receives it, and the mechanics of whatever system is chosen are all areas of debate.  Like many things, there is probably no perfect solution.  Suffice to say that it's important it exists.  (And yes, taking a meal to your neighbour who has just had a newborn or the one unable to get out because of a hip operation are absolutely part of this: compassion should always start at home).

Media

Let's get it out of the way and all say it together: "Fake news!"

Right, with that done, let's consider what useful roles are played by the media, as there are several (arguably, this is an area that could be split further, as historically some functions have been performed by the structures of other spheres of influence).  "Media" here does not have to mean newspapers or the nightly six o'clock TV bulletin, it can include any type of media, everything from the town crier of old to Snapchat.  Here are the functions I can think of:

• News from afar
• Announcements from other spheres of influence
• Investigative journalism
• Holding other spheres to account
• Celebration

The first area, news from afar, is the most obvious and one of the simplest functions.  I say "afar", but this can include local news; it's about getting information on occurrences you did not personally observe.

Announcements from other spheres of influence usually means Government announcements, but can be anything: your school newsletter is a type of Media that is important to many families.

Investigative journalism is when we start to get into the important stuff for media.  This overlaps heavily with "Holding other spheres to account".  Both are about digging past the façades and seeking out truth.  It's not an easy nor flashy job, as in the day of clickbait and snappy attention-grabbers, the considered, often lengthy, depths of investigative journalism can get missed – not to mention the sheer time it takes that could be spent spitting out some other barely-true inflammatory headline-grabber.  We do still see the occasional hard-work-that-paid-off investigative piece, and I have a lot of respect for journalists who still put in the effort.  A risk in the days of clickbait news is that politicians or businesspeople or church leaders or whoever can get away things while they deflect to the latest low-hanging scandal.  We need those who dig out the important stories, even when they're apparently uninteresting to some target demographic.

On a more positive note, media is also about celebration.  This could be heroic acts, or grand human achievements, or sports wins, but it is also the more mundane, such as the Births, Deaths, and Marriages section.  It's important that we know when things have gone well as when they haven't.

The Church/Religious Organisation

In today's secularised world, a lot will ask why I even include the church, but the history of the church's relationship with the rest of society can help us to understand what was valid about it and what we might be missing.  From history, if we move beyond the times of state-endorsed religion, a more healthy relationship grew: one where leaders (kings then, politicians later) lead a populace while the church (or Synagogue or Mosque or whatever) were responsible for the society's moral core.  It is not hard to make an argument that the Christian church has made a mess of its role as "moral guide" over the last couple of decades.  A trail of excesses, fraud, and worse leave us in a place where, if anything, the moral voicings of the church are considered by many to be outdated at best, bigoted at worst.  Not a great look, and it means that when the church has raised any valid point, they've been shouted out of the debate.

However, the failings do not necessarily mean the idea of an independent group who look out for morality is outdated.  In fact, we have this enshrined in our modern society already, in the form of (in NZ at least) the Human Rights Commission.  I don't always necessarily agree with the HRC, but I am glad they exist: someone needs to be asking, "Is this ok?" in our headlong rush forward.  Universities have ethics boards for the same reason.  Recent years have seen calls by some fairly big names to have something similar reining in research into subjects like artificial intelligence: to ask "Should we?" not just "Could we?"

So, I think the idea of "moral watchdog" is important, but it is not the only service performed by the church.  Certainly it has a place in gatherings and social interaction and weddings and funerals, but I think the important one is actually educational: as well as ask whether what we are currently doing is morally right, the church also instructed people in how to be decent human beings.  This, I think, is the role that isn't replicated well in a modern secular society.

In a church, a diverse group of people, usually collections of cross-generational families, got together to be reminded of how to treat others and were called to charitable acts.  Certainly this hasn't always worked great, but at least it gave a forum for (one version of) moral life to be shared.  Churches were a place of stories and reflection.  With the human need for storytelling met now by movies and television, I fear we might have lost the idea of "myth as instruction" present in every civilisation I can think of.  I enjoy the Marvel movies as much as anyone, but what do they teach us about the hard questions in life?  (To be fair, the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies at least do address some of the aspects of "how to be a decent human".  But this isn't the case for other stories we are telling and consuming – I cringe to think what moral instruction someone would be receiving from reality TV shows...!)

In a world where the Church has become increasing irrelevant, I wonder how we are going to fill this gap.  And, before you comment, yes this should be the role of parents first and foremost.  But not everyone receives that from parents – as a parent, I realise I don't do it enough for my kids, so I mourn for the kids of parents too busy or too stressed (or too broken) to give them what they need.  What sort of humans will they become as adults?  At least in a church community, there was a weekly (or more) gathering to put another piece in the puzzle.

Most who are reading this might be wondering what I'm going on about, but realistically that's probably because you are not the people who really need this kind of input.  Most of my friends came from pretty stable backgrounds, and many had Christian childhoods.  But I think there are many people out there who are craving for good role models and not getting them.

I don't have an answer for what should fill this gap in a modern society.  Maybe it is a rebirth of the church (interestingly, even some prominent atheists are coming out now and saying that maybe Christianity isn't such a bad thing for a society after all).^{Note 3}  Maybe it falls now to the schools (as if they didn't have enough to do already).  Maybe it is some new thing I haven't seen.  Maybe it is a return to decent parenting.  I don't know.

Many of the other roles a church traditionally held (place of gathering, place of reflection, place of celebration or mourning) can be found elsewhere.

Bonus Category: the Environment

I say "bonus category" because this isn't a societal construct like the others, yet it is even more important than any of them.  Without the others, we get a breakdown in human society.  Without a properly-functioning biosphere, we get a breakdown in life as we know it.  All of the above – including, critically, the economy – exist within the environment, not the other way around.  If you ruin the environment for monetary gain, everyone loses.  I think we forget this too often.  While, as I mentioned earlier, the economy can be a reasonably good measure of human wellbeing, it presupposes that we have all of the "ecosystem services" in place to supply what both the economic activity and human lives require.  (If you haven't heard the term "ecosystem services" before, I highly recommend reading up on the concept: it attempts to put a value on the immeasurable reliance we have on the natural world).  The capacity of our world to supply human needs is being used up faster than it can replenish itself.^{Note 4}  This is a massive concern, and one we need to address.

Closing Thoughts

I realise this has been a fairly lengthy read.  Hopefully you learned something.  I've had these ideas kicking around for nearly two decades, and I find that it helps me to understand society a little, and helps as a reminder that too much of anything is a problem, but I would warn that any categorisation system is imperfect.  All of these areas overlap, most of them are fuzzy at the edges.  Some of my categories are a bit arbitrary.  I have probably missed something crucial.  But my hope is that we come away with an understanding that a well-functioning society needs to have balance: no one area or one ideal can itself suffice to supply what a complex society requires to thrive.

Power systems require that excesses be kept in check.  If any one area gets too much control, the unbalanced system can hurt the whole society.

You might ask whether we are currently living with anything out of balance.  I wondered the same thing.  My first reaction is: yes, absolutely; we are flawed humans and cannot ever get this perfect.  That is the whole reason we have separate but interdependent spheres of influence in society in the first place.  But a more considered answer?  It actually depends on where you look.  I know I have picked on America a bit here, but that is partly because (a) they do have some pretty significant systemic problems, and (b) their problems make the headlines, unlike say governance issues in Africa (of which there are far more).  The USA has too much power in the hands of corporations – Business is too strong.  It also has too much power in the hands of the Church – while the doctrine of Separation of Church and state is codified in law in the US, we still see an unholy (literally, in my opinion) marriage between the Evangelical church and Republican party.  That is a giant can of worms and a deep rabbit hole that I am not going to dive into here.  I would argue that in a lot of other places, the church has insufficient power, in so much as that role of "moral instructor" is left vacant.  (Note: I do not want to see the church given wads of political power.  Please no).  The Media is too powerful, in the manner of being a wild out-of-control beast that no one understands any more, which is thrashing about hurting everyone (including social media) – yet simultaneously, the "watchman" roles that should be performed by the media (fact-checking rulers, investigative journalism, etc) are far too weak.  Education and Healthcare are somewhat at the mercy of the other areas, so they end up as good (or as bad) as whatever else is going on.  Beyond those, I don't really have the expertise to comment with any confidence.

For me, the important thing in any system that is to function well (and which involves flawed humans) is for it to have checks and balances; for there to be ways that excesses can be reined in before they do too much damage.  In some places, Governments have too much power (and the COVID-19 outbreak has spawned some worrying trends in mass surveillance and government control, which I hope will only be temporary, but which I fear will not – almost no one, having been given power, is willing to relinquish it willingly).  Maybe we need to develop artificial intelligence to rule instead of messy humans.  I for one welcome our new robot overlords.^{Note 5}

Until and unless we manage to come up with anything better, it is important to ensure we have a society that is managed in a sensible way, and that stays in balance.  I challenge you to look out for excesses and imbalances in these areas (or others).  Be an aware citizen who thinks about the run-on effects of any new idea or policy; how might this affect each of these areas?

Thanks for reading.  Feel free to leave me a comment or to critique anything I've said.  I really do appreciate when someone teaches me something new.

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Note 1: If your job doesn't seem to have purpose, then either you or your employer are doing something wrong.  Find something to do that is meaningful, and find meaning in the things you have to do, even if that's as simple as serving someone their lunch.

Note 2: The Democratic Republic of the Congo and Switzerland are neither the top highest nor the lowest countries by Gross Domestic Product, but I am guessing most of my audience are not going to know much about daily life in either Qatar or the Central African Republic, and the ongoing conflicts in the Congo area are something most have likely heard about at some point.

Note 3: Apparently including none other than The God Delusion author himself, Richard Dawkins.  Apologies about the not-so-great source (it's terribly biased, and too smug for my liking), but the other one I found was paywalled: https://www.lifesitenews.com/blogs/atheists-sound-the-alarm-decline-of-christianity-is-seriously-hurting-society

Note 4: We are deeply in ecological overshoot. Current calculations have us at over one-and-three-quarter Earths needed to supply our current rate of resource use and degradation; https://www.theworldcounts.com/challenges/planet-earth/state-of-the-planet/overuse-of-resources-on-earth

Note 5: I suggest developing artificial intelligence to rule instead of humans only mostly in jest: YouTube: A bold idea to replace politicians | César Hidalgo (TED).  The best part about this idea is that he suggests a path to adoption that does not involve immediately signing absolute power over to software.  It starts out sounding fairly ludicrous, but hang in there for the whole thing.  And no, I had not intended to leave this as the last idea on the page.

The Black Swan

So, perhaps unsurprisingly, I have been thinking about "Black Swan" events.  For those who don't know the term, it refers to the fact that everyone took it as known that swans were white, and there was even some famous quote about it, but then black swans were discovered in Australia, and suddenly something that no one expected to be true was found to be true.  Black Swan events are those that almost no-one expects, and they can have far-reaching and often highly disruptive effects.

We are of course living through a Black Swan event right now.  Yes, there were warnings from those in the know that the world was unprepared for a major pandemic.  Even the partial-false-starts of SARS, Bird Flu, Swine Flu, Ebola, etc in recent years were not enough to wake us sufficiently to do anything (except in East Asia).  But for most of us, we never even thought about a pandemic.  It never entered our consciousness, or if it did, we fell into that same mental trap (heuristics, if you want a long word for it) of assuming that "low probability" means "zero probability", and we dismissed it (or at least made no lifestyle changes).

I have a Masters degree in this and I did nothing to prepare for a pandemic.  (It is kind of amusing, in a tragic ironic sort of sense, that the hand sanitiser we put in our emergency kit as an afterthought was actually the thing we most needed from it – so far).

As an aside, please, please make sure you have an up-to-date emergency kit.  If you don't, get one now.  If you don't, not only will you suffer, but us as responding organisations will have to carry you, while we are scrambling trying to get our own systems up and running.  If you are not prepared, you harm others too.

(I would say that I don't think there is such a thing as "too prepared", but actually there is, and it was put well by one of my Uni lecturers: don't spend a thousand dollars to save a hundred – but do spend a hundred to save a thousand).

An interesting characteristic of Black Swan events is that while unexpected, and generally considered to be random and to have unknowable timings, they are not entirely impossible to predict.  In fact, in many cases, a Black Swan event can even be expected, but merely have unknown timing.  An example is a stock market crash: if you know the signs, you can tell when one is due, but you usually will not know the final "straw that broke the camel's back" event that triggers it.  (Incidentally, some of the economic downturn we are currently experiencing was expected and due – although the catalysing event this time happens to have been a very big one).

So what does this have to do with all of us?

A lot, actually.  There is another term closely linked to Black Swan events, and that is "resilience".  This somewhat-nebulous term means the characteristic of a system of being able to bounce back from shocks to that system.  We all probably know people who are mentally resilient: no matter what happens to them, they seem to be able to get back up and carry on (and we probably all know someone – usually ourselves – who isn't good at this at all).  Resilience is hard to measure or quantify, and usually the only true measure is when something goes wrong.  It is also hard to value in economic terms, which is one of the reasons why we don't see much focus on it.  (Whether we like it or not, our current systems of government, business, and even some social interactions are measured in dollar terms – even human life is given a dollar value, as cold as that feels).

(As an aside: if this irks you – and it probably should – it is because money is a convenient measure of exchange and relative value; without any such underlying value system, it is hard to compare anything.  I don't think it is the only option, but I cannot think of a better one that would actually work).

So resilience, as hard to define as it may be, is crucial for anything we want to last.  Think of a marriage: no matter how good it seems during the good times, if it is not resilient, its days are seriously numbered, as life will always have hard times, sometime (it's why it's in standard marriage vows).  We have seen, in fairly stark terms – because the currency this time is human lives lost – responses to this virus that show resilience and some that do not.  A lot of these have been surprises.  East Asia, not so surprising, because they had a few trial runs.  NZ, a big surprise, because we were not actually all that prepared: but good leadership went a long way here (even though there is a long tail to this that even the most pessimistic of us are probably underestimating).  The USA was a big surprise too, as they had (according to one group's measures) one of the best set of pandemic plans.  It shows that resilience is more a human factor than an organisational or institutional one: a resilient person without a plan will always do better than a non-resilient person with a plan (though good plans certainly do help).

When I was younger, I was a fan of MacGuyver (and the fact that I almost always carry a Swiss Army Knife is probably because of this – it's amazing how often they are useful).  While entirely fictional, he's the perfect example of personal resilience: no matter what happens, you don't give up, but you look at what is on hand and work solutions.  You don't panic.  More recently, what may well have become be my all-time favourite movie, The Martian, was all this again, and had a number of excellent quotes:

"At some point, everything's going to go South on you.  You're going to say, 'This is it, this is how I end.'  Now, you can either accept that, or you can get to work.  You solve one problem, and then you solve the next problem, and the next, and if you solve enough problems, you get to go home."

"Work the problem." (I say this to my kids fairly frequently).

"You could call it a failure but I prefer the term 'learning experience'."

"If a hiker gets lost in the mountains, people will coordinate a search.  If a train crashes, people will line up to give blood.  If an earthquake levels a city, people all over the world will send emergency supplies.  This is so fundamentally human that its found in every culture without exception." (I think this one only appears in the book).

By the way, if you haven't, you should read the book.  It's great.  I know it's a tired cliché, but the book was better.  You might even learn some science! :)

Another aside: did you know the author of that book (Andy Weir) lost about a year to debilitating depression and anxiety?  So you don't need to be a super-star to teach yourself these lessons.

(Also, depression sucks).

We are in a world now where some of the foundations have been a little shaken.  I say "a little", because as bad as this seems, it could be far, far worse – and there are institutional issues we are yet to address, yet untouched by the current crises.  This is only a small Swan, as far as Black Swans go.  It is a good time to reflect, to consider what else needs to change, what else lacks resilience and is at risk of failure.

I think The Martian was right: cooperation and compassion are fundamentals of being human.  It's why we hate the sociopathic or psychopathic villain: we instinctively know that a lack of compassion is inhumane, that it's somehow not right.  But, weirdly, we have celebrated a culture that elevates selfishness and self-interest and ego.  That isn't sustainable, not in a time when things might go wrong – or already have gone wrong.  In NZ, we saw the human responses everywhere after the earthquakes in Christchurch: people just coming out to help each other.  That crisis actually made us better neighbours, better people.  Crises often do this: they make us face ourselves with a level of harsh truth we usually shy away from, and give us an opportunity to choose to do good – but more than that, they bring out what we hide, even from ourselves, both good and bad.  Thankfully, for most of us, we are too harsh a critic of ourselves, so we find we're not as bad as we thought.

This current crisis is not going away.  In the last 24 hours I heard the head of the World Health Organisation stating that they had the single largest increase in number of cases in a single day.  While I can sit comfortably here in New Zealand knowing that things are getting back to a version of normal, that is not the reality for many parts of the world: it's still ramping up.  This will be something with a long tail: until we see a widespread vaccine deployed, "normal" will not happen.  That will take at least months, and possibly years; timescales that mean that by the time we get back to "normal", normal will no longer be the same thing it was.  I don't think any of us can properly predict what that means.  It will mean a lot of things, and different things, and many of the choices that determine what those things will be have not even been made.

The economic impacts of this will probably last the decade.

And what then?  What if we are hit by another Black Swan before this one has fully played out?  Empires seldom fell because of a singular problem, but more often because of the intersection of a range of problems, all converging to bring it down.  Our current globalised world is likely the same: one event won't break it, but too many at once might.

And that brings us to the real kicker: we are not living in a resilient world.

Look at any measures of environmental impact or global carrying capacity, and we are in overshoot.  Multiple measures in multiple key resources tell that we are taking more than the Earth can support in the long term.  If we imagine a lake used for fishing, if you take fewer fish than are born each year, the fish stocks can keep replenishing and your fish supply is secure, but if you begin to take more fish than are born, the total fish numbers will decrease, meaning even fewer fish are born, and before you know it, you've crashed the entire fishery.

For anyone wondering, I did not pick overfishing arbitrarily.  It's one of the areas currently in overshoot.

We can argue about whether or not certain measures are accurate or not (climate change is a contentious one, though it shouldn't be), but when multiple measures of multiple resources are telling the same story, that is when you need to sit up and take notice.

I don't have answers for every problem.  I struggle to have answers to my own problems!  But I think it is important to at least be aware that there are problems, to live with a conscious acknowledgement that doing the same as we have always done is causing problems, to think about how we can change, and what we can do to build resilience into everything we do.

The first step in change is a recognition that change is needed.

If I was a betting man (I'm not – too aware of maths to get suckered in to gambling), I would say that we have a roughly even probability of seeing the next big Black Swan before we see the final end of this current one.  We have a close to certain chance of seeing one within the next half-century, and even a fair chance of another big one before this new decade is out.  A lot of this is to do with ecological overshoot and climate change, but that's not to say those are the only options (though they are why I'm putting such high odds).  These are total stab-in-the-dark blind guesses, except that I have studied the subject, so maybe there's a bit of informed intuition there too.  I could be utterly wrong.  I really do hope I am.  I kind of feel I may not be.

In any case, what can you do today, in whatever counts for normal for you right now, to build a little resilience?  What can you do to take a little less, use a little less, waste a little less?  What can you do to help someone else, especially someone in a worse place to you?  The future relies on us cooperating, living with compassion, caring about how we treat each other and the beautiful, delicate systems on the Earth that we rely on.

The coming world will need us to be better humans, as it may not be as comfortable a world as we've grown used to.

[Photo: Michal Klajban, CC-SA-4.0-Intl, Wikimedia Commons].