Resisting the Resilience Industry: Rediscovering Christian Hope in a Troubled World

Metaphors of resilience originate in the natural and physical sciences. They have been enthusiastically adopted across diverse disciplines in academic, private and public sectors and are even influential in policy and curriculum development in Catholic schools and Higher Institutes of Education where they are often assimilated uncritically. In the areas of psychology, business, health, and education, the current vogue for training individuals in ‘resilience’ presupposes an insight and knowledge of human consciousness and cognition that may be premature at best, possibly misguided, and at worst harmful to the very mental and physical robustness such courses purport to improve. From a psychological perspective, resilience is tangled with the positive psychology movement; a movement that emphasizes egocentric concepts of ‘well-being’. This, alongside ambiguities in the construct of resilience, has fostered the idea that resilience is a skill that can be taught. In a neo-liberalist context, this has also supported the commodification of ‘resilience,’ which has become a lucrative industry in and of itself and appears to be immune to the lack of convincing evidence that such training is effective. The ‘resilience industry’ generates and markets commodities such as psychometric and personality tests of ‘resilience’ at the individual level and training in ‘resilience’ at individual and organizational level and this in the absence of consistency in the definition, validity and reliability of the construct of resilience and measures of the effectiveness of resilience training. This paper will argue that the current obsession with resilience as a skill is delusional, not evidence-based, and agitates an already troubled world. In its place it advocates an approach to potential adversity that is grounded in the Christian virtue of hope. It seeks to integrate psychological perspectives of the cognitive simulations that underpin the generation of anticipated futures with theological insights into the virtue of hope in order to construct a different anticipated future to that of a ‘troubled world’