Being adaptable is largely thought of as a good characteristic and for which you are usually commended for. We try our best to be adaptable to the challenges and opportunities that life throws at us as best as we can. To be, feel, or act the same or to be resistant to change can hurt us in an ever-changing society where we are constantly at the mercy of forces that are beyond our control.
When you can adjust to new conditions or changes, there is usually positive reinforcement from others who also are adaptable to the changes or conditions at the same time. My concern is that while adaptability has helped us thrive in different eras as a species, it has at the same time been a weakness of ours in adapting to norms or behaviors that harm our collective progress.
Adaptability is both our biggest strength and our biggest weakness in that it both allows us to change conditions and norms for the better, but also it can make things worse when we backslide into previous harmful attitudes, values, and beliefs that can make a comeback. Being adaptable has helped humanity survive different tumultuous eras since the early days when we were foraging for basic sustenance and shelter to survive.
The act of adaptation goes back to what makes us innately human, at our core, even when we get used to adapting to less-than-ideal conditions or changes that revert progress we’ve made rather than embracing further progress to our benefit. While change does not always equal to progress, my concern is that when we are adaptable to any kind of change, both positive and negative, without thinking of the consequences of such constant adaptability, we remain at risk for going backwards and worsening our quality of life.
To give a few examples of when adaptability is a strength of ours as a species, I would refer to our ever-increasing desire to assimilate, tolerate, and promote diversity, inclusion, and equity in our world. This social inclusion and desire for equal rights has been an adaptation that is rather recent when you consider how far humanity has come from the centuries and millennia of mistreatment, discrimination, slavery, and wars that were fought to keep the horrible status quo of how we treat each other.
Our ability to adapt to making sure that this previous status quo was no longer acceptable and repugnant in terms of previous attitudes has led to greater tolerance, acceptance, and more diversity throughout the world. Yes, there are still challenges to our adaptability in this important area but to say that we haven’t made progress in this area of life would be a falsehood. Being able to adapt successfully to these societal changes has by and large been a positive development in my lifetime and beforehand earlier on in the 20th century. While there has been negative resistance to this kind of adaptability, I’ve found there has been most people accepting these changes that have gone on and while the struggle continues, this strength of humanity to seek greater equality and inclusion has been a net positive of our adaptability mechanism.
In addition to that previous point, the expansion of social and economic rights to more and more people throughout the world have led to greater political and civil rights as a result. They have been tied to each other and have been a positive step in the right direction. There is greater representation politically and economically for more diverse populations than ever before and while progress still needs to be made, the status quo has been upended by our adaptability in this area to these kinds of societal changes.
While adaptability is our greatest strength, it can also be our greatest weakness ironically, and this has been shown in different areas of life where there has been a reversal of progress recently or too much comfort shown with a lack of progress. I’ll point to two different areas where there been a reluctant yet steady adaptability towards the climate crisis and for democratic backsliding across the world. Where there is significant resistance in both areas, we are running out of time in preventing these new ‘norms’ from taking hold. It’s common knowledge that our planet’s climate is changing with disastrous consequences for livability for more and more people in different worlds.
Longer-lasting heat waves, disastrous storms with greater frequency, and unyielding glacial icecap melting threaten to become the rule of our life on this planet rather than the exception. From my perspective, we have become complacent to these changes and are looking to adapt rather than to work harder to change course. From our political leaders to our civil society, we are looking more and more like we are giving up rather than trying harder to reverse the negative changes set to befall us around the world.
Our ability to adapt to a warming world highlight how while we can adapt to negative changes, many of us will still suffer as a result and some won’t survive this kind of adaptation. Rather than seek to change the status quo in climate action, I believe that we are seeking to adapt to the changes that will befall us despite the harm it will do to the planet and our place in it rather than do our best to collectively try to resist such a negative adaptation.
Related to this regretful kind of adaptability, our political leadership worldwide has failed to martial the resources and the willpower necessary to combat climate change as quickly and as effectively as needed. Instead of championing solutions and working across societies to solve the climate crisis, there has been instead of focus on centralizing power, holding on to political office, and reversing previous norms and values of democratic rule to a forthright shift towards autocratic or dictatorial rule. I think this is a negative adaptation that more and more countries are seemingly getting used to as previous norms, values, and equality under the law are being undermined. It is not too late to reverse the damage done while the power of the vote and the right to assemble and protest is still allowed but that is not a given.
As much as we had to adapt to democratic rule centuries ago, it’s been shown that when there is no fight to keep those norms and values alive, we can just as slide backwards to the days when kings, tyrants, and demagogues ruled by force and decree across broad swaths of the world. Democratic norms and values are not universal values these days but our adaptions to them have largely further greater equality, inclusion, and prosperity than the opposite of autocratic rule. If we get used to the unraveling of previous norms that had served us well as a society to a previous time where we adapted to autocratic norms and rule by the few over the many, then we are in for a rough period of adaptation which will not serve us as well.
Adaptability has largely served humanity well since our early days of foraging and hunter-gathering. It is an innate trait that we must make whatever conditions we live in work well enough for us. Being able to adapt can both help us but also harm us depending on what we are adapting to. Let’s continue to set a higher standard individually and collectively to what we tolerate and adapt to and what we will not adapt to. We still have a choice in what we get used to and for what we do not accept and let’s hope we always will but right now, our adaptability is leading us on a crash course where instead of choosing to adapt to our surroundings, we will be forced to do so and will have to do so as a result without having had the choice in previous eras.
