Radical Hope
Every once in a while I’ll read a review that just sticks with me. Pauline Kael’s piece on Clockwork Orange comes to mind whenever I see something in film that is dehumanizing, yet pretends otherwise. I’ve linked above to a review by Charles Taylor of a book called Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation by Jonathan Lear.
Roughly, the question the book and the review pose is: how does one act morally when one’s culture has been so shattered that existing moral codes don’t work anymore. Consider the following statement by the Crow chief, Plenty Coups:
“When the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened.”
What does one do when the buffalo go away, when a city is devastated by a nuclear bomb, when all one has known disintigrates?
Well, here’s what Plenty Coups did, and why his story should speak to us:
Plenty Coups was able to help bring about this kind of redefinition for his people. He drew on the established practice of going into the wilderness to seek a revelation through a dream. The dream he reported foretold in thinly veiled terms the end of the Crow way of life, but it also promised a kind of survival for the Crow, provided they could listen “like the Chickadee,” that is, observe others, and find new ways of going on. These were, of course, at that stage wholly unknown, but the dream was the basis for the hope that somehow, beyond just biological survival, the Crow way of life might continue in a yet to be defined new form.
This is what Lear calls “radical hope.” Hope can only exist if you are uncertain about a desired outcome. If it’s really a sure thing, your anticipation of it can’t be hope. But here we have something more extreme than uncertainty: the very shape of this hope remained to be defined.
Sadly, I haven’t read the book. It’s on a long, long list of things to do.
I think a lot of us have some aspiration to immortality: the hope that what we say or write will be considered important, the idea that some value we hold might continue. It’s probably hubris. Still, I took heart from Plenty Coups, from the possible of radical hope. Not that I personally might spur such hope (obviously it isn’t a position I would want to be in), but that there are people interested in facing the world in an ethical way, and that our ethics might survive our atrocities.
Discussion Area - Leave a Comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.