Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation

by Jonathan Lear

Book Overview

Shortly before he died, Plenty Coups, the last great Chief of the Crow Nation, told his story--up to a certain point. "When the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground," he said, "and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened." It is precisely this point--that of a people faced with the end of their way of life--that prompts the philosophical and ethical inquiry pursued in Radical Hope. In Jonathan...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0674027469
• ISBN13: 9780674027466
• Release Date: April 2008
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 0.46 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.5" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

A brilliant research question

Radical hope explores the question of how cultures, in this study the Crow Tribe, respond to the one situation that cultures are incapable of imagining, the demise of the core culture. The Crow were dependent of buffalo hunting and personal warriorship against their rivials the Sioux (Lakota) and Cheyenne. With the near extinction of the buffalo and the collapse of traditional life on the plains, Crow culture evolved to total irrelevancy overnight. This book focuses on the life of the last great Crow Chief Plenty Coups, who said that after the demise of the buffalo "nothing happened". This is the void that engulfed Crow culture in the last decades of the 19th century. Radical Hope is a detailed exploration of the ultimate chaos that can afflict cultures when they quickly collapse from external pressures. This book shows how insight and the use of traditional problem solving provided Crow leadership with a pathway to re-establishing themselves in this most challenging of circumstances. This book is highly recommended to those people fascinated with how culture institutions respond to crippling challenges and how hope can emerge in the bleakest of circumstances.

a hidden but not unknown warrior

Remarkable man, remarkable narrative , and fascinating messages. You don't have to be a weatherman to understand the meaning of storm clouds. You don't need to be a psychoanalyst or philosopher to understand this book. The author is not the most elegant with the English language, but a small price to pay, given the content. How strange that Plenty Coups (Many Achievements) has been hidden in plain sight all of this time. His headdress and coup stick are apparently on display at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier (The book explains why). -The vision quest dreams of a 9 year-old, interpreted by tribal elders that offered a prophetic vision for a once wealthy and powerful tribe. Over half of that tribe had died as a result of smallpox. -Courageous man who was outside the narrow cliché of brave Indian (pun intended) but ultimately self-destructive and tragic figure. American History has limited interest in non-stereotypes. -Hmmm isn't this 2008. The pending return of Chinese empire in the news, daily. The return of dreams of Arab and Persian imperialism (Need I say they are not the same?). Religion held hostage to dreams of empire. The neo-con's dreams of empire turning in to a nightmare. 600 years of European domination on the world stage, was this suppose to go on forever? This is current events, not history. The lack of industrial technology by the Crow tribe at that time has nothing to do with the complexities they faced or the integrity of their process of analysis. Although this book takes its historical base from American History, the issues are with us all (native American or not, American or not) for the foreseeable future As an analogy, maybe the words of the Old Testament have some usefulness here: Should ye not hear the words which the LORD hath cried by the former prophets, when Jerusalem was inhabited and in prosperity Zech 7:7

An alternative to the Ghost Dance

In a time when any and everything can be pulled out from under one due to devastating political and cultural de-evolution, a growing and decadent mass media driven delusion and the bulk of wealth being in the hands of a small percentage of soulless idiots, this book offers an "a way." At time when one might be tempted, like many Native American tribes were, to lament the past and vainly attempt to bring it back through the sad but hopeful ritual of the Ghost Dance (instead we listen to the Oldies Radio while media encourages us to celebrate some anniversary of some event that had meaning rather than helping us give meaning to current events). It offers a vision of how a person, a culture and humanity itself can keep what is valuable and authentic from one's past and one's culture while navigating chaotic upheaval. It's about keeping one's humanity intact in dehumanizing times and both keeping and building a personal and cultural integrity that endures. So, if you have been a victim of mortgage lenders, student loan rip-offs, downsizing, corporate greed, credit card companies or the crisis in our lack of a health care system, this book lets you know that it just something you're going through. It helps you become active rather than passive in your emotional and philosophical response. So, instead of feeling like a sitting duck, you begin to feel like someone facing challenges and helping others do the same. Enduring and radical hope eventually trumps the temporal power of any oppressive junta in a way they cannot see coming. At the same time, it builds heart, soul and culture. This book has come at a good time.

Courage in the Face of Meaninglessness

This book is a psychoanalyst's philosophical meditations on the words and experience of the last great chief of the Crow, Plenty Coups, a man who witnessed the complete erasure of the culture that formed him, and whose virtues he exemplified. The book is not completely satisfying. It seems unnecessarily repetitious and wordy at times. It seems to promise a tale of psychological and moral triumph, but to fulfill that promise ambiguously. Nevertheless, it provides a penetrating analysis of what one might call paradigm collapse and the suffering of the individuals who experience it. Courage is the core virtue necessary to one's survival of such damage, but, as Charles Taylor, writing in The New York Review of Books, explains more lucidly than I can, this is a special kind of courage, the courage to hope for a future good that cannot yet be conceived. As our society, and indeed societies around the globe, are facing partial or complete collapses of the assumptions that frame the experiences of their members, these ideas will have an immediate personal significance to the reader who understands that the rules of the game are changing, and that he must change too, or perish.

almost useful

"Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation" by Jonathan Lear is the title of a book that brings together the history of the collapse of Crow Indian culture and established philosophical thoughts from works by Aristotle, Freud, and Plato. In this book, Lear has achieved a melding of philosophy and history that should be fascinating to both historians of Native American history as well as students of classical psychological philosophy. The main character appears to be Plenty Coups, who helped steer the transition of the Crows from their traditional lives to the new reality that the U.S. Government had brought forth in the 19th and 20th centuries. Plenty Coups' featured contributions, however, are not the details of U.S.-Crow negotiations but certain acts and statements that the author has deemed worthy of extrapolation. These key dreams and symbolic gestures are expanded upon by Lear with the adaptation of thoughts from Aristotle (on courage) and Freud (on dreams). For example, dreams are categorized in the following manner: no-account dreams, where one merely observes; wish dreams, where a wish is realized within the dream; property dreams, where one acquires properties, e.g. a horse, that comes true while one is awake; and medicine dreams, which "give powerful insight". Dreams experienced under a dreaming ritual are shared to the rest of the tribe, and a collective interpretation of the dream ensues. In this manner, dreams, such as the medicine dream that Plenty Coups had, were "used . . . to struggle with the intelligibility of events [e.g. loss of land to rival tribes and the U.S.] that lay at the horizon of their ability to understand." Lear has demonstrated how classical philosophy and psychology can help us understand the tumultuous transition of a culture, yet at the same time he falls short of a masterpiece. While his title suggests a framework for having hope with an example so that the reader can become a living example of Lear's ideas, the actual text appears to not go much further beyond extrapolations of pivotal symbols. It is as if Lear is the child at the seashore that finds seashells of different sizes, but that child is not yet able to figure out that equally sized clamshells fit together on clams in the ocean; and that the clam has practical value as lunch. Lear does make an effort to generate some practicality, but it falls short. For example, he tried to compare radical hope and optimism, yet he does it in a manner that is convoluted into the text. How are hope and optimism similar, and how are they different? If Lear is willing to rehash decades-old thoughts of Freud and Aristotle as a well-timed review for understanding Crow history, it doesn't seem to be too much more work to have a chart or a table entitled "some ways that hope and optimism are different." Such key tables would probably enlighten the reader in ways that greatly augment the organizing structure provided by Plenty Coups' key st