Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation

by Jonathan Lear

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 Lear’s view, Plenty Coups’ story raises a profound ethical question that transcends his time and challenges us all: how should one face the possibility that one’s culture might collapse?

This is a vulnerability that affects us all insofar as we are all inhabitants of a civilization, and civilizations are themselves vulnerable to historical forces. How should we live with this vulnerability? Can we make any sense of facing up to such a challenge courageously? Using the available anthropology and history of the Indian tribes during their confinement to reservations, and drawing on philosophy and psychoanalytic theory, Lear explores the story of the Crow Nation at an impasse as it bears upon these questions and these questions as they bear upon our own place in the world. His book is a deeply revealing, and deeply moving, philosophical inquiry into a peculiar vulnerability that goes to the heart of the human condition.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, History, Anthropology, Psychology, Indigenous, Native American

187 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 2006

About the author

Jonathan Lear is an American philosopher and psychoanalyst. He is the John U. Nef Distinguished Service Professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago and served as the Roman Family Director of the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society from 2014 to 2022.

Reviews

[Kathleen O'Neal · Rating 3 out of 5]

Jonathan Lear's beautifully written and thought-provoking book "Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation" is a fascinating philosophical exploration of a rarely discussed topic - how should we as human beings lives against the backdrop of the possibility that the civilization and cultures within which our lives and our sense of their meaning is embedded? The book was a joy to read from start to finish which is saying something fairly meaningful given that most works by analytic philosophers published by academic publishing houses (books such as this one, in other words) are often very difficult to enjoy as a pleasurable reading experience. The book's success as literature is largely due to Lear's decision to explore his book's topic through the lens of a fairly narrow meditation on the life of a now deceased Crow Indian chief known as Many Coups. Recently I have been reading and reading about psychobiography and while Jonathan Lear is not a psychologist or psychiatrist and does not use the term "psychobiography" the book can in many ways be seen as such a work and a very convincing and successful psychobiography at that, at least given its modest aims and limited scope. Lears draws on his substantial background in Freudian and psychoanalytic theory throughout the course of his work and the book is much richer for it. However, this narrow focus on the choices of a specific individual in a specific and unique historical circumstance is perhaps the biggest strike against this book as a work of philosophy. With the benefit of hindsight, it is easy to gloss Plenty Coups as a wise leader who did the right things at the right times for himself and the nation which he was leading. However, it seems to me more likely than Lears appears to me to think that it is that although Plenty Coups was apparently a fairly savvy and resourceful individual and a good political and social leader for his people, a great deal of his success depended on sheer dumb luck. Furthermore the ways in which Lear valorizes Plenty Coups for responding to the challenge of cultural destruction which he faced may not be possible or even appropriate to all such individuals or communities facing cultural destruction. I also think that there is a stronger case than Lear seems to think that there is for problematizing some of the ethical features of Plenty Coups's response to his situation and for giving credit to American Indian leaders who chose different courses at the same time that Plenty Coups was leading the Crow people.

First of all, I want to commend the book for packing in so much new and (at least to me) original ideas in the course of such a small book. The topic itself is original and thought-provoking. Lear also makes the excellent choice to start his narrative with an enigmatic and fascinating anecdote about the life of Plenty Coups which grabs the reader's attention instantly and also frames the central issues which Lear's book will seek to tackle as the narrative moves forward. Lear's elucidation of the concepts of radical hope, the human being as a finite erotic subject, self's relationship to the ego-ideal, and poetry as a broadly construed way to make meaning are interesting and important.

My criticisms of the book, however, are primarily due to its over-reliance on a contestable interpretation of one person's life in one unique historical and personal situation. Without looking at responses to cultural destruction as it has impacted other groups of people in history such as the Jewish and Roma communities during the Holocaust, the Western world's LGBTQ community during the early years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, the African diasporic community in the wake of slavery, the upper class of the white American South after the American Civil War, or men in the Western world after the advent of feminism, to take a few examples, it seems difficult to accept without further argument the notion that any of Lear's ruminations on historical devastation and how to handle it can be generalized to speak for all such situations.

I also think that Lear too easily dismisses the notion that Plenty Coups's decision to lead his tribe in cooperating with white Americans against other American Indian tribes was an unproblematic one. At the very least, I think such a topic deserves sustained engagement with the view held by many reasonable people that the American government's attacks on the civilizations of the American Indians was a form of mass murder and the extreme violation of human rights. By looking at the situation as thinkers such as Ward Churchill or Andrea Smith do (and while their way of seeing the situation may not be the only plausible interpretation of it one must admit they they are certainly among the most compelling and plausible interpretations of the problems white Americans have created for American Indians), one could quite reasonably argue that Plenty Coups collaborated with evil by capitulating too easily to the demands of European-Americans.

I highly recommend this book but I also think that it is a book which should be read critically, not just in terms of assessing whether or not what Lears says is plausible or correct in light of his narrative but also in light of the silences in his text which result from a lack of serious engage with situations in which the actions of Plenty Coups may have been unfeasible or inappropriate as well as reasonable challenges to the behavior of Plenty Coups in his own context. In this book, both what is said and what is not said are thought-provoking and important topics.

[Ellen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book addresses something I've been thinking about constantly for some time--that is how people who have been stripped of a context in which to live as human beings manage to imagine survival and then to venture forth on that imagined thread. The author does not pretend to be an expert on Crow Indian culture of but he uses the situation of cultural collapse they found themselves in the late 1900's to examine the
difference between wistful or magical thinking and radical hope springing from an imaginative response to a desperate situation. I had a bit of an unfair advantage navigating the methodical logic and painstaking definition of terms because one of my daughters is a moral philosopher and talks like this! But the language is not inaccessible or full of jargon--it's just relentless in it's inquiry into the most important of all human capacities--worldmaking. I loved this book.

[Morgan Blackledge · Rating 5 out of 5]

A prolonged, painful, heart achingly desperate meditation on hope and survival in the midst of degradation and loss.

Jonathan Lear applies the concept of radical hope to the experience of the Crow people under the leadership of chief Plenty Coups during Native American genocide.

Lear begins the book with an enigmatic declaration from Plenty Coups that “after the buffalo were gone, nothing happened”.

Lear ultimately Interprets this to mean that, after the Crow people lost their land, many of their time-honored cultural practices no longer made sense or had real meaning to them.

It seems that after their way of life was murdered, their land stolen, their culture destroyed, from that moment forward, they ceased living in a meaningfully finite world, and simply existed to watch time pass in a purposeless, featureless void.

Lear argues that Plenty Coups practiced the “way of the chickadee” as a middle path through suffering in times of loss and uncertainty. For Plenty Coups the way of the chickadee entailed observation, acceptance, wisdom and radical hope.

Throughout the book, there is an eerie sense that the environmental devastation and the loss of purpose and meaning that Plenty Coups and the Crow experienced, was an ironic preview of what were currently experiencing as catastrophic global climate change and late capitalism devours our world.

It seems as if the chickadees are coming home to roost for the great grandchildren of manifest destiny.

5/5 ⭐️

[Don · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jonathan Lear examines the destruction of traditional Crow culture following U.S. government aggression and dispossession. As a result, the Crow could no longer engage in the practices that had long defined them, things like hunting buffalo, waging intertribal warfare, and counting coup.

Lear emphasizes the depth of this loss. The Crow’s very sense of worth had been tied to excellence in these practices. The ego-ideal of each Crow man and woman — the internal image of what it means to be a good and valuable person — had centered on performing these tasks with excellence. When traditional Crow life was destroyed, the opportunity to perform these tasks no longer existed, and it was no longer clear what excellence even meant.

As Lear sees it, one of the achievements of Plenty Coups, the Crow chief, was his capacity to adapt in the face of this cultural devastation. While Sitting Bull saw accommodation to the white man as capitulation, Lear argues that it was an expression of genuine courage. Drawing on Aristotle, he writes that courage involves the willingness to take risks for something one values while also remaining mindful of reality. When reality changes, so too must our understanding of what courage requires. Plenty Coups recognized that reality had changed, and so he understood that what it looked like to act with courage had to be reimagined.

Plenty Coups no doubt experienced the grief of seeing his traditional way of life destroyed, but by adapting, by allowing the Crow ego-ideal to evolve, he preserved the possibility that meaning itself could take new form. This was a torturous process, one marked by despair, but Plenty Coups found a way to move forward and to replace his despair with what Lear calls “radical hope” — hope for a future he could not yet fully conceive.

Although Lear focuses on the fate of a particular people at a particular historical moment, his ideas can be applied to our individual lives. We all develop ego-ideals early in life, and many of us discover, once we leave home, that these standards no longer serve us. What confers value in our families of origin might be maladaptive in the larger world. We then find ourselves forced to undergo the arduous process of replacing these old standards with new ones.

[Karen Celano · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's rare that a philosophy book can bring me to tears, but the first chapter of Radical Hope, in its description of the shattered souls of the Crow people in the wake of cultural devastation, was wincingly painful. Admittedly, Lear does not pretend that his description of cognitive disarray actually represents what the Crow endured; he acknowledges his inability and unwillingness to describe their true psychological states, instead choosing to perform a philosophical "thought experiment" based on their culturally embedded historical reality in order to contextualize his analysis. But his description rings true enough, and it is horrifying.

Though the book (somewhat disappointingly, but maybe necessarily) never answers this question within its pages, I find myself asking what would constitute a similar level of cultural devastation for us today. Drawing on anthropology, Lear writes that a "vibrant culture" is characterized by "established social roles," "standards of excellence associated with these roles," and "the possibility of constituting oneself as. . . one who embodies these ideals." By those standards, I think American civilization would fail the test of having a "vibrant culture." American culture could described as thin precisely because it is lacking in those shared cultural norms - yet the irony is that thick cultures are probably more prone to the sort of devastation Lear describes. (Indeed, Lear implies as such when he writes that, in the event a civilization should collapse, it would the most “flourishing” members – the ones most embedded in its value structures – that would be least able to cope.)

Indeed, I wonder if Western civilization has chosen, through its exaltation of relativism, tolerance, and diversity, to adopt cultural thinness (with its porous cultural boundaries and social fluidity) precisely to avoid such vulnerability. Lear writes that teaching people to conceive of the possibility of their culture’s demise is “counterproductive” as it undermines faith in the reality of one’s culture, but we Americans are actually very good at conceiving of our culture’s demise: just consider all the dystopian novels and films we produce. The irony is that, though we’re protecting ourselves from cultural vulnerability, we’re also somewhat deliberately (though perhaps unconsciously) thinning out our culture even more, introducing skepticism about its value and worth.

Some people consider may consider this a good thing – we are increasingly thinking of ourselves in global terms, as “human beings” and “individuals” rather than “Americans” or “Westerners,” and there are even questions among some about whether our civilization “deserves” to survive at all. But we do have to look at the effects such a thinning out of culture may have on those within it. Lear’s description of how some Crow lived and spoke of their experiences on the reservation remind me of how some commentators have described the mentalities of those who descend into opioid addition: without a telos, without a conception of the “good life,” without a sense that their life has any significance.

But of course, Lear’s book is entitled Radical Hope, and in his second chapter he grounds this hope in that which gives a culture both its stability and its openness: faith in transcendent goodness, what the Crow called Ah-badt-dadt-deah, what a Christian would call God, what a secular person might see as the potential for goodness that is still of this world though it transcends our current understanding. This goodness is what gives us hope for the possibility of a “dignified passage across the abyss” even if we don’t understand what that passage may entail. This hope in transcendent goodness is what remains firm both before and after the passage over the abyss and is what enables cultural continuity.

Lear rarely uses the word "religion," probably because the term “religion” is, sociologically speaking, such a slippery one, and because his project is a secular one. But insofar as "religion" encompasses the acts and beliefs (whether thematized or not) that orient us towards the transcendent, religion was deeply embedded and enmeshed into the ‘traditional’ society of the Crow (as it is in most ‘traditional’ societies). Of course, our relationship as Westernized Americans with religion is very different, and I think that the detangling of religion from the heart of our civilization is part of the “thinning out” of our culture. But it is still worth asking what “religion” we, as postmodern Americans, have to empower us – and I don’t mean religious faith in a denominational god. I mean, rather: do we even have a belief in transcendent goodness? Do we have acts and practices that help us access this faith? What place do we have in our culture for prophets, seers, “dreamers”? Where do we see our potential for cultural resurrection? And: if we have rejected any such faith, have we also rejected the very thing which might enable us to hope?

Asking these questions, I think, can help us make sense of the fear and anxiety driving a lot of politics today. On the far right, there’s an angry fear that American culture is on the verge of collapse, and among some there’s a worry that elimination of traditional religion from the public sphere has left us even more vulnerable to this demise. On the far left, there’s an increasing sense that Western civilization does not deserve to survive – that we should not only accept but propel ourselves across the abyss, come what may. Across the board, there’s increasingly hostile disagreement about what it means, if it out to mean anything, to be “American.” I see Lear as attempting to offer a way to and through the future that allows for a sense of continuity amid radical change – that allows us to reshape our cultural narrative in a way that treasures the past but opens us to the future.

Working out these questions must be done on both a communal and personal level. In asking how virtue can be preserved in the wake of radical civilizational upheaval, Lear recognizes that, on the one hand, virtue requires a culture and a community that can inculcate it into its members, and, on the other hand, virtue must become the personal inheritance of each member of that culture. The question becomes, then, whether the virtue of members of a culture can survive the destruction of the culture itself. In answering this question Lear himself strikes a virtuous balance: in order to endure, virtue must find the mean between relativism on the one hand (in which virtue has no meaning) and rigidity on the other (in which virtue is so embedded in a particular cultural scheme that it could never survive that scheme's collapse). Lear rejects relativism with his insistence that virtue is virtue - not merely a psychological coping strategy employed by individuals in times of distress to preserve their psychic integrity. But he resists rigidity by arguing that virtue is also open-ended - and indeed, for Lear, such open-endedness becomes constitutive of virtue itself.

This open-endedness means that we each face an existential choice when it comes to the practice of virtue. There may be no "right" answer. To his credit, Lear never claims that Plenty Coups's choices were the only way to manifest virtue in his particular situation - he seeks merely to defend them as a "plausible" way. And, to his credit, he wants to restore to the Crow - and indeed to all people in cultural crisis - a means of reclaiming agency. Plenty Coups was not enslaved to his psyche's efforts at self-preservation, nor was he enslaved to historical contingency. The "open-ended" nature of Lear's conception of virtue meant there was room for freedom to choose and to act. Plenty Coups' ability to hope - to believe in goodness beyond the horizon - is what empowered and emboldened this freedom.

This framework that puts Aristotle in conversation with Freud is enlightening, and may provide one way of fruitfully understanding the role of, for instance, prophets and visionaries in helping to usher a people through catastrophic change. But I'm still puzzling over how to apply these insights to our own historical and cultural milieu. Lear suggests ways in which our cultural framework differs from the Crow's, but he never tells us how those shifts might effect how we apply the lessons he's drawn from Plenty Coups. But perhaps, given the polarization and fragmentation of Western culture today, those are answers we'll each have to work out for ourselves.

[Monika · Rating 2 out of 5]

Czytam te pozytywne recenzje i nie zgadzam się z nimi niestety, choć chciałabym żeby mi się ta książka podobała.
To rozprawa o tym w jaki sposób poradziło sobie plemię Wron z końcem ich dotychczasowego świata i końcem ich historii. O tym jak musieli sobie poradzić z kryzysem ich tradycji i wartości.
Niestety sposób tej rozprawki kompletnie mi się nie podobał, powtarzanie tych samych twierdzeń co kilkanaście stron, deliberowanie nad jakimś jednym stwierdzeniem i międlenie go przez następny rozdział mnie denerwowało. To mógł być dobry artykuł, ale na książkę chyba za mało materiału.

[Mesoscope · Rating 2 out of 5]

I got nothing out of this book. It is written for a philosophically-illiterate audience, and Lear took fifty pages to say what Ernst Jünger or Hans Blumenberg would have said in a single page. And it is very, very repetitive. I lost count of the number of times the author returned to three or four rudimentary observations and repeated them, each time as if he were saying something new, or advancing some new perspective. He wasn't.

I found his analytic approach highly dubious. He appears to believe that all interpersonal actions and intersubjective judgments are situated in an implicit rational structure that can be excavated and analyzed. I find that profoundly problematic, and reductive, as if organizing structures of human interaction are or must be "rational" in the same terms as the high-level frameworks we use to analyze them. This is question-begging in the extreme.

I lost out of steam about halfway through.

[Laura Howard]

In many ways, exactly what a philosophical text should be--grounded in real events, focused on real people, and interested in real application of ideas. A humble, accessible, and important little book.

[Simon Wiebe · Rating 3 out of 5]

Stark angefangen, stark nachgelassen. Fand es super spannend zu lesen, wie Lear ethische Perspektiven der Hoffnung aus den Crow-Indianern ableitet. Meines Erachtens dreht er sich aber irgendwann im Kreis. Seine Ausführungen zur Hoffnung angesichts kultureller Zerstörung hätte nach meinem Empfinden auf 50 Seiten runtergebrochen werden können. Das Grundanliegen ist aber interessant.

[Ethan Zimmerman · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book represents the gold standard for what good philosophy writing should be. Eminently readable and engaging all while being convincing, insightful, and provocative.

Radical Hope is a philosophical and anthropological analysis of the destruction of the Crow culture by the US government and asks about what it means for a person to retain personal identity and be virtuous in the face of such devastation.

This is a particular story of particular people, but I was surprised at the way I saw myself in parts of it as it helped me make sense of some parts of my experiences. Not that I've experienced anything like the Crow did. But there are other forms of cultural devastation that all people are vulnerable to by virtue of being human. This also made for interesting discussion in class as we asked whether we (modern Americans) live in a devastated culture.

I definitely intend to revisit this book.

[Jatan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A long-ish essay on the psychological dynamics underlying the recollections of Plenty Coups, the mid 19th century Crow Indians’ Chief. Faced with a dwindling population of Crows and buffalos, Plenty Coups decided to ally with the "white man" against their traditional rivals, the Sioux and Cheyenne tribes. Later in his old age, he shared his life story with a Native American ethnographer, Frank B. Linderman, famously saying that after the Buffalo fell nothing happened.

Lear uses this statement of civilizational collapse -- for the Crow way of life at least -- as a starting point of his inquiry, exploring the psychological motivations of possible ethical responses on this horizon. The initial chapters in part one are mildly repetitive, iterating in different registers the fundamental anthropological insight: our values, habits, and their significances are socially anchored. In nomadic tribes like the Crow these anchors are chiefly organized around hunting and battles with neighboring tribes. Thus, when the Crows retreated to a reservation, Lear interprets "after that nothing happened" to imply that while daily life went on as before, an entire constellation of social values around it was rendered meaningless.

So, what are ethical modes of living when an exogenous shock (such as a pandemic or climate catastrophe) threatens our socially organized life? Lear addresses this question in the brilliantly argued parts two and three of the book. He uses the life of Plenty Coups as well as other Crow traditions to outline the ethics of living on the horizon. In particular, he focuses on two childhood dreams of Plenty Coups, which the Crow elders collectively interpreted as a vision of the imminent end of Crow society. They also advised Plenty Coups to develop his mind alongside physical strength in order to adapt to changing circumstances. With the benefit of hindsight, Lear believes that these formative experiences influenced Plenty Coups' psychological structure, shaping the healthy imagination at the root of his response to cultural devastation. Rather than be deranged (cf. Amitava Ghosh) at the loss of meaning, Plenty Coups' ethics reflected his radical hope for the emergence of something good at the end of the horizon. While the good was by no means guaranteed, Lear argues that radical hope was the source of Plenty Coups' courageous decision of aligning Crows with the US military aiding the latter's westward expansions thereby preserving a majority of Crow lands. Adapting to life on a reservation, Plenty Coups also counseled the younger Crows to learn the white man’s ways (cf. Audre Lorde) in order to economically and legally consolidate their position.

[Pepe Martínez · Rating 5 out of 5]

Como lo dice su título, el libro hace reflexionar y tomar posición ante los retos del cambio acelerado que hoy estamos viviendo. Lo hace a partir de la mirada de la devastación cultural que vivieron los indios americanos, en particular los Crow. Hace una crítica al optimismo simple, y nos habla de la confianza, la apertura a escuchar y el coraje. El libro genera esperanza que es posible tomar posición y vivir la vida con convicciones, en tiempos en que las antiguas categorías ya no nos orientan. Nos señala que tener coraje, es saber que nos avergüenza y que nos genera temor, es contar con un propósito hacia el cuál caminar, a su vez está sintonizada con la situación en la que se encuentra, y es en la experiencia donde encuentra los fundamentos de sus juicios, el coraje implica estar en riesgo, estar dispuesto a tener pérdidas, y por último entender que el coraje no es lo mismo que el optimismo. El coraje supone contar convicciones, las que están vivas en la comunidad. El coraje es la capacidad para vivir bien con los riesgos propios de la existencia humana, la persona que cultiva esta virtud (el coraje)es maestra en vivir la vida comprometida con otros, de manera de estar en el mundo con nuestras propias debilidades y vulnerabilidades. @ooh

[Jesse Hayden · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a fascinating read! This book is my favorite kind of case study: multidisciplinary, culturally informed, and vividly written. Combining historical and anthropological data with philosophical and psychological analysis, Lear’s examination of the Crow tribe ponders how a people group might recover and move forward from a cultural collapse. The solution that he explores - “radical hope” - is exemplified in the remarkable actions of the last Crow chief, Plenty Coups, as well as his followers.

I do wish that Lear’s analysis was more connected with modern events, and I kept wishing he would generalize more from his findings or recommend how modern people might embody radical hope. Some of his argumentation was also a bit tricky to follow for this amateur philosopher. Yet it’s a stirring account of optimism in grim circumstances, one that I’ll be thinking about for a long time. I wasn’t expecting Plenty Coup’s struggle to resonate so deeply with my experience of leaving religion - that bewildering and terrifying dissolution of categories for making sense of the world. If you’re looking for something to read during this National American Indian Heritage Month, I heartily recommend this book.

Shout-out to Ethan Zimmerman for the great recommendation!

[Marie · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a book mining the effects of cultural devastation from the point of view of one Native American Indian tribe - the Crow of Montana. It is an interesting premise, and well thought through, but should have been just a long New Yorker type article. The author is very repetitive, and as a philosphy professor, the book is kind of hybrid between accessible by lay audiences and being academic. My book group got a good 1 and half discussion out of it though - better read if discussed with others.

[Joshua moses · Rating 5 out of 5]

You could live on this book alone I think.

[Alexander · Rating 4 out of 5]

There’s a story that Jonathan Lear tells here about the young Crow medicine man, Wraps His Tail. It’s a story incidental to the book, one mobilised in the course of narrating the life of his preferred protagonist, Plenty Coups, who, in every way, is the hero of Radical Hope. Wraps His Tail is not the hero of Radical Hope. Unlike Plenty Coups, the Crow chief who helped lead his people through the devastation of reservation life imposed upon them by the American government, Wraps His Tail had the temerity — to rebel. For it he was killed as he surrendered, shot in the head by Fire Bear, an Indian police officer. Of this, Lear writes that from the perspective of Plenty Coups’ ‘commitment to the future’, Wraps His Tail’s actions weren’t “just futile”; they were also “a nostalgic evasion”.

Against this nostalgic evasion does Lear pitch his ‘radical hope’: the idea that, despite the falling away of an entire life-world - the holocaust of bison, the confiscation of a continent - one might yet still come out on the other side with an ability to flourish, recomposed in a world after the end of the world. It’s a beatific vision, one studded with promise, offered as a model of how one is to practice ‘ethics in the face of cultural devastation’. For Lear, Plenty Coups lead a “complete life” (Aristotle), one in which he was able to “unify it across discontinuity”, and, at the end of that life, capable of "seeing it as having unity and purpose”.

Yet the serene triumphalism of Lear’s reading is oddly marred by the statement that Lear picks out as motivating his entire book from start to finish. It comes from Plenty Coups himself, who, in relating his life story to his biographer, lamented that “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”. To hear Lear tell it however, not only did plenty of things in fact happen, but these happenings allowed for a continuity and a completeness that straddled the time both before and after White settlement, itself reconfigured into something like an opportunity to reestablish a life-world, an opportunity which Wraps His Tail did not seize, but which Plenty Coups did.

Told like this, what counts as ‘cultural devastation’ for Lear is almost something like an accident. It happens, however it does, and the therapeutic question is simply: how is one to face up to it so as to live the good life now? It's in this regard that the recalcitrant actions of Wraps His Tail come off as 'futile nostalgia', unable to meet the moment because unable to refigure his life in the face of devastation. Yet what remains unasked in this picture is, I think, the question once posed by Theodor Adorno, which has never ceased haunt all ethical inquiry since: can one lead a good life in a bad life? To this, I think Lear has nothing to say. Circumstances such as they are, one either finds a way to live a good life, or one fails to do so.

At no point is the question raised as to whether the good life is, at the same time, a just life. While Lear's ethical sensibilities run deep and, in truth, brightly illuminate some of the most distinctively human parts of ourselves - Radical Hope is, as the title implies, replete with accounts of dreams, fantasies, imaginings, courage, eroticism and desire - at no point is any sense of justified recrimination against a state that imposed Indian misery given its due. Ensconced in the revivifying but overwhelming light of ethics, politics as a legitimate arena of human action is snuffed out, an obstacle to the good life at best, a threat to it at worst. Where the US government is mentioned, it is as if a natural force, a sometimes unfortunate presence to which any engagement is exhausted by legal petition.

For instance, while a passing sentence makes mention of the 'alcoholism and drug abuse that plagues the reservations [in which] unemployment and poverty play crucial roles', the accent is placed instead on 'finding ideals worthy of internalizing' - ideals espoused and lived by Plenty Coups. While the latter surely has its place, what Lear doesn't acknowledge, in fact actively excludes from acknowledging, is any sense that the 'incompleteness' of a life might have to do with those who actively maintain such lacks. In this neutralization of politics, those who are ethically worthy are simply those who survive devastation the best. An ethics for victors and their collaborators. From this angle, what Lear calls radical hope, looks not unlike a radical resignation if not - forgive me - a radical cope.

--

One last, positive, thing. If the ethics of radical hope leaves much to be desired, Lear, for all that, is a diagnostician of devastation of the first order. His account of loss that makes up the first half of the book - the loss to which radical hope is a response - is a genuinely moving and soul shattering piece of writing. I read, with almost trembling hands, the moment recounted here where Wraps His Tail returned from a raid on an enemy camp, in the full expectation of celebrating victory with his tribe, only to be met with the charges of disgrace and shame.

It was an inversion of values that left him bewildered and unmoored: "They call us 'thieves' ... they, the palefaces, who make treaties only to break them, who have stolen our buffalo and our land, they call us 'thieves'". In the face of genocides that remain ongoing today - Palestine and Sudan - where every moral response is met as though as slight to all that holds the sky in place, it is in the incomprehension of Wraps His Tail - and not in the noble acquiescence of Plenty Coups - that we can find the image that is most equal to our time. I only hope - a more radical hope than is espoused in this book - that we meet a better fate.

--

One even laster, kinda neutral, thing. It's probably not irrelevant that Lear was a practicing psychoanalyst. Radical Hope reads as if having put a culture on the couch, one in deep distress and in a need of a cure, so much so that a not insignificant part of the book is given over to an analysis of Plenty Coups' dreams! To that degree it also speaks perhaps to the limits of psychoanalysis when pressed into a social or cultural role. Concerned, primarily, with what is possible in the clinic, to take it out of the clinic without at the same time working to alter the conditions of society, leaves one with what are impoverished tools for a job it was never designed to handle.

Having read Lear's Happiness book (which is fantastic, by the way), it's interesting to note a kind of isomorphism between the two: where Happiness diagnosed crises of meaning as opportunities for clinical breakthroughs, Radical Hope does something very similar at the level of (a) culture. Only, here it doesn't work, at least not without lapsing over into a conservatism as a result of its inability - or unwillingness - to ask for change not just at the level of the analysand and their unconscious, but of the very world they are embedded in. This isn't a call to write-off the use of psychoanalysis in, or for, politics entirely, but perhaps for its more incautious deployments, of which this is one.

[Oliver Mack · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enjoyable balance between ethical philosophy and historical insight into the Crow and Sioux tribes. Plenty Coups is truly a remarkable person and leader, who deserves to be remembered in high esteem. Despite the traditional Crow conception of a good life being utterly destroyed, Plenty Coups’ leadership and inspiration of radical hope in the face of unfathomable change gave the Crow the best chance at collective flourishing. In the face of complete societal collapse, Lear’s conception of radical hope provides a creative attempt of what one ought to do, when the institutions in which one might act completely dismantle. Plenty Coups is also a ruthless dude who starved himself in the mountains and cut off part of his finger in order to achieve a vision which would guide him throughout his entire life. Pretty kewl.

[Emmy · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The world is a place in which such a storm can occur. It is possible for humans to be overwhelmed in this way, but the fundamental goodness of the world is secure."

[Martin Rowe · Rating 5 out of 5]

This beautiful and resonant book struck many chords with me. Not only does it demand that you, the reader, reflect on the lessons that we will all have to learn as we move deeper into a century that will very likely ask us to cope with changes caused by a warming planet as devastating and unforeseeable as those that affected Plenty Coups and the Crow nation, but it has made me want to go back and examine my connections to people I've known—particularly Wangari Maathai (about whom I wrote in THE ELEPHANTS IN THE ROOM)—to see if, in some ways, she wasn't the Plenty Coups for her own people.

The author's deep engagement with the Crow people, the boldness of his argument and yet the modesty of his presentation, and fundamentally the kinds of claims that he does NOT make as much as those he does, render RADICAL HOPE a refreshingly open, readable, and stirring book of moral philosophy. If the book feels repetitious, it's mainly because the author wants to be absolutely clear that his central concern is how the experience of cultural devastation MAY have felt to the Crow, and HOW Plenty Coups interpreted the dream presented to him for the future of his people—not WHAT happened or whether Plenty Coups was correct to interpret the dream in the way he did. Some might feel this to be an overly narrow view, and yet I found it to be profoundly persuasive and frankly moving and revelatory: for, Lear suggests, all that may remain to us in the future is the power of the imagination to keep open options in the face of catastrophe and a wholly different world in which everything we know no longer contains meaning. Simply a wonderful book that I cannot recommend highly enough.

[Undrakh · Rating 3 out of 5]

What would you do if everything you believe and your nation aspire to is gone? The wall that used to protect your culture, tradition, and ethics has fallen down. You and your people are now standing against the unknown world with full of threats and enormous changes. Can everyone be enough courageous to confront such disaster? Plenty Coups, last great chief of Crow nation, managed to get his tribe go through the hardest period of their entire history. In Radical Hope, Jonathan Lear explains how Plenty Coups' acts were wise and full of courage thus enabling the tribe to have a chance to thrive again.

From now, I'll see two animals differently than I did before. First one is buffalo. That fluffy, hairy, and clumsy looking animal had much more value and meaning to Native Americans' lives than any of us can imagine. When the last buffalo went away, Crow's nomadic life following the buffalo herd was gone too. Another animal is Chikadee, a small bird who listens to the all, stay quiet, and makes the wisest decision, which was Plenty Coups' strategy for the awaiting future.

Every culture has values, ideals, honor system, and internal organization. Even though I know nothing about the academic/theoretical points of view, I could feel what factors are crucial to keep the culture alive! I'm gonna write a report for the history class and add to my review. So the review for the time being ends here :l I think it would have been more interesting if i had some fundamental knowledge about Crow Tribe or ethical issues.

[Peter Landau · Rating 4 out of 5]

What do you do when your culture no longer exists? That happens to me every day. As I grow older my life feels less relevant to the culture writ large. I’m pushed into a dead end, watching everyone move on without me. Boohoo. But what about if everything I knew, everything everyone knows, was taken away. Could you live with that? How would you live in a world in which has been erased, all you have learned to survive is irrelevant? In RADICAL HOPE: ETHICS IN THE FACE OF CULTURAL DEVASTATION, Jonathan Lear explores this unfathomable event, which in fact happened to Plenty Coups, chief of the Crow tribe. Through what Lear calls radical hope, the Crow chief found a path through the impossible that wasn’t blind optimism but an active embrace of the unknown. It’s a lesson we can all learn from.

[Noah · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's something about this book that reminds me of a podcast -- it goes into depth on a single person's story, explores their context and what followed them, and then explores larger ethical, spiritual, and epistemological implications of that story. As a fascinating book to just read, it offers a fascinating story followed by really thought-provoking consideration of not just how we make meaning in the world, but how we are able to make meaning (and later understand it).

[Christine · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this to be a super important book to read and think about, as I think humanity is going to need to be able to move forward through some very difficult times to come, including perhaps an entire re-envisioning of what constitutes a life well lived. I liked the presented concept, via a specific past case study, of being able to commit to the hope that something good can/will emerge, even if it transcends our present limited and vulnerable attempts to understand it.

[Julie · Rating 1 out of 5]

Repetitive, meandering, wordy, self indulgent, dull.... it boggles the mind that anyone gave this book a great rating. Friends of the author? If Lear had written a 2 page magazine article about this subject, I'd have enjoyed it. There is zero reason to blather on for 154 pages when 2 would have gotten the idea across.

[LVD · Rating 3 out of 5]

what is our buffalo?
OIL.
CAPITALISM.
what would our culture be like without them?

[Aurora Jablon]

In the specific circumstance of the Crow tribe, Lear explores the boundary of hope and continuity in a poignant, psychologically and philosophically analytical way. It was extremely thorough in explaining and analyzing the plight the Crow faced regarding the White man, and juxtaposed Sitting Bull and Plenty Coups polemically in their confrontation with White encroachment. What did courage mean, then, when social mores and foundations, having been so deeply uprooted, became obsolete? What could pursuing "the good life" mean to them, at that moment, when their very concept of success and purpose was no longer an option? How does one keep living from that point on? I believe Lear means to contend that the best means for moving forward were offered by Plenty Coups, that he displayed a courage following the Crow tradition, that the radical hope, indeed radical because of its stability in such tremulous, uncertain times, he believed in, ultimately provided the best outcome for the Crow tribe, unlike Sitting Bill and the Sioux.

[Kyle van Oosterum · Rating 3 out of 5]

While this book does make use of philosophy, psychoanalysis, anthropology and much more (studies of knowledge that I find fascinating), it is far too bogged down in the details of its primary case study: the cultural devastation of the Crow Native American tribes. I would have enjoyed this book a lot more if its titular concept "radical hope" - defined as 'hope that is directed toward a future goodness that transcends the current ability to understand what it is" - was explored without the allusions to repetitive historical and anecdotal evidence. That being said, if you find yourself interested in every detail concerning the lives of Plenty Coup and the Crow people then this will certainly be the work for you because it is highly thorough, analytical and insightful. Personally, I would have preferred to explore the subject of 'ethics in the face of cultural devastation' with a touch more abstraction and a touch less about laying down 'coup sticks'.

[معتصم الهقاص · Rating 4 out of 5]

كتاب صغير، وكثيف. لغته سهلة وقريبة التناول. بقي لي منه الثلث الأخير تركته دون قراءة.

يقول لنا لير أن بأمكان الأمل الجذري، أو الصادم، أن يولد بعد أن ينهار كلّ شيء. ضرب لذلك مثلا في قصة الزعيم الأمريكي/ الهندي "بلنتي كوب" الذي عقد اتفاقيات مع الرجل الأبيض وبموجب هذه الاتفاقيات تنتهي حياة الصيد، وتنتهي الحروب المستعرة بين قبيلة " بلنتي كوب" والقبائل الأخرى، وطقوس الاحتفال والنصر كلها تصير إلى زوال.

بعد هذا قال كوب كلمته التي علق عليها لير طويل وهي "بعد هذا، لم يحدث شيء" أي، بعد أن توقفت هذه الطقوس توقف التاريخ. ثم يشرح لير هذه العبارة بقوله أن كوب، ومن وراءه القبيلة، كلنت تستمد المعنى، معنى الحياة، من حياة الصيد وصيد الجواميس وغيره، وبعد أن توقفت توقف كل شيء. والآن على القبيلة أن تعيش في العالم الجديد الذي تسيطر عليه الدولة، وهي أمر لم يفهمه كوب ولا القبيلة.

والمؤلف استعان كثيرا بهايدغر وفرويد، كي يفسر بهما ما حدث. ولقد عقدنا درسا حول هذه الكتاب وهالني أن أحدا من الحضور-وكلهم غربيين- لم يتطرق لها يعاني من الشعب السوري، أو الليبي، أو اليمني، أو غريه. ويشير لها باعتباره مثالا على الأمل الجذري. ثم أنني كتبت مقالا عنه وقلت أن حياة اللاجئ تمثل هذا الأمل الجذري أكبر تمثيل.

[Erik Rostad · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible book that ties together so well. It's a look into what to do when threatened with cultural collapse by analyzing what Chief Plenty Coup of the Crow Indian Tribe did in the late 1800s. It's a look into how virtues like courage can be maintained in completely different cultural contexts. It also contrasts the Crow with other tribes like the Sioux and how their leaders approached the coming onslaught. A short and fascinating book that I'll be thinking about for a while.

[Samantha Loeper · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting to learn about how the Crow dealt with reservations compared to the Sioux. Plenty Coups was a dawg fr