15. Hoping for …
Environmentalists
are sometimes hard pressed to say what they are hoping for. What is the “object-state” they desire? It won’t do to describe some world where
anthropogenic climate change never happened; that would be to wish for an impossible world. Hope always aims at something possible, even
if it is unlikely.
Christians
who pray for God’s kingdom to come face a similar problem, because shalom is such an all-encompassing
object-state. We pray for God’s will to
be done. But history—right up to today’s
news—shows us a world where people freely accomplish much evil. We might wish that people had acted
differently yesterday, but the past is fixed.
We cannot hope that the past be other than it was.
How can we
hope when we are not sure what future object-state is possible? What follows is an earlier essay I wrote that
may give direction.
Radical Hope
Chief
Plenty Coups of the Crow people lived his life in hope. At least, that is the thesis offered by
Jonathan Lear in Radical Hope: Ethics in
the Face of Cultural Devastation.
Plenty Coups hoped for a good future for the Crow people, a future in
which they would keep their land and maintain their cultural identify as
Crow. And he held this hope in spite of
his belief, grounded in visions he experienced as a boy, that the coming of
white people to the plains would irrevocably change the Crow way of life.
Lear says
this is “radical” hope. Radical hope
looks forward to a good future even when the very concepts one uses to describe
a good future have been robbed of their meaning. The Crow people had a rich traditional way of
life; centered on nomadism, buffalo hunting, and intermittent warfare against
rival tribes. Their traditions included
religious rites (such as the boy Plenty Coups’ vision quest), sacred dances,
celebrations of successful hunts and raids, and many other things. White domination devastated the Crow way of life; by this Lear means not just that
the Crow lost their independence but that they lost what philosophers call
“thick” concepts of the good life that the future would hold. Plenty Coups had only the “thin” concept that
the future would be good after the storm.
Lear wants to make Plenty Coups
available as an exemplar of wisdom for secular people. He recognizes, of course, that Plenty Coups’
hope was grounded in religious beliefs.
Plenty Coups and the Crow elders interpreted the boy’s visions as
messages from the Great Spirit, telling the Crow people to imitate the
Chickadee, to listen and adapt.
Nevertheless, Lear denies that religious beliefs are necessary for
radical hope. He says that the goodness
of the world is greater than finite people can possibly know. Even secular people may rationally believe
this. Therefore, Lear argues, even
secular people can hold to hope in times of cultural devastation.
Lear says nothing about which forms
of cultural devastation that might threaten his readers. What are the great anxieties of our
culture? Disastrous climate change? Terrorists who obtain and use nuclear
weapons? A failure of liberal political
regimes such that, when faced with terrorism, liberal states collapse into
tyranny? Technological horrors as
depicted in science fiction dystopias? A
21st century version of Big Brother?
Each of Lear’s readers is free to read Lear’s interpretation of Plenty
Coups in light of her own deep fears.
Radical hope is not an ostrich-like
denial that bad things may come. Lear
emphasizes the realism expressed in
Plenty Coups’ visions (and the interpretation the elders placed on them). Native American tribes had no way to prevent
the onslaught of European invaders.
White trappers would be followed by white miners, white settlers, and
white soldiers. The invaders would bring
their own definitions of justice, by which they forced the natives off their
land, killing as many as necessary to take possession. Crow leaders—to the degree they understood
the situation in terms of realpolitik—knew that Plenty Coups’ vision was
true. The storm is coming, and we cannot stop it.
Our situation is different. We do not know that any of the “storms” we
fear are unavoidable. It is possible,
perhaps even likely, that the effects of climate change will be mitigated, that
terror groups will be defeated, that liberal government will meet 21st
century challenges, and that we will gain the wisdom to rightly use new
technologies. Nevertheless, we may say: it is possible that a storm is coming. Radical hope enables one to look for a good
future no matter how bad the storm.
But radical hope is not a
Pollyannaish belief that everything will turn out fine. The good future we hope for will be different
that what we expect. Lear underscores
the depth of the disaster experienced by the Crow (and other tribes as well,
but his focus in on Plenty Coups’ people).
The Crow had to learn a revised set of moral concepts. Courage is still a virtue—but what is courage
in this new age? Courage no longer means
planting a coup stick in battle. It may
mean facing a new age resolutely, even when many traditional behaviors no
longer make sense. As Lear understands
him, Plenty Coups led his people to a new and deeper understanding of virtue
and of the good life.
If
one of our deep fears comes to pass, we will need radical hope. The concepts we use now to describe human
flourishing may need to change. Jonathan Lear never says this explicitly,
but I think it is implied by his argument.
Here is an example.
The dictator of North Korea
threatened this week that his country has intercontinental ballistic missiles
to carry his nuclear weapons to targets all over the world, from Seoul to
Washington, D.C. Does North Korea
actually have this capacity? Military
and technical experts express some doubts, but it seems clear that North Korea
aims to have such powers soon. Does Kim
Jong Un merely intend to bully his neighbors?
Would he actually use such weapons?
We may hope (a kind of extreme
hope) that Un would have sanity sufficient to restrain himself and never use
nuclear weapons. But what if Kim Jong Un
is as unstable as some news reports say he is?
Suppose North Korea fired missiles
and destroyed Seoul, Tokyo, and Seattle (to pick a random North American
city). The international response would
be immediate and overwhelming, for no political leader could tolerate letting
North Korea fire a second round of missiles.
Let us suppose that retaliation, led by the United States, was carefully
limited to strikes against North Korea.
(We may imagine that China endorsed retaliation against Kim Jong Un, so
long as China was not attacked.) But let
us further suppose that somehow, either directly as a result of attacks on
North Korea or because of sabotage by Korean fanatics, fifteen or twenty large
nuclear weapons were detonated in North Korea.
What we are imagining is a North Korea turned into an atomic wasteland.
This scenario is not the doomsday
story that haunted the cold war, the annihilation of humanity. Most of the world’s people would
survive. But our future would be changed
in unpredictable ways. Nuclear fallout
would hit South Korea, China and Japan first, but its effects would spread
worldwide. Radiation poisoning would
affect tens of millions of people. Just
as important would be the social and political fallout—but we cannot predict
what it would be. What would governments
do to try to prevent a recurrence of the Korean decimation? What “lessons” would be learned by terrorist
organizations? How would ordinary people
conceive a good life in a post-catastrophe world?
The Korea example is not the worst
“storm” that might afflict our world.
Worse things are possible.
Nevertheless, we may hope. We may
hope for a good future, even if we are not sure what a “good future” might look
like.
