Radical Fear and Christian Hope
In Radical Hope, Jonathan Lear argues that
people can hope for a good future even in the worst circumstances, in times of
“cultural devastation.” Lear builds his
case by describing the hope of Chief Plenty Coups of the Crow nation, who hoped
for a good future for his people though he knew that the coming of white people
would destroy the traditional Crow way of life.
Lear emphasizes the depth of loss experienced by the Crow people; their
most important thick concepts of the good life were turn upside down. What does it mean to be brace when
traditional expressions of courage have been turned into felonies punishable in
a white man’s court? Part of the
excellence of Lear’s book is that it helps one see how natural it would have been
for Plenty Coups and his people to despair.
Plenty Coups did not despair; he hoped for a good future, even when he
couldn’t say what that good future would be like.
Lear says
you too can hope. You don’t have to be
Crow, or Native American, or even religious.
Completely secular people can hope, even in the worst of times. His argument is simple. The world is big and people are small. The world contains much more goodness (and
more possibilities for goodness) than any person could ever experience. No matter how bad life is for my people at
this time, it remains possible that goodness will come. We can hope for a better future.
This is
“radical” hope. It reaches beyond the
thick images of a good life we have inherited or invented to look forward to a
future that will be good in ways we cannot now comprehend.
The
analytic philosopher in me wants to say: Yes, but… Notice that Lear’s argument builds on certain truths.
The world is big and people are small.
The goodness of the world is greater than we can experience.
I want to
agree with Lear that these things are true.
But will they always be true?
Suppose some small cultural group
was targeted for extermination by a powerful neighbor. Suppose the powerful nation carried out its
plan, leaving the weak group no survivors.
To complete the story, suppose all memory of the weak group was lost in
the passage of generations. (Given
hundreds of thousands of years of human prehistory, our suppositions almost
certainly describe actual facts.) What
hope would there be for a member of the weak group when she realized that she
and all her people were going to be destroyed?
“Radical” hope is transcendent in the sense that it rests
on something much bigger than a single person or people group, the goodness of
the world. Unfortunately, we might also
say that the evil of the world
transcends a single person or people group.
Who knows what terrors there might be?
In the 1940s, Enrico Fermi proposed
what has come to be known as Fermi’s paradox, when he asked the simple
question: Where is everybody? Given what
we know about the age of the universe (very old), the nature of our galaxy
(billions of stars, so billions of planets), the possibility of evolution (low
probability in a particular case but near certainty in millions of cases), and
the facts of radiation (in particular, radio waves), we should be hearing radio
programs from other planets. But we
aren’t. Where are all those radio
signals?
People have proposed lots of
possible solutions to Fermi’s paradox.
For instance, maybe intelligent life (any life capable of making
powerful radio transmitters) is much more rare than we expect. Or maybe ours is the first species in the
galaxy to reach such technological heights.
(Most scientists would laugh.)
And so on: speculation abounds.
Consider this solution. Perhaps in every case—millions of cases—in
which life evolved to master radio technology, that species also invented
nuclear weapons, much as humanity did in the 1940s. And in every case—millions of cases—the
intelligent species totally destroyed itself.
Picture our galaxy as a collection of millions of suicide planets,
sprinkled among the far more numerous uninhabitable planets.
I’m not trying to provide a
probable, or even plausible, answer to the Fermi paradox. My point is just this: The horrors of the
universe could transcend human experience in counterpoint to Lear’s doctrine of
the goodness of the world. Lear is
correct; there are grounds for radical hope.
There are also grounds for radical despair.
Christian
hope is grounded in the resurrection of Jesus.
This is a central point in N.T. Wright’s Surprised by Hope, and in one sense it merely reports a historical
fact: this is what the 1st century Christians believed. Jesus was crucified, but three days later his
tomb was empty because he rose from the dead.
Wright spends time on the empty tomb part because it guards against
morphing the resurrection into something “spiritual.” The New Testament repeatedly insists that
Jesus’ resurrection included his body.
Further, Jesus is going to return to earth as king. We pray: “May your kingdom come,” which is
close in meaning to the prayer in Revelation: “Come, Lord Jesus.”
Though
grounded in a particular event, Christian hope transcends the world in a
greater way than radical hope. Lear’s
concept is tied to the truth that the world is bigger than me and my
people. Christian hope is tied to the
truth that Jesus, the maker of the world, triumphed over sinners when he let us
kill him and rose from the dead.
