hope and cultural devastation

Among the many outstanding teachers I had in college, Jonathan Lear was one of the most interesting and intellectually exciting  -- you never knew what he was going to say, but you knew you wanted to hear it.  He made Aristotle come alive for sophomores, in ways that readers of his Aristotle: The Desire to Understand (1988) will, well, understand.  Lear has written many books over the two decades since the Aristotle book, and I now see, thanks to a recent review by Charles Taylor in  the New York Review of Books, that he has published Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation.  Here is how the review opens: 

"Radical Hope is first of all an analysis of what is involved when a culture dies. This has been the fate of many aboriginal peoples in the last couple of centuries. Jonathan Lear takes as the main subject of his study the Crow tribe of the western US, who were more or less pressured to give up their hunting way of life and enter a reservation near the end of the nineteenth century.

"The issue is not genocide. Many of the Crow people survive; but their culture is gone. Lear takes as his basic text a statement by the tribe's great chief, Plenty Coups, describing the transition many years after in the late 1920s, near the end of his life: "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."

Lear concentrates on those last four words. What can they mean?"

And here is how the glowing review ends:

"But the fact that there are no general rules for these transitions, just as there are no rules for coming back from cultural near-death, doesn't mean that we have nothing to gain from such careful studies of particular societies as Jonathan Lear's Radical Hope. On the contrary, the wider the range of cases we are familiar with, the more likely we are to find features that may be relevant to a new case and suggest new lines of thought.

This is what makes Lear's well-written and philosophically sophisticated book so valuable. As a story of courage and moral imagination, it is very powerful and moving. But it also offers the kind of insights that would-be builders of "new world order" desperately need."

Tolle lege.