Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (review)

Introduction

Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation is a brief, complex, erudite, fascinating work, ultimately an attempt to explore the idea of a “moral psychology.” In Radical Hope, Lear weaves together a tapestry of ideas, crisscrossing with grace boundaries of academic and professional disciplines, engaging and sometimes dazzling his readers.

It seems almost shameful to dissect his artwork, but taking it apart is necessary in order to see clearly the value and limitations of this work for psychoanalysts. Lear presents us with a number of challenging ideas that might affect our behavior, especially outside of the consulting room. Living one’s life in the world, even in the community of psychoanalytic organizations, requires different skills of thinking and acting from those employed in the practice of clinical psychoanalysis. Living in the world involves moral values and their expression in action. Analysts tend to avoid those problems. Lear certainly does not.

The book employs the history of the destruction of the Absaroke Indian tribe (also known as the Crow) as a prototype for cultural devastation, and looks to the ensuing behavior of the Crow to show the possibility of survivors building a new way of life. The author then proceeds by imagining hypothetical states of mind that might make this kind of adaptation possible. An assumption is that, in order to achieve the resiliency needed for such transformation, one must continue to see oneself as the person one has always been and still is as a part of the culture that used to be one’s own, while adapting courageously and wisely to a transformed, unfamiliar world.

Obviously, the idea of resilience in the face of cultural devastation, of going beyond merely surviving calamity, applies much more broadly than to the reaction of American Indians to genocidal onslaught. That is the inspirational direction of the book. In the course of exploring, Lear encourages the reader to face a number of problems crucial to psychoanalysis as an ongoing profession.

For guidance in reading this review (and perhaps for reading the book as well), the reader may want to keep in mind that Radical Hope is not about any of the following: history, Crow Indian culture, the Crow chief Plenty-Coups, or Aristotle’s scheme of ethics, though the author writes extensively about each of these. The book is not about psychodynamics (though the author has to create a hypothetical psychology for Plenty-Coups), not about a psychology of morality, and not about how to teach oneself or anyone else how to survive and prosper. The book is about ideas of the “good” (from Aristotle’s [c. 350 BC] Nichomachean Ethics, Book 1), inspiration, and, eventually, the idea of god (Ab-badt-dadt-deah in the Absaroke language, and God in English-speaking Judeo-Christian tradition)—in short, it is about “moral psychology.”

Essential Background

The Crow (Absaroke), a tribe related to the Sioux, are thought to have migrated from the Missouri River area to the eastern edge of the Rocky Mountains.¹ The Crow were a nomadic warrior tribe with their own language, but no forms of writing and no agriculture except growing small patches of tobacco for ceremonial use. In about 1800, they occupied a vast area of land in what is now Wyoming, Montana, and the western parts of North and South Dakota, for their camps and hunting grounds (Hoxie 1995, 11, 31). Frederick Linderman, a trapper and hunter who lived most of his adult life near the Crow tribe, recorded an extensive autobiographical account from Chief Plenty-Coups. Linderman noted that “the country belonging to the Crows was not only beautiful, but it was the very heart of the buffalo range of the northwest . . . especially when it was untouched by white men” (1930, 26–27).

Other tribes occupied adjacent areas. There were wars over ill-defined boundaries in the service of protecting opportunities for hunting buffalo and other game animals. As white immigrants pressed into...