Radical Hope
While reading McCarthy's The Road, we are given a glimpse into a grim post-apocalyptic future. We are thrown into a world of "what ifs," an imagined world, so horrifically foreign to us. In Jonathan Lear's Radical Hope we have an account of a similar apocalypse which has already occured for some, in the name of "progress", on this continent. This type of total destruction was inflicted upon the Crow People, the subject of Lear's book. To compare the two books, one fictional, one biographical, is not to hyperbolize the Crow's situation.
The most chilling parts of The Road are the moments of attempted self-reflection, moments when we hear the thoughts of the father ponder on his plan for the future, attempt to assess his possibilities, his intentions, his quest for meaning. The futility of this pondering is brought to light when his son interupts his thoughts to ask directly what he has planned for the future. He cannot answer. Plenty Coups, a leader of the Crow People, said 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." This quote informs most of Radical Hope. The sentence is clarified with an example: Imagine a world where someone goes into a restaurant to order a buffalo hamburger and the waiter tells the customer that this is an impossibility as the last buffalo has just been killed. This is what Taylor calls a "de facto impossibility." A different predicament would be one where we find ourselves in a future where no restaurants exist and words like "ordering" have lost any meaning they once had. Taylor calls this a "radical impossibility." The subjects in The Road and in Radical Hope both suffer the latter type of impossibility. The boy in The Road questions the Dad's terms, his memories, his language. This language no longer has any meaning, which is to say that there is no longer any way of speaking meaningfully. A culture is formed linguistically and this linguistic culture embodies a life's possibilities. When their tradition, their way of life, their language, terms, and concepts, are all altered so significantly that it is unrecognizable, that is is bereaved of meaning, the possibilities for the individuals in that culture end. The possibilities for the father have ended in The Road, just as they did for the Crow People. Their way of life has ended; in fact, their life, insofar as that concept consists of a linguistically formed identity, is over. Some fates are worse than death ... genocide would have been kinder.
However, both Plenty Coups, in Radical Hope and the father in The Road find a type of Radical Hope -- a realistic way of redefining their terms while acknowledging their past - avoiding both a romantic naive ignorance of the contemporary situation and an overzealous resignation or comfort with the current situation. Such a radical hope is virtually undefinable, but it requires a faith in something. It is this sense of faith (as scarce as it may be) that is important to both The Road and Radical Hope and which makes both books so extremely relevant to our time of ongoing cultural devastation.
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Charles Taylor's review of Radical Hope is in the newest New York Review of Books and online here.