More Radical Hope

“I think there is an unspoken subtext in our national political culture right now. In fact I think it's a subtext to our society. I think that a lot of people are carrying around in their heads, unarticulated and even in some cases unnoticed, a sense that the wheels are coming off the trolley and the trolley off the tracks. That in some deep and fundamental way things have broken down and can't be fixed, or won't be fixed any time soon. That our pollsters are preoccupied with ‘right track’ and ‘wrong track’ but missing the number of people who think the answer to ‘How are things going in America?’ is ‘Off the tracks and hurtling forward, toward an unknown destination.’”
Peggy Noonan, Wall Street Journal, October 27, 2005

“We live at a time of a heightened sense that civilizations are themselves vulnerable. Events around the world—terrorist attacks, violent social upheavals, and even natural catastrophes—have left us with an uncanny sense of menace. We seem to be aware of a shared vulnerability that we cannot quite name. I suspect that this feeling has provoked the widespread intolerance that we see around us today—from all points on the political spectrum. It is as though, without our insistence that our outlook is correct, the outlook itself might collapse. Perhaps if we could give a name to our shared sense of vulnerability, we could find better ways to live with it.”
Jonathan Lear, Chapter 1 of Radical Hope

Some of us may be relieved by the results of med-term elections in the US, but only mildly relieved. The sense of vulnerability is still with us, and will probably last the rest of our lives, as we face a world in which almost none of our ideas about how to live remain relevant.

This is the kind of world in which Native Americans found themselves in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Not only their traditions, but very deep underlying assumptions about good and evil were challenged, often overthrown, by radically altered circumstances.

In Radical Hope, Lear illustrates the cultural genius with which one tribe, the Crow nation, approached an unknowable but inescapable future. Chief among their resources was the belief that there is a higher order of reality from which guidance may be obtained. Through dreams, the Crow received instructions that helped them to transcend or, more accurately, transmute their traditional stories, evolving narratives more useful in an unrecognizably altered reality.

Analysis, reason, common sense, organization, radical action: these alone will not prepare us for our possible futures. Only the alchemy of imagination—envisioning in new ways—will ultimately suffice.