“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.
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5 comments:
This is a test to see if I REALLY have to sign up to Google in order to post a comment ....
Oh, that's kewl, I don't actually HAVE to sign up, but I am treated as 'anonymous', even though I identified m'self as 'other'.
Well. stay tuned, and I'll actually post a comment soon.
Tom
Yes, well, this is Blogger Beta and wierdness aboundeth. You often get false error messages, f'rinstabce---don't believe 'em.
I was about 11 years old when I was informed that I wouldn’t be going on the fishing trip. My mom was sick with a near-fatal kidney ailment, and I was needed at home. I retrieved my pole and my stuff from the back of my grandpa’s pickup and waved sadly as he and my uncle A.B., and my cousin Junior drove off to the lake over in Texas.
They found their bodies 3 days later in a capsized aluminum fishing boat. A storm had come up suddenly, as they often do in West Texas. This was before anyone ever thought of wearing life vests on fishing trips. My cousin’s body was still wired by his waist to the seat of the open boat, where my grandpa or my uncle had secured him as they tried desperately to make it back to shore. If I had gotten in the pickup truck, instead of running errands for my mom while she recovered, I’m sure I’d have been wired in right next to my cousin.
That realization was when the “uncanny sense of menace”, the sense of vulnerability, the sense of the wheels coming off first became clear to me.
My dad was a construction boomer, worked all over the Southwest. So we had moved a half-dozen times by the time I was 11, and we’d move a bunch more. I never started a fall in the same elementary school twice. I attended at least 10 elementary schools, 4 junior highs, and two high schools. The only lasting childhood friends I kept were a few from my junior and senior year of High School. “Evolving narratives”? My reality seemed by this time to be a permanently, “unrecognizably, altered reality.”
Outside the admin offices after graduating from Tank School, the Army had us line up in two lines to get our paperwork processed. We went through the building, got our orders stamped and came out the back door. That’s when we learned – too late – that if you were in the left-hand line you went to Viet Nam, the right-hand line got you to Korea or Germany. I went to Korea, and thus became one of 66 basic trainees who survived out of our training company of 470—one of the highest casualty rates ever. So, yeah, I knew my “outlook itself might collapse” -- at warp speed, long before I ever heard of the Crash, or Global Warming, or Peak Oil.
Later. My best friend -- who was one of those high school brothers from 1962 -- died from a reaction to two Sudafed tablets he took for the flu. Talk about challenging your “deep underlying assumptions of good and evil”….
From 1976 until now I seem unavoidably to lose a major body part every decade, last time in 2006 when I lost a few fairly important oxygen-starved cells in my brain due to a stroke. I suddenly found myself paralyzed, on the floor of my business’s office, where I had locked myself in on the weekend to do a little paperwork. “radically altered circumstances…”, eh?
Enough, enough. Yes, “things have broken down and can't be fixed, or won't be fixed any time soon.” For some of us, that *is* the story, that *is* the normal state of affairs. My possible futures have always been transitory, ad hoc, subject to unannounced change. I have barely understood, since I was 11 and waving for the last time at my grandpa, why anyone expected any other way.
I cling to something like Radical Hope, lived that way all my life, I guess.
“How are things going in America?”
Oh … you know … about the same. You were expecting something different?
Love,
tom
Well, Tom, you have managed to keep your feet while traversing unusually uneven terrain!
Although not, perhaps, an experience on quite the same order, a sudden and crippling illness had the same impact in my own life. The center could not hold, and the earth opened beneath my feet.
So yes, we've had some relevant practice. The difference between our personal experiential brand of hope and that about which Lear writes is one of degree, but significant degree. If I may stretch the metaphor: For us, no matter how ravaged it seemed, the earth still remained.
In some important ways, this was not true for Native American nations in the 19th century.
We may be able to imagine something of this experience. We've seen New Orleans residents, suddenly deprived of food, water, shelter, and safety, for whom outside help did not come for many many days.
What if it never came, if there simply were no outside help?
Lear writes, not about any personal sense of menace or individual resilience, but of the vulnerability of the paradigmatic framework which supports us all, however imperfectly—and what happens when the framework collapses. The vulnerability of a people, rather than of a person.
In the words of Plenty Coups, "But 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."
But the Crow did survive as a people,—transformed, but intact—and fared better than most tribes on this continent. In Lear's meditation on their history, I've encountered revelatory passages. It's possible, just possible—even though you are much older and wiser than I am— that you would find them revelatory too.
Love, Lisa
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