Radical Hope in Cultural Loss

April 11, 2007

This morning I was teaching the biblical book of Lamentations for my Intro to Religious Studies class. I love this little book.. which I think gets neglected because it is tucked into an out of the way place in the Bible.. sandwiched between two big books: Jeremiah and Ezekiel. The book of Lamentations is composed of a series of five poems that are laments for the destruction of Jerusalem at the hands of the Babylonians in 586 BC. It offers a narrative to explain these events: Israel has sinned, God is angry and brought judgment, there remains a hope. This final theme of hope is most purely expressed by the great lines (which I can't read without humming the chorus): "The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end. They are new every morning.." When you reflect upon the fact that the Jewish people survived this captivity as a coherent group of people.. with traditions preserved.. that speaks highly of the social value of religious narratives.

This morning before class, serendipitously, I read a review by Charles Taylor in the most recent New York Review of Books (April 26, 2007). The review was an erie echo of Lamentations. It examines a work about the fate of the Crow tribe as they were settled within a reservation. The leader of the Crow is named Plenty Coups (pictured above). His name comes from the Crow practice of marking boundaries by throwing down a stake.. The warrior who successfully defends such a position has won a "coup". Having explained a cultural detail like this it becomes evident why life on a reservation will not be easy: it is cognitively impossible. It is not just the case that warriors have to settle down and hunt less.. rather in settling down nothing about their values system makes sense. Taylor writes:

A culture's disappearing means that a people's situation is so changed that the actions that had crucial significance are no longer possible in that radical sense. It is not just that you may be forbidden to try them and may be severely punished for attempting to do so; but worse, you can no longer even try them. You can't draw lines or die while trying to defend them. You find yourself in a circumstance where, as Lear puts it, "the very acts themselves have ceased to make sense."

Here I would draw a parallel between the sack of Jerusalem described in Lamentations and the forced settling of the Crow on a reservation. Both cases mark a cultural disaster which could easily have marked the end of a people. Where the Crow example is helpful is that it acknowledges that cultures can be "sacked" cognitively.. have their thought worlds wiped out.

Taylor (and Jonathan Lear in the book under review) portray how the Crow find an escape from this threat of cultural death. The chief Plenty Coups received a revelation in a dream:

The dream told the Crow that the old standards of courage and shame were going to lost their validity. And yet they would not be left completely adrift in a world without meaning and direction; new standards would emerge if they learned to watch and observe like the Chickadee.

This sounds remarkable like Lamentations:

The LORD is good to those who wait for him, to the soul that seeks him.

It is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the LORD.

It is good for one to bear the yoke in youth,

to sit alone in silence when the Lord has imposed it... [4.25-28]

Perhaps it is possible to think of that waiting and silence as a cultural (and personal) mechanism.. to wait and consider and ponder the ways to move forward in the midst of devastation. (It also reminds me of Quaker meetings where the silence offers space to find internal direction.)

At the conclusion of his review Taylor moves from the specific example of the Crow to a broader discussion of cultural destruction as a component of globalization. We understand genocide.. but we don't so easily understand the way our spreading way of life eliminates.. sacks.. other ways of life. Taylor sees in the Crow a model for the way cultures can perpetuate themselves and in a deep sense survive.

The hope comes from Lear's account of Crow society: that human beings can find the resources to come back from a virtual dead end, and invent a new way of life in some creative continuity with the one that has been condemned, as the Crow did in embracing settled agriculture.

And one can add to this the remarkable return from a dead end as made by the Israelites.. who re-invented their religion (the synagogue system was begun in the exile).

Where I perhaps differ from Taylor is with his seemingly sunny faith that these cultural efforts always result in something positive.. something we would want to praise. My sense of fundamentalisms is that they are also a way to "come back from the virtual dead".. redefining traditional words to fit a totally changed context. But that is a process which we watch with fear.. even if it does stem from a radical hope.