Radical Hope by Jonathan Lear: book review

Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (2006) is a philosophical and ethical inquiry about the changes that occur to people’s own culture over time.

I read this book after viewing the ‘Radical Hope’ art exhibition at the National Gallery in Tbilisi, Georgia, in June 2022, which was inspired by the book. The collection represented works from Polish artists over the last 30 years, as well as a few artists of central Europe.

The book ’Radical Hope’ attempts to answer three questions: 1) how to live in a world that has suddenly lost meaning, 2) whether there is still hope in such a world, and if so, 3) in what language can you try to express it.

The heroes of the book, the tribe of Ravens and Crows, experience a cultural apocalypse. ‘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 else happened,’ says Plenty Coups, the leader of the Crow Nation. He raises the issue – how should a person face the possibility that their culture might collapse?

However, the leader of the Raven Nation decides that it is better not to have fixed boundaries to defend regardless of consequences, but to adapt to the new world to survive.

Historical forces, external forces, and unpredictable forces are strong, leaving characters in the book feeling disoriented, feeling that it is ‘the end of times.’

How do people find meaning in uncertainty? What role does society play in causing the collapse of culture or in helping people come to terms with the changes as they are occurring? How can society preserve and nurture cultures?

This is an interesting book that explores individual and societal vulnerabilities, particularly in times of confinement and cultural decline. It makes us question our own place in the world.

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MARTINA NICOLLS

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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international human rights-based consultant in education, healing and wellbeing, peace and stabilization, foreign aid audits and evaluations, and the author of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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