Jonathan Lear
It at least seems possible that we can look on others from a third-person perspective and conclude that their conditions of living—their level of poverty, malnutrition, or sanitation, their being subjected to torture or slavery—are such that their basic dignity as a human being is being violated. The thought seems to be available that they have a right to better treatment. Here the methods of measurement perfected in the social sciences can play an invaluable role, both in giving us an accurate sense of what these conditions of deprivation consist in and by helping us to see what forms of response make a measurable difference. We may thereby be able to formulate an adequate social policy.
But this kind of response depends on an agreed upon understanding of what a human rights violation is, and that gives rise to three problems. What if there is little agreement about what human dignity consists in? Or what if there is agreement, but that agreement is significantly mistaken? Or what if there is agreement and the agreement focuses on a worthy goal, but there is nevertheless a disconnect between what people take themselves to be agreeing on and how they actually live their lives? It seems to me that in each of these cases, an engagement with the humanities can make a difference. I want to say a few words about what kind of difference this might be, and I want to focus on the third possibility, in which a gap has opened up between how we view ourselves as living and how we are living. This is a peculiar form of insensitivity, one in which our very awareness of and objection to an injustice can help to sustain the injustice.
In the tradition of the humanities, I would like to tell you a particular story. In the fall of 1987, Peter Brooks was director of the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale and I was a fellow there. There were regular Friday lunches in which fellows would present works in progress, and one week William Cronon gave a talk about how to write a history of the West, one in which the land and environment would foreground the narrative, with the travails of humans in the background. In passing he quoted Chief Plenty Coups, the last great chief of the Crow tribe, on life after the move onto the reservation: “After the buffalo went away, the hearts of my people fell to the ground and we could not lift them up again. After this, nothing happened.” I was struck by the power of those words, but that was it. The lunch ended after a discussion.
About fifteen years later, I was taking a familiar walk along Lake Michigan, letting my mind wander, and those words of Plenty Coups came back to me. It was a startling experience because I was not particularly thinking of anything. But it was not just that these words came from out of the blue. There was something special about the manner of their presentation: as though some kind of response was called for. I had no idea what that response might be—that was enigmatic—but I did have a sense that these words had found a target, and in this case the target was me. This vulnerability to being struck by the words of another is, I think, a moment of aesthetic receptivity, and it at least has the potential for disrupting us out of familiar routines.
I bought Plenty Coups’s biography and discovered that these words only came in an appendix. The book is in the “as-told-to” genre. The author, Frank Linderman, a white man who lived in Montana as a hunter and trapper, had become Plenty Coups’s friend.1 The book is taken up with Plenty Coups’s stories of growing up in the traditional ways, battles against the Sioux, and hunting and nomadic life. But in the appendix, Linderman says that he could not get Plenty Coups to talk about life after the Crow moved onto the reservation. It is only when repeatedly pressed that Plenty Coups uttered those haunting words. As a psychoanalyst, I am fascinated by speech that does not want to be spoken. But I am not here interested in analyzing Plenty Coups’s reluctance; rather, I am trying to describe a process of crystallization that occurred in me. I had no particular interest in writing a book about Plenty Coups, but I did want to respond to him somehow.
This is how my book Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation was born.2 I mostly want to tell you about what happened after the book was published, but there is something about the peculiarly humanistic engagement with Plenty Coups’s words that made the aftermath possible. If I were in the social sciences, I would be under pressure to determine what actually happened, to record, analyze, and transmit the available data. But I wanted to write an essay on what Plenty Coups might have meant by his words. Might he have been standing witness to the collapse of temporality? And, if so, what would that witnessing consist of? In effect, I wanted to make an imaginative possibility robust. This does not mean one can just make things up. I wanted my investigation of Plenty Coups to be constrained by all known facts about him, about Crow life, about the life of the Plains Indians, and about the history of the West in that period. So I immersed myself for several years in Native American studies and histories of the West; I made visits up to the Crow reservation and talked to whomever would talk to me; I hiked through the land Plenty Coups described, into the Crazy Mountains where he had his vision, and went to the sites of his battles. Yet I never thought of myself as getting beyond what he might have meant. (And, of course, as Kierkegaard taught us, with a knight of faith or a knight of infinite resignation we could never know on the basis of empirically available evidence whether we were in the presence of one.) The important point is this: If one can succeed in making an imaginative possibility robust, it can have a profound effect on how we live our lives. For our lives are shaped not just by what we take to be the case, but also by our sense of what is possible. Once an imaginative possibility is opened up, there is room for it to become a practical necessity.
After Radical Hope was published—and this must be the postmodern event in my life—I was invited up to the Crow reservation to discuss it. The Crow themselves were reading the book and wanted to talk about it. I was to address the assembled faculty, deans, and students of Little Big Horn College. That I came from a humanities background was crucial to making this occasion a success. I told them, first, that I was no expert on Plenty Coups and could do no more than share with them a sense of what he might have meant and why that might matter, not just to the Crow but to all of us. Second, I said that I was not there in any way to study them. You will not be surprised to learn that the Crow are both weary and wary of being studied.
The conversation that began that day continues. A number of tribal elders invited me to come back and keep talking with them. So I have been going back about four times a year, and we spend the day around a seminar table or hiking into the mountains, talking about the problems they face. My Crow friends also visit me in Chicago. One of my Crow friends had a dream in which our discussion group was given a name, Medicine Dream, so we are Medicine Dream. And we became a “we” in conversations that began in, and have been sustained by, our shared responses to Plenty Coups’s words. Two of the members have adopted me into their family as their brother, so I now have an extended family among the Crow. We talk, for instance, about the meaning of water: how water is sacred to them, how the natural springs are threatened by mining projects, how difficult it is to pass on the sacred meaning of water to the younger generation. One August, my family and I lived up in the Wolf Mountains, and my Crow friends would stop by unannounced for a meal and a chat.
In the course of these conversations and developing relationships, my understanding of the wrong the Crow have suffered has shifted. So has my sense of how I am implicated. When I began my work, I thought that the Crow had faced a catastrophic trauma and were now living in its historical aftermath. I now think the trauma persists in the present. Consider, for example, the question “What does it any longer mean to be Crow?” Even from the perspective of a sympathetic outsider, it is so easy to hear this question in the register of the superego. We hear it as asking how the Crow in the present reservation period could possibly live up to the traditional ideals of being Crow. It sounds like a problem of belatedness. But in conversation with my Crow friends, I have come to hear the question differently. The question is at the very center of their lives, and it is not being asked in a superego voice. Rather, it is in the register of irony—an utterly earnest irony about how to be. It expresses a fundamental anxiety that marks their lives. Theirs is not a concern that they fall short of a now impossible ideal; it is a concern that there is no longer an ideal to fall short of. And it is not at all a concern about being too late; it rather expresses confusion about what it means to be in the present. The psychoanalytic model of intergenerational transmission of trauma is appropriate. Six generations after the catastrophe, the trauma is still alive in the present, inflicting psychic and cultural harm on present generations.
I do not know how I could have come to see this without the interpretive approaches that are a hallmark of the humanities and the human relations that have grown out of shared interpretive responses. Obviously, when the formal and final causes of a culture are destroyed—and I do think one needs these Aristotelian categories to understand what happened—one should not be surprised that there are myriad manifestations that can be measured: for instance, poverty, failure to thrive in educational institutions, alcoholism, and methamphetamine addiction. This can encourage the illusion that, in this catalogue of deprivations and harms, nothing is missing. But what is missing from the list is that condition in virtue of which these measurable harms are showing up. This is the destruction of the formal and final cause of Crow life. It is both crucial and incredibly tricky to capture this harm—the one that can never show up on a list of measurable harms but is somehow explanatory of the fact that there is such a list.
It is crucial because unless one can somehow grasp the loss, there is no way to mourn it, nor is there a way to craft an appropriate response. One can keep trying to address manifestations of the loss—for example, trying to improve reading skills in school—but the loss itself persists. And it is tricky because although there has been a trauma to the culture, there is no one-to-one relation between that trauma and any psychological trauma to the individual bearers of the culture. One cannot make direct inferences about the psychological states of the individuals. Bearers of a culture may react in all sorts of ways to a traumatic blow to their culture: Some may abandon the culture and try to adopt the dominant one; others may insist on the traditional ways in spite of the fact that they have become impossible; others may have large families, while others give up on family; some may get depressed, some anxious, and some may try to act as though nothing has happened.
Yet the loss must necessarily show up somehow psychologically. This is because a form of life is significantly constituted by the actions of the participants, and these actions are necessarily psychologically represented. This is one exemplification of the basic truth that, in general, people can say what they are doing. So if there is a breakdown in the doings of the culture, there must correlatively be a breakdown in the practical understanding of the participants. At this level, it is the language of practical reason, rather than psychological diagnosis, that seems most applicable. If there is a destruction of the formal and final cause of a culture, there must necessarily be a breakdown in the practical self-understanding of the participants.
In a funny way, I have been slowly working my way backward through Plenty Coups’s utterance. Radical Hope was about Plenty Coups’s claim, “After this, nothing happened,” but now with my Crow friends I am focused on “the hearts of my people fell to the ground and they could not lift them up again.” This is not just metaphor, and it is not simply a psychological description of personal heartache; it is an attempt to communicate a practical harm that has befallen them: the inability to lift their hearts up again. This is, as I now understand it, an inability to commit to a formal and final cause because there is none that presents itself as a heart-lifting option.
I do not know whether this story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. But I shall conclude with a vignette. At the end of Radical Hope, I talk about the need for a new generation of Crow poets. These words resonated with a young Crow poet and fiction writer, who ended up applying and being admitted to the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. He has been studying with us for the past few years and, indeed, will begin his Fundamentals Examination shortly. Scott is the grown son of one of the members of Medicine Dream, and he has himself become a member. He is now a resident head of one of our undergraduate colleges. He and Mark Payne, a classicist who is also a colleague in the Committee and someone deeply interested in Native American affairs, and I have become a Chicago-offshoot of Medicine Dream. Mark is an amazing linguist, and he and Scott are learning Crow on the University of Chicago campus. Together with our Crow friends and family on the reservation, we have unearthed over a thousand pages of unpublished manuscripts from the basements of the Field Museum in Chicago and the Museum of the American Indian in Washington. They were written by curators and anthropologists who visited the Crow at the beginning of the reservation period. Their aim was to purchase artifacts for collections, but they used the occasion to record extensive oral histories about contemporary life on the reservation, memories of the pre-reservation period, and accounts of the Crow approach to the sacred. The three of us have been meeting weekly these past two years to read through these manuscripts line by line, as one might interpret an ancient text. Scott is able to read about his own ancestors and the ancestors of his friends in these unpublished texts, and he can think about these century-old efforts of members of the dominant culture to come to grips with the transformation in the lives of his own people. We are bringing this all back to Medicine Dream for further discussions on the reservation. This is a collaborative effort in which the Crow are coming to say for themselves what this means. Where all this is ultimately going I cannot say. Perhaps it will peter out, or perhaps Scott will find other things to do that have nothing to do with being Crow or being an Indian. I hope he finds ways to flourish, and I have no particular views about what they should be.
But I have become convinced that if there is someday to be an appropriate response to the harms inflicted upon the Crow by the dominant culture, it will not just be in the dimension of righting measurable wrongs, but in a poetic response that not only reinvigorates Crow imagination but also manages to strike a chord in the souls of we members of the dominant culture. We all know that American history is stained by the appalling treatment of indigenous peoples, but there is a serious question as to how much the familiarity of that knowledge induces its own lethargy. Certainly, I can say in my own case, before I was snared by Plenty Coups’s words, I thought I understood at least some of the history and plight of Native Americans. I now think that that purported understanding functioned in me as the basis for a complacency I did not recognize as such. We need the poetic words of another to wake us up. Obviously, it is not easy to say what this consists of. We are all familiar with examples of advocacy fiction that leave us cold. Still, we also know that there can be occasions in which we are struck, confronted, and implicated by the words of another in ways that both draw us out of ourselves and toward our own humanity and the humanity of others. This seems to me one way in which the distinctive voice of the humanities can play a crucial role in helping us come to appreciate basic violations of human rights.