I decided some time ago to pretty much give up on writing. I am still not sure why, but it was some combination of the following: I had done my fair share of it, and the the general army of “content producers” would get along just fine without my efforts, and the feeling that the imminent arrival of artificial general intelligence will make all efforts at putting thoughts into words pointless. And I have nothing to gain by my efforts: I don’t feel any need for fame, money, or influence, and I’m okay just being an observer.
But recently my friend Dan (who is always reading light and breezy things) prompted me to read Jonathan Lear’s book, Radical Hope: ethics in the face of cultural devastation. The book is about a Crow chief named Plenty Coups who witnessed the cultural devastation of his people. The Crow had their tradition, their world, their culture, and then the whites came and the bison disappeared and, in Plenty Coups’s words, “After that, nothing happened”. Lear thinks by this he might have meant something like “After that, nothing made sense anymore”, or “After that, we didn’t have anything that could count as purpose.” When a culture is annihilated, the survivors are bereft of any frame for understanding anything. So nothing can happen anymore.
But what is remarkable is that, rather than giving in to total despair, Plenty Coups tried to encourage among his people a cultural shift that might preserve elements of Crow culture and perhaps allow for a new frame of meaning. As Lear tells it, this is an act of radical hope: just when any reasonable person would judge that his world and all value had been murdered, Plenty Coups dared to hope that there might be a path forward into a new, as yet undetermined meaningfulness.
I view what passes for contemporary American culture as cultural devastation, and not just a devastation of what had passed for American culture, but a devastation of any sort of culture. Imagine people who give up on words and images, and content themselves by wiggling their butts. They will not be able to think or say very much, under such restrictions. It’s not just that their culture has shifted; instead, they have destroyed any possibility of culture.
An act of radical hope would have us dare to hope that there may be some way forward out of this, a chance of something more than mere butt wiggling. I don’t know what this might involve, other than not giving in to despair. So I am going to try to keep writing, at least to keep alive the possibility of something meaningful. I am not by nature a hopeful person, and I can’t promise that I won’t give in to an overall despair after all. But when things get bad enough, it may be that there is a moral imperative to maintain some degree of hope. I don’t know exactly why this should be so, and even if it is so, there is no guarantee that such hope will accomplish anything. But it feels wrong not to try.
Huenemanniac 
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