"cultural loss"?

Y and I had an interesting discussion a propos Charles Taylor's review of a recent book by Jonathan Lear: Radical hope: ethics in the face of cultural devastation (the review is published in New York Review of Books 54 (2007): 7).

Lear describes how the culture of the indian Crow tribe was transformed when their life was restricted to the reservation. Traditional life of the Crow tribe revolved around buffalo hunting and protection (by means of warfare) of hunting territories. Not only did some practices become hard to hold on to in the life of the reservation: some practices even became unintelligible. Protection of boundaries was intelligible in warfare and buffalo hunting, but some of its traditions became unintelligible when the conditions of life were changed. Taylor explains: "It is not just that you may be forbidden to try them [the relevant cultural practices] and may be severely punished for attempting to do so; but worse, you can no longer even try them."

Lear & Taylor make a good point here, I think. What we do is intelligible in a particular setting. We are doing something when a certain description of it can be applied, it might be said (this is, however, a problematic way of putting it). People can be said to "vote" only within a particular form of political culture (I allude to Peter Winch here). We can understand the radical loss of meaning in the Crow culture in comparison to what it would mean if practices we consider important were suddenly eradicated from our lives (Taylor mentions phenomena such as computers and classical music). In the case of the Crow tribe, the meaning of life, not only the meaning of a particular practice, is transformed under the new conditions. Lear quotes Robert Lowie, an anthropologist: "War was not a concern of a class nor even of the male sex, but of the whole population, from cradle to grave."

In our culture, Taylor notes, flexibility, rather than tradition, is celebrated as a virtue. This tends to make us blind to the kind of tragedy that is involved in "cultural death". A slightly more daring claim is Lear's contention that cultural loss is not to be understood as a loss from a particular point of view (i.e. from the point of view of "the parties involved"). "It is the real loss of a point of view".

Obviously, Lear is highlighting something very important when he attends to the disastrous ways in which many forms of life have been destroyed by Western (post-)colonialism & the economic doctrine of "free trade". Lear is also right in pointing out that, historically, "Westeners" seem to have understood little about the implications of such a destruction of a form of life. Or to state it more aptly: they have not wanted to understand. Or: the destruction of a cultural practice has been seen as justified (e.g. "conversion of the heathen").

But I am in disagreement with Lear & Taylor when it comes to the idea about "cultural death" as being a loss independently of all existent perspectives. Perceiving something as a loss means that we relate to it in a quite specific way; that the disappearance of a phenomenon or a practice is something that we regret. Or even: perceiving something in terms of a loss implicates that one sees what has been lost as something good. This point will have quite radical consequences for how we talk about the Crow tribe example (which was, according to Lear, dominated by "honor" and "courage"). Moral reactions, rather than theoretical claims, are what is involved in describing "cultural loss". [Cf. discussions about secularization: a loss or the victory of Reason?]

Lear's conception of radical hope is interesting. He talks about hope as something that is not necessarily limited to the possibilities that we can make sense of in a straightforward way. Even if we do not yet understand (conceptually) how something is possible, hope presents something as, claims something to be, a possibility. But, sadly, Lear attempts to justify how this kind of hope is possible and perhaps also justified. Or he seems to be saying something along those lines, but perhaps it would be worth reading the book in order to have a clearer picture of how he describes radical hope.