The Courage to Survive

Reflections on Jonathan Lear’s Radical Hope and what courage looks like when strength is no longer enough.

This was the third book I had read that drew heavily on ethnography, and it left me thinking about one question more than anything else:

What does it actually mean to be courageous?

Jonathan Lear’s Radical Hope looks closely at Plenty Coups, a chief of the Apsáalooke, or Crow Nation, who lived through the collapse of the world in which his people had once understood themselves. The buffalo disappeared. The old nomadic way of life became impossible. The warrior culture that had given courage, honor, and achievement their meaning could no longer continue in the same form.

Plenty Coups had grown up inside that world. He himself had been known for courage as a warrior. Yet he eventually helped lead the Crow toward accommodation and survival rather than a war of resistance they were unlikely to survive. He also spent later years defending Crow land and helping his people adapt to radically altered circumstances. 

From one angle, that can look like surrender.
And surrender rarely looks courageous.

We Usually Imagine Courage as Resistance

The ordinary definition of courage is easy enough to recognize.

A courageous person stands their ground.
They take the risk.
They fight even when they are afraid.
They refuse to back down.
They endure.

In other words, courage is usually associated with strength. That understanding makes sense.

Sometimes courage really does mean fighting.
Sometimes it means holding on when everyone else tells you to let go.
Sometimes it means refusing to surrender something worth defending.

But Radical Hope made me wonder whether that definition is too narrow.

Because what happens when fighting guarantees destruction?

What happens when holding on to the old way means there will be no one left to carry anything forward?

What if courage sometimes means knowing when not to fight?

There Has to Be a Next

Plenty Coups seems to have understood something that is much less romantic than dying heroically:

you have to survive before there can be a future.

There has to be someone left.
Someone to remember.
Someone to speak the language.
Someone to tell the stories.
Someone to raise the children.
Someone who can carry whatever remains of the old world into a world that does not yet make sense.

Within an older warrior ideal, refusing to fight to the end could easily look like weakness. Lear’s interpretation of Plenty Coups, however, is that he did not simply deny the devastation taking place. He accepted that the old world could not simply be restored and remained open to forms of Crow life that could not yet be clearly imagined. That openness is central to what Lear calls radical hope. 

And I think that requires a kind of courage that is much harder to admire from a distance.

The courage to be misunderstood.
The courage to look weak.
The courage to swallow humiliation.
The courage to live through a reality you would never have chosen because disappearing with the old world would leave nothing for the people who come after you.

There is something clean and beautiful about the story of a person who fights to the end.

Survival is messier.
Survival sometimes asks you to bend.
To compromise with circumstances you hate.
To accept help from people you would rather not need.
To walk through a world in which the old rules no longer tell you who you are.

And still keep going.
Not merely because I want to live.

But because:
someone has to be here for what comes next.

Sometimes Strength Means Letting Go

I think this is one of the hardest things about courage. We are taught to associate letting go with failure.

Do not quit.

Do not surrender.

Do not give up.

There is wisdom in those words. But there are also moments when refusing to let go becomes another kind of fear.

Sometimes an old identity cannot be preserved exactly as it was.
Sometimes the path we thought we would walk no longer exists.
Sometimes reality changes before our understanding of ourselves has had time to catch up.

At that point, courage may not mean forcing the old world to return. It may mean saying:

This is gone.
I do not yet know what comes after it.
But I am willing to remain alive long enough to find out.

That is not passive resignation. There is a difference between giving up on life and giving up on one particular version of life. Plenty Coups did not know exactly what Crow life would become after the old cultural structures had been devastated. That uncertainty is precisely why Lear calls the hope radical: it reaches toward a good future before we even have the concepts to describe what that good future might look like. 

You do not know what comes next.
You only refuse to believe that nothing can.

Courage Can Also Mean Asking for Help

This book also made me reconsider another assumption I had about courage. I used to associate strength with self-sufficiency.

The strong person handles things.
They do not fall apart.
They do not need anyone.
They figure it out on their own.
But human beings are not built that way.

Lear describes us as “finite erotic creatures.”

The phrase sounds strange at first. But erotic here is not simply sexual. It refers more broadly to desire—to the fact that we reach beyond ourselves toward people and things we need, love, value, and hope for.

And we are finite.

We have limits.

There are things we cannot do.
Things we cannot know.
Things we cannot survive entirely by ourselves.

Once I accept that, asking for help starts to look different.

Sometimes courage is saying:

I cannot do this alone.

That sentence exposes something.

It admits weakness.
It puts us in a position where another person can refuse us.
And maybe that is why asking for help can require more courage than pretending not to need any.

There Is No Shame in Being Weak

Weakness embarrasses us. We like to present ourselves after we have recovered. After we figured it out. After we stood back up. We like stories of resilience much more than we like the part where someone was lying on the ground and needed another person to reach down.

But that part is human too.

There are times when we are weak.
There are times when our judgment fails.
There are times when grief, illness, age, loss, or circumstances simply exceed what we can carry.

The courageous response does not always have to be:

I will handle this myself.

Sometimes it can be:

Can you help me?

And if someone reaches toward me with that question, perhaps I should remember that their weakness is not proof that they are fundamentally different from me.

I have needed someone before.

I need people now.

I will need someone again.

We take turns.

Today I may be the one holding someone up.
Tomorrow I may be the one unable to stand.

If we are finite creatures, dependence is not some humiliating exception to human life.
It is part of human life.

Maybe We Are Not Cowards

That thought changed the way I understood courage.

Maybe we are not cowards simply because we are afraid.
Or because we need help.
Or because there are things we cannot endure by sheer force of will.

Maybe sometimes we are simply not courageous enough to admit our limits. It can take courage to fight. But it can also take courage to say:

I am weak.
I was wrong.
I cannot keep doing this.
I need you.
I have to let this go.
I do not know what comes next.

Those sentences do not sound heroic. Maybe that is exactly why they are difficult to say.

Surviving for Someone Else

And this brings me back to Plenty Coups. What moves me about his story is not simply that he survived. Survival by itself can be instinct. What matters is what survival made possible. Because people remained, there was still a people capable of remembering, adapting, teaching, and reimagining what it meant to be Crow.

Plenty Coups continued to defend Crow land and urged younger people to gain the knowledge necessary to navigate the new political world around them. His approach did not preserve the old world intact—that was no longer possible—but it helped leave descendants with the possibility of continuing and renewing Crow life. 

That makes me think there are moments when courage is not measured by how gloriously we resist.
It is measured by what remains after us.

If crawling through humiliation is what keeps your people alive,
perhaps standing proudly and dying is not obviously the braver choice.

If accepting help preserves a future,
perhaps independence is not always strength.

If letting go of one form of life allows something else to grow,
perhaps surrender is not always defeat.

Sometimes staying alive is not cowardice.

Sometimes it is responsibility.

Someone Has to Be Left to Begin Again

We tend to admire dramatic courage.

The person standing alone.
The final battle.
The refusal to bow.
The heroic last words.

But Radical Hope made me think about another kind.

The person who remains after the battle.
The person who accepts that something is truly gone.
The person who has no idea what a meaningful future will look like and yet refuses to close the door on the possibility that there will be one.
The person willing to look weak today so that someone else can still exist tomorrow.

Maybe courage is not one thing.

Sometimes courage is standing your ground.

Sometimes it is letting go.

Sometimes it is admitting that you are weak.

Sometimes it is reaching out and asking someone to help you.

And sometimes it is simply surviving long enough for there to be a next chapter.

That is what stayed with me after reading this book.

There is nothing shameful about being finite.
Nothing shameful about being vulnerable.
Nothing shameful about needing other people.

What matters is whether, when the world we understood falls apart, we can remain open to a life we do not yet know how to imagine. Plenty Coups could not bring the old world back. But he could help make sure there were still people left to remember it. And perhaps that is one of the deepest forms of courage there is:

to survive what you cannot save,
so that someone after you still has something to carry forward.

---

Book Referenced

Jonathan Lear, Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation. Harvard University Press, 2006.