"When the buffalo went away..."

Jonathan Lear's "Radical Hope" (2006)

Apr 09, 2026

Plenty Coup’s signature, from Frank B. Linderman’s “Plenty Coups, Chief of the Crows”

What did the word “coup” mean to Plenty Coups (1848 - 1932), the last great chief of the Crow people? Maybe his thoughts went first to the “coup stick,” that essential instrument of war which, when planted into the ground, entailed that its owner will either win or die. Maybe instead he thought about the many coups he earned against his Sioux, Cheyenne, Shoshone, Arapahoe, and Blackfeet enemies: how he dominated them with nonlethal strikes from his coup stick; how he stripped them of their weapons in the thick of a melee; how, shrouded in mud and wolf pelt, he stole into their villages at night to relieve them of their horses. It was through the accrual of such feats that the boy Buffalo Bull Facing The Wind became the man Plenty Coups.

The Crow way of life can be said to have been rooted in two things. First is warfare. Surrounded by enemies, the Crow raised their children to dream of “counting coup” — which is to say, both to accrue coups, and to thereby be entitled to sit with the men to recollect their coups together. It is widely attested that this dream was so acutely felt that the Crow did not have to resort to violence in their martial pedagogy. Here’s a representative example: when Plenty Coups was a child, his grandfather, to better teach him how to run, told him to go out into a field to catch a yellow butterfly; after finally catching one after hours of play, his grandfather whispered in his ears, “now rub its wings over your heart, and ask it to lend you its grace and swiftness”; Plenty Coups did so and was thrilled to learn this secret, which he later whispered to his friends; soon after, all the Crow boys were seen running through the fields and rubbing butterfly wings on their chests.

The second is the buffalo. The collapse of the buffalo population precipitated a permanent crisis of meaning. Frank B. Linderman’s incredible book “Plenty-Coups, Chief of the Crows” (1930) ends abruptly with the following note:

Plenty-coups refused to speak of his life after the passing of the buffalo, so that his story seems to have been broken off, leaving many years unaccounted for. “I have not told you half that happened when I was young,” he said, when urged to go on. “I can think back and tell you much more of war and horse stealing. But 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 happened. There was little singing anywhere. Besides,” he added sorrowfully, “you know that part of my life as well as I do. You saw what happened to us when the buffalo went away.”

Biographically speaking, many things happened to Plenty Coups after the buffalo went away, and he did many things, but all of it occurs in a postlapsarian age lacking the grounds for meaning-making. This sense of loss was universal to the Crow of his generation. The warrior Two Leggings said of the advent of the reservation era, “nothing happened after that. We just lived.” The medicine woman Pretty Shield said:

We talked to our children, told them thing they needed to know, but we never struck a child, never…
Lately I did strike a child. There seemed to be nothing else to do. Times and children have changed so. One of my grand-daughters ran off to a dance with a bad young man after I told her she must not go. I went after her. It was a long way too, but I got her, and in time. I brought her home to my place and used a saddle-strap on her. I struck hard, Sign-talker. I hoped it helped her, and yet I felt ashamed of striking my grandchild…
I am trying to live a life I do not understand.

This sentiment (“after this nothing happened”) is the subject of Jonathan Lear’s “Radical Hope” (2006). Lear, an Aristotelian and psychoanalyst, died last year, and has accordingly been on my mind. His book is an odd one: one part anthropology, one part philosophy, one part psychoanalysis. It addresses an epistemological speculation: what if Plenty Coups’ statement that ‘after this nothing happened’ is not a hyperbolic metaphor, but is simply true; and what would it mean for such a thing to be true? Accordingly, his book is not anthropology, not philosophy, and not psychoanalysis.

It contains a vision of what’s to come.

Here’s an Aristotelian analysis. Practical reason aims towards what is instrumentally useful, or what is proper behavior, or what is pleasurable. The post-buffalo Crow still use their practical reason all the time, but their acts are no longer embedded within their conception of virtue. Taken as one end, coup-counting and buffalo hunting together are the keystone in a vast arch of virtues: that boys should be pursue the excellencies of running, riding, fletching, scouting, swimming, hunting, horse stealing, and so on, is a stable ground for meaning-making within this structure. Boys are happy to chase butterflies when they think it plays a part in their one day becoming honored men. On the reservation, the highest end is mere survival; accordingly, practical reason attenuates. Pretty Shield lost the ability to persuade her grandchildren, because she and they can no longer be said to share a telos.

Here’s an Amerifat analysis. Lear calls on us to imagine a burger:

By way of analogy, consider a person who goes into her favorite restaurant and says to the waiter, “I’ll have my regular, a buffalo burger medium rare.” The waiter says, “I’m sorry madam, it is no longer possible to order buffalo; last week you ate the last one. There are no more buffalo. I’m afraid a buffalo burger is out of the question.” Now consider a situation in which the social institution of restaurants goes out of existence. For a while there was this historical institution of restaurants— people went to special places and paid to have meals made and served to them —but for a variety of reasons people stopped organizing themselves in this way. Now there is a new meaning to “it is no longer possible to order buffalo”: no act could any longer count as ordering.

Similarly, Lear has another analogy (which I can no longer find in the book, but is nevertheless in my memory): imagine you come home one day to watch your favorite show, and are dismayed to find that it has been permanently cancelled; now imagine you come home the following day, and find that the whole channel has folded; now imagine you come home the next day, and find that all broadcasters have folded. At a certain point the ground beneath your feet gives way, even for something as trivial as watching television.

Plenty Coups led the Crow across an abyss. He told young people to pursue education, and allied closely with the American government to preserve what he could. He had “radical hope”: an optimism that some new grounds for meaning-making could present itself to others, but not to him. Nothing can happen for him.

Perhaps one looks at the collapse of the Crow’s hunter-warrior life and says, “Good! Glad that’s over. Warriors are bad, hunting is a local maximum — welcome to modernity.” Fine. But identical dynamics play out with the aborigines and the collapse of their section system, who as a people were almost comically pacific, so one’s gripes with warrior culture is not really pertinent. Bertrand Russell, a deep progressive in all things, did not draw comfort from how much he saw the world change during his life (he has memories of touching the hand of his grandfather who touched Napoleon, while Russell himself would live to march against the Vietnam War). “Adapt or die!” sounds tough, but not very when coming out the mouth of a person who has only known the Great Stagnation. We’ll find out what we’re really made of soon enough.

Slow takeoff means that all of this is going to happen to you. What did you think “a century of scientific progress compressed into a decade” meant? Vibes?

Putting aside for a moment (the all-important) concerns of existential risk from superintelligence, I am certainly a techno-optimist and a transhumanist. But one of an odd sort, as I increasingly think that my end, personally, will not be a good one. Recursive self-improvement will facilitate the creation of many lives that are constantly getting better — but almost certainly not for us. Unless we too are continuously, radically self-modifying, we too will eventually see the buffalo die — and then we will watch them continue to die in ways heretofore unimaginable. For instance, meditate upon how bizarre and cursed it would be to retain something as simple as the institution of rearing children. Radically new forms of reproduction will open up to us, many of which do not involve giggling infants by default.