Professor Charles Taylor’s heart aches for the Crow—the Crow Indians of the Yellowstone river valley, that is, whose warriors are now mere ghosts, and whose culture of incessant killing and scalping and murder and rapine has been irrevocably lost. “Tragically lost,” says Taylor, Professor of Law and Philosophy at Northwestern University. In his mind cultural loss is about the worst thing that can happen.

Genocide is even more serious, it’s true, but as he writes in last April’s New York Review of Books, reviewing Jonathan Lear’s Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation, “The issue is not genocide. Many of the Crow people survive; but their culture is gone.” He then quotes the tribal chief Plenty Coups who said back in the 1920s that “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.”

Now you can find this sort of thing all over the world, with or without the poignant image of departing buffalo—and although you may be surprised to hear this, quite often something did happen. In New Zealand and Australia, individual Maoris or Aborigines of will, energy, and foresight picked themselves up and got on with it, changing their lives and taking new directions. Why didn’t this happen among the Crow? Why have they not lifted up their hearts and started again?

Of course the truth is that many of them did exactly