Culture of Hope: A New Birth of the Classical Spirit

This is a marvelously original book that discusses spirituality, mythology, cultural criticism, aesthetic theory, and science with all kinds of new ideas in mind--chaos and information theory, fractal geometry, restoration ecology, sociobiology, neuroaesthetics, etc. If one has become frustrated with the "postmodern" world view--its cynicism, its relativism, its nihilism, its snideness, its despair, its traps and contradictions and its desperate ugliness--this book stands to brighten one's day considerably. If one espouses the postmodern worldview, or denies that such a thing exists at all, this book may well seem like a sort of scientistic, neoconservative tract and will likely provoke anger or indifference. The author's habit of critiquing "climates of taste" rather than specific ideas from specific works by specific people often leads him to make sweeping pronouncements and what appear to be straw man arguments concerning the history and character of intellectual movements. This, combined with his support of market capitalism, will likely alienate some 80% of people with a humanities background who read this book. However, I have been gradually convinced by Mr. Turner's ideas over a number of years, and I believe the statements in this book which are actually unfair or in error may be counted on one hand, and do no damage at all to its principle arguments, which are as follows: beauty has a pan-cultural, neurobiological, evolutionary basis. The experience of shame is a natural part of self-consciousness, and is inseparable from the experience of beauty. Shame is transmuted into beauty through ritual commutation or sacrifice. Likewise, love is to some extent inseparable from territoriality and aggression. These phenomena may be found in rudimentary form throughout the natural world in animal social and mating rituals and sexual display, but are deepened and refined by culture, including art and religion, which manage and mediate people's experience of shame and its transformation into beauty. Cultural narratives, such as postmodernism, which deny shame, relativize beauty, and politicize and pathologize all aggression are incorrect, ugly and irrelevant at best, and often downright dangerous. Much humanistic and scientific thought since the Enlightenment has been concerned with the question of order or determinism vs. disorder or randomness. This is loosely analogous with the left vs. right political dichotomy, which pits the possibilities of innovation and progress against those of conservation and tradition. Turner's main point is that evolution, an idea that he embraces on various levels, including the biological, the cultural, the cosmological, and the metaphysical (a move which will likely alienate some scientists as well, although Turner's grasp of these ideas is anything but superficial, and the book has been praised by the likes of E.O. Wilson and Robin Fox) is both profoundly ordered AND disordered, conservative AND innova

The Culture of Hope provides the reader with a truly new world view for the reader prepared to honestly engage Turner's ideas. This book provides us with not only a new paradigm in the arts, moving us thankfully beyond postmodernism and the nihilistic dead end that is its world view, but of the world as a whole. Turner unifies the hard sciences of quantum physics, chemistry, and biology with the soft sciences of economics, political science, psychology, and sociology and with the humanities, including philosophy and the arts. Turner's thesis: humans have a nature, and that nature is classical. Not classical in the merely Greek and Roman sense, but in a natural sense. He sees rhythms and patterns, for example, as a natural part of human experience, thinking, and art. Attempts to give them up in the arts separate those works from our very humanity and from the world and life itself. Rhythms are patterns over time, and time too is a vital element of Turner's thesis. He takes the idea of time seriously, and uses the emergentist paradigm of J.T. Fraser [ASIN:0870235761 Time: The Familiar Stranger]] as a model for his own cosmology. Turner further uses a truly universalist approach to how we should understand the arts, philosophy, religion, and society. He believes we do have a human nature, but that nature is a unity which gives rise to variety. That unity does not stifle variety or creativity, but rather acts, like a sonnet's form, as an engine containing the explosion to turn it into productive work. Thus, his ideas on human nature are neither conservative (unity-only) nor liberal (variety-only), but libertarian (good rules generate good games). I cannot recommend this work strongly enough. It is the kind of work that, if enough people would read it, it could and would change the world -- and change it for the better.

This book - with its diminutive subtitle of `A New Birth of the Classical Spirit' - is after very big game. Nominally a broadside against post-modernism in the arts, `The Culture of Hope' quickly expands its focus to tackle the entire American cultural establishment and goes after this monstrous weed by its roots. I found his effort hopelessly ambitious -- but strangely successful in many respects. Frederick Turner's arguments are complex but utterly novel, his *optimism* is refreshing (especially compared to reactionary cultural commentaries that regard any cultural *change* as hedonistic or ridiculous), and his courage to wage these battles from *within* the academic world downright inspiring. Where else in the academic world, for example, would you find a scholar arguing for "a return to patriarchy, in its best sense" (and using the glorious *Don Giovanni* as an artistic example)? To show he's no prissy "conservative" critic, Turner also gives a nod to matriarchy (but easily shows its cultural destruction by "oppressive" patriarchs to be a myth), and witheringly contrasts both of these with what he terms the "juvenocracy" - a culture that ultimately destroyed the traditional patriarchy/matriarchy divide (under the neat guises of anti-authoritarian and "feminist" ideals), replacing it with a cult of the hip, young (men, mostly), self-absorbed, impulsive and emotional. If all this sounds a bit abstract, be assured Turner provides lengthy examples from history and literature - ranging from the Greek muses to Shakespeare - to hammer home his points. I was further impressed by an overall lack of sourness. The author generally stays very true to the "hope" in his title - and impressively devotes the majority of this book to a new cosmology and doesn't dwell on the old. If he proposes any "manifesto" it consists of what appears to be rather simple propositions: * Reunite the artist with the public * Reunite beauty with morality * Reunite High with Low art * Reunite art with craft * Reunite passion with intelligence * Reunite art with science * Reunite the past with the future The harkening-back verbs are intentional. One of Turner's subtlest and best points is an exhortation not to literally *return* to the past, but rather to bring back many of the *methods* of the past with the best of the present. (Rather obvious in the last point, of course.) Contrasted with the modernist "starting from zero" impulse, this stance appears mature and reasoned - rather than peevish and emotional. Juvenocracy, indeed. Many commenters have skewered the avant-garde, of course - Paul Johnson's doorstop-like `History of Art' being a, well, solid recent example. But Turner is a true apostate: an *academic* storming the gates of the modern (and, for good measure, post-modern) cultural fortress. Other writers and critics can be easily dismissed as "conservative" (read: not *serious*, not one of us) and therefore probably "retro" or "old-fashioned" (why, they actually t