Customer Reviews

Beauty: The Value of Values

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I imagine readers will be wandering toward this intriguing book by way of some very different roots. Some, although not I, may be drawn to the implicit neo-political message in its subtitle, "The Value of Values." Perhaps having read your William Bennett you seek a more austere, academically flavored approach to moral absolutism. I don't think you'll find it here, but I wouldn't be surprised if the complexity (or is it ambiguity) of Turner's message didn't allow ideologues of the moralist right to snatch up this book to wave in the other free hand.

I came to this book after having discovered a very unusual book-length work of epic poetry. A rare enough form in itself these days, but this epic takes the further genre-bending leap of representing its story in the future, as "sci-fi." The epic poem is "The New World" and, as you might have surmised, the author is Frederick Turner. I guess it figures. Consider the readership problem. An epic poem may capture about 10% of the already small poetry-reading cohort, then one has to slice away another 90% of that often rather snooty crew as disdaining the sci-fi genre. A writer would have to have some sort of "big idea" fuel to drive such a thankless and relatively readerless endeavor. Turner has (many) such ideas!

Turner believes there are cross-cultural, cross-temporal universals, one of which is that which he shamelessly calls "beauty." You might note your own reaction to that title (or the thought of reading the book openly on a bus ? better a Danielle Steele). In choosing the more vernacular term, Turner purposely steps around the academic doo-doo that has become "aesthetics" while pursuing a rather academic task - defining beauty and bolstering the claim for absolutes in the process.

I'm not sure if he succeeds.

One intriguing link he makes, drawn rather extensively, is that between beauty and shame - notice another word one rarely sees in discussions outside the psych department. Beauty, he suggests, lies at a boundary between the dark and the light - shame energizes that interface for humans, fueling a historically tumultuous dynamic.

Casting a sidereal light on recent events he suggests:

"We can tell ideological pity from true pity by the killing.
Once the killing starts, another feedback mechanism springs into being; our shame at our crimes is denied, and transformed into further hatred, which must be slaked by further crime... This is the essential mechanism of the phenomenon of Terror."

Wow... "where's did beauty go?", you might ask. Well I can only say that the power of Turner's argument probably stems from his walking the sharp edge between dark and light and that one chosen quote represents the style and the energy of his approach if not its breadth.

Turner's discussion, I must add, are not a-political. He is certainly aware of the political content that lies within a head-on challenge to "modernism" and relativism. He also goes ahead and steps into the busy and dangerous highway of intellectual discourse by claiming that the development of the notion of left-right political dichotomy itself is at the core of the shames which have driven our culture away from the beautiful. Once again, the Bennett-ites will leap in to place a heavy hand around Turner's shoulders, but I think he would shrug it off. (Not being a student of cultural history I wonder that this 1991 book must already have had its reaction within intellectual circles and for all I know Turner is co-authoring books about what your 2nd grader needs to know... don't think so, though).

He is careful to develop the notion that his idea of beauty-lost is not necessarily a toga-party; not just a revival of a Greco-Roman canonical corpse. His references, such as they are, are smattered with non-western elements which build a broader base for that-which-is-lost than Bennett and the gang.

But its in the references department that I found the book wanting. As a lengthy essay it is very thought-provoking. But Turner suggests throughout that his notion of the "absolute" part of the argument is built upon recent discoveries about human brains and consciousness. Perhaps it is - but he drops nary a single footnote or reference (or even a slender bibliography) for the inquiring mind; and thus leaves, in the end, a certain doubt about the grounding of his ideas. If, like me, you have rooted some of your own thinking and reading about human existence around writers like Daniel Dennett (or even Morris Berman), you will feel cheated knowing that such scientific grounding doubtless exists and could have been bundled into this bouquet.

Ah well, you can't have everything (or five stars). This is an intriguing book.