14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Claiming the Best Within Us, January 16, 2007
This review is from: Culture of Hope: A New Birth of the Classical Spirit (Hardcover)
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 think representation art has merit! How quaint!). Turner, an arts and humanities professor at the University of Texas, has not such protection. No doubt he gets few free tickets to openings.
If you find any part of the current art and cultural scene fundamentally distressing I strongly recommend a careful reading. Turner's only nagging flaw - an occasional lapse into jargon - seems to be in all academic's DNA and only slightly detracts from an otherwise sterling effort.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A New Paradigm in Seeing the World, October 21, 2008
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.
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