Paul Trout
English
MSU-Bozeman
One of the most exciting intellectual developments of the last decade is the effort to rescue American culture from the malaise, if not morass, into which it has fallen.
One of the major contributors to this eclectic and inchoate movement has been Frederick Turner--literary scholar (primarily of Renaissance studies), novelist, poet, polymath, and social visionary. In Natural Classicism (1985), The Rebirth of Value (1991), Beauty: The Value of Value (1992), and now in The Culture of Hope, Turner argues, in essence, that such disciplines as ethology, evolutionary biology, physics, mathematics, ethnomusicology, sociobiology, neuroanatomy and bioaesthetics (or "kalogenetics") are providing startling new findings and theories that refute the noxious assumptions of postmodernism and other counsels of despair. According to Turner, a creative synthesis of findings from these areas provides the foundation for a second intellectual Renaissance that promises to transfigure human life. An accessible presentation of these theories can be found in John Brockman's The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution (1995).
Not easy to pigeonhole politically, Turner argues that the cynicism and despair now afflicting our culture is the result of false and pernicious dichotomies (order-disorder, nature-culture, human-animal, etc.) inherited from the nineteenth century and still embraced by both Right and Left. Both, for example, narrowly define the role of art in reference to order, with the Right maintaining that art must preserve order and the Left that it must subvert it. Turner argues that these decaying dichotomies and "faulty assumptions" are pernicious, serving only to foment hate, rage, envy, fear, and despair.
Freedom from these vicious dualisms--and new grounds for hope--can be found, Turner contends, in the startling findings now coming from the human and natural sciences, technology, and environmentalism. The natural sciences, for example, reveal a world neither chaotic nor deterministic but nonlinear, reflexive, iterative, self-ordering, dissipative, turbulent, open-ended, unpredictable, and above all free and self-creative. From this new perspective, the world is seen as evolving into a richer and richer mix of physical and spiritual complexity (15). What constitutes progress for those at the emerging "radical center," Turner explains, "is the continuation of the natural evolution of the universe in a new, swifter, and deeper way, through the cooperation of human beings with the rest of nature, bringing conscious intention and organized creativity to the aid of natural variation and selection" (11). Turner calls this concept "evolutionary hope."
Art, particularly the art of narrative, plays a crucial role in this emergent culture of hope. According to prevailing assumptions, art is merely entertainment or an exercise in political power. But recent findings in anthropology, ethnomusicology, and brain research refute the notion that beauty is subjective or culture-bound. Cross-cultural research has revealed that there are pan-human aesthetic preferences and universal art forms and genres (Turner calls them "neurocharms"), and that evolution has equipped us with a neurobiology that rewards us for recognizing and creating them (20). In short, the capacity to create and appreciate beauty is hard-wired. This suggests that classical artistic genres, such as narrative, are "built into our makeup as human beings" and cannot be ignored by culture without damaging consequences (20). Turner calls this view "natural classicism."
The human capacity to create pleasing, brain-satisfying narratives plays a crucial role in driving cultural/biological evolution. Here art and hope are intimately entwined. The stories and myths humans first told themselves projected events and outcomes that were hopeful--that is, involved an "imaginative estimate of possibility, an intellectual leap into the future" (28-9). A typical story, for instance, may have narrated the future success of a life-nourishing hunt. This affirmation of what is to come triggered and reinforced the feedback reward system of the brain and was itself the reward for projecting emergent behavior that would lead to the survival and flourishing of the community (28). Hope must fuel endeavors if they are to succeed for without it, long, arduous tasks cannot be undertaken with the confidence and ardor necessary to bring them about. Thus, storytellers who could craft hopeful scenarios contributed directly to the evolutionary success of their community. One could say, then, that art preserves and changes society through the manipulation of hope (28).
According to Turner, our culture desperately needs new stories and myths, for the current ones are making it sick. To demonstrate this, Turner deconstructs "The Feminist Myth of Patriarchy" and "The Myth of the Oppressive West," and proposes new, more generous and plausible myths of reconciliation ("A New Feminist Myth" and "A New Multicultural Myth"). There is much good sense to be found in these chapters.
The Culture of Hope is filled with subtle distinctions, incisive critiques, startling analogies, and bold speculations. It moves with grace across an immense intellectual terrain, visiting such topics as cosmology, neurotransmitters, ecopoetry, Fibonacci spirals, Sierpinsky carpets, Mandelbrot Set theory, natural theology, Boolean logic, evolutionary shame as the source of modem cultural unease, and much more. Almost every page contains illuminating and provocative ideas.
But a work this broad and daring is bound to be open to a number of objections. Occasionally, I found it impossible--perhaps due to my own obtuseness--to follow Turner's speculations, as when, for example, he talks about parallel universes and contends that the future can communicate with, and influence, the past. And I am not sure I understand why, if "evolutionary hope" is wired into the universe, it needs help from the poor forked animal called man.
At times Turner's penchant for dazzling speculation stretches credulity. Indulging in the sort of "limitless" thinking that the hard-nosed critical thinker Garrett Hardin recently debunked in Living Within Limits (Oxford, 1994), Turner foresees "inexhaustible power" by the 2050s, commenting absurdly that by that time our gadgets--which he presumes will not increase in number even though the population will--may be "so small and efficient that they will not draw much power at all" (235).
And every now and then Turner's speculations sound like the ravings of a Renaissance Magus on LSD. For example, he tosses out the hare-brained notion that genetic engineering "will give us oiled fur and gills to inhabit the ocean, or a lower body-weight, keeled breastbone, and wings to inhabit the air" (238). He is also convinced that science will make us immortal (241), replacing our biological neurons with artificially nano-engineered ones of unlimited endurance (246). And he is confident that we will eventually engage in the "ecotransformation" of Mars and then of other star systems (though he does not compute the enormous cost of such a venture, 232-33).
Despite indulging in all these airy speculations, Turner, who is able to put a happy-face decal even on the greenhouse effect ("the world will be warmer, wetter, and more fertile," 240), does not want to be dismissed as a utopian dreamer. Nor should he be. Near the end of the book he insists that there is a tragic component to his ideal of evolutionary hope: "there will be much greater and more terrible things to fear if our hopes indeed come to pass. The world that is to come will be the more tragic, for being the more beautiful and free and wise and holy, and the more these good things for being the more tragic" (260). As spiritually ravishing as this may seem to souls more sensitive than I, it raises the moral issue, at least for me, of whether or not I should help bring about a future where humanity will have, as Turner puts it, even "greater resources" to suffer. Despite these excesses, and indeed because of them, The Culture of Hope is a provocative, stimulating, and bold effort to transcend the puny engagements of our culture wars and to encourage us to pledge ourselves to bringing about a more beautiful world than the one we now inhabit.