Reviews for Culture of Hope: A New Birth of the Classical Spirit

The average rating for Culture of Hope: A New Birth of the Classical Spirit based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-10-03 00:00:00 Carey Losos This book came to me at breakfast one morning. At my place I found an article cut from an old Harper's Magazine. When I looked up the book I learned it was published in 1995. Fascinating stuff, which I took to be literary criticism. It's not--it's more philosophy, a philosophy of culture. Its date may be a bit of an impediment. There have been many upheavals, political and cultural, since 1995. Think about how many lives we've lived since that time. Another weakness may be his leaving the political out of his calculus for the future. His vision is utopian, but watching the news 23 years after the publication of his book may discourage one from believing in a world we'd think utopian. Generally, Turner sees art and culture in political terms. The avant-garde, or left, is limited in its development. Bankrupt is a word he uses. On the right is modernism calling for a maintenance of the old forms and ideas, also a brake on development. Between the two is the promise of the future, what he calls the radical center. It's a fusion of the classical with technology. The new culture of hope will be brought about by ever-expansive and elegant development of technologies. The new discoveries will eventually fuse with art. He calls the process evolutionary hope, this natural classicism growing from the exhausted wings of modernism and the avant-garde. The result is a new attainment and appreciation of beauty. What we learn is that our perception of beauty is part of the beauty. Turner's optimism and faith in human cultural progress gives the book its value. His ideas, analysis, and charts of the way forward are convincing, if we can bring them off. It's very knotty reading, though. In some places it's so complex and dense that it beats you up. But when I could see his ideas and arguments clearly I was confident of being well-led and instructed. In the end the bright light he shines doesn't blind but reveals ways to restore meaning to our lives by allowing the fusion of spirit with flesh, mind with matter, and culture with nature, of which we're the most important element.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-01-19 00:00:00 ITUMELENG Tshabalala Though he gets a little wild at times with his belief in technology, I still regard Turner's work as some of the most important I have run into. Using current brain theory, chaos theory and the anthropology he grew up with, Turner presents us with a new paradigm, which takes us both forward and back to classical values. I'm with him! "Of course we need to use all the computerized weather prediction, all the nonlinear econometric models, all the electroencephalograms, all the careful ecological analysis we can get. But our decisions on the basis of this knowledge must finally be in the service of the greatest beauty: the greatest epistemological beauty, that is, truth; and the greatest ethical beauty, that is goodness. The attractors of these, we can be sure, are in the human breast. We must evoke them, by educating our conscience and our intuition of the truth; most important of all, and for our very survival, we must cultivate our taste."