The Culture of Hope: A New Birth of the Classical Spirit.

ARISTOTLE remarked, in the Physics, that if the art were in the material, ships would be growing out of trees. The presence of art indicated the presence of a shaping hand. Art would of course be governed by the laws of matter, but plainly also art was something apart from the world governed by the "deterministic" laws of cause and effect. No laws of physics would produce El Greco's Annunciation; and even if we could reproduce the pattern of electrical activity in the brain of Shakespeare, the sequence of neural firings would still not yield the 18th Sonnet.

That ancient understanding seems to be deeply at odds with the scheme offered by Frederick Turner, even as he seeks, in this book, to restore "classical" principles of art. Turner, an occasional contributor to NR and a professor at the University of Texas at Dallas, has the advantage at least of beginning with the things nearest at hand, and with complaints that are accessible to people of ordinary understanding: In this age of postmodernism, we have seen shows at the Whitney Museum in New York exhibiting simulated vomit and excrement. Taking the idea of minimalism to the limit of its logic, one artist "mounted" a collection of blank canvases, and the Tate served up to its public an empty gallery.

Turner would reject this arid work as he would reject at the root that collection of self-consciously "modern" posturing from which such travesties have sprung: postmodernism, deconstruction, radical feminism, multiculturalism -- they are, as Henry James would say, chapters in the same book. They are simply different expressions of "relativism," and their effect, in the world of art, has been to level hierarchies -- to deny the gradations that separate high art from low, the fine from the coarse, the good from the bad. To the modernists, who offer abstractions or blank canvases, Turner opposes the work of artists who would restore a sense of representation: recognizable places or human figures, in situations familiar or alien, yet intelligible, with moods and feelings that stir an instant recognition in the viewer. Turner offers the example of Frederick Hart. Against the funereal design of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C., Hart added the sculpture of three young soldiers. Hart's figures showed in their faces and bodies the strain of that war, and yet the comradeship of fighting men.

But that account of Hart's work is not filled in by Turner, as indeed there is little attempt to fill in an explanation of the work of most of the artists and writers whose names fly past the reader in improbable clusters. Evidently, Turner does not take it as his purpose to look closely at the work of these artists in an effort to draw out the features that define the "classical" character of their art. Instead, he soars off into the higher reaches of theory, in a strange exercise in "futurology" where he can now encompass, in a majestic sweep, crystalography and electrochemistry, turbulence and feedback, poetry and dry cleaning. Names, titles come rushing past: Beethoven's Fidelio, Henry James's The Princess Casamassima, Melina Mercouri -- all strung together as if a vast pot of names would somehow make up the "grand synthesis" that Turner professes to seek. With the air of bringing the news, he announces "cross-cultural and neuropsychological studies," now apparently confirming that certain ingredients in art -- musical scale, tonality, pictorial representation -- "are built into our makeup as human beings." They will not be confined to one place or "culture." And yet, Cicero long ago wrote at length, in "The Orator," on the natural reflex of any audience to wince in the presence of a discordant note on a lyre or an unseemly rhythm of speech. No one supposed he was referring to the habits merely of a Roman audience.

Only in a time affected by the confusions of cultural relativism would anyone think it novel to suggest that there are understandings of form and beauty that remain the same in all places. Why then the need to launch out into the more distant realms of futurology?

On the face of things, nothing in the razzmatazz about technology and genomes and DNA would seem to affect the nature of art or the question of what art has to teach. But these sallies into futurology provide, for Turner, a showy cover for a simple purpose: he relies on an up-to-date view of the cosmos for the sake mainly of installing a rather primitive relic of modernism -- namely, Darwinism. Once again, the details and the intricacies in the argument are lost in the sweep of the narrative. Turner is apparently innocent of the problems that torment even committed Darwinists in our own time. There is no mention of the failure of the accumulated fossil evidence, and especially of the new evidence from molecular biology, to confirm the theories of Darwinism. Still less is there any recognition of the deeper problems that have plagued Darwinism as empirical science: most notably the failure to state hypotheses in a form that would actually lend itself to empirical confirmation or falsification. The record of evidence and the strange weakness of the case have been summarized recently by Phillip Johnson in Darwin on Trial. Johnson has also made clear the truth that cannot quite speak its name: that Darwinism is really a brand of metaphysics; that it posits, as the source of species and evolution, a cause that cannot be confirmed and cannot be subjected to the test of evidence. For Darwinism, the cause of all things is as mysterious, and as cut off from empirical testing, as the presence of a Creator. And in fact, as Johnson points out, the function of Darwinism for many of its practitioners is mainly to deny the existence of a Creator and the presence of a purpose in the universe.

For Turner, the "culture of hope" is "evolutionary hope." The "classical" nature of art will now be redefined by incorporating, in the premises of art, a universe motored by "evolution." But by evolution, Turner seems to mean mainly "change," but, even more emphatically, a universe without a purpose or a Creator. The "new evolutionary universe," he says, does not require an "outside creator and arranger"; it contains, rather, its own "internal creative and organizational impulse." The universe is "self-renewing, self-ordering," and yet not entirely, for it seems to need a helping hand, and that is where "art" comes in: Turner declares that "we are, I believe, charged with [the] continuance [of this universe]; and the way that we continue it is art."

"Charged with"? In the sense of an obligation, a moral duty? But from what would any moral duty spring? From the notably non-moral fact that the universe is powering itself, without a moral purpose, how are we to move to the conclusion that this state of affairs is somehow "good," desirable, that it merits our exertions to preserve and advance it? At several points, in the first chapter of Genesis, it is recorded that God looked at the Creation, in its advancing stages, "and God saw that it was good." But in Turner's universe, there is no God to vouchsafe that goodness, and it is not at all clear just what supplies the moral predicate for his vast moral conclusions.

It used to be understood that moral obligations presupposed the existence of "moral agents," creatures who can understand matters of right and wrong. But in Turner's universe, "human beings emerged from the mutual interactions of cultural and biological evolution." That is to say, we are creatures thrown off in the workings of a universe that is unaffected by a moral purpose. And so, in Turner's curious universe, there are moral beings but no moral ends. But presumably nature and evolution make nothing in vain. Why would evolution have cast up beings with moral understanding when there were no moral purposes to be discerned? Why have a faculty of moral knowing with no moral truths to be known? Professor Turner has succeeded then in placing Aristotle on his ear: the ships apparently do grow out of the trees. A sublime art has come into existence without an artist, and without a design.

When Turner declares near the end that "there should be a renewal of the moral foundations of art," he makes a grand rhetorical flourish, but he has put in place a structure that virtually empties this declaration of its substance. Turner senses that the insistence on "moral foundations" in art is taken as a mark of seriousness, and so he adds it as an embellishment to his design. But he achieves then a certain symmetry: he would restore "classical" principles and morality in art, while evacuating the moral convictions that imparted meaning to them both.

For Turner a "new nature of religion" will offer another grand synthesis that incorporates Buddhism, Hinduism, and Shintoism, along with Judaism, Christianity, and anything else that vaguely engages what he calls "spiritual values." In other words, everything may be encompassed as long as we remove the things that give to each religion its character and integrity. But in this vast, enveloping scheme, there is one thing that cannot be accommodated: as Turner makes clear, there is no place for the God of the Bible. In fact he finally lays it out, with a stinging candor, that God stands as an adversary to the understanding of art and the universe that pervades this book:

The notion that life in all its complexity should have a single, fixed little moral having to do with pleasing an omnipotent Father who knows everything that is going to happen and who must give His permission for anything to happen at all -- who is merely, as it were, playing a game with us, performing a loyalty-check on us that can involve gas-chambers and child starvation and AIDS . . . --is, as the modernists rightly and stoutly maintained, obscene. . . . God's Plan is and always has been a direct attack on all art, science, and morality; because art cannot be painting by numbers, because science must reserve judgment, because morality must be its own reward and punishment.

But in such a universe, what becomes the ground of "hope" for this so-called "culture of hope"? It would seem, in the end, to be this: "the universe's ingenious and Falstaffian contrivances for delaying payment of its thermodynamic debt." In other words, there is a certain worldly faith that the doomsayers, mainly on the Left, will be wrong; that humans can somehow be counted on to bring forth the inventiveness, the wit, even the goodness to avert the dangers that beset us. In this, I am inclined to think that Turner is eminently right-headed. But why, to make that modest point, does he find it necessary to engage in a frenzy of dubious science, and produce a Godless universe purged of moral substance? Perhaps he has absorbed, from Zorba the Greek, a touch of madness, or he has been so seized by metaphors that he has run even beyond the generous bounds of sobriety. It may simply be, in that line of Mrs. Malaprop, that he has become "as headstrong as an allegory on the Nile."