Natural Classicism

Frederick Turner

When I heard that Frederick Turner had died, in November of last year, my first thought was, “oh no, now it’s up to us!” Because this mild-mannered professor was fomenting revolution, the very revolution in the arts I have wanted to see my whole life.

Essentially, when you show that “beauty is a real property of things and rooted in the physical universe, then the whole body of contemporary critical theory and practice is deeply in error and should be revised.” Turner’s theory, which he calls “natural classicism,” wishes to “rejoin artist with public, beauty with morality, high art with low, art with craft, passion with intelligence, art with science and past with future.” No small task!

I am quoting from a paper Turner prepared in 1995 for the Conference on the Unity of the Sciences which you can read in its entirety here. It is a concise formulation of a theory that posits beauty as an engine of evolution, which Turner has been suggesting throughout his many writings. Although known in academic circles, he and his work are unknown to most people. Readers of this blog will have encountered him, however.

I first ran into Frederick Turner in 2016 in a reference in E. O. Wilson’s book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge [published 1998]. I went looking for him and promptly read three of his books. 

That year I was working on the fifth book in my family saga about the Mikkelsons, So Are You to My Thoughts. To locate you in the habits of that year, I spent three or four hours every morning writing at a standup desk in our spacious office in San Rafael. On days when I wasn’t shelving books at our county library or hanging out laundry for our Airbnb guests, I could be found reading in front of our lush patio garden. 

I had begun the books in the So Are You to My Thoughts series with the idea gleaned from Christopher Alexander that “wholeness” recursively reproduces itself. He applied this idea to architecture and even had a mathematical formula for it. I applied this idea to families, realizing that families which exhibit “wholeness” recursively reproduced themselves in further whole families. That is, I came to believe that was what I was doing! I didn’t really know.

Alexander defined “wholeness” as the qualities of beauty, harmony and comfort we recognize in certain places, feeling it in our bones. Frederick Turner insists that beauty itself is the generative power in the universe, driving both physical and cultural evolution. He has no problem stating that “the fundamental tendency or theme of the universe, in short, is reflexivity.” And he has the new science of nonlinear dynamical systems to help explain how this works.

Turner was the son of the anthropologist Victor Turner and grew up in the various locations his father’s work took them. Thus, in addition to his background in science and literature, he brings the insights of anthropology to his understanding of humans as a species. He connects beauty to our shame at being human and insists that beauty has been absent from the modern world since our politics has been divided into left and right. “The left-right dyad killed beauty, by denying its shame.”

Turner writes “art might take on a new mission, which is also its old one: to be the ritual by which we accept our shame and transform it into beauty. It means a new importance for historical art, for the subject of the family and of reproduction, of myth; and it also implies the necessity of hope and a commitment to the future.” 

Turner’s formulations seem to me to support my own work and I would be happy if my series were categorized as “natural classicism.” I have long thought the banality and carelessness of post-modernism something we need to get past. We have dug ourselves into a deep cultural trench which pervades schools and public discourse. “There are fish with no eyes down here,” says Don. And many young people do not even know there is any other way to think!

We have been disappointed by the quality of stories offered by the young people currently controlling the narrative. They focus more on a concept than an actual physical and sensual human story. They have transmuted shame into guilt and have no sense of the generative qualities in beauty and the pain and inevitability of tragedy.

I am hopeful, however, certain that once people see what is happening, they can begin to correct it. And Turner was certainly hopeful. He once described how we would feel if we arrived in the middle of the 21st century: “We would be most surprised not by the expected innovations, but by the way that all of human cultural and biological history will have become part of the landscape; by how magically corny, how shamefully old-fashioned, how primate-like and tribal we will be among the almost invisible and intangible miracles of our technology; by how slow and quiet everything will be, how improvised, how richly ornamented; by how closely we will live with the animals and plants, how much in the open air; by how gorgeously and formally and anachronistically clothed we will be, how morally earnest and at the same time how light-hearted, how accepting of shame and tragedy; by how much also as we lived in the great pedestrian cities of the civilized past.”