Book excerpt: "Taste is everything, Hans says, for it produces the primary values that guide our lives. Taste is the fundamental organizing mechanism of human bodies, a lifelong effort to fit one's own rhythms and patterns of the natural world and the larger community. It is an aesthetic sorting process by which one determines what belongs in - a conversation, a curriculum, a committee, a piece of art, a meal, a logical argument - and what should be left out. On the one hand, taste is the source of beauty, justice, and a sense of the good. On the other hand, as an arbiter of the laws of fair and free play, taste enters into more ominous and destructive patterns - but patterns nonetheless - of resentment and violence."--Jacket.