If Jedediah Purdy, the ostentatiously earnest and true-blue author of “For Common Things: Irony, Trust, and Commitment in America Today” (Knopf, $20) isn’t an Eagle Scout, he should be. The foregoing sentence is exactly the kind of shallow, facile, faintly sneering remark that so dismays Purdy, who soberly decries the culture of irony that, according to him, reveals and contributes to the erosion of public life, civic endeavor and faith in politics. A home-schooled West Virginian and Harvard graduate, Purdy has written a strange, patchwork book, an amalgam of op-ed sententiae, intellectual history lite, pop-cultural-reportage and moral philosophy. What unifies the disparate strands of this book are Purdy’s undeniable moral seriousness and his astonishingly controlled, nearly oratorical style.
Purdy’s argument sits intriguingly and uneasily between concrete detail–memories of his Appalachian childhood, how strip-mining works–and a Great Books version of philosophical abstraction. For all his paeans to passion and “ecstasy,” Purdy’s style is methodical, measured, occasionally taking eloquent wing but more usually devolving into banal renditions of arguable verities. Purdy has few proposals, and the ones he makes sound reasonable, if tepid (for example, putting environmental-impact labels, along the lines of nutrition statements, on product packages). He is less concerned with making policy than with delineating an “interpersonal, moral ecology” through which we could reimagine our lives and commitments. He insists that a reform in our ideas of “social ecology” must precede any legislative action. He wants to change hearts, not laws.
This book is too temperate to be a jeremiad, too emotionally alive and politically vague to be a white paper: It falls somewhere between sermon and pep talk, and one wonders whom Purdy imagines his audience to be. His elders in the media and at think tanks, it seems.
A brief, simplified synopsis of some of Purdy’s cultural assessments:
“Seinfeld”: bad. Wired magazine: bad. Sigmund Freud: bad. (The unconscious, alas, is an ironist.) Technophilia: bad. Bruce Babbitt: bad. (Bruce Babbitt? Yes indeed. In one of his more sharply pointed passages, Purdy recounts how the former secretary of the interior made disgustingly disingenuous pronouncements about the soundness of mining practices and the beauties of the mined landscape while standing on a devastated strip-mined mountain in West Virginia.) Irony is bad except when it’s good, and it’s only good if it’s properly and salutorily dramatic–that is, if it leads us to some discovery about the worthy life. Dissidents in totalitarian states are good (surprise!). George Orwell, Vaclav Havel, Csezlaw Milosz: good. Thoreau: good. West Virginia: good. (In a flash of what one hopes is droll understatement, Purdy remarks, “West Virginia was not an ironic place.”)
There’s a strain of irony Purdy tellingly chooses not to highlight, a strain elaborated in the mode we call satire. Hogarth, Swift, Rabelais, Twain: exuberant ironists all. One could imagine the fun they’d have with Purdy’s book. Too much display of earnestness seems to generate in human beings an equal and opposite desire to puncture and caricature the publicly and officially sincere. To his great credit Purdy knows this, and he is willing to run the risk of seeming and being the class nerd and Pharisee. Below Purdy’s perfectly turned (if strangely forgettable) sentences one catches the poignant notes of a young man who seems to make others uneasy and who for his part recognizes this: His seriousness, his orotundity, his reflexively displayed high cultural literacy (Emerson, Tocqueville, Locke and Montaigne line up like ducks in a row) bespeak a persona prematurely mature, or to be more precise, eerily sealed and polished.
And yet this book would have more authority if it weren’t trafficking so awkwardly and prominently in the very material it sees as symptomatic of malaise: to wit, sit-coms and magazines. It’s as if Purdy were straining to be current, with-it, now. It would be terrific if Purdy turned his refining mind toward his interesting weirdness–his distinctive background, his unusual sensibility, his awareness that he’s out of sync with his contemporaries. However much he positions himself as a generational spokesman, repeatedly declaring what “we” feel and what “(t)oday’s young people” think, hope and fear, Purdy’s eccentricity comes through loud and clear. It’s as if he were playing Al Gore in twentysomething drag. Reading his prose, one often can’t help thinking, this guy is out of it! And rather than embrace and thoroughly analyze the oddities, costs and benefits of his experience, he harnesses it to a generic message of uplift.
His recurrent diagnoses of our malaise as “our” malaise gives one pause, or at least gave me pause: What’s this “we,” white man? Purdy may represent a counter-counter-revolution: Objecting to the grandiose ennui associated with that marketing concoction Generation X, Purdy is one of several contemporary young writers articulating–or serving as the mouthpiece for–a chastening and chastened vision. The ’60s are so over. Revolution: over. The ’70s, ’80s and ’90s: also over. It’s no longer hip to be hip. It’s no longer hip to be jaded. It’s no longer hip even to want money. (OK, it’s always hip to make money, if not to display it.) You got to care, man–my fellow citizens, I mean.
Well, sure. But “care” and “commitment” detached from institutions, communities and practices mean little, as Purdy knows. In his last chapters Purdy turns to his mother, a school-board member and grass-roots education activist and lawyer, as his primary example of civic engagement. Her work is all the more exemplary because she devoted herself to public schooling even as she chose to home-school her kids. What looked to be inconsistency, Purdy convincingly argues, was a productive simultaneity of engagement: She had a much broader notion of and commitment to “the public” than those who leave so-called public schools and other facilities to the poor and to bureaucrats. But inasmuch as Purdy wishes to offer an argument and not just anecdotes, it’s not clear how we get from his critique of irony and his meditations on commodity culture to a model for civic and political re-engagement. Purdy wants us to think as citizens but addresses us first as consumers; the gap between these two conceptions of the individual is the gap this book seems unable to recognize, much less traverse.
Should we, like his mother, take up grass-roots activism? What are the boundaries of “community”? (As Mr. Rogers continues to sing, just who are the people in your neighborhood?) How do these boundaries shift, depending on your race, your class, your education, your sex, your age, where you live, whom you know, whether you’re “wired”? Is all politics local? Should it be? Should we have a national referendum on a variety of issues? Do globalization and bureaucratization contribute to the erosion of trust in government? What role should the state play in fostering the “common things” of Purdy’s title? These rudimentary but relevant questions largely go unanswered and, more strikingly, unasked.
The retreat of Americans from the political sphere, from any notion of a common public project, is remarkable and lamentable and also, paradoxically, a symptom of the very success of American democracy. As Purdy remarks, “The liberation of private life from politics is one of the great attainments of a moderately free society.” Such a liberation takes a peculiar form in this era of consumer capitalism: The happiness we’re supposedly free to pursue is for many people an unpolitical, depoliticized happiness, a happiness furnished by mass and consumer culture in all its garish glory. People do want their MTV, by God, and Purdy never adequately reckons with this. In some respects, then, Purdy takes the easy way out. By emphasizing primarily the cultural (as opposed to civic or institutional) signs of disenchantment, he inadvertently contributes to a depoliticizing of the public sphere. What if there were a prohibition on talking about feelings and values (and their attendant lords–commitment, compassion, forgiveness, responsibility)? What would American political discourse look like? One can only fantasize. It would be a harder and worthier task to convince readers and citizens that the issues they think of as private are, in fact, public (for example, where and how to educate children; how to conserve and distribute resources, environmental and otherwise; how to provide health care equitably), and that “the public” is something other than an aggregate of everyone’s individual rights, claims and polled preferences.
Purdy looks properly askance at the thinness of a “politics of meaning”–“Sentiment in itself does not alter the social world,” he intones–but at the end of the day, or at least at the end of this book, it’s not so clear that he has offered much more. A deft analyzer of rhetorical dodges (by, for example, Bill Clinton), able to work up a fine and persuasive moral indictment when he gets down to facts, legislation and historical outcomes (for example, in the case of coal mining in West Virginia), Purdy too often swerves from these strengths to offer bromides about “responsibility,” “care” and “attention.” One wishes his laments for the world and his recommendations of care were anchored in something richer than a kind of potted, middlebrow boosterism. (We can do it! Let’s be attentive! Let’s take responsibility! Let’s tighten our belts and pull up our bootstraps! All together now!)
It’s all too easy to satirize naivete, as Purdy himself points out. The problem isn’t that Purdy is naive (I will leave his political naivete to be judged by others more versed in libertarian, communitarian and neo-liberal arguments) but that his style inspires not active engagement but at best unreflective assent. Yes, we sure are disappointed in our politicians. Oh, yes, it would surely be good if we all accepted limits to our claims on the common things of life. Preservation and conservation are surely good.
What is controversial or novel about this book? Nothing. This book is a symptom of this moment in our cultural politics, though it presents itself as a diagnosis and a tentative prescription. And yet buried in Purdy’s call for renewal is the story of a genuinely and quietly lived radicalism, one chosen by his parents, who planted themselves in West Virginia in the ’70s, taught themselves what they needed to know to live, and raised and home-schooled their kids. Purdy describes himself as coming from another era, and indeed the childhood his parents afforded him and his sister does seem archaically idyllic. Yet they and hundreds if not thousands of other Americans established and sustained alternative communities and modes of living over the past 35 years.
Purdy’s elegiac tone and nostalgia for the ways and ethic of craftsmen seem strange unless you consider that West Virginia childhood. For all his lofty meditations on the republic and its endangerment, what’s really mourned here is not a vanished national past but Purdy’s own childhood and natal community. A book that focused on that would be a richer, realer thing. In its brief excursions into West Virginia, Purdy’s book offers testimony, against itself, that the ’60s aren’t over: They got carried on by other means and might still be carried on today.
