Books

For Common Things: Irony, Trust, and Commitment in America Today

by Jedediah Purdy

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I think that the greatest example of casual, social cruelty I can imagine is laughing at a sincere love letter. It is the moral equivalent of knocking change out of the hand of a beggar: a pointed and cynical response to declared vulnerability. What prompts us to mock sentimentalism in the public sphere--what makes it morally acceptable to make fun of Celine Dion's music, for instance--is the suspicion that such music is itself a form of cynicism, a manipulation of America's overwhelming urge towards the saccharine. You get the sense that when Dion and her kind are singing about love they are not singing about their own love at all: and erzatz emotion is laughable. But it takes moral callousness to mock somebody's genuine sincerity. After all, what the scoffer is saying is that one person's true hopes and fears are ridiculous.

Roger D. Hodge is not afraid of this kind of behavior. His Harper's Magazine review of Jedediah Purdy '97's first book, For Common Things, is one of the most vitriolic and least clever put-downs I have ever read; when its negativity is contrasted with Purdy's obvious and infectuous enthusiasm for the many things he loves and praises, the review also begins to seem strikingly sad. In his preface, Purdy boyishly admits that his book is "one young man's letter of love": it is this vulnerability that makes Purdy a moving and an effective narrator. That Purdy's sincerity can become overbearing, that it can devolve into sentimentalism, is acceptable collateral damage, an occupational hazard of writing from the heart. It is one of the occupational hazards of being a resentful book reviewer and a claptrap ironist, it seems, that Hodge has become unable to read from the same place.

The subject of Purdy's sincerity is precisely the pervasive cult of irony whose brand Hodge wears, to whom "Believing in nothing much, especially not in people, is a point of vague pride, and conviction can seem embarrassingly nave." In response to the culture of irony that mocks because it does not have the faith to believe or love, Purdy resolves to "speak earnestly of uncertain hopes." The fragility of hope in the ironic world, he asserts, is not a reason to give up on hoping: "I have written this bookso that I will not forget what I hope for now, and because others might conclude that they hope for the same things. That would be the beginning of turning some of our private, half-secret repositority of hope and trust into common things."

In the course of his pursuit of common things--"the things we all rely upon that can be preserved by attention running beyond narrow interest"--Purdy advocates for the envisioning of public life as three "interrelated ecologies." The ecological paradigm is important: Purdy's point is that the restoration of public life depends upon recognition of the codependence of every position in the ecological web. Thus Purdy conceives of understanding human interpersonal responsibility as "moral ecology," individual responsibility to the public sphere as "social ecology," and environmental responsibility as, well, "ecology." Not, perhaps, the neatest of aphoristic parallelisms in an American environmentalist tradition that has been marked by the brilliant aphoristic prose of its writers: but Purdy, despite his occasional lapses in tone, is an heir to the aphoristic tradition of the environmentalists, and to their conviction that sincere beliefs must root themselves in the solid realities of the physical environment. In Purdy's case, this conviction manifests itself in the attention this text pays to Purdy's native West Virginia."