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."

It is a truism of the psychologizing age that a book tells us as much about its author as about its subject. And the authentic power of For Common Things resides not in the originality of Purdy's thesis but rather in the not-at-all-incidental portrait of Jedidiah Purdy. The book is filled with autobiographical detail, and with confessions that spring from a mind uninterested in artifice and concealment: it is the example of Purdy's love of common things, rather than his sometimes boring case studies in the downfall of public culture, that proves effective.

In the course of his slim book--For Common Things runs to 207 pages--Purdy spends altogether too much time on what he openly admits are his pet issues: the miasma of confusion that is eastern European public life after 1989, and the ecological disaster of strip-mining in West Virginia. And Purdy admits, too, that his notions of the direction in which public life should move are highly derivative--although his chapter on the pervasive effects of irony and its corrosion of popular culture is original, very sophisticated, and compelling. But if you can cut through the occasional tediousness, what is left is the author as powerful exemplar of embodied faith and conviction, his emotion rousing correlative emotion in the reader. There is remarkable moral force behind Jedediah Purdy's introspection; a generation could do worse than to be moved by the example and the lucid expression of his passion.

Hodge has not read Purdy carefully enough to express himself coherently on the topic, but one senses that Hodge's criticism is built upon umbrage at the fact that For Common Things, at its heart, is not about intellectual arguments but rather about Jedediah Purdy's passionate hopes. The instance of an idealist is offensive and risible to the ironic mind that can not stand to see ideals expressed or fulfilled: "our being human," writes Purdy, "has become a strong argument against cleaving to demanding values, or respecting them in others." One can sense in Hodge the resentfulness born of this attitude, as Hodge castigates Purdy more for who he is than for what he believes: "Apparently because we're all too ironic or falsely spiritual to believe in anything as simple and real as the value of living on a hillside farm in West Virginia, we lack a politics that functions as a repository of our hopes and dreams." Even to a reader less self-consciously worldly and less corrosively bitter than Hodge, Purdy's tone and substance--the fact that this book is about Jedediah Purdy, and that any power in the book springs from his unshakeable convictions--may seem narcissistic; and his tendency towards moralistic aphorisms, towards a Thoreauvian epigrammatic style, seems a little bit pompous.

But I think any such judgments must be preceeded by an attempt to understand where this book comes from. For Common Things is remarkable for, among other things, its fidelity to the tradition of American environmentalist writing in particular. Since its beginnings, American writing has been infused with the conviction that the personal must somehow stand for the nation. It is characteristic of what has been called the American Self that the particular events of the individual life are understood to somehow trend towards universality.

Perhaps this tendency of the American Self evidences itself nowhere more clearly than in environmentalist literature and eco-criticism. It wasn't narcissism but selflessness--in the most authentic sense of the term, the vanishing of the self--that led Thoreau to tell us about his life in the woods: it was his conviction that individual choices possess some kind of cosmic exemplary significance. Walden is a sort of spiritual biography of man in Nature, told through Thoreau's experience in the woods. The notion is that experience is transcendent of the personal, and indexes the general.

And similarly with the great environmentalist writers of this century--Aldo Leopold, Edward Abbey, Doug Peacock and many more like them--who feel compelled to tell us about their lives to an extent that often becomes deadening. Peacock has spent the years since his return from a deeply traumatic stint in Vietnam photographing and following brown bears from unimaginably unsafe distances: what lurks behind Peacock's lengthy exposition of his Grizzly Years, though, is not the implication that his set of unusual experiences are unique but that somehow they partake of the universally shared history of the relationship between man and Nature. The naturalists resolve the paradox between the necessary subjectivity of experience and the importance of nurturing a public that believes commonly in the good of environmentalism--a public that can never share the precise set of experiences that led the naturalist himself to his environmentalist beliefs--through the figure of the representative individual, not self-absorbed but rather allowing the self to absorb into the fabric of the common.

Purdy is certainly heir to this tradition of highlighting the exemplary individual, and what is remarkable is the extent to which he seems to understand and to successfully employ the techniques and the tropes of American environmentalist literature. What these techniques come down to, at bottom, has always been the recognition that logic will not suffice in altering the common perception of human responsibility.The environmentalist's have believed that, ultimately, it is not logical consideration that brings people to hopeless irony, and that redemption too will be effected not through logic but through passion and commitment.The use of the exemplary self is the attempt to convince not through argument but through moral suasion: if I can act this way or believe these things, the speaker suggests, so can you. And aphorism does not necessarily proceed through channels of reason but rather through inspiring an emotional response of identification, an instinctual rather than an intellectual yes.

Purdy's book is in its way strikingly mature and knowledgeable, extraordinarily well crafted, and in the end profoundly meaningful. This does not mean the book is flawless. It simply means that in the sum of things Jedediah Purdy has written a book that, in its example of a person who is unafraid to express out loud his delicate loves, richly deserves fulfillment of its modest request: "I cannot help believing that we need a way of thinking, and doing, that has in it more promise of goodness than the one we are now following. I want to speak a word for that belief, in the hope of an answer."