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Title: For Common Things: Irony, Trust and Commitment in America Today by Jedediah Purdy ISBN: 0-375-70691-7 Publisher: Vintage Books USA Pub. Date: 12 September, 2000 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.19 (79 reviews)
Rating: 2
Summary: Why the mean spirited reviews?
Comment: I went to Harvard with Jedediah Purdy, and although I did not know him very well, I was always impressed by his genuine niceness. In a school where cynicism ran rampant (and where I was/am one of its worst perpetrators), the genuine niceness of someone like Jedediah seemed like a breath of fresh air. By contrast, while reading through all of the reader reviews on this page, I was immediately struck by the mean-spiritedness of many of his critics. For sure, For Common Things is not a perfect book, and some parts of it may indeed be "naive". However, this should not blind us to both the book's and the author's many virtues.
All in all, I would say that For Common Things is a thoughtful book written by a young man who sees jarring incongruities between the small world he grew up with and the larger world he sees around him. However, as much as I might want it to be the contrary, the author's strategy of trying to generalize the moral lessons he acquired from his upbringing on a rural farm to the modern world of technology, multinational economics and on-demand media ultimately fails. As someone who has lived both on a farm in Oklahoma and consulted to major Fortune 500 companies on mergers and acquisitions, I can attest from personal experience that the farmer-philosopher life that author advocates in this book IS not necessarily the best life. There are certainly some agrarian values such as thrift and repect for sustainable development which are very noble, but there are also values in the business and high tech communities (which author seems to despise) which are just as noble ... e.g., analytical rigor, a bias toward action, a desire to truly make an impact on the world at large. The author may be right in believing that the world would be a terrible place if everyone thought and acted like Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, but the world would also be a terrible place if everyone thought and acted like philosopher-farmers as well. In short, we need both.
After reading the book, I have become convinced that it would have been far more successful if it were written more as a straight narrative, e.g., in the tradition of Henry Louis Gates' autobiography, than as a universal call to moral action. Just as immersed travel into a radically different foreign country allow people to see their own culture and customs in a much more enlightened perspective, an immersed journey into the childhood story of Jedediah Purdy could have helped many readers to see American popular culture from much richer perspective.
It is too bad that Jedediah decided to adopt a moralizing tone which distracts from the true value of his story. It is something we can all learn from, if only to understand how to become a nicer, less cynical person.
Rating: 4
Summary: Opie's Examined Life*
Comment: Through Plato's pen, Socrates said that an "unexamined life is not worth living." Now through the earnest words of a recent Harvard graduate, a twenty-four-year-old examines our modern lives and offers us a prescription for what ails us. The ailment is irony, or more finely put, "ironic detachment." Its chief avatar is the television character Jerry Seinfeld, who moves in and out of relationships with all the enthusiasm of a jaded, I've-seen-it-all-and-could-care-less New Yorker, which, of course, he is. Written by Jedediah Purdy, For Common Things: Irony, Trust and Commitment in America Today targets an array of cultural arbiters who value cleverness over curiosity, style over substance, self-awareness over social immersion, and, above all, the private over the public. For his efforts, Purdy has reaped scornful reproaches from the very class of ironists he preemptively criticizes. As someone more than twice Purdy's age, I am both amazed and tinged with a bit of envy that a young creature of a West Virginia hollow could possess so much erudition, wisdom, and perspicacity. I dare say that most twenty-four-year-olds could not spell Montaigne let alone quote his magnificent expressions. But Purdy-drawing upon the writings of the 16th-century French essayist; the observations of Tocqueville (which serve as epigraphs in Purdy's book); the philosophies of Kant, Rousseau, and Hegel; the life and words of Wendell Berry; and the profound experiences of Adam Michnik, the brave Polish dissident who retained his integrity as his country succumbed to capitalist rot-urges us to reject ironic detachment in favor of a renewed commitment to the commonweal. Chief among his detractors is Roger D. Hodge, who offered a scathing indictment of Purdy's new book in the September issue of Harper's Magazine. Entitled "Thus Spoke Jedediah: The Distilled Wisdom of a Cornpone Prophet," Hodge, with impatient disdain, says that Purdy belongs to "a line of young Ivy-educated authors whose prose briefly quickened the hearts of the marketing executives who decide which titles will appear at the front of book catalogues, in Barnes & Noble display windows, and on the banner of the Amazon.com home page. And yet how utterly worthless are their books, stacked on remainder shelves in the basements of used-book stores soon after their publication, their notoriety worn thin, their authors' careers all but over." On the contrary, counters Walter Kirn in Time Magazine. "Purdy's book is a precocious diatribe against the sort of media-savvy detachment that passes for intelligence and maturity in the age of Letterman...It is not the accessible pop polemic some reviewers have made it out to be but an achingly ambitious manifesto from a very young man who happens to be, alarmingly often, eloquent beyond his years." Jedediah Purdy was raised on a farm and homeschooled by his parents, mostly his philosophy-trained mother. At the age of 14 he entered New Hampshire's prestigious Phillips Exeter Academy. From there he matriculated at Harvard, where he became "obsessed with ethics," quotes Time. Yet he returned to the family farm at every opportunity to directly experience "the mundane," which, as he reminds us in his book, comes from the Latin mundus-'the world.' He is now studying law and the environment at Yale. In his spare time, it would appear, he writes best-selling manifestoes. What are the "common things" he describes? Essentially they are three "ecologies"-moral, political, and environmental-which are inextricably linked and interdependent. Purdy sets these against our zealous, uncritical embrace of all things private, which, he says, connotes deprivation. He sharply rebukes management guru Tom Peters, who, in his most recent incarnation, champions "You.com," the self as marketed product. (Peters, like his weight, dramatically fluctuates. He used to praise "excellent" corporations for their respect for and involvement of employees. He embraced quality and systems, à la Deming and Juran. A couple of years ago, he recanted. He began to promote virtual companies like Sara Lee, which have a brand name, relatively few officers, a host of products made by others, and no loyalties. Today, Peters proclaims the individual über alles-you are but your résumé, which must constantly be marketed.) The magazines Wired and Fast Company promote greed and self-absorption, argues Purdy. Bill Clinton resorts to facile rhetoric in manipulating public opinion, yet delivers little. Worse, Purdy suggests, the President's hypocritical behavior exquisitely models ironic detachment, feeding the growing cynicism toward public institutions. Purdy, as you have gathered, is a self-proclaimed progressive, acutely concerned for the environment and anxious to improve society. Time writes that "his broader goal is to spur a resurgence in grass-roots public activism." But it's an activism steeped in reason, nurtured by the mundane, and profoundly compassionate. It is not "Promethean," he argues. Rather, it draws on our best public traditions and decides human nature in favor of Rousseau over Hobbes. We would surely profit from more young sages like Purdy and far fewer of what writer Calvin Trillin calls 'Sabbath gasbags.' After all, there are very real problems out there that command our urgent attention.
* After hearing Purdy on NPR's Morning Edition, I could not resist the image of Ron Howard as Opie. The voice is pure and fresh and innocent. But the words reveal perceptive sagacity. Given his book's nasty reception by the ironists he abhors, Purdy may be deterred from writing another. However, I suspect that he will energetically pursue his overarching goals. And his splendid portfolio should provide this polymath with ample opportunity to make a difference in the world.
Rating: 2
Summary: Interesting, but empty.
Comment: When I first saw this book, I was intriqued by the very straightforward writing of the author, and immediately related to his desire to see a simpler world that was not unnecessarily complicated by greed and insincerity. Seeing as this book was published right as the dot-com boom was at its crest, the digiterati of silicon valley (and elsewhere) seemed an easy target. I admit that I took a more than a little pleasure in seeing the fall of many of the dot-commers.
However, the book quickly languished in identifying the problems of modern society without giving any concrete alternatives to the society against which it railed. Jedediah seems to take great pains in telling us about his early life in West Virginia, but does nothing to enable us to translate his earlier experiences into modern society. In the end, this comes painfully close to becoming a "Things were better back in the good-old days" type of book.
Overall, I was disappointed, but not surprised. If all of the worlds ills could be dispelled just by writing about them, things would be much easier.
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Title: Being America: Liberty, Commerce, and Violence in an American World by Jedediah Purdy ISBN: 0375413073 Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf Pub. Date: 11 February, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
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Title: Shows About Nothing: Nihilism in Popular Culture from The Exorcist to Seinfeld by Thomas S. Hibbs ISBN: 189062635X Publisher: Spence Publishing Company Pub. Date: 15 December, 2000 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics by Bruce J. Schulman ISBN: 030681126X Publisher: Da Capo Press Pub. Date: 16 April, 2002 List Price(USD): $17.00 |
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Title: Double Trouble: Bill Clinton and Elvis Presley in a Land of No Alternatives by Greil Marcus ISBN: 0312420412 Publisher: Picador USA Pub. Date: 01 September, 2001 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: Picture Windows: How the Suburbs Happened by Rosalyn Baxandall, Elizabeth Ewen ISBN: 0465070132 Publisher: Basic Books Pub. Date: 19 June, 2001 List Price(USD): $17.00 |
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