FOR COMMON THINGS

With this, his first book, Purdy, at age 24, emerges as a fresh and vibrant voice, calling for the renewal of commitment to and faith in American civic and political life. The dominant personal manner in America today is irony, a bemused detachment from both the self and the very idea of common cooperation, aspirations, or projects; Seinfeld is everyman. Yet, while irony certainly insulates us from failure and disappointment, we continue, maintains Purdy, to long for a sense of wholeness, commitment, and real values. Once, such things could be found in politics, but Promethean dreams of social perfection and transformation are as extinct as the Soviet Union, and politics is now widely viewed—often for good reason—as a place for self-serving hypocrisy. So to find meaning we escape into what is unreal, into beliefs that guardian angels look out for us, into delusions of “the business-man-as-hero,” of computer hacks as the boundless, limitless masters of cyberspace. But as the author carefully explains, these are all self-defeating fantasies; they are bound to disappoint, bound to drive us back to where we started, irony. He suggests instead reality, the sloppy, not always easy or successful reality of civic life. We need to care for those things that “must be common if they are to be at all”: a justice system that is indeed just, an economy that works and is fair, a natural world that might persist beyond our own generation. Although the author himself does at times take on the proselytizing tone of the fantasy purveyors he decries, this is above all a realistic message. It’s not manifesto for revolution but, more modestly, a simple call for tending to human possibilities that in their frailty are in danger of being lost. Conservative in his respect for tradition, progressive in his calls for change, Purdy offers original insights by and for a generation that is too little heard from, or perhaps listened to. (Author tour)