This is a very intriguing book, especially impressive given the age of its author. He correctly identifies a growing problem in our society; the disengagement of many from public life. He finds the main culprit to be "ironic detachment," the result of disillusionment with the failure of politics to deliver on its promises in recent decades. While I agree that the ironic attitude, along with its cousins cynicism, skepticism and disillusionment regarding politics and public life generally have become widespread in recent decades, I believe these are effects, not causes of the problem. The cause has been the steady and inexorable growth of government, which has been and must always be accompanied by encroachment into the realm of civil society. While the latter relies on voluntary cooperation in dealing with the problems of society, the former relies on coercion. George Washington warned us about placing too much trust in government: "it is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force," and "it is, like fire, a dangerous servant and a fearsome master."
It is easy to understand why many have chosen to disengage themselves from a political process that has become increasingly agressive in seizing resources by force and redistributing them as it sees fit, not incidentally keeping a large portion of the booty for itself. If you were in a grocery store checkout line and discovered that the local approved payment method was for shoppers in line to vote on who should pay for their groceries, would you shop there often? As more and more areas of our lives become politicized, the incentives to withdraw become greater.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not pessimistic about the ability of people to work together in voluntary cooperation to deal with society's problems, only about the use of government coercion in this effort. In point of fact, those who, like Purdy, advocate the resort to force in the politicization of virtually all issues betray a deep pessimism about the effectiveness of voluntary cooperation, notwithstanding their attempts to paint government mandated solutions as representing such cooperation.
Because I disagree with his analysis of the root (although not the existence) of the problem, I also disagree with his prescribed cure. He asks us to drop our skepticism about the effectiveness of government solutions to society's problems, inviting us to come back to the table and push for politicized solutions to a broad swath of environmental, moral and other issues. His argument is that government works, we just have to get more involved and bring our best ideas and efforts to it. This is in contrast to the view of our founders, who warned: "that government is best which governs least," thereby maximizing the scope of civil society and minimizing political society. Our best ideas and efforts should indeed be offered in the former realm, but not in the latter, which needs restraint more than encouragement.
I don't wish to disparage Mr. Purdy, who has written an impressive set of essays that could easily be mistaken for the work of a much more seasoned author. I applaud his desire for us to return to sincerity, honesty and earnestness in our relationships with one another in civil society. I only ask that he, and others, reconsider their call for more government, more force, less discussion and less voluntary cooperation in preserving the common things.
"Irony is a fear of betrayal, disappointment and humiliation, and a suspicion that believing, hoping or caring too much will open us to these. Irony is a way of refusing to rely on such treacherous things" (xii).
"Where anyone may become rich and powerful, everyone begins to suspect that they are obliged to become rich and powerful...If America as a nation was boundlessly hopeful, Americans as individuals were endlessly uneasy...At the same time, the American faith in equality...did away with authority...anyone's opinion was as good as any others...That everyone's opinion be equally worthwhile might seem from a distance to open up a free-for-all of argument and exploration. Up close, though, it meant that the American was disinclined to take anyone's opinion seriously: Why listen to him, talking as though he knew better than anyone else? Rather than burst into a new egalitarian public life, people were inclined to shut up, close their ears, and turn their attention to something concrete, like making money...Our leading cultural currency today is a version of the stubbornly flat skepticism that Toqueville observed. We practice a form of irony insistently doubtful of the qualities that would make us take another person seriously: the integrity of personality, sincere motivation, the idea that opinions are more than symptoms of fear or desire. We are wary of hope, because we see little that can support it. Believing in nothing much, especially not in people, is a point of vague pride, and conviction can seem embarrassingly naive" (pp. 4-6).
"The point of irony is a quiet refusal to believe in the depth of relationships, the sincerity of motivation, or the truth of speech - especially earnest speech. In place of the romantic idea that each of us harbors a true self struggling for expression, the ironist offers the suspicion that we are just quantum selves - all spin, all the way down" (p. 10).
"The ironic response to these uncertain currents is eager acquiescence. This distinguishes the ironist from that more somber and familiar beast, the cynic. The cynic, harboring at least a residual sense of superiority, stays home and denounces callow and frivolous party-goers. The ironist goes to the party and, while refusing to be quite of it, gets off the best line of the evening. An endless joke runs through the culture of irony, not exactly at anyone's expense, but rather at the expense of the idea that anyone might take the whole affair seriously" (p. 10).
"Jerry Seinfeld's stance resists disappointment or failure by refusing to identify strongly with any project, relationship or aspiration...The great fear of the ironist is being caught out having staked a good part of his all on a false hope - personal, political or both" (p. 14).
"Instead of inspiration, contemporary irony finds in public life a proliferation of cant that reinforces ironic skepticism. Emotions have attracted relentless and often vapid attention in recent decades, abetted by the confessional culture of talk shows and choreographed political repentance that makes such concern unabashedly public. The young ironist rightly feels that that species of sincerity is more honored in the breach than in the observance. Today's irony also reacts to a curious conjunction in public life between the rhetoric of evangelical revival and the behavior of low vaudeville; Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker sometimes seem to have formed the mold for the public figures of the past decade" (p. 15).
"...we are permeated by Sigmund Freud's view that "we are all ill,"...It is revealing that anyone who regards his own standards a little too reverently is likely to be labelled not proud, but "anal."...to aspire to wellness is to invite debunking. Our being human has become a strong argument against cleaving to demanding values, or respecting them in others. In a curious way, we consider ourselves too honest for that" (pp. 16-18).
"Tom Peters' call to "brand" ourselves...chimes unsettlingly with a a widespread suspicion that marketing is not a bad metaphor for what most of us do most of the time" (18).
"For all its ready laughter, the ironic mood is secretly sad" (19).
"Refusing to place its trust in the world, irony helps to make a world that is more likely to be worthy of despair. And so, despite our assiduous efforts defend ourselves from it, disappointment and a quiet, pervasive sadness have crept into our lives" (20).
"In the ironic view, each individual is essentially alone" (20).
"The meaningfulness of things is fundamental to a tradition that begins on the one hand in Plato's discourses on the intelligibility of reality, and on the other in the declaration that "In the beginning was the Word." We are inheritors of the idea that intelligence and at least partly comprehensible order lie at the root of all that is. However the experience of the past hundred-odd years has been marked by the growth of the idea that the world's order can neither guide nor nurture us, that any significance it may have is essentially inhuman. In the phrase of German thinker Max Weber, the world has become "disenchanted." ...Angels answer this aweful apprehension. Ministering to our sadness and lonliness, they assure us that we are not unloved...By interceding in the course of events, angels propose...the very fabric of things can respond to our desires...If the world does not revolve around us (a childish belief), it does at least wobble our way on occasion (start a stalled engine, prevent a dropped key from falling through a grate...)....Purdy goes on to criticize this view since it allows us to feel comfortable with the world alone, not requiring working with others to make it better" (21-25).
The tone of his attitude toward religion indicates he does not believe it and therefore has turned to politics as a substitute. He openly criticizes libertarian ideas in several places and prefers an activist government critiquing the marketplace. His attitude is that we either participate in important choices (via coercive state intervention) or (heaven forbid) leave it to the marketplace.
"Anyone who objects to something on principle invites the favorite ironist technique, the reinterpretation of principles into psychological symptoms: 'What's bothering him?'" (63)
Purdy is forever trying to blur the boundaries of "public" and "private."
All 3 false (in Purdy's view) responses to the world (irony, credulity, free agentry) involve evasion...an attenuated sense of autonomy...not exactly a bold pronouncement of "Invictus" - "I am the master of my fate, the captain of my soul" but a studied refusal of obligation, a cultivated insubstantiality of devotion. The ironist keeps his own mind and heart private, and they are not enriched by their isolation. Credulity (i.e. for Purdy, looking to angels for comfort) leads to other-worldliness. Free-agentry to the attempt to escape all constraints for self (85-86). In place of irony, credulity and free-agentry, he recommends caring, real-world focus and community-orientation.
His 3 ecologies are moral, social and environmental.
Purdy would like us to acknowledge a sense of inherited obligation. "Yet inherited obligation is a thing of the past. John Locke, the founding thinker of modern political society and especially of American politics, held that because political obligation was based on the free consent of citizens, no state could be legitimate that denied its members the right to leave it. That idea has not left us since. Many of the defining figures of modern political reflection cast the same conviction in the distinctly American mold of Thoreau. They are inner emigres, whose first loyalty is to conscience or to some particular, freely chosen, and often dissenting moral community. Moreover, a nation of immigrants is founded on the prerogative to leave something behind in favor of something else. It begins with the refusal of inherited duty. It is no surprise that American Catholics are selective to the point of Protestantism in their reception of church teachings, or that Americans are "born again" with a frequency that baffles the populations of other prosperous and educated countries. This practice is a religious analogue to our restless movements and self-inventions (e.g. Ben Franklin)...we honor only what we have chosen, and sometimes only what we have made. These experiences and attitudes are cornerstones of our identity. We could not be rid of them. Obligation to the commons, then, requires not the return of hereditary obligation but the self-discipline of liberty. It is the mark of our freedom that we can ignore any tradition and refuse any loyalty. We are at liberty to be entirely self-concerned...in order to take responsibility, we must relinquish boundlessness to acquire form" (pp. 106-107).
Purdy refers to the book The Captive Mind, Czeslaw Milosz, 1981. Good profiles of different types of characters.
My assessment is that Purdy makes an excellent call to moderns away from irony and to belief in government. The call should be made, but to belief in God, not government!
Here's another quote about irony from Liberty magazine (Feb 2002, p. 18):
All [ironic] comedy works in the same way: its the sudden discovery that what we feared, what we were taught to respect, what we worried about, what we were intimidated by, isn't anything that we need to worry about after all.
Still more thoughts about irony (written on the occasion of my parents' 50th wedding anniversary):
As I was reading an article recently in the American Scholar magazine (The Case of Thomas Carlyle, Summer 2001), I thought of one lasting impact of my parents' example in my life. The author (Rochelle Gurstein) explains the motto of the famous 19th century writer and thinker: 'Life is earnest.' The author continues: 'We need to pause for a moment to reflect on this phrase, since in our time of unrelieved cynicism and irony it has become largely unintelligible. Indeed, ever since Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest was first performed (1895), earnestness has been a term of derision used to mock the Victorians. But in an age when religious belief and the social order were increasingly under assault, Carlyle's 'gospel of earnestness,' as it was called, was a revelation. To be in earnest intellectually meant to have, or to seek to have, genuine, intensely examined beliefs about the fundamental questions of life; it meant refusing to accept received wisdom, or to treat such questions as if they were an intellectual game. To be in earnest morally meant to recognize life as something more elevated and more serious than moneymaking and sensual gratification; it meant asserting an absolute and transcendent moral and spiritual order and struggling arduously against the forces of evil, both in one's own soul and in society. For Carlyle, earnestness was a prime virtue of the hero.'
I have come to realize over the years that my parents have exemplified for me what it means to be earnest. I now see that this approach to life is closely linked to strong faith in God and that its opposite (cynicism) is often the result of a weakened or broken faith. Although I don't always exhibit perfect earnestness, I see its value from observing it in them and this is an area in which I'd like to do better.
The author also sheds some light on why this earnest approach to life can cause misunderstanding among others who don't share it. She explains that Carlyle was often misunderstood, 'always suffer[ing] from the lack of the sense of humour in mankind, and from the impossibility that the insincere should understand the frankness of genuine sincerity.' I imagine my parents have probably been misunderstood over the years by various people for similar reasons.
The author goes on to link a healthy understanding of earnestness to the idea of privacy (i.e. boundaries), both of which have been largely discarded by modern culture. 'Just as the gospel of earnestness has become alien to us, so too has the ... reticent sensibility. This is largely because our post-Freudian and media-saturated world of constant publicity, exposure, unmasking, and confession has incited feelings of entitlement to know everything about everyone. What were once considered the defining qualities of civilized life - tact, discretion, reserve, decorum, propriety - are now despised as obstacles to knowledge, as forms of guilty cover-up or psychological repression. Yet at their core was a profound respect for privacy, for it was commonly held that privacy was the sole guarantor of individual dignity.' My parents have also exhibited this sense of proper boundaries and respect for the dignity of individuals as they strive to live uprightly before God.
In these ways and many others they have shown me what it means to have a proper approach to living life before God. I am deeply thankful to my parents as they celebrate 50 years of faithfulness to God, to each other and to us.