[Tucker needs to be thoroughly mocked at every opportunity. I'm resentful of boomers b/c they got to have all the fun in the 60s and 70s and we're stuck with the war on drugs and cigarettes, and the first lady preaching abstinence. Jed has gotten under my skin and I'm trying to exorcise him. Bear with me.] ----------------- New York Times 9/9/99 'For Common Things': Why Seinfeld ('Irony Incarnate') Is So Menacing By CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT
"An ironic man, with his sly stillness, and ambuscading ways," wrote Thomas Carlyle in "Sartor Resartus," "may be viewed as a pest to society."
No, worse, argues Jedediah Purdy in his impressive if somewhat pious first book, "For Common Things: Irony, Trust and Commitment in America Today." The ironic man, whom Purdy personifies as the sitcom character Jerry Seinfeld, "irony incarnate," is an outright menace.
With his "style of speech and behavior that avoids all appearance of naïveté -- of naïve devotion, belief, or hope," the individual armored in the irony so prevalent among young people today has withdrawn from the political arena just when it needs him most. With good reason perhaps, Purdy concedes, politics these days being, in his words, "undignified, disreputable, vaguely ridiculous and thoroughly outmoded," especially compared with an earlier time in the century, when, as the German novelist Thomas Mann wrote, "The question of man's destiny presents itself in political terms."
But politics today is both less and more than a Promethean exercise intended to "bring about basic changes in the human predicament," Purdy argues. Politics can also serve the maintenance of what he punningly calls "common things," referring all at once to what is public, what we all share and what is ordinary.
Purdy says that the decline of the commons isn't as inevitable as the ecologist Garrett Hardin described it as being in "The Tragedy of the Commons," which argued that self-interest must lead everyone with access to the commons to take as much as possible -- that is, to overgraze or to clear forests -- until it is exhausted.
If only, Purdy implores, the commons can be seen less narrowly as three interrelated ecologies: first, "an interpersonal, moral ecology"; second, "a broad social ecology," including "the institutions and practices that affect the shape of our lives," and third, the "natural world." In this perspective then the ironist's shunning of politics will become untenable.
To reveal this vision of politics and the commons, he has written "so that I will not forget what I hope for now, and because others might conclude that they hope for the same things." He continues: "That would be the beginning of turning some of our private, half-secret repositories of hope and trust into common things. I think that some of them must be common, if they are to be at all."
As abstract as his ideas may sound, he has rooted them in the realities of West Virginia, where his parents moved in 1974, the year he was born. Growing up there until he went off to Phillips Exeter Academy at age 14, he was inspired both by the way his parents integrated their work and home lives with the community and by the indifference of the coal-mining companies that he sees as having ravaged the environment. He came away with a vision of work that embedded thinking in the dirt of reality, precluding irony.
By defining this work in moral terms, he hopes to unearth another kind of irony, one that "uncovers, in what is ordinarily imagined to be unimportant or banal, something that elicits surprise, delight and reverence." He concludes: "This irony is ecstatic, in the etymologically strict sense of drawing us out of our stasis. It is the irony of discovery. It moves us."
The difficulty is that little of what Purdy writes is new. As he is the first to recognize, it takes us back to familiar thinkers like Emerson, Thoreau, de Tocqueville, Marx, Camus, Orwell and Weber, among others. On top of this, he labors at length such crashingly obvious ideas as the ethical ambiguities of technology (in particular genetic technology) and the decline of neighborly communities.
Worse, he often sounds self-righteous. He treats the global market economy, which he anathematizes, as if it were something that came into existence in the absence of human effort, whereas it is arguably the consequence of decades of engaged political striving. (Yet on the issue of mountaintop-removal strip-mining, he takes the libertarian position that to pay the cost of coal-mining's environmental damage you must factor it into the price of coal.)
Finally, he trivializes his opposition, not only by reducing all ironists to Seinfeld but also by disdaining all those who seek easier connections to reality than the thankless task of politics.
One comes away from "For Common Things" feeling that the superficial people he seeks to convert won't be bothered to fight their way through his abstruse prose, with its sometimes complex way of saying the most simple things.
Still, you almost always sense what he's getting at, and you have to admire him for taking on the disease of irony, which some see as afflicting an entire generation. If many will not heed him, at least he has articulated a cure.
As his epigraph by Czeslaw Milosz puts it, "What is unpronounced tends to nonexistence." Now that "For Common Things" pronounces the case against a static irony, it gives one pause about reacting ironically.