-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- BEING AMERICA Liberty, Commerce, and Violence in an American World. By Jedediah Purdy. 337 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $24. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
'Being America': The Global Villain
By BARRY GEWEN
Jedediah Purdy was the wunderkind du jour a few years ago. In 1999, when he was 24, he published ''For Common Things: Irony, Trust, and Commitment in America Today,'' an ambitious assault on his own generation for its narcissism and self-absorption. ...
His second book, ''Being America: Liberty, Commerce, and Violence in an American World,'' shows that Purdy has lost none of his ambition. His theme now is globalization in its social, economic and, above all, intellectual aspects, his goal an answer to the oft-repeated question ''Why do they hate us?'' In 2001 Purdy went to see for himself, traveling through the Middle East and Asia, talking to students, business executives, ethnic nationalists, religious fanatics. This is his report on the bad news.
Globalization, Purdy says, has produced disruption everywhere, an unavoidable ''tectonic'' shift. Traditions have been uprooted, institutions overturned, populations left untethered and resentful. Does this sound familiar? It should. Marxism may be dead, but Marx's picture of the awful destructiveness wrought by free markets still has force, and his famous comment on the psychological impact of capitalism could be Purdy's as well: ''All that is solid melts into air.'' But Purdy diverges from Marx in two key ways. First, he does not have a 19th-century faith in the inevitability of progress. Where Marx was confident that the proletariat would usher in a golden age, Purdy sees a still unresolved conflict between two tendencies, one liberal and tolerant, the other illiberal, fanatical and violent. These tendencies, he is keen to point out, exist side by side within countries, even within the same person.
Second, where Marx understood history to be driven by inexorable economic forces, Purdy gives those forces an American face.
... this is not an easy book to like. ...
The problem is that Purdy has a deep aversion to the employment of power. In this he is not very different from many others on the left, and it is a major reason large numbers of Americans look upon liberals (understood here in the narrow sense) as wimps. Do not try to imagine Jedediah Purdy with his head poking out of a tank. At one point he says that ''Being America'' is a book concerned with varieties of power, but it is more accurately a book about the avoidance of power. The United States is urged to be prudent and recognize its limits, to use its strength to nurture and protect. Be modest, he says. ''It is better not to speak too loudly of one's own principles.'' Purdy himself has certainly learned to speak softly. So far, however, he has failed to grasp the other half of Theodore Roosevelt's equation for surviving in the real world.
(Barry Gewen is an editor at the Book Review.)
<http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/30/books/review/30GEWENT.html?pagewanted=all&position=top>
Carl
_________________________________________________________________ STOP MORE SPAM with the new MSN 8 and get 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail