FOR COMMON THINGS: Irony, Trust, and Commitment in America Today.

FOR COMMON THINGS: Irony, Trust, and Commitment in America Today

by Fedediah Purdy Knopf, $20.00

IN 1992, AT THE TAIL END OF the Reagan-Bush era, I published a memoir about my time at Harvard Law School, lamenting that so many idealistic liberals (myself included) were tempted by the fruit of corporate law. But the book also held out hope that if a Democratic president were elected, perhaps there would be a rush away from the greed and cynicism of the 1980s and public service and political activism would be restored to the lofty heights of earlier eras.

In 1999, Jedediah Purdy, now a Yale Law student, has published an idealistic book which rightly argues that at the end of the Clinton presidency, we are in fact worse off than ever: less committed, more cynical, more sarcastic. Says Purdy, "To talk about politics today is to presume insincerity. It is the requirement of even modest political sophistication to understand that public figures neither say what they mean nor mean what they say"

Purdy's book, For Common Things: Irony, Trust, and Commitment in America day, is written as "a response to an ironic time" The book, which contrasts Purdy's childhood in rural West Virginia with the jaded environs of Exeter and Harvard College, is a protest against a culture which reveres irony, which he defines as the "refusal to believe in the depth of relationships, the sincerity of motivation, or the truth of speech -- especially earnest speech" Purdy makes his case passionately and sometimes eloquently, but the strongest evidence about the tenor of our times comes not so much from the book itself as from the public reaction to it. The book and its author have received a flood of attention from the elite media and it turns out that lots of people, including lots of liberals, hate the book and intensely dislike the author. What is it that gets people so worked up? Several explanations emerge.

The first, and the most legitimate, criticism is that in taking on all that is ironic, Purdy overreached. Irony, as opposed to cynicism, can be a source of enjoyment and humor and a devastating tool for exposing hypocrisy. A liberal against irony unilaterally disarms and gives up on the right to savor a cartoon of George W. Bush delivering a sermon about "merit" while standing on a platform built of his many unearned advantages. A proper sense of irony can keep idealism exhilarating and inspirational yet grounded; a lack of irony can render it somber and sanctimonious. The real problem comes when irony degenerates into Seinfeldian cynicism, which lazily assumes everything George W. Bush (or any other politician) says is inauthentic. This more nuanced sense of irony is evident in parts of Purdy's book, but in the opening chapters, Purdy's sledgehammer approach obscures his essentially sound and important message.

A second criticism discounts Purdy's earnestness as a by-product of his privileged background. Raised by committed parents who moved to rural West Virginia to create a sane environment for their children, Purdy was home-schooled until age 13 before attending Exeter and Harvard. The charge is: With that background, I wouldn't be cynical either; maybe if he'd fought in a war or had a drunken father, he'd appreciate irony. But anyone who has sat around a Harvard dining room table, reeking of privilege, knows the cynic is highly revered, the idealist scorned. And it is to Purdy's credit that he has avoided this reflexive cynicism that comes with privilege.

The third thing that irks people about Purdy is his age. His elders are annoyed by all the attention -- the lengthy profiles, his appearance as an NPR commentator -- while Purdy's peers resent his anointment as generational spokesperson. A scathing review in Harper's brought up Purdy's age nine times in two pages. Of course jealousy does not constitute an argument against the substance of what Purdy says. His age (25) and his physical appearance (16) are unfortunate, instead, because they reinforce the debilitating stereotype that students and retired people are allowed and expected to be idealistic, while those of us slogging it out in the working world are hardened realists. A related criticism is that, as David Brooks has written, Purdy has "developed the ability to write like a university president at a very young age" But if his prose is sometimes heavy, it can at other times be eloquent and pithy. And, in any event, the focus on style elides the more important issue of substance.

Which leads us to a fourth criticism, that Purdy's book is prudish and judgmental. This is a tricky criticism to evaluate; the line between upholding high standards and cloying self-righteousness is a thin one. Purdy might have walked this line better if he'd been more open about his own faults. But Purdy's large point is right: Cynicism is often less a sign of sophistication than of resignation, and irony can be useful to the ironist as a way of avoiding responsibility. While Purdy's earnestness is said to be brooding and unpleasant, cynicism is far more base and depressing.

Finally, the book is accused of being so wide-ranging that it lacks coherence. As Harper's justly observed, the author "seems to have included every single term paper he wrote at Harvard" But when Purdy turns his analysis to political life in the late 1990s, he is dead on. In the Clinton administration, Purdy sees an environmental president whose Interior Secretary rationalizes strip mining with demonstrably false claims about the power of reclamation. He sees a president who declares the need for a national conversation on race but emphasizes sentiment over concrete social change. Worst of all, he sees a president who came to office raising hopes and idealism and left us more cynical. Under this analysis, Clinton's crime is less that he can't keep his zipper shut and more that he can't keep his Bible to himself whenever people find out. The Clinton era helped close the gap between the cynical Ivy League and trusting West Virginia by encouraging us to believe that it's "all spin, all the way down."

Jedediah Purdy is right to object to these developments, and he should not be written off as a self-righteous child who doesn't know better. Idealism is too important to be left to the young and the old exclusively.

RICHARD D. KAHLENBERG, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, is author of Broken Contract: A Memoir of Harvard Law School.