Sometimes it feels like we’re all living in a kind of (time) bubble.  Contemporary society floats above the mire of history untethered, we think.  In this selection from For Common Things, Jedidiah Purdy might beg to differ:

What we should expect to find is that independence is not the essential quality of a mind or personality. On the contrary, we are in every respect testaments to our own thoroughgoing dependence. Thought that we recognize as wise or witty, behavior that is gracious or elegant, desire refined beyond mere hunger and rut, is all a portion of an inheritance. No one invents such everyday excellences; we all take them up and make them our own by acting in a way that confirms we have understood them.

The exercise of a good mind, or a good personality, is the accomplishment not of escaping a tradition of thought, speech, and behavior but of having understood its elements well enough to make them one’s own reflectively, to sort and distinguish among them. This freedom displays itself in a kind of propriety, or fittingness, that is twofold. A person’s ideas and manner sit naturally together, and fits her disposition as well. At the same time, she is able to respond— to other people, to ideas, to familiar or unfamiliar circumstances— in a way that is appropriate both to her and to the situation. She knows what she is about, in the several senses that this fruitfully ambiguous phrase allows. She knows what matters to her, what her purposes are; she knows what she is doing, what she is up to; and she knows what is around her, that is, she knows her setting. In all of this lies the dignity of familiarity with oneself, one’s work, and one’s place.

Purdy’s idea of inheritance in connection with authority is something that Chesterton picks up on (a century earlier) in What’s Wrong with the World.  There’s no way around authority, Chesterton might suggest.  To be taught is to submit to an authority, which usually manifests itself in a tradition of some kind.

I really like that Purdy used the term fittingness, as it’s a term I came across most significantly in the thinking of Kevin VanHoozer (The Drama of Doctrine).  There is an appropriate and right way to move through the world, even if the world doesn’t seem to understand the direction in which it moves itself.  We’re too much like Esau, really.  Would rather be him, trade the good thing for the immediate thing, than anything else.  Unlike Esau, though, our hopeful inheritance might still be a possibility (even if only in bits and pieces in this life).

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I’ve only been sharing bits and pieces of Purdy’s first book (and I think I’ve only got one more quote to go).  He does a good job of rooting his concerns in his understanding of America.  And he is optimistic, hopeful to find a better way through the murk of contemporary culture.  He understands that significant things are at stake (as in the tension between the public and the private).  He uses a number of issues (like fracking and genetic engineering) to tease out his views.  He also spends a few pages working through the actions of Wendell Berry, one of my favorite essayists and poets.  All to help us see (like Steve Garber) that we should strive to work well in the world, even when it refuses to repent of all its self-inflicted wounds.

(image from eBay.com)