Every spring, I ask my students questions from an old “discussion questions for youth groups” book.  This past week, one of the questions concerned what period of time students would live in if they could choose a pre-2000 life.  The Roaring ’20s comes up a lot, as does the Renaissance and the 19th century.  I’m always interested in students saying the 1990s.  One of the things that I realized about the 90s when I moved to Hawaii was how much of that decade I missed.  In fact, I think I spent most of my first few years in Hawaii learning about the literature of a decade that I lived through (Eggers, Foster Wallace, Coupland, and the like).  Having had a good childhood experience and having been invested in the institutions of my culture (church, work, school, etc), I was quite surprised to find out how deep (and how much) was the cynicism of the 90s.  Maybe it’s because I was never a fan of Seinfeld.  We’ll never know.

So now that we’re well into the second decade of the 21st century, I think I have at least a little better grasp of the ironic and destructive approach to life that Purdy was writing about in For Common Things.  And while I enjoyed the majority of the book, it really hits its stride near the end.  In the concluding sections of the book, Purdy turns to the idea of hope.  And while his view of hope is more of what I would call optimism (per Garber), I do like what he says, especially as it connects with good work in healthy cultures.  Instead of giving in to despair, we must work to find a better way.  To live in a better way means to find and to emulate those who are living better lives.  Consider:

The full response to despair is not just to invoke hope, but to generate it.

People who undertake this sort of living maintain what I have called a moral ecology. By demonstrating that certain ways of living are possible, they invite others to live in the same ways. Living proof of possibility exercises a claim on the imagination that can become a claim on action. It calls us out of ourselves. We learn to shape our lives by answering these models, because in them we see what we might be, and find it good. In the absence of these examples, the possibility of such lives would slip away from us. Every good in us has lived before, and nearly all is a direct gift from people who, often quietly, taught it to us as one might teach a craft, a dance, or the knowledge of a place: by permitting us to participate in it with them.

A friend recently asked me if I could name people who had “aged well” spiritually, who had not soured and shrunken because of the mess that life can be.  That’s part of what Purdy seems to be going for here (and in the book, in general).  Steven Garber would say these are the kind of people who see the mess of world but still strive to love it well.  Seeing such people does give hope, much more hope than what comes with a slogan or bumper-sticker mentality.

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I’m really glad that I read For Common Things, even if I’m over a decade late.  I’m curious to see what kind of philosophical arc Purdy takes over the rest of his writing career.  I’ve already started into his second book, Being America.  And while I probably won’t discuss huge chunks of it here, I can already tell that his thinking is good.  One last quote from For Common Things to close this series out, though:

We need today a kind of thought and action that is too little contemplated yet remains possible.  It is the kind aimed at the preservation of what we love most in the world, and a stay against forgetting what that love requires.  It is an exercise of margins against boundlessness, of earned hope against casual despair, and of responsibility against heedlessness.  If it appears conservative, that is because we have begun to forget the conditions necessary to betterment.  If it appears radical, that is because we have neglected the conditions necessary to conservation.  The common origin of personal practice and public project is the maintenance of a world, natural and social, that moves us to participate in and protect it, and of the human character that can be so moved.  It is a slow, unceasing work whose ground and aim is ecstasy.

If you ever get around to reading For Common Things, let me know.  I’d love to talk to you about it.

(image from familyfriendpoems.com)