Space Enough, and Time

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)

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)

One of the trickier parts of being a teacher is how the work you do seeps into life beyond the classroom.  It is not uncommon to hear teachers say something like “sometimes I wish I had work that I could just leave at 5:00 and not think about again until the next morning.”  Jedidiah Purdy touches on the odd dynamic between public life and private life in For Common Things.  On some level, it’s part of his overall argument, especially in relation to politics.  It also reflects something of the atomization of American culture in general.

Our emphasis on the private is a concession that many of the good things we cultivate alone are unavailable elsewhere. Private life is so much a reprieve, an emotional and erotic haven or temple of self-improvement, partly because many of us feel the need to retreat from other reaches of our lives . . . it is difficult to see much of the work we do as something we would want to bring home, that would enrich our most intimate connections if the two realms were woven together. It is even less plausible that public matters, like our degraded and disappointing politics, could make our private lives better. Admitting these into our homes would only color the intimate realm in the grays, or the garishness, of those alternatingly bleak and absurd arenas. Private life becomes the sole place where we can exercise trust and care, the sense of good purpose, that seem to have little safe purchase elsewhere.

It’s too easy for the frustrating, uninspiring part of any job to become that part you talk about most after punching the clock.  We run from it and find it waiting for us.  But is there a way to rethink the divide that works in a better way?  I can’t help but think that the answer is “yes,” but how to get there?  As with so many other things, it probably requires creating (or re-acquiring) a particular language broad enough for both public and private (the eschews both the creepy and the defeating).  Why do work that can’t be brought over into the private life?

Purdy goes on to argue that our vacating of the public sphere ultimately puts our private spheres at risk.  One ultimately protects the other.  He’s definitely on to something there. How, then, do we find the better way between?

(image from forcesofgeek.com)

From Purdy’s For Common Things:

One thing that a culture does is give people ways of thinking about what they are doing. They can see the connections among their work, their talents and the needs of the world. They perceive their work as belonging to a whole, some of whose possibilities are good, which they help to sustain.

In other words, a rich culture helps people to say what their work is for, what its purposes are. This means an architect can understand how her work serves the purpose of creating heartening places for people to live and work, a journalist the aim of informing people of their community’s business and the world’s, a doctor making possible healthy lives, or a farmer feeding people and maintaining fertile land . . .

Work that can be good in these elemental ways can also, necessarily, be bad. It can fail. There are ruined fields, unintelligible essays, and displeasing buildings. Just as good work gives a measure of sense and dignity to a person’s activity, bad work is degrading. A job or an industry that does not offer the possibility of good work, that is manifestly unnecessary, that develops no talents, that achieves no excellences, is a species of tragedy, or of insult.

On one level, Purdy’s first book is an interesting parallel to Steve Garber’s Fabric of Faithfulness or Visions of Vocation.  Like the Purdy quote above, Garber seems to understand the intrinsic value of good work.  Good work and good culture go hand in hand.  And the same can be said for bad work and unhealthy culture.

My own vocational experience has taken some interesting turns over the last couple of years.  I love my job, even on its most frustrating and tiring days.  And as it has changed, has moved beyond the classroom, I have had to reorient what that “good work” looks like and how it fits into the bigger scheme of things.

We don’t talk about work well, which is funny when you think about how much we all talk about work.  What does the culture around us say about work?  How does that affect our approach to the work we have all been called (or have chosen)?  Those are good questions worth asking.

(image from advancedcabinetscorp.com)