Being America
by Jedediah Purdy
Knopf

Critics can be so cruel. When Jed Purdy published his first book, "For Common Things," in 1999, the fresh-faced 24-year old Harvard grad spun tales of his free and easy youth being home schooled, doing farm chores and reading the classics in rural West Virginia. His emphasis on sincerity and openness in everyday life and his attack on the cult of irony that had emerged in the popular culture didn't sit well with many readers who understood the culture much better than poor, sheltered Jed, causing critics to circle the book like vultures waiting for the kill, tearing it apart at the first light of publication. Harper's magazine called the book "utterly worthless" and said it was filled with "unctuous sentimentality," while Salon, in a very personal review, said that the book was "treacly and disorganized" and mocked Purdy for his pretentiousness. Time magazine simply called it "really stupid."

While his writing still skews on the side of emotional plea, Purdy has toned down the transcendental "ifs" that clouded his earlier writing. As a result "Being America" is a more balanced, nuanced work. But that's not to say it's necessarily more mature. While "Common Things" focused on the ills that affect the spirit of America, "Being America" is an exploration of what "America" means to an international community who simultaneously loves and hates what it does, and more importantly, what it represents. With a cast of characters including young, hip female lawyers in Cairo, shopkeepers in Pakistan, budding capitalists in China and sweatshop union organizers in Cambodia, Purdy initially lulls his readers into believing he's out to answer "why they hate us." But by the time the book ends, you've been fed so much ancillary information and pulled in so many different directions that you forget what you thought the point was supposed to be in the first place.

What Purdy seems to be trying to do is sketch the crossroads where culture, economics and politics meet — not an easy chore in a world that seems more ruled by multinational corporations and cultural chauvinism than the straightforward strictures of Enlightenment reason. Nevertheless, Purdy hits the mark when he treats what can be called the aesthetics of modern capitalism, an idea which seems to be taking hold among the educated classes in China and India. With the ongoing economic liberalization occurring in these two countries, the rising (but still miniscule) middle classes seem to be pinning their hopes for government reform on the continued growth of the free market system. In other words, while they're ecstatic with the freedoms they have in the marketplace, they don't seem to be all that bothered by the lack of corresponding freedoms in the political sphere. This creates an odd mixture of authoritarianism and capitalism that perplexes Americans yet seems to work well enough (even if it's an uneasy mix) in countries with no history of political freedom.

Purdy's conversation with a group of vehemently anti-American business students in China is one of the more striking sections of the book, as it exposes the nationalistic chauvinism ascendant in countries still trying to shake off the effects of 19th century colonialism. The students launch into conspiracy-laden anti-capitalist, anti-globalist rants which sound odd coming from a group of budding free-market capitalists. It's easy enough to see an intense nationalism at work here, since they merely seem to be substituting "capitalist" and "globalism" for "Americanism." This self-conscious nationalism, Purdy believes, "gives a new public language, however violent and incomplete, to a country that long navigated by the words of Marx and Mao and now has no serious vocabulary for political conversation."

Purdy is uneasy with this tradeoff between economic and political freedom, leading him to contradict himself in his conclusions. On one level he doesn't feel free markets, when left to their own devices and without the help of an enlightened political discourse, can get the job done: "Without a politics that can force reform and survive crisis, markets alone will not enable a nation to navigate between liberty and violence." But about a hundred pages later he changes course with speaking of the "bargain of modernity" which he says "means not purporting to order public life by the highest certainties, but instead building a common life on the low but stable ground of ordinary motivation."

So which is it? Was Adam Smith right in believing that the "invisible hand of the market" will lead to increased political freedom by investing ordinary citizens with a stake in the economic (and therefore political) well-being of society at large, or do liberal political ideals have to work hand-in-hand with economic reform to build a society of laws that grants citizens the freedom to choose their own version of the good? In failing to answer the question, Purdy is at least in good company: Thinkers from Plato to St. Augustine to John Rawls have been unable to answer the conundrum themselves. It's our age's version of the old chicken-or-the-egg stumper.

The book contains moments of startling clarity that hint at a formidable mind at work, but too often Purdy loses himself in long, at times condescending, asides about the politics of AIDS in Africa, 19th century British colonialism and riffs about how the writings of Lincoln, Thoreau and Whitman can lead us to a better self-understanding as Americans — if we'd only read them. Interesting topics all, but it's hard to see where they fit in to the work as a whole.

When all is said and done, however, what it seems Purdy is getting at is the idea that America's greatest strength is also its greatest weakness. Our almost religious belief in the inherent value of personal freedom makes us dogged universalists. As such, we can't understand why everyone doesn't choose the good life we've been so graciously handed. While the world loves our cultural exports, it resents (to put it politely) the very universalism that leads us to export them. Although American interests are suspect in many corners of the world, it's Purdy's belief that the ideals on which our nation was founded likely offer the last, best hope for a future in which freedom is a value recognized around the world. While he manages to impart this at various points throughout the book, it's too diffuse a work to really hit home.

— P.J. Tigue (pjtigue@yahoo.com)