For Common Things: Irony, Trust, and Commitment in America Today by Jedediah Purdy

Author:Jedediah Purdy [Purdy, Jedediah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-75727-2
Publisher: Vintage Books
Published: 2010-11-23T16:00:00+00:00

Responsibility and Freedom

Only an individual can think of herself and her work as containing an element that is inescapably public. This identification does not happen by accident. Although it may be facilitated by them, it is not brought about by national policies or the exhortations of professional bodies. If it were ever ensured by unthinking tradition, it is not now: today a person belongs to a tradition only inasmuch as she seeks it out, aligns herself with it, and puts herself in its line of tutelage.

This is why the nature of the commons has changed in a most important way. I have been using a language that may suggest inherited obligation—inescapably carrying responsibility for the well-being of a place and for the acts of a political community. Yet inherited obligation is a thing of the past. John Locke, the founding thinker of modern political society and especially of American politics, held that because political obligation was based on the free consent of citizens, no state could be legitimate that denied its members the right to leave it. That idea has not left us since. Many of the defining figures of modern political reflection cast the same conviction in the distinctly American mold of Thoreau. They are inner emigrés, whose first loyalty is to conscience or to some particular, freely chosen, and often dissenting moral community.

Moreover, a nation of immigrants is founded on the prerogative to leave something behind in favor of something else. It begins with the refusal of inherited duty. It is no surprise that American Catholics are selective to the point of Protestantism in their reception of church teachings, or that Americans are “born again” with a frequency that baffles the populations of other prosperous and educated countries. This practice is a religious analogue to our restless movements and self-inventions. The strain of Jay Gatsby in us runs as far back as Benjamin Franklin, an eminently self-made man who practiced his artless manner and crafted his naivete as scrupulously as anyone before or after him. We honor only what we have chosen, and sometimes only what we have made.

These experiences and attitudes are cornerstones of our identity. We could not be rid of them. Obligation to the commons, then, requires not the return of hereditary obligation but the self-discipline of liberty. It is the mark of our freedom that we can ignore any tradition and refuse any loyalty. We are at liberty to be entirely self-concerned. Our freedom, though, does not prohibit seriousness of purpose; it may be that it can come to maturity only by undertaking such seriousness. With a free, reflective choice to accept responsibility for some place, to take a role in a political and geographic community, and to answer to some tradition, we take full responsibility for our lives. We relinquish boundlessness to acquire form.

I cannot consider this idea without thinking of the decisive act in the life of my fellow Appalachian Wendell Berry. Berry, an essayist, novelist, poet, teacher, and farmer, was born in Port Royal, Kentucky, where his family had farmed for generations.

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