Tag Archives: Commonwealth

Book Review (Unedited)

By Michael F. Duggan

Jedediah Purdy, This Land is Our Land, The Struggle for a New Commonwealth (Princeton, 2019), 164 pages.  $19.95

…when all the time life’s inseparable conditions allow only clumsy opportunities for amelioration by plodding compromises and contrivances.
-Thomas Hardy

It has become a tradition with us.  In December we go up to Rhinebeck for the Sinterklaas festival—an amalgam of Old Dutch, upscale small town America, funky Upstate elements, and any number of cultural traditions of the season.  And then, among the festivities, I duck into Oblong Books and Music to buy another book I don’t need for my burgeoning collection, or a CD (I have a similar summer tradition with The Island Bookstore near the Currituck Beach Lighthouse on the Outer Banks).  For 2018 the book was Andrew Bacevich’s Twilight of the American Century.  Before that was a collection of Charlie Christian recordings.  My choice for December 2019 was Jedediah Purdy’s slender volume, This Land is Our Land, which had the fortune, or misfortune, to be issued during the same season as David J. Silverman’s This Land is Their Land, whose title gives away the moral of a story that, when told accurately, lays waste to the cherished American myth of Thanksgiving and related historical fictions.

Over the course of Western political thought, we have had Plato’s Republic, Moore’s Utopia, Hobbes’s Royalist Leviathan and the do-it-yourself Renaissance principality of Machiavelli.  We have seen the gradualist conservatism of Hume, Burke, Hamilton, and Viereck, and Locke’s individualistic (and legalistic) libertarian Eden echoed by Jefferson and reflected in the Bill of Rights. In the next century, Marx proffers the worker’s utopia. The followers of Locke and Marx assumed that reason, cooperation, and benevolence can dominate as human traits (either while pushing Native Americans off of their land or executing class enemies and their families).  We have witnessed the great twentieth-century excrescences, the tribalistic non-identical twins of Marxist-Leninism and National Socialism.  With a vision drawing on Locke and a temperament reminiscent of the Loner of Walden, the present book presents the egalitarian commonwealth of Jedediah Purdy.

As one would expect, it is well written.  Purdy constantly surprises with just how well he expresses and unpacks his well thought out ideas.  The humbling feeling I get when reading him is like the one I got the first time I read Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek thirty-odd years ago, but then one of the most important lessons I have learned about the life of the mind is to not be intimidated or otherwise distracted by impressive form. It is the ideas that matter and one must evaluate by restating them in one’s own voice, no matter how homely.  Thus it is possible to love Purdy’s writing without always liking it.

Professor Purdy is one of those hard cases who sees the world for what it is and still chooses idealism without apology.  In this sense he resembles Gandhi and the early Marx.  Although he has described himself elsewhere as a “political pessimist,” he is not a happy pessimist who has made his peace with an imperfect world like Hardy, Holmes, or Hume.  Nor is he a partner at the Hobbesian firm of Nasty, Brutish, and Short.  Like Twain he sees the underlying motivations of frauds and shams, but has not been beaten down by the world’s dark truths. Rather, he sees the world as starkly as any realist and then for bearing, acquires the unfulfilled ideals of the Enlightenment in his sights.  He is a disillusioned interpreter of the past but a temperamental optimist about human potential.  He puts forth ideas that are even more egalitarian than ones that have by his own account failed in the real world.

His mind is curious—distinctive—and his arguments are powerful in a moral rationalist way. He strikes one as decent, earnest, high-minded, and rational.  If he was younger one would (and some did) call him precocious, but with depth.  He is the real thing: a serious, often brilliant scholar.  He is confident in his abilities and in the correctness of his vision, and it is hard to say whether or not his optimism is hardwired, his moral rationalism dogmatic (and therefore beyond rational discussion), and, without psychologizing the author, I am curious to know what one would have to demonstrate in order to prove to him that a position of his is implausible. Taken to extremes, positions of moral rationalism are as unreasonable at any other perspective.

The book, described by its author and dust jacketeers as a meditation, a “Thoreauvian call,” and a history, works up to the concept of commonwealth after introducing it up front.  He develops the idea, or rather the need for it, through a Preface and five essays or loose-fitting chapters laying the groundwork, and terminating with a “Forward” (presumably a call to advance or else a prologue for either a future book spelling out the details of how to implement his plan, or else whatever is coming in the unfolding environmental catastrophe and the human response to it).  In order, these are “Homeland,” “This Land is Our Land,” “Reckonings,” “Losing a Country,” “The Long Environmental Justice Movement,” and “The Value of Life.”  The perspective, like the problems the book diagnosis is closely tied to the land.

Purdy defines his idea of commonwealth in his Preface, “Homeland.”  A lawyer and a wordsmith, he begins with the etymological roots of the word (in a couple of places he introduces fundamental concepts by examining their Latin, French, or Middle English origins): early usages both common and elite, and the definition provided by the great double-edge sword of liberal political philosophy, John Locke.  He then generalizes, distills, and defines commonwealth by what it is and does: a social/economic arrangement allowing for “the well-being of the whole community—the flourishing that is shared and open to all” (p. xii), and by what he believes it could be: “an economy where no one gets their living by degrading someone else, nor by degrading the health of the land or the larger living world.  In such a community, the flourishing of everyone and everything would sustain the flourishing of each person.  This would be a way of living in deep reciprocity as well as deep equality” (p. xiii). Deep indeed.

Here the author speaks of a world that I do not know other than from the views of early communists, levelers, nineteenth-century anarchists, and utopians unified by a record of failure.  It is also a perspective akin to what one hears on the Millennial left and is reminiscent of the economic egalitarianism of Rutger Bregman.  At best these ideas may embody an idealistic part of a larger equation for successful government, like those of seventeenth-century thinkers such as James Harrington and English Oppositionists like Charles Davenant, John Trenchard, Thomas Gordon, James Burgh, and Henry St. John First Viscount Bolingbroke (see Forrest McDonald, The Presidency of Jefferson, 19-21, 161-162, 171).  His writing rings somewhat of the liberal rationalism of John Rawls, who he criticizes at the beginning of his Forward/last essay. Like a Holmesian legal positivist or an existentialist, he denies Rawls’s idea of a metaphysical theory of meaning for the world and those of us in it.  Thus Utopia is to be the fulfillment of rationalist will and effort and not a deterministic unfolding of historicist laws.

He writes “The freedom of that community [the commonwealth] would not be freedom from the consequence of your actions,” without elaboration. In the commonwealth, equality would seem to edge-out freedom in all of its manifestations both good and bad.  But how are we to enforce such equality in order to secure good results? And what about those who exercise their freedom toward bad ends? He doesn’t say how organized crime, black markets, drug cartels, tribalism, psychopathy, other forms of criminal insanity and anti-social behavior—human venality in general—or simple (or cynical) nonconformity would fit into such a scheme of benevolent reciprocity or how the commonwealth would respond to them. These things are not just inconvenient details to be swept up or shrugged off in light of an otherwise perfect blueprint. They are permanent features of the human moral landscape and extrapolations of significant features of our animal nature.  

I realize that in order to save the planet, humans will have to completely reorient our relationship with nature and in doing so, reconfigure our relationships with one another.  I also understand many of the steps that got us to where we are.  I cannot fault someone for not coming up with the right formula in a race where nobody has a produced workable one.  Perhaps the world cannot be saved within the confines of the existing economic, legal, and social institutions.  But as with any proposal, I am just as curious about the first practical steps of a general outline toward a solution as I am with what the prettiest imaginings of what the final arrangement might look like.

As if to preempt the objections of skeptics like me, he provides a sprinkling of historical instances from the American tradition that foreshadow elements of his vision in the public utterances and deeds of Lincoln, Lyndon Johnson, and Martin Luther King, Jr.  Notably missing is Franklin Roosevelt’s Economic Bill of Rights from his 1944 State of the Union Address.  Purdy then rightfully observes that “The American commonwealth has been blocked again and again by division and exploitation.”

I think that Purdy and people like me ultimately want the same thing: a just and sustainable social order within a just and sustainable world order, or the closest workable thing to it.  The difference is in the way we see history, the nature of power, and human nature, and therefore the basis of possible solutions.  The concepts of chaos in physics and baseline manipulation in advocacy and adjudication tell us that slight variations in initial conditions, premises, and trajectories will take you to very different places.  Purdy and I thus arrive at different conclusions. 

Professor Purdy appears to interpret history in light of a goal: the potential of the highest ideals of the Enlightenment amounting to literal social and economic equality. These objectives may go beyond the actual ideas of the Enlightenment (e.g. literal economic equality in response to an interpretation of capitalism as economic authoritarianism and employment as exploitation).  The result is a vision of egalitarianism taken to an extreme.

By contrast (and rifting off of William James), I see history as a dark and bloody mess (underscore bloody, underscore mess) lit haphazardly by noble ideas and periods of relative enlightenment. I see capitalism as a thing that can be, and has been, regulated toward the public good (e.g. the New Deal paradigm of 1933 to the early 1970s). I see employment as a necessary thing that in some instances can be rewarding, even amounting to a calling or life’s purpose (e.g. the profession of a successful author or law professor), or else something unpleasant we do to barter our time for more meaningful or enjoyable things. I realize that this is not how employment currently works for most of the world’s people.  

Like many of his generation and younger Millennials, his view of “capitalism” suffers from excessive narrowness in interpreting a vague term.  Rather than limit one’s definition of “capitalism” to the collusion of powerful oligarchs, there is another view of it as a mechanism of growth, diversification, and creativity that relies on the dominance of small and medium-sized companies which I believe can be very good.  In this model, people and local and regional economies rely on the market for essential economic relationships that generate wealth and create prosperity. Thus construed, economies are naturalistic phenomena like organisms living in and interacting with their environment (see generally Jane Jacobs, Cities and the Wealth of Nations). Adam Smith himself believed that capitalism becomes poisoned once you allow collusion of the powerful to harm the public good. I digress.

Purdy dreams of things that never were (and not for want of trying) and asks “why not?” where I look at the world and ask “what is reasonably possible based on past experience and a realistic understanding of what people are like and how power operates in the world?”  He seeks to perfect; I seek to accentuate the good given our meager ability to understand it among the cacophony of competing interests and to actualize it and maintain it, however imperfectly.  I embrace efforts intended to curb the worst abuses of our system; he seeks to perfect.  I agree that we can and must do better, but we cannot—and should not—try to perfect human nature.  The perfection of humankind is a dangerous and seductive illusion at the end of a well-trodden path.  I suppose the reply to my criticisms would be that the world cannot survive anything short of an ideal commonwealth and that we have to get it right the first time.  I agree that whatever the solution, it must be the right program done with fewer errors than almost all human enterprises to date. 

As regards human nature—and in spite of the historical record that he understands better than most—Purdy apparently sees people as being essentially good and rational or at least capable of having these qualities predominate in their nature which we can then generalize into a system.  “Deep reciprocity” will not work otherwise. And yet how are we to bring forth and sustain these positive human characteristics?  Proffering a polity based on an assumption of the dominance of the better qualities of our nature is like trying to build a school of clinical psychology on the assumption that people are primarily happy. Both ignore significant aspects of our nature.

By contrast I see people as a mixed bag. We are intrinsically conflicted, off-balance creatures divided between primary considerations of self-orientation driven by pressures of individual selection, and less dominant motivations of altruism driven by group selection (see Edward O. Wilson, The Social Conquest of Earth, 142-47, 156-57, 162-65, 170-88, The Meaning of Human Existence, 22-24). Thus our inborn repertoire of behavior includes the general categories of aggression and competition between individuals and groups as well as cooperation.

Purdy is fully aware that that to date, governing in the real world has had more to do with power and the interests of the powerful than with abstract morality, and that the United States is just another nation whose history is a yin-yang, or rather a thatched weave, of good and bad.  Good acts do not expunge or balance-out bad ones, and how is one to weigh and disentangle these things in a world of shifting gray tones between the Manichean extremes of dark and light?  To what degree does a bold experiment in republican self-rule wipe the slate clean of cultural murder, robbery, cheating, and slavery?  And which side is more truly reflective of what we are as an animal and under what circumstances?  Equally important is the fact that well-intended programs frequently breed disaster just as cynical programs may yield fruit, and we can never be sure if the consequences of our intentions will succeed. One thing is certain: in social and political life, things never turn out entirely as intended. The drag and resistance of the real world of human events and elements of our own internal nature will always thwart idealistic enterprises from working as planned. Utopian projects are nonstarters as intended and tend to morph quickly into monstrosities.

Purdy realizes that “the history of this continent’s past five centuries is woven from fantasy on the one hand and the relentless and often inhumane and destructive extraction of wealth on the other” (p. xv). Ironically both of these are based on, or were justified on, Lockean grounds that cut both ways—they emphasize individual rights while providing moral and legal cover for the killing and displacing of native peoples and the vulgar amassing of capital. 

He ends his Preface with the reassurance that his book “is not a morality tale” (perhaps in a similar way that people asserting that they are not insane are really not insane), that “It is a material story, an accounting of how this familiar tale was made that both illuminates and rebuts the morality tales that have attached to this place.  It is a story about the terms of land making that made American wealth so unequal, uncommon.”  Fair enough, although embedded in this statement is the idea that in order to be meaningful, a material (objective? literally true? accurately reflective of a greater external reality?) story must center around or have proximity to a greater moral point while rebutting false ones (likewise a morality tale must have a tangible relationship to and application in the real world).  It also implies the idea of degrees of truthfulness and falsity of moral narratives.  It is even possible to tell a “material” story shorn of moral implications? How do you tell a neutral story and what would be the point of it? The mere telling of a story means that it is important to the author in some sense. Is this a Hemingway-like exercise in simple description of real trends and events that allows readers to fill in the feelings and morals themselves? In matters where values are at stake, “neutrality” is for cowards, cynics, and psychopaths, and Purdy is no coward or cynic and seems to be about as far from being a psychopath as a person can get.

There is no such thing as morally-neutral interpretations and in history we walk a tightrope between judgment and clemency—the avoiding of unduly presentist chauvinism—of the past, of also trying to understand it in its own terms and values as best as possible.  The liberals of today stand on the shoulders of bold experimenters of the past who are likely to come up short in terms of subsequent developments in moral standards.  So, in spite of a checkered national-historical tradition, and in a time when cynicism, division and mistrust, disparity and exploitation are at levels not seen in almost a century (and in a time when radicals on the right have adopted postmodernist arguments on the relativity of truth), why does he think that our better angels will prevail and that a utopian commonwealth will work when all others have failed?

1. This Land is Our Land

In Chapter One, also the namesake of the book, Purdy attempts to uncover the source of enmity that divides the nation.  He observes that “the things that tie people together and the things that divide them tend to be the same thing,” like the two sides of a coin.  This includes the land itself, whether it is the forever ruined landscapes of the Appalachian coal belts, the agricultural country of eastern North Carolina, the various fracking regions, or the public lands of the West.

Here he is on to something, but I also think that he is emphasizing only one manifestation, one lineage of the rift in the nation that still baffles most of the chattering classes on the mainstream left.  He asks fundamental questions like “How to people come to be one another’s problems, threats, burdens?  How do we become one another’s helpers, protectors, friends?”  While Purdy is too smart to accept uncritical clichés claiming that it was “Russia and racism” that swung an election that should not have been close, he presents a landscape-based explanation rather than one of overarching causes—that the establishment wings of both parties abandoned huge swaths of the electorate and embraced trade multilateralism, comparative advantage, and the off-shoring of jobs. Both have embraced a neoliberal economy based on cheap labor both in distant nations and imported domestically.  Thus the Party of Labor abandoned a primary constituency in favor of identity politics.  In his new book, The Age of Illusions, Andrew Bacevich blames our current predicaments on the failure of post-Cold War policies generally and the entrenched ideologies of the “The End of History” model.

Purdy takes some shots at nationalism (presumably the scourge of extremist ethnic nationalism), characterizing it as a myth “that came into this world dripping blood and soil.”  It is unclear whether or not the moderate embracing of the nation-state falls under this category of myth, although later on he does write that the state would remain the basic unit of the world order (96-101). One can only hope that Purdy is not throwing all forms of nationalism into one basket. Prior to Bismarck, state nationalism was sometimes seen as a progressive alternative to monarchy, and Theodore Roosevelt’s “New Nationalism” of 1910-1912 was the first major platform of social democracy in U.S. History. As Diana Johnstone observes in her new memoir, Circle in the Darkness, “Ho Chi Minh, Amilcar Cabran, Mahatma Gandhi, Simon Bolivar, and Patrick Henry, and a whole array of liberators” were nationalists. She also points out that “within the framework of the nation state, representative democracy was born.” (416). Democracy, to include democratic socialism are phenomena of the state and are not prairie fires of a borderless world.

Purdy notes that “It’s a truism that nativism and nationalism are crises today,” and that “nationalism is bound up in the American landscape.”  Here, too, I wouldn’t put such a fine point on it.  He is certainly right in a proximate sense, but tribalism and bigotry are parts of the human condition and they are always present, even when not conspicuous.  They are not “myths” to be easily rebuffed, but rather manifestations of fundamental human proclivities that must be actively opposed and taught against.  (Edward O. Wilson, The Meaning of Human Existence, 30-31). 

When a nation is doing well economically, these ugly facets remain below the surface; when a nation is prosperous, there are few grievances to pin on others.  The resulting decline in racist incidents during periods of relative prosperity may lull progressives into a false sense of triumph, of permanent social progress, that we are “defeating” what is in fact a dark base element of our nature.  Tribalism and racism reemerge when people are doing poorly and feel a need to bind with their own kind and irrationally look outward for scapegoats for their problems.  This is obviously made worse when people fall prey to propagandists and demagogues who tell them to embrace their ugliest impulses as moral principles.

Bigotry and tribalism are not reinvented whole cloth at particular points in history. Something cannot come out of nothing.  They are not visitations—pandemics—that mysteriously arise out of the corrupted ether.  They always there, dormant, sleeping serpents that reawaken in response to real historical (economic, political, social) conditions.  Sure, nativism and nationalism “may be bound up in American landscapes,” but in this respect whites or Americans in general are by no means unique.  Rather, these are symptoms of much broader problems, and land use is a single (but important) manifestation of these.  They are an indication of just how badly off so many Americans have fared under the globalized economy.  If we do not address the underlying disease, the symptoms will persist, and if we only threat the symptoms, the underlying pathology will persist and spread.

2. Reckonings

Here Purdy develops the idea of land as the basis of division and disparity.  He describes the transformation—destruction—of the environment for shortsighted gain, and how the people living on the ruined land are marginalized and eventually destroyed.  He offers the stark observation that “Power rearranges people on the land.  Those who cannot control the land are controlled by it” and “…economic powerlessness is tied to the incapacity to control your environment.”  As with feudal and agricultural Britain, power is closely tied to property.  But unlike the feudal period, much of today’s use and abuse of the land is primarily extractive and permanent in its transformation.  Unlike the English gentry of a later time or the analogous Junker class in Prussia, the powerful today are remote and no longer tied to the land or the people on it.

In his descriptions and numbers shock the conscience: that an estimated 500 mountains in West Virginia have been destroyed by “mountaintop removal” mining, that adjacent valleys have been filled in to depths of 600 feet (about 45 feet deeper than the height of the Washington Monument), that an estimated 2,000 miles of headwater creeks have been buried, “that mining [has] altered 7 percent of the surface area central Appalachian coalfields,” that “1.4 million acres of native forest [have] been destroyed and are unlikely to recover on the broken soils mining leaves.”  He also discusses the toxicity left behind in addition to the outright physical destruction.  Every American should be required to bear witness to these facts.

Here too my temptation would have been to couch the issue more broadly in terms of neoliberalism (which Purdy has written about elsewhere) and economic globalization, but then a part of his thesis is how the land unites and divides us and “land” and its possession is in the title after all.  Thus he stays more narrowly on point and makes his points with the devastating eloquence of a prosecutor who is certain of his facts and the guilt of the accused.  He does touch on underlying causes, “a tableau of abdication: years of privatization and non-regulation.”  This is putting it mildly: privatization is a part of active agenda that includes a reregulation of the economy in favor of rich special interests (see Barlett and Steele, Betrayal of the American Dream, Chrystia Freeland, Plutocrats, and Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land).

For most of this essay he writes brilliantly about the abuse of the land and its people—“the disregarded and discarded classes”—by the powerful.  It is no coincidence that the regions he writes about, the ravaged former extractive or industrial areas of West Virginia (his home state), Pennsylvania, the fracking regions of Oklahoma and Texas, and the farm country of eastern North Carolina, voted overwhelmingly for the current administration.  On these issues Purdy knows what he is talking about as well as anybody and he is an expert on the relevant law.  Every American, left, right, and what passes for the center these days should read this striking piece and the price of the books is worth the cost for the observations made in this chapter alone.

3. Losing a Nation

In Chapter Three, Purdy describes the depression felt by many Americans after the 2016 election.  He gives an accounting about how most of his life has been a sequence of political disappointments.  He channels Henry David Thoreau in historical parallel to himself (although one infers that Purdy is a better sport than the moralistic Loner of Concord, although one senses a temperamental affinity and an ideational lineage).

In spite of its eloquence, the beginning of this chapter feels like a backsliding from the previous two—feels a little out-of-place in this collection altogether.  After having diagnosed the disparities on the land that led to the result of the 2016 election with power and insight, Purdy lapses into a stance more like that of a conventional depressed Democrat, baffled at how it all could have happened. 

He reaches the epiphany that he has lost his country writing that a “country lost in this fashion may never have been more than a pleasing illusion, a gauze of selective ignorance of indifference. ‘Losing a country’ may be a way of describing coming to see more clearly”(P. 60).  What he is describing is akin to the moment of peripetia (or perepeteia) in Greek tragedy when (according to Philip Roth’s protagonist, Nathan Zuckerman in the The Human Stain) “the hero learns that everything he knows is wrong.”  With such a realization, one’s moral awareness is suddenly thrown into reverse, crisis, and disillusionment.  In this realization, whites are far behind others in the nation who long knew that they never had a country to lose or at least approached pleasant national-historical myths with a healthy measure of caution and skepticism.  Purdy/Thoreau’s historical illustration is the slave, Anthony Burns, who, after fleeing the South was returned to servitude by the Fugitive Slave Law.

I know of the country about which Purdy writes in this chapter—a nation founded on slavery, Indian wars, land grabs based on Lockean moral justificationism, and the continental expansionism of Manifest Destiny.  Later it would be founded on or allow child labor, wage slavery, myths of rugged individualism and Frederick Jackson Turner’s Frontier Thesis, traditional overseas imperialism, neoliberal imperialism—a nation that “began as both a world-historical land grab and a world-historical experiment in republican self-rule.”  I know this story and so does Professor Purdy, and he is weary of trying to come to terms with it.  Good first principles do not erase or balance-out bad acts, not really. 

But where I see—or at least until recently, saw—each new period of history as just another succeeding Manichaean chapter in the human story in which good and evil are inextricably intertwined, Purdy sees the gold to be separated from the dark ore.  The present day may thus be a hopeful demarcation between the bad old past and a truly enlightened future. The hope here is a modification of Emerson: the present is prologue.  Where I see goodness and reason that may be accentuated and darkness that at times can be minimized or temporarily kept in check, Purdy apparently hopes for bad to be eliminated to a substantial degree, and for good to be perfected as a kind of fulfillment of an uber Enlightenment ideal that has never existed on a large scale. 

Thinking, feeling Americans come to powerful disillusionment when they realize that much of the national mythological history we are taught or absorb via cultural osmosis is just that.  The truth is always more complex and a lot messier.  Thus Silverman’s corrective, This Land is Their Land.  Conservatives tend to cling to the myths and rationalize away or shrug off the dark truth as justifiable (or at least understandable) operating costs, the rounding errors of “freedom” and the foibles of an essentially good system.  As a friend of mine used to say, rationalization and denial are the twin pillars of human psychology—never underestimate another person’s capacity for self-delusion, and never underestimate you own.

A nation’s historical morality is not arithmetic and its history is not a balance sheet.  Progressives tend to focus on the first principles of the Founding and Framing and the more sensitive among them may turn bitterly against their flawed nation when they realize that our sins and attributes don’t balance out on a ledger of sums and deficits (from the point of view of most Native Americans, the British position on westward expansion during the 1760s was more enlightened than that of the American patriots).  The hope is that the national moral vector is straight and upward with a minimum of bad outliers. 

But history is not a simple graph indicating a median or mean of a rising moral trajectory, the “upward trend” of FDR’s fourth (and final) inaugural address.  One problem may be in trying to cast history primarily in moral terms, as if social progress was guaranteed like the growth of scientific knowledge and technological progress and in believing that a nation is somehow exceptional—exempt from human nature—because of the values found in its founding documents; a nation is only as decent as its people and their chosen leaders, and social progress is never a given. Progress must be fought for, and, once achieved, it must be defended.  Those on both the right and the left therefore fall prey to respective kinds of exceptionalism: denial in the first instance and excessively narrow focus in the second that sometimes leads to disillusionment and a crisis of faith.

The second of these appears to be what happened to Purdy in 2016.  If you assume that our system and its history are exceptional because our corpus includes the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, Letters from an American Farmer, Democracy in America (by a sympathetic outsider), and On Civil Disobedience, you will spend the rest of you life trying to reconcile these with slavery, Jim Crow, the Indian wars, and the Gilded Age(s). 

Conversely, if you assume that humans are aggressive creatures—a plague species—capable of total warfare, genocide, the strategic bombing of civilians, and the destruction of the world environment, but who are also capable of love, kindness, altruism, courage and self-sacrifice, classical music, hot and cool jazz, the works of Shakespeare, the Sistine Chapel, the New Deal, the Marshall Plan, the Peace Corps, and the Voting Rights Act, the world makes a lot more sense than one we construct in our minds based on binary categories of good and evil and an assumption of the eventual triumph of the former.  A realistic view of our ourselves makes more sense, and one will arrive at the conclusion that, although we may and should take moral lessons from the past, no nation is an unswerving paragon of virtue.  And while we should never abandon efforts to make the world a better place, we cannot ignore what people are capable of doing, and will continue to do.  The question then becomes: at what point does the corruption of a system make it intolerable for us?

The world I know not only permits disparities, to some degree it requires them in a similar way that monochrome photographs require black and white and every shade of gray in between in order to produce an image. The issue is how to keep the dark side in check rather than defeating or eliminating an intrinsic part of what we are.  I rolled my eyes when politicians spoke of “defeating” evil in the world after the attacks of September 11^th, and I do not know the world to which Professor Purdy aspires.

Like many people younger than me, Purdy writes about “privilege” and now projects it backward on to someone who likely never used the term in the sense that he means it, his nineteenth-century doppelganger, Thoreau.  Thus even Thoreau does not escape whipping because he fails to keep the abolition of slavery in the forefront in his mind at all times.  “Thoreau is complaining about, among other things, losing the privilege of ignoring slavery much of the time while also disapproving of it.” (P. 60).  Here Purdy falls on his sword, admitting that he is more like Thoreau than Anthony Burns in terms of having a country to lose.  Purdy had a country to lose and now he has lost it.

From here he goes into an elegant, if privileged, wallow into solitude and a Thoreau-like return to the moral instructiveness of a “naïve” response to nature—“a kind of second naïveté that one returns to after time away.” (p. 63).  I think that all of us who are attracted to nature know exactly what he is talking about and choose occasional re-emersions in it.  Sometimes we long for or even attempt to return to it with the lost pre-Darwinian wonder of youth or that high-on-life moral superiority one feels after reading Walden for the first time, a particularly inspiring essay by Emerson or a Wordsworth poem. 

In analyzing this part of the essay two opposite thoughts entered my mind.  On the one hand is the idea expressed by Twain scholar, Ron Powers, on Clemens’s last return to Hannibal, his boyhood home: “When you become unsure of who you are now, you go to who you were when you knew who you were and try to read back out of that.” (see Ken Burns’s documentary, Mark Twain)  On the other hand, you can’t repeat the past, Jay Gatsby—and you cannot unlearn what you know.  My sense is that Jed Purdy, even in despondency, knows full well who he is and does not really need to be reminded what his “nonnegotiables” are.  He asserts a third consideration: that this re-emersion in nature “would never be an escape from history and social life into a greenwood idyll.  It would be a way of getting another angle of vision on the same social facts, the same greedy and unequal humanity.” (65)  In a depressed state, some people self-medicate with ice cream or chocolate.  Others choose scotch.  Purdy chooses reorientation via a return to nature.  Who can blame him?  

In a sense, Purdy and Thoreau, indeed all of us so inclined, must choose a naïve response to nature in order to achieve a fresh vantage point on human events.  A more realistic return would be a distraction.  It would have revealed to Thoreau the Formica subintegra—slaver ants—that live in the woods around Walden, and whose “Austerlitz” (really a typical slave raid) he describes so vividly in his masterwork (see Edward O. Wilson, The Future of Life, xviii-xix).  A less naïve/more realistic emersion would remind Professor Purdy of nature’s overarching amorality, its unfairness to individuals and groups, its universal inequality and ubiquitous suffering, its injustices with no means of redress, its amoral chaos and frequent disasters.  As Annie Dillard writes, “Cock Robin may die most gruesome of slow deaths, and nature is no less pleased.” (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, 178).

He then goes into a discussion of fear and manipulation.  We are told by some of the powers that be to fear immigrants and Islamists but not the climate change that threaten us all.   Here I think Purdy makes a slight misstep.  He is correct that the rich will be able to initially ride out the changes in the environment that are already affecting so many of the world’s poorest people and affecting them disproportionately.  Where I think he is wrong is in the belief that the rich will be able to escape this for very long, that “The world of 2100 may well be no more dangerous for them than the world of middle-class Americans in 1950 or that of Gilded Age plutocrats in 1890” (73). He is right that there is an immediate risk to them in “opening up economic life and global order to the challenges that would come from an honest confrontation with climate change.”  He calls this “willed complacency” and correctly believes that it will persist as long as enough voters identify with it.  I don’t know how to get to Purdy’s commonwealth from here, but I suspect that any realistic approach to addressing the environment will have to be the result of mortal fear to jar people out of complacency, a Pearl Harbor of the environment.

In the end, it was not the radicalism of Wendell Philips or the brooding meditations of Henry David Thoreau that destroyed slavery.  Nor was it democratic form other than the election of a transformational moderate president with a plurality of the popular vote.  It was brute force and top-down administration.  It was the Armies of the Potomac, the Tennessee, and the James.  Wherever these armies went, slavery was dead forever.  Wherever Thoreau went, we got essays and privileged observations.   

4.  The World We have Built

Here Professor Purdy introduces the ominous metric category of “technosphere” (an important term only slightly less creepy than biomass as used by E.O. Wilson in The Future of Life, (29)).  This he defines as the estimated thirty trillion ton sum total of human infrastructure on the planet, or the 4,000 tons each of us uses to get through our lives.  It is the aggregate of the extended human phenotype and is “five orders of magnitude greater than the weight of the human beings that it sustains” (82).  Without it, individual humans are “like a oyster ripped from its shell—“unaccommodated man” in the word’s of King Lear (perhaps, even more accurately, we are like cancer cells that cannot live independently and are killing the body in which we exist).  “Unaccomodated man” may also be a foreshadow of the fate of the vast majority of the world’s 7.75 billion people in the coming Mad Max world?  An unacommadated plague species.  Imbalance. 

He is correct that “Our species infrastructure is the technosphere of roads, rails, utility lines, and housing.  It also has a broader sense, in which it encompasses all the artificial systems that allow people to survive together and to reach one another for communication and cooperation” (although it would seem to be a point of contention about the degree to which an animal’s extended phenotype is ever truly “artificial,” I digress). (83)  

Purdy then expands the idea of the technosphere to a second category that includes immaterial systems like “the world’s economies, and these in turn shape the global carbon cycle, the food system, mineral extraction… and so forth” (83).  The first two categories of the technosphere are the human world.  The third category is the altered physical systems of the world—the great life support system provided by the planet.  

 Building on a central idea of his 2015 After Nature, he writes “A world that is pervasively human-made present a question: ‘What sort of world shall we make?’” Given the lack of control of the world we have toward progressive ends, one can only wonder what control he thinks we will have in the future. His goal is to make something “chosen and common” (88).  An internal reform he dismisses with the term “hack” or “a way of pursuing system-level agency in the absence of political capacity to act at the scale of the system” (88).  Here he seems to be talking about a kind of technocratic osmosis into the “infrastructure of Leviathan’s circuitry and make[s] it cleaner, faster, cheaper.”  This he rightfully dismisses.  

Then, as if resurrecting the pre-November 2016 Jed Purdy, he launches into a review of positive things government and high political ideas have done and can do (immediately before this he even gives a grudging nod to the New Deal while pointing out its warts).  He endorses the “uniquely constructive power of political sovereignty.” After such a robust assertion of political realism, and the identification of “some of the world’s most powerful states form an Axis of Denial, in which refusing to seriously acknowledge of do anything about climate change is a point of convergence from the coal industry to the religious right,” (93) he also bravely asserts a list of social issues that cynical political hacks frequently uses as wedge issues to distract from topics of survival of the planet and ourselves.  He realizes that “the state, the weaponized tool of the worst things we do—against one another and the rest of life—is also the way to a different solution” (93).

At this point, the rollercoaster turns down again and Purdy concedes “choosing what sort of species we are going to be—often feels like more of a pious wish than a potent reality” (93-94).  He sums up:

“The appeal to humanity is at once cogent and nonsensical, urgent and pointless.  The heavy facts of a fragmented and unequal world contradict the scientists’ call at every point, but they don’t disestablish it.  Here is our paradox: the world cannot go on this way; and it can’t do otherwise.  It was the collective power of some—not all—human beings that got us into this: power over resources, power over the seasons, power over one another.  That power has created a global humanity entangled in a Frankenstein ecology. But it does not include the power of accountability or restraint, the power we need.  To face the Anthropocene, humans will need a way of facing one another.  We would need, first to be a we.”

There is a lot in this paragraph.  To address his points: an appeal to humanity on a basis of the right thing to do is pointless, unless people are motivated into thinking that their survival and that of their children and grandchildren is directly threatened and that they will die unless our behavior changes in fundamental ways.  Yes, we cannot continue to go on this way.  Yes, some people and nations have contributed more to climate change.  But human beings are a plague species, and we are all to blame (see John Gray, Straw Dogs).  The idea of the human species seeing itself as single tribal category—also called for by E.O. Wilson and Adam Frank—is a nonstarter given the time in which we need to take action.

He concludes with a call for a new internationalism based on sovereignty.  In this is he correct, we will have to address the crises of the environment on a global scale from a critical mass of cooperating nations.  Beyond that his solutions seem overly optimistic.

5. The Long Environmental Justice Movement

            Purdy loses me in this meditation with what at times seems like the harsh judgment of good historical efforts.  The moralizing is not dominant, but is a spinoff, an epiphenomenon of the chapter.  In the first seven chapters of his 2015 book After Nature, Purdy shows himself to be an intellectual historian of the first order.  In this meditation he projects onto the past his twenty-first century values as if they were known and accepted as a part of a general normative morality of the earlier time, or else as absolutes that should have been known as we know them today.

He begins with a discussion of “one of the most popular and polarizing politicians in the country… Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez of New York.”  He discusses the meaning of her (and Bernie Sanders’s) self-inflicted ideological tag of “democratic socialist.”  He states that this term is used to characterize “that we have in common the things we choose to share together, and these things—good schools, good transport, public parks, and medical care for all—make a shared worlds.” 

Here, Purdy (like all those who approve of this term) reveals a tin ear for practical politics.  For many Americans over 40, the word “socialism” is political poison.  When we look at the comparative happiness and health of the Scandinavian nations, we realize that socialism need not be a synonym for the USSR under Stalin, but many voters still interpret it that way.

Given that all of the things Purdy lists under “socialism” also fit comfortably under a designation of “social democracy”—e.g. the New Deal—why not use this less contentious term?  After all, another characteristic commonly ascribed to socialism is the takeover of the machinery of the economy by the government, and yet has Ocasio-Cortez or Sanders advocated such a position?  The proposed environmental program supported by Cortez even adopts the language of social democracy: the “Green New Deal.”  So why not call oneself a “social democrat”?  Stay a bit.

The answer may be that the original New Deal was an “industrial [and financial, and agricultural], racially exclusionary, male-centered program” (admittedly with some “potential” that could be reworked into a genuine commonwealth).  A few pages later he repeats that the domestic programs of Roosevelt were “patriarchal and racist.”

To this I would ask Professor Purdy: “patriarchal and racist,” relative to what?  Of Course Roosevelt should have done more for women and African-Americans, but what were the situational dictates and constraints under which he was operating? Let us concede that all times before the present in this country were racist and that even today we have a long way to go. The question is: how does the New Deal measure up relative to the period in which it was implemented?

Did the Roosevelt administration not hire more women, Jews, and other minorities into high-level positions than any before it and more than some that followed?  Were women like Frances Perkins and Eleanor Roosevelt not movers and shakers in the administration (to say nothing of Missy LeHand, the trusted gatekeeper and intimate of Roosevelt’s inner circle and member of his “Cufflinks Gang”)?  What about Roosevelt’s “Black Cabinet” and the fact that by 1935 “one-third of all African Americans were receiving some kind of Federal help” (quoted from Ken Burns and Geoffrey Ward, The Roosevelts).  Was it not the Roosevelts who arranged for Marian Anderson to sing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial after she was blocked from performing at Constitution Hall?  Was it not Franklin Roosevelt who issued Executive Order 8802 that created the Fair Employment Practices Commission (and if a cultural southerner like Harry Truman could desegregate the military in 1947, it is likely that Roosevelt would have done so at least as quickly had he survived his fourth term)? Were all of these things not regarded as socially progressive and even radical for their time?

In order to appreciate what Franklin Roosevelt might have done in a better world or a different time, we need only look at the activities of his wife.  Eleanor Roosevelt was probably a quarter of a century ahead of most Democrats on issues of civil rights.  She and the reaction generated by her writing and activities were a barometer for what the president could and could not hope get away with.  Why not support civil rights more vigorously than he did?  Because the Democratic Party was not only the party of labor, it was also the party of the deeply racist “Solid South.”  Should Roosevelt have initiated civil rights bills that would have no chance of making it through both houses for another 25 years at the expense of a war footing necessary to defeat Hitler and the Imperial Japanese?  As war loomed, should he have risked losing an election?

Are words like “racist” and “patriarchy” terms that F.D.R, or others at the time commonly used and understood in the sense we use them today with their powerful moral implications?  Are these terms—again, in their modern usage—categories in which people in the mainstream could have consciously included or excluded themselves?  To paraphrase a commentator on a similar topic, calling FDR a “patriarch” is a little like saying that Jesus was a member of the Elks Club.  By today’s standards, Lincoln was a racist and Purdy references him favorably.  It was this racist backwoods lawyer who more than anybody was responsible for destroying slavery and not Wendell Phillips, who kept slavery in the forefront of his mind.  Lyndon Johnson was a racist even by the standards of his day but also pushed the Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, the Fair Housing Act, and the programs of the Great Society through Congress.

My reading is that the New Deal was a leap forward in progressive policies and for someone to impugn Roosevelt’s domestic programs in such casually strong language is not constructive.  Ironically, although the New Deal was far less socially progressive than the modern Democratic Party, it was economically more progressive than the party’s mainstream of the past 30 years.  Purdy concedes that the environmental and health and safety goals of legislators of the late New Deal Paradigm and its allies in organized labor “would seem fantastical today” (90).  It is demoralizing to see the gains of the past characterized in disapproving terms.  Here, as elsewhere, the perfect is the enemy of the good just as the utopian is the enemy of the possible, and radicalism is the enemy of real progress.  

Purdy understands history, understands the conservative nature of much of the country and yet still embraces the word “radical” and takes it out for a walk in its various forms throughout his book (he also has an affinity for the vague intensifier, “deep”).  It is unclear how he hopes to sell his “radical” ideas to a mainstream necessary to win over in order to win elections and to enact effective legislation for the environment.  

In this chapter also, the author discusses Aziz Rana and the important observation of “the two faces of American freedom,” that “From the beginning, the country was built on a more radical (that word again) respect for the equal freedom of its insiders—white male citizens—than any other in the world.  At the same time it was among the cruelest in its domination and exploitation of ‘outsiders,’ especially enslaved and indigenous people, women, and those who did not fit its gender and sexual norms.”

There is a lot in this passage, this dichotomy.  Without defending the obscene practices of slavery, the killing and displacing of native peoples, and the racism that remains a living feature of our nation, one could present a plausible interpretation of the history of the United States also characterized by the expansion of the franchise and rights.  Did the Northern states not attempt to correct an imperfect constitution via fratricidal war all of whose causes go back to either slavery or political issues directly related to the spread of slavery and whose conclusion brought about the death of slavery? There is of course the unforgivable national abandonment of Reconstruction, the great lost opportunity, the lost revolution. And there is Jim Crow.

But history is characterized by numerous countervailing currents. Is the U.S. history of the late nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries not in part the story if an ultimately successful organized labor movement (now largely undone by its enemies and abandoned by former allies) and a noble and partially successful civil rights movement? Is our own time not characterized by an ongoing women’s movement and an inspiring Black Lives Matter movement attempting to rid our guilty nation of its continuing ingrained racism?  Does Professor Purdy agree with the claim that the legal status of most women at any time in our history is really “among the cruelest” relative to the treatment of women in traditional cultures in places like Southwest Asia, much of the Middle East, East Africa, and nineteenth-century China?

Purdy goes on to address Theodore Roosevelt, the man most singularly responsible for “America’s best idea,” the creation of more than 230 million acres of parkland (T.R. set aside more than 100 million acres himself: six national parks, 18 national monuments, 51 bird reservations, and 150 national forests), and his unsavory friend, Madison Grant.  Apparently “nature was worth saving for its aristocratic qualities; where there were lacking, the conservationists were indifferent.” (114)

Although there is some truth to this observation in regard to the preservation of spectacular landscapes like Crater Lake, Devil’s Tower, the Grand Canyon, and the Sequoia groves, what about Pelican Island?  What “aristocratic” qualities do white pelicans exhibit and why did T.R. equate killing of them with murder? (Douglas Brinkley, The Wilderness Warrior, 211).  What was so particularly noble about the terns of Tern Island that led him to declared it a preserve?  Although the snowy egret is a beautiful bird, “aristocratic” is not the first adjective the leaps into my mind when I see one.  And yet T.R. made a number of Florida islands into sanctuaries to save them and other birds from the fate of the Carolina parakeet.  The egret population had been decimated by a demand for plumes for women’s hats.  

My reading of T.R.’s conservation efforts is that he saw the wilderness as a thing of great intrinsic importance to be preserved.  In a more personal sense, he saw it as a place in which to test oneself and wished to set aside large portions of wild areas for ordinary Americans to have the kind of experiences that he believed shaped his own character (T.R. may not have had the common touch, but his life among the cowboys in the mid-1880s and the eclectic makeup of the Rough Riders suggests an affinity for ordinary people).  TR’s ethos of preservation probably has as much to do with his own intellectual interests as an amateur naturalist and the nineteenth-century notion “manliness” than it does with class considerations.   

Thus various strata and lineages leading to a modern liberal perspective are tainted as excrescences of a racist, elitist, patriarchal past: the magnificent conservation efforts of T.R. are smeared as “the last redoubt of nobility in a leveling and hybridizing democracy.  They went to the woods to escape humanity.” Why then make a gift of 230,000 million acres of preserved nature to that mass of humanity? Even John Muir is written off as a “romantic naturalist,” a misanthropic purist, and bigot.

The author also dismisses Paul Ehrlich’s very real concerns about overpopulation—the bedrock crisis of environment upon which all others are incumbent—as “misanthropic,” and one is left wondering whether the mere acknowledgement of the fact that humans have become a plague species makes one a misanthrope in Purdy’s estimation. As for the eugenics of Madison Grant and Gifford Pinchot, it is important to note that with the pendulum deep on “nature” side of the “nature versus” debate during the early 1900s, these ideas were frequently supported by progressives of the time including Margaret Sanger and Louis Brandeis, who signed on to the 1927 Holmes opinion in Buck v. Bell. On a side note, the times in which Jed Purdy and I live are far more involved in genetic tampering than the early twentieth-century.  We just don’t call it “eugenics” anymore.

That I have digressed so far as to defend a mixed nature like Theodore Roosevelt illustrates the problem of strong presentism and acontextual history: it risks alienating non-radical progressives who might otherwise be sympathetic.  Chris Hedges makes a similar mistake in America: The Farewell Tour (301).  I am defending T.R.’s conservationist impulses and accomplishments, and yet most of what the author has been trying to get across in this meditation is tainted or lost on me altogether.  It also seems to be bad form to insult those upon whose shoulders one stands, to include the Roosevelts—the most successful progressives and conservationists in U.S. history. Perhaps this point of view, like Roy Scranton’s belief that the Second World War in the South Pacific was genocidal represents the van of a new wave of historiography denouncing everything that has come before as criminal—the apotheosis of the blame game of superior people. By standards of a future time, we may be be found wanting as the people who ruined the entire planet.

Purdy’s moral frankness therefore risks undermining his own program in terms of practical policy.  In the meditation “This Land is Our Land” he perceptively diagnosis the plight of the powerless on the land with real sympathy and empathy.  He must realize that many of the same people harbor resentments about the attention that modern social (as opposed to economic) progressives lavish on identity politics at their expense (see for instance, Jean Bricmont’s “Trump and the Liberal Intelligentsia: a View from Europe,” The Counterpunch, March 30, 2016).  There appears to be a disconnect in Purdy’s understanding, between his sympathy for the dispossessed and its relationship with the radical nationalism he rightfully despises. If we are going to solve the crises of the environment and the economy, we must make the problems and the solutions cognizable and congenial to a great majority of people—make the people a part of the solution, rather than objects of derision.  We must bring people together.

The point, as so many others have noted before, is that when people fling epithets like racist and racism at ordinary people and well intended programs of the past, they have not only ended any possibility of further discussion, but have also written-off these people as irredeemable.  This obviously does not include people who embrace racism, who should be denounced in the strongest possible terms. But do we really want to write-off the impressive historical first step in American economic progressivism, its bold experimentation, and earlier efforts at environmental protection?  In order to address the environment, we will have to close ranks and entirely reconfigure the human relationship with the planet.  And you can’t win people over with name-calling.    

Purdy may well be a foreshadow, a bell weather, for an emerging outlook that will come to the fore as the Millennials rise into positions of academic and political leadership.  Some of the young people I have spoken with in my classes and elsewhere embrace a powerful utopianism that is heavy on the speculative social philosophy and moral judgment and harsh in its historical understanding.  Some are true believers who see things in terms of either/or moral absolutism.  The implication here, to paraphrase George W. Bush, is that you are either with them or against them.  People who disagree with them are to be defeated rather than won over.  If the climate crises turn out to match the worst predictions, we can only assume that these true believes will advocate violence against obstructionists.  From my vantage point this seems more likely than an ideal commonwealth materializing somehow.

As Regards the New Deal, I realize that I have focused unduly in this section on a few lines in which the author likely intended no offense to mainstream progressives with the suggestion of building something like an ideal Green New Deal out of the potential of the original New Deal with all of its warts.  These I have probably blown up beyond all proportion.

Chapter 5 Forward

 “The Value of Life,” is a magnificent lecture, a sermon of reason and humanity.  Here he shines—soars—although, as with reading science fiction, you have to take it in its own terms and suspend disbelief, until he presents his solutions that is.  I am still curious about what this last chapter is a “Forward” to.  Hopefully it is for a future magnum opus in which he spells out the realistic measures of how to implement his commonwealth point by point.

He begins by discussing the false assumptions of capitalist economics and theories of value and price.  Free market capitalism tells us that price can be know and quantified and that it is the result of freedom—the exerting of priorities as choices in a marketplace.  “By contrast, a theory of value would be totalitarian… Freedom and equality cannot tolerate a public theory of value, but price is their favorite child.” (142-143)  It’s a fancy way of describing supply and demand.  Purdy then demolishes this outlook with a power that I have seldom seen before, and it was shocking in the way that the questioning of fundamental assumptions is always shocking when done well.  

To the contrary, Purdy tells us, the economy “does embrace a theory of value and is driving our slow but accelerating disaster for both human and nonhuman life” (the delusional detachment of economists and economics from the natural world is also a point that Edward O. Wilson discusses in The Future of Life, which he coincidentally begins with a letter to Henry David Thoreau, 22-41).  The next three pages outline how the economy imposes value on our lives, what we produce, resources, the living world, and in doing so reveals itself to be a de facto  “totalitarian system of value” whose systems betray the ideals they supposedly uphold, of the equality and freedom of human beings.  They impose a flawed and destructive theory of value.”  (145-146).  Everybody—especially economists and businessmen/women—should read this.  He concludes these moving passages with the encouraging “We have made a world that overmasters us.  Some of us have learned to call it freedom, and others call it a sin.  But the reality is both worse and better than that.  It is the sum of human choices and powers, and those—and only those—can remake it.”  Bravo.

Although his observations equating the values of capitalist economics with the oppression of a totalitarian system are in my opinion overstated, at this point I was engaged and couldn’t wait to read about his solution.  It is the commonwealth.  This is where he loses me in a final sense with “a way of living in which our survival and flourishing do not prey constantly and involuntarily on the lives of others…”  This would involve a “deep reworking of two intertwined infrastructures, the economy and the material technosphere.”  In the next sentence he tells us what it would take to do this.  “If we change those, we will have to change human nature and begin a kind of peace with one anther and the rest of life.”  Oh, is that all?  

That we will have to change the human relationship with nature and ourselves is undeniable.  But for me the “changing of human nature” position is a categorical deal breaker, a kind of moral perpetual motion machine (and human nature is the moral second law of thermodynamics): it might be possible, but it is yet to be proven, and no existing one has ever been built.  As the late Tony Judt observed: “If we have learned anything from the 20^th century, we should have grasped that the more perfect the answer, the more terrifying its consequences.” (Ill Fares the Land). 

My reading of history is that the most successful political programs are those designed to accommodate human nature while preserving rights and equality (as the Roosevelts tried to do) and that the most notable failures have been attempts to perfect human nature.  Given that that scientific means to alter human nature may now exist (read: genetics), the danger of well meaning utopianism is even greater than it has ever been.  For a true believer, “utopian” means a plan for a perfect world; for a realist historian, it is an adjective to describe the ideas behind the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.

The other problem with Purdy’s outlook is its base of moral rationalism.  All programs thus founded—whether it be Marxism or the Chicago School or Law and Economics—ignore the fundamental reality that people are not primarily rational or predominantly good (and morality is located more in the realm of the passions than in reason).  The cut-and-dried tenets of moral-rational programs do violence to a nuanced understanding of the reality of human moral and social complexity.

Yes, predatory capitalism creates disparities, winners, and losers, in a similar way that a biosphere, in addition to symbiosis and the altruism driven by pressures of group selection requires the death and suffering of individuals.  Yes, the greatest American presidents have attempted to abolish or minimize inequality, disparity, abuses of power, and poverty.  Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt attempted to bring the worse abuses of capitalism to heel and to regulate the economy to better serve the public’s interest.  But to equate political equality/inequality to de facto economic parity/disparity is a bridge too far for any realistic political calculus.  It is also all-too easy to write about this and to make this equation into a literary exercise of eloquent utopianism like Thoreau and Emerson, who were content to write and talk about slavery.

Practical questions and objections to Purdy’s commonwealth abound.  Would the egalitarianism and altruism necessary for this plan be voluntary—could one opt-out?  Would such dissent and nonconformity be tolerated?  If not, then what does that say about freedom in the commonwealth?  Would not the commonwealth be just as authoritarian as capitalism?  Where the law is not enforced the law ceases to exist and one is left wondering who would enforce the egalitarianism of the commonwealth and how (see generally the Soviet Union)?  If human equality—equality of intelligence, common sense, ambition and drive, artistic and musical talent, morality (height?)—is not literally true, how would it be enforced?  Stalin had some ideas on this subject.  Would the economy of a “world-renewing ecological commonwealth” in which nurses are “prized comparably to surgeons” and which rewarded “elementary school teachers comparably to professors at research universities” be a managed one or would it sprout naturally from human benevolence (see, again, the Soviet Union)?  What does the history of completely managed economies look like?

People hate to be required to tow the line and there is great differentiation between the ambition and talents among the individuals of any group.  Some people are content with what they have.  Others wish to reach for unknown spheres.  Would they be allowed to do this?  Would they be rewarded proportionally for rarer abilities or a greater contribution or the relative difficult of their efforts?  Would they be forcibly restrained if they acted on their ambition?  Again, what of dissent?  

Small, eccentric communities of likeminded individuals can collect to form societies like the one Purdy proffers.  The Shakers and other religious utopian groups might serve as examples.  But how would you sustain this at a national level in a diverse and populous nation?  Where are the Shakers today?  Moreover such conformity tends to undermine progress.  Would the Amish have ever produce penicillin, the Works of Shakespeare, Special or General Relativity or quantum mechanics, or advanced theories on the environment?  How would the Amish have stood up to Hitler?  How do you scale up a homogenous community like this?  These groups may be dissenters from a national norm, but within their groups they are conformist to the extreme.  Would nonconformity be permitted within the commonwealth?  What if he non-conformists are aggressively against and resist the commonwealth?   

These are the easy questions, and until one devises and equally elegant program for implementing it and then scaling it up to the nations of a world heading for 8 billion people, it is essentially a discussion about either unicorns or more likely, monsters.  It makes no sense to have millions of people conform to a program based on nonexistent standards and a stipulation of perfecting human nature.  Anybody who advocates such a monolithic view to be generalized into a working system that would include all people is not in touch with political reality.    

Purdy’s model is heavy on the altruism, but without specifics about how to implement it and with only the vaguest of economic details (what exactly would “an economy where no one gets their living by degrading someone else, nor by degrading the health of the land or the larger living world” entail as a practical matter?).  How can he be sure that his plan would lead to the “the flourishing of everyone and everything would sustain the flourishing of each person” anymore than Marx could not imagine the worst abuses of Stalin?  What exactly is “living in deep reciprocity as well as deep equality,” and even with a vague assertion of some kind of depth, how would a basis for such a life be put in place?  The world is a complex interplay of good and evil that is impossible to completely sort out.  Very bad things come from well-intended programs (making utopian efforts a nonstarter), and sometimes good things come out of evil efforts.  The only thing we can be sure of is that the commonwealth, if implemented, would not work as intended.    

We should always be skeptical whenever a brilliant theorist, an ideologue with his or her own plan presents a clear, pleasing vision about how a society, the economy, and government should be ordered.  Government may be based on a general outline, but it is always imperfect—an overlay allowing for a naturalistic process of trial and error and adaptation.  The U.S. Constitution was a very impressive document by eighteenth-century standards, but took a war that resulted in the deaths of perhaps a million people to work out its flaws.  There is no utopia, there is only piecemeal social engineering (see Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies). There are no clear and applicable universal standards and there are few things more dangerous than a true believer with clarity of vision.  Even with all of its wonderful propositions, I believe that if Purdy’s program was put in place, it would quickly become something unintended, something oppressive.  As Hemingway writes, “All truly wicked things began as innocent.”  Henry Adams puts the blame on the author of the ideas and actions: “It is always the good men who do the most harm in the world.” (The Civil War, Geoffrey C. Ward, 284). Purdy is like a tragic hero, and his excessive optimism is his flaw. As a superhero for a kind of progressive academic sensibility, his idealism is his kryptonite, and he carries it with him.

In spite of his powerful understanding of relationships of the weak and powerful to the land and his broad and deep understanding of history, the law and legislation, what Purdy does not seem to realize is the relationship of human nature to power.  In human society, power aggregates, and the elite tend to separate themselves from the weak and favor their own and their own interests.  New elites tend to acts just as poorly as the previous landlords.  The elites in all communist nations (e.g. the Soviet Nomenclatura) favored their own over the masses.  A simplistic argument can be made that, even when its applications are generous and altruistic, the whole purpose of having power from those who possess it is to help their own. Rarified visions expressed with grace and refinement will not uproot the realities that underlie politics as an expression of power. Thus Purdy is reminiscent of Noam Chomsky: a brilliant diagnostician without a realistic prescription.

Can the weak be protected?  Yes—the fact that the law is primarily a power enterprise and a tool for the elite to serve their own interests does not mean that it cannot be generous and high-minded, and, if a nation’s elite is wise, it will be generous.  This was also known by early legal positivists like Brooks Adams. (James Herget, American Jurisprudence, 131-134).  The law is an external set of rules; morality is the internal impulses that rise up in us in response to events.  Again, where the law is not enforced, the law ceases to exist (the law requires a written or understood rule, general compliance, and enforcement; if any of these elements are missing, the law is not extant as a practical matter—and the purpose of the law is fundamentally practical).  The question is how the poor, the disenfranchised, the unrepresented minority can use the law to their favor.

The weak in society can be protected by laws and by the enforcement of those laws.  Excluded minorities attain rights by increasing in their political power, by the increase of recognition and sympathy for them in society at large.  They can demand recognition and they can appeal to the morality and sense of decency of the majority, and in a representative system this sometimes works (as with the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and ‘60s).  Shifts in demographics manifested as changes in ratios of power hastened by appeals to morality may succeed.  Moral arguments and appeals to basic fairness can be made to increase sympathy, recognition, and power, but ultimately it is about attaining and wielding power that brings political equality.  French Algerians have made some progress in attaining rights because they now exert some degree of influence; French gypsies have not.   

The twin moral concepts of our system, equality and freedom, have a kind of Cain and Abel relationship: the more freedom, the less equality; the more equality is enforced, the less freedom.  Like the conceptual non-identical twins of price and value, these are siblings that don’t play well together.  They are values fundamentally at odds with each other and their rivalry make governance in this nation a constant balancing act, or rather, they keep the Republic in a precarious state of imbalance, like an inverted pyramid.  The rift between equality and freedom make balancing a necessary condition lest the Republic collapse (similar to the struggle between freedom and security, but that is another story).  Governing in a free society is a constant process of balancing and fine-tuning.     

Conclusion

Does Purdy offer a workable plan?  What exactly is the “commonwealth” as a proposition?  Is it a practical model?  A stopgap or half measure devised for a time beyond the looming environmental catastrophe?  Or is the commonwealth just more of the same: vague idealism in the face of an unfolding catastrophe?  Is it a preface to a post-apocalyptic eschatology—a handy blueprint for the calms after the storm? The world after the Flood?  The bare bones outline handed down from a great prophet from before the collapse?  Is it wishful thinking—the hypothesis of an untestable thought experiment—or the “The World according to Jed Purdy, if He were God”?  Of what good is this?  Until we have details, it is all just as discussion of unicorns.  Until we talk about first steps and how ordinary people will generate wealth and a means to live, I suspect we are talking about building castles in an increasingly carbon-suffused sky. 

Ultimately, Purdy is a chauvinist for the species: a tribalist of a species-wide chosen class—a “we”—that includes all human beings, a universalism within the limits of the human genome.  As with Adam Frank and E. O. Wilson, Purdy believes that all people must come to accept all other people as their brothers and sisters if the world is to be saved.  If this is the only chance we have, then the game is up given the timeframe with which we are dealing.  It is a tenet of mine that when a prescription is necessary but rendered impossible by existing political realities, then it is the political system and not the remedy that is unrealistic.  The caveat is that the prescription would have had to be workable if its implementation were politically feasible.  Even if the nations of the world were positively predisposed to attempt such an audacious undertaking—and the powerful were inclined to voluntarily relinquish their wealth and power or let ordinary people vote it away—there is no reason to assume that the great majority of people would be inclined to such a world order. The unsettling political reality of our time is that most of the populist revolutionary fervor appears to be on the far right.

If the survival of human beings and the planet depend upon a universal mutual sympathy of all humankind suddenly coming to the fore as our dominant characteristic, then I fear we are finished.  If people can be brought together in a shotgun marriage of cooperation by a “Pearl Harbor of the environment,” then perhaps there is a chance.  There is something morally suspect about the idea of imposing an involuntary system on people regardless of its motives. We must be careful not to impose on the world a hypothetical model of commonwealth based on ultra-Enlightenment principles that might not be a part of local traditions. The idea of Jane Jacobs of a world order based on sustainable naturalistic production regions in turn based on local customs, traditions, and natural and human resources seems far more practicable (again, Jane Jacobs, Cities and the Wealth of Nations).  As with Purdy’s model, the question is how to get there from here.

And so I recommend Professor Purdy’s book without agreeing with its prescriptions and in spite of my doubt about the plausibility of his commonwealth as a model.  History is discussion and policy should be based on historical understanding.  In my opinion Purdy has a penetrating understanding of history, but fails to apply its lessons realistically as a basis for his model.  Regardless, I hope that many others will read his book and that its ideas will inspire spirited discussion.

Yes, we have seen Plato’s Republic, Moore’s Utopia, and Marx’s worker’s paradise and all have been nonstarters or failures.  Now we have Purdy’s commonwealth.  We shall see.  (Apologies to Georges Clemenceau). 

I hope that this review has not come across as unduly harsh or a piling-on in opposition to a noble effort with the highest of purposes: to sketch out a basis for a better world.  I have not tried to be mean, and I recommend reading this book.  From what I infer from his writings and speeches, Professor Purdy is an impressive person, a high-minded rational man in an increasingly mean and irrational time.  There are few contemporary commentators whose writing and abilities I admire more.  If I didn’t have respect for him, I would not have taken the time to write this.