Free, and Bad, Markets
Jedidiah Purdy's For Common Things
Preston Jones
July 1, 1999
For Common Things:
Irony, Trust, and Commitment in America Today,
by Jedediah Purdy
(Knopf, 1999), 256 pp., $20.00.
Jedediah Purdy, home-schooled farm boy from West Virginia, wants nothing to do with the McDonald's theory of international relations: namely, that no two nations that host McDonald's restaurants will ever declare war against one another. On this as on many other topics, Purdy alludes to an authentic conservatism that resists libertarian mythology. The unfettered "free market" has bred a massive sex trade in East Asia that has enslaved tens of thousands. In this country it has bred a factory farm industry that is frankly wicked. Not to mention the entrepreneurs who sit atop this country's abortion enterprise, pornographers (defended recently by one of our eminent "conservative" magazines), and peddlers of rank, if fashionable, nonsense like "on-line universities."And then there are the public philosophers who couldn't help but publish op-ed pieces on the meaning of the "tragedy at Littleton" -- how long did it take CNN to get that logo up on the screen? -- even before the killers' guns had grown cold. Several months after the event, I am still perplexed: how is it that, despite the ministrations of the ubiquitous "grief counselor" (postmodernity's answer to the decline in priestly vocations), hardly anyone thought to observe the basic principle that the most appropriate thing to do in the face of extreme grief is to shut up? This sort of journalism is what Jedediah Purdy, echoing Wendell Berry, calls "bad work." "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," Purdy says, "a species of tragedy, or ...
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