The Wilding of America: How Greed and Violence Are Eroding Our Nation's Character.

Whether they blame the civil libertarianism associated with the '60s or the economic libertarianism of the '80s critics right and left decry America's moral decay. Either we suffer from undue social permissiveness--promiscuity, no-fault divorce, the dissolution of the nuclear family--or we are afflicted by a permissive free market that offers the license to put our untrammeled pursuit of wealth first, while blaming poverty on the poor. On both sides, debates about a range of issues, from welfare, crime, and out-of-wedlock birth, to tax cuts, environmental pollution, tort reform, and corporate downsizing, have become debates about morality. Public policy failures have been moralized; it's as if we only get things wrong because we're bad.

In The Wilding of America, Charles Derber targets an "epidemic" of self-centeredness, competitiveness, and greed, in corporate boardrooms and Congress, and on urban and suburban streets. Derber, professor of sociology at Boston College and author of The Pursuit of Attention, defines wilding as "individualism run amok": It reflects an utter lack of empathy, conscience, or compassion and a belief in pursuing self-expression, gratification, and success at any cost. In Derber's view, Michael Milken, O.J. Simpson, Donald Trump, Newt Gingrich, and an army of anonymous yuppies share a psychic disease with the gang of teenage boys who brutally assaulted a female jogger in Central Park in 1989, introducing the term "wilding" to the vernacular.

Derber disdains efforts we make to distance ourselves from the most sensational outbursts of wilding--such as murder for money--by labeling the perpetrators sociopaths. We live in a sociopathic culture, he asserts, in which less extreme forms of wilding have been normalized. And excesses of individualism are nothing new. Nineteenth century robber barons engaged in wilding, Derber notes, and to the extent that the American dream focuses on acquiring power and wealth, wilding is an American tradition. It is criminalized at the lowest socio-economic levels, while it is "sanctified as professional ambition" among the educated upper classes. But Derber argues that wilding is particularly grievous today, partly because of the unabashed embrace of free market policies during the Reagan and Bush administrations.

This is not a book that will appeal to political centrists, much less people tilting even slightly to the right. Still, even readers who don't share Derber's political views may find their understanding of wilding deepened by his analysis. We don't link street crime to white collar crime (or mere ethical lapses) and political venality often enough. By defining wilding broadly, associating it with unmitigated greed, Derber highlights the normalization of anti-social behavior among elites.

The pitfall of his approach, which Derber acknowledges but doesn't quite avoid, is expanding the definition of wilding to the point of meaninglessness. It's difficult to broaden our understanding of wilding enough to connect crime in the streets, suites, and legislatures without broadening it so much as to subsume every arguable form of misconduct. The effort to make wilding stand for everything can make it stand for nothing at all. Derber tries to limit his subject by defining wilding as individualistic behavior that "indulges the self by hurting others," but that doesn't narrow his focus so much as explain it (and mollify civil libertarians who consider individualism a social good).

It's not surprising that this ambitious definition of wilding is not always substantiated. Derber tends to back himself up simply by quoting other commentators who agree with him, as if more than one opinion constitutes a fact. And he is insufficiently skeptical of popular journalistic pronouncements on culture: He relies on a New York Times article speculating that the younger generation today is one "that couldn't care less" to buttress his own generalizations about wilding--as if any generation were monolithic. He approvingly cites a Newsweek article asserting that 90 percent of American families are dysfunctional (as evidence of wilding's corrosive effect), without recognizing that this particular statistic is merely a figure of speech. If you define dysfunction very broadly, as popular psychologists do, you can label all American families dysfunctional.

The other pitfall of Derber's approach to his expansive definition of wilding is tedium. Even readers who sympathize with his politics (as I do) may become impatient with the laundry list of liberal complaints that constitutes most of his book. Virtually no social ill is excluded. The crumbling infrastructure, Republican campaigns against federal watchdog agencies such as the EPA, global capitalism and the rise of sweatshops, the creation of a contingent workforce, violent crime, attacks on welfare, and tax policies that favor the rich are all given as examples of wilding, and there is little that's new in this polemic. What is new is the linkage he makes at the outset between self-serving, socially destructive behaviors at the highest and lowest levels of society. Much of the text that follows is essentially a footnote for that interesting and original premise. Within this pedestrian book, there is a provocative magazine article struggling to get out.