The Rise of Selfishness in America.

• Author: McInerney, Jay

The Rise of Selfishness in America. James Lincoln Collier. Oxford, $24.95. How did a prudish, hardworking, God-fearing country become, in a mere half-century or so, a republic of hedonists and narcissists addicted to drugs, alcohol, television, sports, vacations, gossip, fast cars, and slow work? Two ways, according to James Lincoln Collier: gradually and then suddenly. Like Virginia Woolf, Collier thinks that human character changed sometime around December 1910, although in the case of the American character he comes up with a pivotal year of 1912 by factoring in such events as Freud's lectures at Clark University in 1909 and the 1913 Armory Show in New York. From this moment on, Collier traces the demise of Victorian morality as embodied in such ideals as conformity to community standards, self-denial, temperance, and the work ethic. After sketching pastoral, pre-industrial Jeffersonian America, he goes on to document, through the rise of the city and waves of immigration, a broad, slow movement "towards increasing permissiveness in sexuality, wider acceptance of the consumption of alcohol as a human norm, greater involvement with the entertainment media, and in general, a continued insistence on the primacy of the self. By contrast, in the early seventies there was a swing politically to the right, the ending of post-war prosperity, and a dramatic upward surge in selfishness which very quickly became so gross as to effect a qualitative change in American life."

The sudden acceleration of self-interest putatively occurred in 1973, signaled by the first appearance of public hair in Playboy (Marilyn Chambers in the tub, in a pose that hinted at autoeroticism--two taboos for the price of one). Collier's date is actually not as arbitrary as it seems: He marshals a good deal of data to support the notion that the social, sexual, and pharmacological revolutions of hip sixties youth were adopted by the masses in the seventies. Certainly, by the mid-seventies, the midwestern construction worker who was beating up hippies in '68 had grown his hair out, donned bell bottoms, and started smoking Kalamazoo Gold on his lunch break.

The date also suggests that even though the Republican dynasty established by Nixon seemed to signal a recrudescence of "traditional values," the ethic of selfishness was merely hiding out. When the time was right, it hopped into its BMW and went into fifth gear under former actor Ronald Reagan, a divorce ostensibly...