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

• Author: Kaminer, Wendy

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...