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California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Created: May 11, 2004
Latest Update: May 11, 2004
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu

The Wilding of America

Site Copyright: Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata and Individual Authors, May 2004.
"Fair use" encouraged.

Summary and discussion questions for The Wilding of America, by Charles Derber, Worth Publishers, 2004. ISBN: 0-7167-0956-2. Be sure you get the 2004 edition, since Derber has updated that to deal with the War in Iraq.

Grrrr. I get so tired of people putting up discussion questions without giving a clue as to what they're thinking. There are some good discussion questions on the Worth site, but no answers, no clues. So, you'll have to deal with my interpretations. We all know that means only one perspective, when it would have helped tremendously to have Derber's perspective spelled out. They probably put that in a teachers' edition. God forbid you should learn something without a ticket of admission to the Disneyland of Academia.

Anyway, as Fellman so gently reminds us, it's not about venting frustration; it's about cooperating. So I forgive Worth Publishers for closing off paths of knowledge in the interest of competitive exploitation, and will do my best to offer you my interpretation. This summary is designed to provide some knowledge of wilding for those of you who will not have the time to delve more deeply into it at this point. The book is readable. Do come back if you can; the issue is important to all of us.

First, I'd like to define wilding as Derber describes it:

"Wilding---a degenerate from of individualism---encompasses a huge varieity of antisocial behavior." (Derber. at p. 11)

Some important clues in that oversimplified definition: "individualism" and "antisocial behavior" in one and the same sentence suggest that "wilding" is a form of the eternal tension between the individual and the community, an age-old social isse. "[D]egenerate" adds the moral component. "Wilding" is bad. And "wilding" occurs when the tension is resolved in favor of the individual.

Now consider Derber's discussion question 10: What forms of wilding do you engage in?

Whoa! Who, me? I don't do anything bad that is against the best interest of society. Now, see, that's what I mean. Of course, you don't. But neither did the young soldiers in Iraq before the tortured and humiliated Iraqi prisoners. My interpretation of question 10 is that we need to think about the slippery slope of doing just a little fudging, just a little something just a little bad, to gain an advantage for ourselves. I'll read the summary of the book and skip the book itself, and then I can have a free day at the beach? Now that's not antisocial, is it?

Well, if you rely on the summary when you could have thought more deeply about this important issue, you have less expertise about the ease with which ethics can be set aside. Sure, you can get away with it, but maybe you won't get the concept down well enough to share it with a younger sibling, or a friend. Society is harmed by your loss of in-depth disourse on the issue.

But is that what Derber means? I think yes. I think he really wants you to think about this slippery slope idea. Start fudging, and it gets a little easier every time. I'm not saying you can't take the day off at the beach. That might even be a good thing for your health and your sanity. But I am saying that you need to be honest in your decision. Know that you give up some learning in order to take care of yourself in other ways. Just don't slip into thinking that "getting away with it" is free. It's not. We are our choices, at least in an existential sense.

Let's consider Derber's discussion question 6. Are all the recent mass lay-offs a form of corporate wilding?

Aha! Now we see that corporations can engage in wilding. That makes sense. A corporation is considered an individual for other purposes. The corporation acts through its executive and board members, with specific objectives, usually to make money, and those actions can benefit and/or harm the community. Benefits are employment, contributions to culture and education, acting as a good member of the community. What are the harms? Toxicity. Choosing toxicity over a higher cost of production, with less profit. Exploiting workers by paying wages that do not permit the worker to support herself and her family comfortably.

Worker exploitation occurs when the worker is dependent upon his wages, and cannot, with those wages, guarantee himself and those who depend on him, enough to eat, a place to live, an education. This is harmful to the community because survival depends on feeding, clothing and housing one's community members and providing for them the means to carry on the community in its physical and ecological safety as well as its economic security. When Northern capitalists argued against Southern slave-owners prior to the Civil War one of their contentions were that slave-holding did not permit the slave to develop the skills that would enable him/her to further advance the community good over time. (And I don't remember the source for that, so it's just my statement, for now. jeanne)

Notes:

1. "[E]xistential sense" refers to existentialism, John Paul Sartre. Meaning before essence. A philosophy that became enormously popular at the end of the Second World War in France, as the resistance, who had fought the Nazis, tried to come to terms with those who had supported the Nazis. In this terrible time of terror, Sartre emphasized that we each have choice over what we become, and that man [sic] IS only when he has ceased to exist. Right up until the last moment of his life, he can change, can act differently, and can "be" someone different. This tended to lay responsiblity at the supporters' doorstep. Yes, the Nazis threatened their very lives, but they could have chosen to die without harming others, without revealing what the Nazis wanted to know.

   Great philosophy for holding people responsible for their actions. One small problem. Who we are, our essence, is more in the real world than our choices. Existentialism looks more to the agency of the individual and less to her inter-relationship with other individuals and with the infrastructure. The individual doesn't have nearly as much control over who or what she is as some of us would like to believe. Culture, community, spiritual connections all shape our responses and are shaped by them, making us less "individual" than some of us would like us to be.

   So why do I suggest that in terms of "wilding" we are our choices? Because ultimately a community cannot survive individual behavior that wholly disregards the needs of the community. Individuals are not free in that sense. First they develop a police force to restrain the "wilder," but as wilding grows and spreads to many individuals, there aren't enough police to be everywhere at once, and the community becomes unsafe and can succumb to the loss of values and caring.

   Now, all this suggests that there's a lot more to "wilding" than just that one sentence summary. That's why it pays to read the book for yourself. Yes, you can and should decide not to read the book on your own, if there are more pressing things, like your health, that you must consider. It's only "wilding" if you do it because you can and with no thought to the harm it might do the future "you" and your community.