The Wilding of America

NOTE, I am having trouble posting to Blogger. I had this intro written the way I liked, but my writing disappeared when I hit submit. Writing in a HTML textbox is a bad idea.

I am stealing the "term" wilding of America from a Professor Charles Derber who wrote a work called The Wilding of America.

This is an extremely odd piece of work. The term "wilding" refers to a gang that is out doing some crimes to pass the evening. Derber twists the word around and uses it to mean the evils caused by a thing he calls "individualism."

I read the 1996 edition of the work. It is largely an "us v. them" piece of liturature. Professor Derber is a "communitarian" which is a modern twist on other varieties of Socialism and Communism. Communitarians are the us. Businesses and the Republican Party are the "them." The Democratic Party is helpless stooges. There is a new 2003 edition put out to aid in the campaign against George Bush.

The primary thesis of the work is that we need stronger Communitarian led social institutions and possibly even collectivization of businesses to stem the wilding that results from individualism.

The 1996 version of Wilding of America labels Newt Gingrich as the ultimate wilder. Now that Gingrich no longer appears as a threat, I suspect that Bush is now the ultimate wilder who will bring the end of civilization. The mere fact that the book appears dated after less than a decade in print strongly indicates that Derber is not addressing any universal problems.

If you choose to read the book, I suggest you hunt down the 1996 edition.

What Derber does in the work is really odd. He recounts a large number of tales from current headlines to make us feel scared. He then blames the scary things on a strawman called "individualism." He spends a great deal of time praising friends, and denouncing enemies. Derber finds ample cases of "economic wilding" in businesses he despises. A lay off is a form form of economic wilding. The things he doesn't like in politics he calls "political wilding". Voting for a Republican is an example of political wilding.

Nowhere in Derber's essay does he talk about "Intellectual Wilding." The academic community is, after all, Derber's power base. I wouldn't be surprised if he doesn't include any professor that disagrees with Communitarianism as wilders. Intellectual wilding didn't come up in the 1996 edition.

Hmmm, my calling Derber an "intellectual wilder" will probably earn me the same silly label.

Of course the thing that is really odd about Derber's work is that he starts with cases of gang activity (which is the ulimate example of group think) and blames the gang activity on "individualism."

Intellectual Wilding

Dictionary.com defines the slang term wilding as: "To go about in a group threatening, robbing, or attacking others.

I use intellectual wilding to refer to "intellectuals who go about in a group threatening, robbing, or attacking reason."

This blog will work in conjunction with The Roots of Sound Rational Thinking. Plusroot.com is interesting in promoting foundational logic that promotes civil discourse and quality reasoning. This blog, however, will take stabs at understanding the negative discourse which seems to dominate the current intellectual climate.

Perhaps by identifying and naming negative trends, we might be able to avert them and get back on the track of positive discourse.

The biggest challenge when discussing negative discourse is that there is a tendency for people to become caught up in all the negative tricks that people use to subvert reason. For that reason, I believe a blog might be a better mechanism for discussing such trends than a more structured program.