-See all writings in this series-
Week 8 was focused on individual morals and responsibility.
The first reading we had was Defining Deviancy Down by Daniel Patrick Moynihan. The main focus being that to make the current cultural makeup seem OK we have to make it normal. So no longer is children out of wedlock unheard of, but natural.
One of the first quotes made in this was when Moynihan was quoting Kai T. Erikson and said:
to that extent the rate of deviation found in a community is at least in part a function of the size and complexity of its social control apparatus.
Basically saying if there are 1,000 prison cells then the deviancy accepted will match the level it takes to fill those 1,000 prison cells.
Then he went on to explain some of the ways in which deviancy has been defined down.
“In the great wave of moral deregulation that began in the mid-1960s, the poor and the insane were freed from the fetters of middle-class mores.” They might henceforth sleep in doorways as often as they chose. The problem of the homeless appeared, characteristically defined as persons who lacked “affordable housing.”
Now understand this is a very inflammatory statement in that not every homeless person is mentally ill. But the author brings the point up that we, as a society, stopped really treating the mentally ill in the 60’s. At some level this is a bit over simplification in that over the decades we have also found better ways to treat folks.
Then the writing went on to discuss the break down in family:
Thirty years ago, 1 in every 40 white children was born to an unmarried mother; today it is 1 in 5, according to Federal data. Among blacks, 2 of 3 children are born to an unmarried mother; 30 years ago the figure was 1 in 5.
And yet there is little evidence that these facts are regarded as a calamity in municipal government. To the contrary, there is general acceptance of the situation as normal.
Richard T. Gill writes of “an accumulation of data showing that intact biological parent families offer children very large advantages compared to any other family or non-family structure one can imagine.
Then the article went on to discuss the effects in this in school. The first quote defining the issue, the second quote is very telling.
The 1996 report Equality of Educational Opportunity by James S. Coleman and his associates established that the family background of students played a much stronger role in student achievement relative to variations in the ten (and still standard) measures of school quality.
For there is good money to be made out of bad schools.
This reading closed with a very interesting thought. The thought being that things have to bottom out, they can’t continue to get worse can they?
Dawson wrote, adding that since the adverse effects had not diminished, they were “not based on stigmatization but rather on inherent problems in alternative family structures – alternative here meaning other than two-parent families.
Next we had to read Defining Deviancy Up by Charles Krauthammer. This reading went on the other way where good things needed to be seen as bad, and bad things as good. Or as he put it.
The normal must be found to be deviant.
First he covered how the middle-class, two parent family has been made to be deviant. Using a stat about child abuse. I personally think that a better ‘Ozzie and Harriet’ example could have been used. How the traditional family is degraded as being back in the 50’s.
Next he covered rape. How traditional studies show 1 in 1000 women having been raped, where as a study by Mary Koss put that number at nearly 50% of women. Why the discrepancy? Because of what was defined as rape. 73% of the women Koss defined as being raped did not classify themselves as being raped. As Krauthammer put it:
Date rape is only the most extreme example of deviancy redefined broadly enough to catch in its net a huge chunk of normal, everyday behavior.
Date rape is real. But not everything some want to classify as date rape is rape.
Next he covered ‘thought crimes’. Where normal actions or opinions were declared crimes because they fell against some protected group. The obvious example he used is homosexuality. Some of us feel that it is not natural and wrong, yet we get called bigots and in the worst cases, criminals.
It is clear that the family in America is struggling to keep a healthy identity, and I wonder if it will be dealt with before it is to late. If its not already to late.
[Initially Written 2.15.2009]