If you’ve never read it or if it’s been a long time since you’ve read it, I’d encourage you to read Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s famous article, “Defining Deviancy Down”. It can be found online here.
He opens by noting that the number of deviants recognized by a society is quite stable over time (“the Durkheim constant”), expands on this with an analysis of how societies promote stability by defining deviancy with a particular focus on marriage, child-rearing, and violent crime, and concludes with this:
The hope—if there be such—of this essay has been twofold. It is, first, to suggest that the Durkheim constant, as I put it, is maintained by a dynamic process which adjusts upwards and downwards. Liberals have traditionally been alert for upward redefining that does injustice to individuals. Conservatives have been correspondingly sensitive to downward redefining that weakens societal standards. Might it not help if we could all agree that there is a dynamic at work here? It is not revealed truth, nor yet a scientifically derived formula. It is simply a pattern we observe in ourselves. Nor is it rigid. There may once have been an unchanging supply of jail cells which more or less determined the number of prisoners. No longer. We are building new prisons at a prodigious rate. Similarly, the executioner is back. There is something of a competition in Congress to think up new offenses for which the death penalty is seemed the only available deterrent. Possibly also modes of execution, as in “fry the kingpins.” Even so, we are getting used to a lot of behavior that is not good for us.
The article contains plenty of the aphorisms for which Sen. Moynihan was famous, e.g. “There is good money to be made out of bad schools.” Although the article is more than twenty years old now, I find much of it as fresh and applicable now as it was then. We could use public intellectuals of his sort again.
