PicoBlog

My weekly take on America's news, culture and ideas -- from exactly 30 years ago. From 1989 to 2007, during the last Golden Age of print, I wrote a weekly newspaper column about what I found interesting, provocative or ideologically subversive in the incredibly diverse and powerful world of magazines. This one appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 30 years ago this week.

Nov. 18, 1993

Daniel Patrick Monyihan of New York, widely regarded as one of the smartest men in the Senate, recently wrote an essay that attracted a lot of attention among the chattering class of pundits and commentators.

In "Defining Deviancy Down" in the American Scholar, Monyihan argued that criminality, family breakdown and mental illness have reached such unbelievable proportions that the only way we as a culture have learned to deal with them is to deny their existence.

We do this, he said, by "defining down," or defining away, the problems.

Take, for example, the incidence of single parenthood. It has tripled since 1960 and is a problem with devastating social effects, yet it's now defined by social workers, intellectuals and the mass media as simply a lifestyle choice, a la Murphy Brown.

Likewise, Moynihan argued, we've come to accept as normal a high level of crime and the appearance of the mentally ill on our sidewalks — a pair of deviant social conditions that he says a more civilized, more orderly and more healthy society of 30 years ago would never have tolerated.

In an extremely interesting and thoughtful piece in the Nov. 22 New Republic, columnist Charles Krauthammer expands upon Moynihan's theme.

In "Defining Deviancy Up," Krauthammer says that in addition to making deviant social behavior seem normal, there are those among us who have been busy making the normal seem deviant.

Krauthammer says large areas of behavior— that were once considered innocent and benign — are now being attacked as deviant. Family life now stands accused of being a "caldron of pathology, a teeming source of the depressions, alienations and assorted dysfunctions of adulthood."

The net effect of this attack, he says, "is to show that deviancy is not the province of criminals and crazies but thrives in the heart of the great middle class."

Meanwhile, he says, whole new areas of deviancy have been discovered — politically incorrect speech and thought, and the fuzzily and broadly defined "epidemics" of date rape and sexual harassment.

Krauthammer sees all this as an attack on morals and mores of "the bourgeois West."

Ideologically, he says, the convergence of the definition of normal and deviant is a new version of the now-dead argument that there was no moral difference between the West and the Soviet Union, that we were just as bad as they were.

Psychologically, he says, defining deviancy up and down distracts us from "the real deviancy and gives us the feeling that, despite the murder and mayhem and madness around us, we are really preserving and policing our norms."

It might be interesting to hear what Krauthammer thinks about Jeffrey Snyder's grass-roots ideas about combating crime.

His "A Nation of Cowards" is one of several good articles in the fall Public Interest. Snyder blasts liberal and conservative elites for their namby-pamby attitude toward self-defense, which he says is a God- and Constitution-given right and moral duty of every citizen.

He says we have rampant crime not because there aren't enough police or prisons or social programs. We have it because we condone, excuse, permit and submit to it. We are a nation of cowards and shirkers, he says, because we don't fight crime immediately, when it happens, where it happens.

Anyone who truly values his own life and takes seriously his responsibilities to family and community, he says, will never be content to let others provide for his safety: "He will be armed, will be trained in the use of his weapon, and will defend himself when faced with lethal violence."

Snyder's weapon of choice is the handgun. He calls for a national law similar to the Florida statute that permits honest, law-abiding citizens to carry concealed weapons.

No yahoo, Synder makes his case forcefully, provocatively and intellectually. He says "our society sulfers greatly from the beliefs that only official action is legitimate and that the state is the source of our earthly salvation. ... As long as law-abiding citizens assume no personal responsibility for combatting crime, liberal and conservative programs will fail to contain it."

Later in my career I interviewed Moynihan for the Pittsburgh Tribune Review.

ncG1vNJzZmibnJ69tHrSrpmsrJGYuG%2BvzqZmqWeYnsC1u9GyZJuxXaKuqK3ZoqWeZZSas6q6yKeeZpyVq7aiusKy