Defining Deviancy Down
1 comment on this blog entry
Feb 15, 2012
I read an interesting quote today:Daniel Patrick Moynihan coined the phrase "defining deviancy down."
Moynihan was an intellectual trailblazer. In 1993, he introduced the concept of "Defining deviancy down." In a widely quoted article, he wrote that each generation adjusts its growth in antisocial and sexual behavior by regularly redefining deviancy and, in effect, pretending nothing is getting worse.
As he summarized it in the language of political science: "I proffer the thesis that, over the past generation … the amount of deviant behavior in American society has increased beyond the levels the community can ‘afford to recognize’ and that, accordingly, we have been re-defining deviancy so as to exempt much conduct previously stigmatized, and also quietly raising the ‘normal’ level in categories where behavior is now abnormal by any earlier standard."
Political Correctness will kill us... ether through extreme, radical toleration, or an inner moral rot that helped bring the Roman Empire down. America is repeating history, and expecting different results.
Truth...

How true, Mark. What a tremendous commentary on the moral decline in America that's being proclaimed as 'enlightened'.
[11:23pm]