Paper for Class

It would seem to me that proposing the idea that we have defined deviancy downward, to accommodate the increasingly deviant behavior of our society seems a reasonable claim. To illustrate this, I will use the example of manners. In times past, one would have been considered extremely rude to exhibit behaviors that today we accept as commonplace. We do not politely take our turns, but rush to cut off someone before they can enter where we are headed. We do not consider the polite actions of past social graces - many times failing to write thank you notes, or simply saying “thank you” and “you’re welcome” to others in our daily lives.

There are more deviant behaviors which have greater consequences on society. It seems we, even while believing it to be wrong, shrug our shoulders with acceptance when we hear of fraud, government cover-ups, abuses of political or economic power, claiming what can we do, anyway? Where is the public outrage that should occur at these actions? Moynihan declares that a “society that looses its sense of outrage is doomed to extinction,” (pg. 419).

He also described where when a deviancy is defined, and society makes room for dealing with it, amazingly those institutions erected to fulfill this function increase to capacity. This attitude was displayed by our own Sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona when Sheriff Joe claimed that he would build prison beds, and they would be filled. When we reach the point of capacity for our prison system, soon we will have to redefine what we incarcerate people for, in order to reduce the public costs of this system.

It concerns me a great deal that with the increase of the incarceration rate of this country (which by the way, almost exceeds that of the Soviet Union at its height of power), has given power to those who “control the deviant population,” (Moynihan, pg. 416). Prestige and transfer of resources, he states, is an outcome of this control. This can well be seen in the huge growth of the prison industry, and all the related industries which have profited mightily from this increase in imprisonment. This now billion dollar industry of shackles, steel furniture, restraint devices and chairs, stun devices, and equipment to enforce compliance of behavior is devoted to the caging of our population.

On the other hand, where is the public’s outrage when the Vice President confiscates two personal recording devices from news reporters during a speech to a student body, ironically enough, the speech was on our constitution! What has happened to our freedom of the press? Where is the outrage over this? Aren’t we concerned that we are sliding toward totalitarian dictatorship, and the suppression of the people of their right to information?

On the other hand, we can look at the same phenomena of deviancy from another approach. I believe Krauthammer is merely stating the same disturbing trends with different approach. While we have gotten used to many disturbing behaviors and actions of each other and our government, in a world where we have become desensitized to violence and horrible auto accidents, we are now becoming more focused on ridiculous and frivolous infractions. While it seems an everyday occurrence for teens to go to school in wild clothes, engage in sexual conduct which made even the most rebellious of another era blush, yet a kid who brings a prescription for someone else to use is arrested at school for having illegal possession of drugs, and prosecuted! Insane.

It surely seems to be true. We as a society define and describe a crime, and viola! There is a large number of incidents reported. Not for a minute do I believe that there was no incest and child abuse in the days of Ozzie and Harriet. The fact is those days never existed. Incest and abuse has been in practice since the beginning of recorded history, else why would Moses have been told by God that it was wrong for a father to have sex with his daughter, or a mother her son? So this is not new.

The thing that bothers me most of our “defining deviancy up” is the criminalization of poverty. There are many laws which affect those who are on the bottom of the economic stratum, which by their very attempt to live and exist, they oftentimes cross the law. For instance, working poor may be unable to afford a new car. They may have difficulty insuring that vehicle, and may not have the money to keep decent tires. They might be working as many hours as they can. They must have this car in order to get back and forth to work. Now, should they get into an accident, and not have insurance, they can go to jail. Should they get stopped and the officer notes the tires are bad, they can be ticketed. Once a person is down, the system works to keep them down. That is why, as a book with the title says, “The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Jail.”

Krauthammer spends a fair amount of time discussing the new definition of rape. While I agree that we may have a lot of behavior that might in times past have been considered merely the behavior between men and women, I would charge that his opinion is colored by the fact that he is a man, and not a woman. Most men are cultured to believe that “women want it” and that if they don’t, there must be something wrong with them, like being a lesbian or something. Social culture also in the past stigmatized and blamed the female for any ill-behaved or improper actions by the males, and women bought into it by incorporating shame. This has been changing in our society, and many have been extremely proud of the correctional officer when she publicly identified herself to speak to the media about her rape when hostage in the prison takeover here in Arizona.

Sadly, as Putnam in his article “Bowling Alone” discusses, we have become an isolated people, surrounded by others who are in turn, islands of aloneness. As a society, we have progressed to a state of wealth that in times past, only the very few possessed. But, our social capital is at an all-time low. We have simply stopped “investing” in our social communities and organizations. We are not connected to those who live and dwell in our communities. We have stopped participating in civic affairs; have thrown our hands up in disgust at our government. We trust no one, as the X-files asserted. And this is not always wrong. There are many whom we cannot trust. Our government seems corrupt, unconcerned with the lives of the majority of common people, illogical in their obvious disregard for common sense.

I agree that the mobilization of society has increased this isolation and separation. Technology has contributed greatly. The automobile, then the television were the beginning. The internet today has shaped new communities, but they are not of the same bonds and ties as those forged by face to face connections. While we may join major groups like the Sierra Club, or be a member of AARP, the nature of these groups does not necessarily involve contact or recognition with other persons of like mindedness. We do not connect with our fellows anymore, and this is a sad trend. While the author states that he finds a decline in overt discrimination, I personally feel there has been an acute increase in intolerance and racism in the last few years. We must not become a nation of fearful, distrusting and reactionary people.

I wish I were to understand feudalism a bit better. Schumpeter theorizes that capitalism is merely the last state of breakdown and decomposition of feudalism. It would seem to be true, however, that those who were landed gentry, the nobility, and the lords and knights are today those of the diplomatic, political, and high-ranking military and government officials, as well as the corporate executives and the wealthy families which have controlled much capital and government actions since the inception of our country. There is surely an active “symbiosis” between the haves and the have nots. In order for the “haves” to have, there must be those who are willing to get down, get dirty, do the work, so that the haves will continue to have. Sadly, today, those who labor are not necessarily rewarded with the fruits of their labor. In other words, while there are the elite who control and own the means of production, they do not of themselves produce anything. I do not begrudge any athlete who makes millions of dollars a year. He is far nobler in that he is earning his money off his own back, so to speak, more so than the corporate executive who, with the stroke of a pen, wipes out 30,000 jobs of people making $30,000 a year, and then gets a bonus of several million. Would it not have been better to retain those people, and maintain the social and economic status quo? Could someone making more than a half a million dollars not forgo a wage increase?

We have become too greedy in our society, and worse, we have glorified these people. The New York Times carried an article about a year ago, questioning why do the people consistently vote against their own interests? The author hypothesized that it was because most people vote their desires rather than their actual lives. Everyone hopes to become rich someday. Thus, they do not wish to “spank” those who are already there. This would explain why we have not had huge outrage over the current lopsided tax cuts, which have enriched those who already have, then watched as our local police and fire departments have had to cut services because of funding shortages. Our schools are in a turmoil to provide educational programs and meet standards without funds. Budget deficits? Cut spending to housing assistance for the poor. This is not logical to tolerate.

Yes, there has been a moral deterioration of the family. It has been fostered by economic need, as well as encouraged by marketing and the media. Our earning power is less today than it was in the past, and our desires are cultivated by psychologically designed marketing campaigns to manipulate our desires and culturally pressure everyone into compliance. So, too often, parents are more interested in providing the best of designer jeans and shoes and MP3 players for their kids than they are in providing a role model of decency, integrity of character, and community involvement. My daughter lamented that her son’s baseball appears not to be about team spirit and fairness, but about who can get the win. These are grade school players! It teaches not working together, sharing, and common goals, but individual competition leading to selfishness, greed, and inconsideration, ultimately, non-compassion for others.

Lehrman touches upon the dual good-evil nature of capitalism. While the free market has produced what was once only luxuries for the rich in abundant quantities that the masses can afford, it has also encouraged illicit trade, the worst of it being the trafficking of women and children for sex and even murder films. I disagree however, that abortion, or the use of fetal cells belongs in the same category as prostitution, pornography and slavery. I don’t believe that those who perform abortions are in it for the money, nor do I believe that researchers who wish to use fetal cells are purely in it for the money, although research breakthroughs that they might attain could certainly have an economic boom for them. However, there is little that I could equate with, and nothing that I see as beneficial, in the trafficking of women for sex, or children being bought and sold. This was recently a subject of the New Yorker magazine article, and it is well known among the officials in our government and the world, and yet there is little done to stop this hugely profitable illegal trade.

The idea is that we must have an inner conscience that forms our platform for good behavior, that social conscience is formed at the family level, the most basic of community from which all other relationships are built. Without this solid foundation, which in our society is basically built upon Christian principles, we end up with moral and social anarchy, and there is never enough law enforcement to ensure compliance.

Sadly, our society is fast-track, do it cheaper, give me now, immediate gratification. In Ritzer’s article of the McDonaldization of Society, I feel the most disturbing development in this “best practices” business environment and the search for complete control as well as division of action into tiny parts is the devaluation of humans as workers. When each job is divided up into a tiny piece of information, no worker is at all valuable, but merely replacement parts to the whole. This has taken place at first on the assembly line, where no one person could thus feel pride in the final product. It has now moved to the call-centers, where rows and rows of cubicles resemble the dairy cow’s plight as they are hooked up to the milking machines as their human counterparts are connected to their desks with a headset and computer console. Not only are there negative effects on the worker in the dehumanization of their movements and the suppression of their individuality, but it leads to stagnation of the spirit as well.

We must resist for all of our society’s sake when we see humans replaced with machines, because as this continues to go on, what jobs will there be for any of us?

While it was true of our society in 1960, when Gunnar Myrdal wrote “Planning in the Welfare State,” we have moved away from all those things since 1980 and the era of Reagonomics, which began to destroy all the gains the working class people had made from the New Deal. The Bush administration is simply finishing off what Reagan started, by continuing the dismantling of social welfare programs. Myrdal talks about how full employment had resulted from political power gained by unionized workers, which helped the social conscience to be aware of the realities and real struggles of real people who were victims of the “market fluctuations” that clearly, the wealthy feel much less. While it is well and good to talk about shifts in economic jobs, and the rise and fall of this industry or that, there are real people who can’t afford to continue their child’s education; must give up their house and move somewhere cheaper/smaller/far away, forgo that dentist appointment; not take a medicine that the doctor suggests. The wealthy who make these decisions simply do not experience these pains that those who depend upon their paychecks endure when there is lack of jobs, or lack of decent paying jobs.

Today, our country is mostly in a hostile worker environment. The loss of unions has been a result of many assaults and wars conducted by the powerful businesses employing high-paid and highly trained but unethical union-busting “labor-management” professionals whose sole mission was to divide and defeat. This is certainly part of the community and unity which the unions fosters, and which the companies use to drive a wedge between the people so they cannot form a united effort. Young people today have bought the lies given by corporate America that unions are bad. These people are children of the children of those whose lives were made better, safer, more prosperous by the labor union movement. Myrdal states that there is now a “dwindling minority” who experience unemployment, and that few have any memories as those from the depression even during boom times regarded unemployment as a “sinister cloud on the horizon of every working class family,” (pg. 463). I think most will agree, this is indeed the current situation for more and more Americans, and the prospects are getting bleaker every month.

While I don’t disagree with Bastiat when he states that there are three forms of plunder, I still would defend the idea of a certain amount of redistribution of the successes of the top to the most unfortunate members of society. I disagree that social redistribution if plunder however, because if we are a member of a society, and that society decides that they will in fact, have a progressive tax system so that the schools, libraries, roadways, and infrastructure should be available to all, then by their participation in that society, it becomes willing and participatory. I adored Andrew Carnegie’s Gospel of Wealth. I would that all wealthy people were to conduct their lives in the manner he describes. Many do, of course, such as the Pugh Foundation, the Heinz Foundation, and many others that exist to improve the quality of the lives of the masses. These are examples of the very best that capitalism has to offer. It is to “place within [society in general] reach the ladders upon which the aspiring can rise” with the use of education, and access to knowledge, recreation, and the arts.

It is probably most true for most wealthy people that they do live quiet lives of modest, unostentatious living. If they did not, the people of the working class would probably revolt and disrupt the system. It is no doubt the lives of the famous, such as Hollywood stars, and sports figures which flout their wealth to the fascination and horror of the general public. Theirs is not the wealth which will benefit society in the long run, because unless they do more than gratify their egos and their selfish wants, they will “die disgraced,” (Carnegie, pg. 440), leaving no real legacy toward their fellow man.

As Jesus said, to whom much is given, much is expected. He was referring to those who had many gifts and talents. If they were to squander them rather than put them to use, the master would be angrier than the servant who invested his talents wisely. So it should go for our society. Those who are blessed by God with wealth, business savvy, talent, intelligence and the ability to make money, should take what he needs, and use the rest to better others, and will help others help themselves as well as leave a legacy for himself long after he has departed this life.