defining deviancy down.

defining deviancy down.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan once gave a clever name to the process by which a culture, little by little, learns to tolerate more and more socially destructive behavior. He called it ''defining deviancy down.''


Whatever D'Souza's intentions in ''The Virtue of Prosperity,'' the book is mostly going to serve to define greed up: it's essentially an elegant rationale for members of his mass affluent class to continue not worrying very much about anyone else.


By a mass affluent class, for instance, D'Souza seems to mean the 6 million or so households with an annual income of more than $150,000, or about 5 percent of the population.


I once asked a soft-spoken woman who counseled pregnant teenagers in a Birthright office about contemporary attitudes toward "sexuality."

"What do you mean by that word?" she snapped with an alarmed look in her eyes. "I can't stand when people use it. It always makes it seem more important than it should be!"


They had more leisure and were thus able to develop a richer interior life; accordingly, they came to desire a spirituality which did not depend entirely upon external forms. The most sensitive were troubled by the social injustice that seemed built into this agrarian society, depending as it did on the labor of peasants who never had the chance to benefit from the high culture. Consequently, prophets and reformers arose who insisted that the virtue of compassion was crucial to the spiritual life: an ability to see sacredness in every single human being, and a willingness to take practical care of the more vulnerable members of society, became the test of authentic piety.


an authoritarian quasi democracy, with an overclass, an underclass, and a hidden politics driven by money

Created Unequal
The Crisis in American Pay
By JAMES K. GALBRAITH
The Free PressThe skills-shortage hypothesis--the idea that computers or other forms of skill-enhancing technology are mainly responsible for what has happened to the wage structure--and the idea that education can cure the problem are, I believe, fantasies. They are comforting fantasies for politicians, policymakers, and business interests, for they lay the blame for the phenomenon of rising inequality on workers themselves (if they fail to keep up with changing times, whose responsibility is that?), they ensure us that something good will come of it anyway (hey, isn't technology wonderful?), and they exonerate the state. For these same reasons, they are also dangerous fantasies, for they insulate us from a serious discussion of why inequality has risen and what might be done about it.

In his review of ''Created Unequal: The Crisis in American Pay'' (Nov. 1), Bruce Nussbaum faults me for including criticism of the Federal Reserve's current chairman, Alan Greenspan, in my general assault on the legacy of monetarism, anti-inflation monomania and the so-called natural rate of unemployment at the Federal Reserve. But the passage he refers to is a discussion of monetary policy through 1992, a period when Greenspan had not yet broken with orthodoxy on these issues. And so Greenspan did earn a share of responsibility for the rise in inequality that recession and high unemployment produced during this time.

Since then, Greenspan has indeed changed his views, and he deserves credit especially for pushing to lower interest rates in recent months in the face of the Asian crisis. This last issue is too recent to be covered in a book that went to press in late 1997, but I have repeatedly praised Greenspan on this score this year.



Today, as noted, we are undergoing a similar period of transition. Its roots lie in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of the modern era, when the people of Western Europe began to evolve a different type of society, one based not on an agricultural surplus but on a technology that enabled them to reproduce their resources indefinitely Today, as noted, we are undergoing a similar period of transition. Its roots lie in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of the modern era, when the people of Western Europe began to evolve a different type of society, one based not on an agricultural surplus but on a technology that enabled them to reproduce their resources indefinitely People in the fourth and third millennia BCE, instead of simply growing enough crops to satisfy their immediate needs, became capable of producing an agricultural surplus with which they could trade and thereby acquire additional income. This enabled them to build the first civilizations, develop the arts, and create increasingly powerful polities: cities, city-states, and, eventually, empires. In agrarian society, power no longer lay exclusively with the local king or priest; its locus shifted at least partly to the marketplace, the source of each culture's wealth. In these altered circumstances, people ultimately began to find that the old paganism, which had served their ancestors well, no longer spoke fully to their condition. Western civilization has changed the world. Nothing — including religion — can ever be the same again. All over the globe, people have been struggling with these new conditions and have been forced to reassess their religious traditions, which were designed for an entirely different type of society.