Standard Deviance.(Book Review)

The Politics of Deviance, by Anne Hendershott (Encounter, 194 pp., $26.95)

A play about a man in love with a goat wins the Tony award. A prime-time TV game show features a totally naked woman throwing a little football at a large screen. A mainline Protestant church encourages homeless people to live in cardboard boxes on its steps. College students consume and create pornography for credit.

Such is little more than an average week's news in the blandly decadent America of the 21st century, and, as each new wave of bizarreness unfurls, practically the only condemnation we hear is against those who dare to be offended. Thus Anne Hendershott's astute and useful new book, which places the current mess in historical context, is welcome and indeed long overdue.

Hendershott-a professor of sociology at the University of San Diego- explains how the act of defining deviant behavior was once seen as a staple of sociological study, and also an ordinary and necessary aspect of a sound society. Sociology itself arose as a discipline, she writes, "out of a sense that individualistic philosophies placed too little emphasis on the moral ties that link people" together, and out of an understanding that "societies require moral definition" by which "some behaviors and attitudes must be identified as more salutary than others." Hard to believe, but sociology was once in conformity with the traditional belief that human beings "are creatures with unlimited desires, which need to be held in check."

But with the rise of the "radical egalitarianism of the 1960s," and the "growing reluctance to judge the behavior of others," all discussion of deviance became "obsolete." Indeed, Hendershott observes, "merely to label a behavior as deviant came to be viewed as rejecting the equality-perhaps the very humanity-of those engaging in it." Social scientists convinced themselves that the sociology of deviance was actually the "construction of deviance," i.e., "the imposition of selective censure by the dominant elements of society."

Such books as Ken Kesey's 1962 novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and the more academic work of C. Wright Mills and Howard Becker, author of Outsiders (1963), became part of a movement that switched the focus of attention from deviant behavior to social, even cosmic, injustice. The necessary function of defining unacceptable conduct was called "blaming the victim"-the title of a 1976 bestseller by William Ryan. All kinds of previously sanctioned behaviors were seen as-to quote Hendershott-"rational adaptations to an increasingly oppressive society." As she describes the now familiar pattern, the "homeless were defined as victims of an unfair housing market," while criminals "were redefined as victims of an unfair economy that effectively locked them out of legitimate opportunities."

This has consequences. Calling a behavior deviant can help lead to some specific solution; denying the very reality of deviance precludes any remedy. The older approach respected the humanity of a troubled individual even as it addressed his dysfunctional behavior; under the new dispensation, the individual becomes a victim, his problem an open-ended claim of entitlement and the very source of his identity.