I swear sometimes. Actually, I swear a lot. Some people say (and I tell myself), there’s nothing really wrong with using dirty words. After all, who can it hurt? I have so few vices. So I let a curse word slip sometimes. Uttering obscenities isn’t good, but everyone does it, right?
When my 25-year-old daughter calls me on this behavior, I get annoyed, but I know she’s right: Profanity damages the society in which we live by subjecting others to intense negative output.
During the 27 years that I was a public official, I was keenly aware that people were watching me. But I’ve only recently begun to realize that people watch all of us. We all influence others by our behavior, including our language. In so doing, those behaviors shape the world in which we live, for better or worse.
This is a bit of a problem for me, since I also watch “The Real Housewives of Atlanta” on TV. It serves as a release after a long day at the office, even though I know the way the women treat one another is deplorable.
My point is, we all do things we know aren’t great but we tell ourselves they’re no big deal. Sociologists call this phenomenon “defining deviancy down” — a phrase coined by the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who argued that as people become accustomed to deviant behavior, we lower the “normal” level of acceptable conduct.
In other words, when you put up with bad behavior for too long, it can become normal to you.
The types of behaviors that have “defined deviancy down” cover a broad spectrum — using profane language (once unacceptable, now the norm), bearing children out of wedlock, driving up credit-card debt, cheating on income taxes, and the proliferation of sex and violence in the media.
Another was featured in the news recently: cheating on standardized tests in the Atlanta Public Schools system, with reason to question the validity and integrity of testing data in school systems around the country. Cheating by teachers has become an epidemic.
A number of teachers appear to have thought it was the normal, acceptable thing to do. A friend of mine, a retired teacher, told me she didn’t know what all the fuss was about. She said that she saw teachers changing test scores all the time as an effort to combat the discriminatory impact standardized testing has had on some classes of children.
Even if that’s true, is cheating the answer to this problem? Or does it only complicate the search for the solution by lowering the moral standards by which we live?
I was at a local business recently in which some children were speaking very poor English. Their mother, who speaks standard English, seemed oblivious to the fact. I was shocked. I feel strongly that being able to speak standard English is a critical first step for children to be successful. I should have said something to the mother, whom I consider a friend, but I didn’t speak up. I didn’t want to be intrusive, politically incorrect, or worse, hurtful.
In these examples, the behavior in question is tolerated — even accepted — as bad, yet not so bad. The behavior has become the norm, rather than just plain wrong.
We should all examine ourselves carefully to make sure that the way we live our lives serves only to contribute in a positive way to the world in which we live. We should speak up when we see things that aren’t right and uproot our own petty offenses before the bar is set so low that what is deemed unacceptable becomes the standard by which we must all live.
We can start by swearing a little less, watching less smutty television and refusing to look the other way when we see something undeniably wrong, like condoned cheating. In so doing, each of us will do our part to stop “defining deviance down.”
Leah Ward Sears is a retired chief justice of the Georgia Supreme Court and the National Appellate Team leader at Schiff Hardin LLP.
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