As we marveled over the basketball brawl between players and spectators at a recent Indiana Pacers-Detroit Pistons game - and then the fourth-quarter melee between Clemson University and University of South Carolina football players - I kept thinking, "broken windows."

The "broken windows" theory of social breakdown goes more or less like this: If a broken window in a building is left unrepaired, pretty soon all the windows are broken, and so goes the neighborhood.

By now familiar, the theory was conceived and popularized by Harvard professors James Q. Wilson and George Kelling. They wrote in the March 1982 edition of The Atlantic Monthly that if broken windows are not repaired, "the tendency is for vandals to break a few more windows. Eventually, they may even break into the building, and if it's unoccupied, perhaps become squatters or light fires inside."

"Or consider a sidewalk," wrote Wilson and Kelling. "Some litter accumulates. Soon, more litter accumulates. Eventually, people even start leaving bags of trash from take-out restaurants there or breaking into cars."

The authors determined that the way to prevent vandalism - and thus more serious forms of crime and urban deterioration - was to fix the broken windows. To clean up the sidewalk. To fix the small things before they become big things.

As mayor of New York, Rudy Giuliani put the theory to work by strictly enforcing laws against small crimes - subway fare evasion, for example - and major crime dropped significantly.

Wilson and Kelling explained that the reason one broken window leads to more broken windows is because human beings respond to these signs as an absence of caring or of anyone being in charge. In the absence of authority - the symbolic adult - children tend to behave badly. Order breaks down. Civility disintegrates.

Given which, it seems reasonable to extend the broken windows theory to the larger culture. Why wouldn't a similar lack of adult attention to standards of human civility eventually result in the cultural equivalent of broken windows?

It does not seem a stretch that what we witnessed on the basketball court and the football field is merely the inevitable conclusion of the general coarsening we've witnessed in the culture the past few decades.

Where Wilson and Kelling considered broken buildings and littered sidewalks, we might consider a profane and sex-saturated culture in which coarse language, base human interaction and incivility are no longer the exception but the norm.

In such a climate, shock jocks and post-pubescent television producers think scatological humor and titillation on public airwaves is a hoot. It's knee-slappingly funny during family time - the more and better to offend. Continued...