Durkheim Quotes

Melancholy suicide. —This is connected with a general state of extreme depression and exaggerated sadness, causing the patient no longer to realize sanely the bonds which connect him with people and things about him. Pleasures no longer attract;

When mores are sufficient, laws are unnecessary; when mores are insufficient, laws are unenforceable.

Man cannot become attached to higher aims and submit to a rule if he sees nothing above him to which he belongs. To free him from all social pressure is to abandon him to himself and demoralize him.

We do not condemn it because it is a crime, but it is a crime because we condemn it.

Socialism is not a science, a sociology in miniature: it is a cry of pain.

One does not advance when one walks toward no goal, or - which is the same thing - when his goal is infinity.

Maniacal suicide. —This is due to hallucinations or delirious conceptions. The patient kills himself to escape from an imaginary danger or disgrace, or to obey a mysterious order from on high, etc.

Reality seems valueless by comparison with the dreams of fevered imaginations; reality is therefore abandoned.

It seems very strange that one must turn back, and be transported to the very beginnings of history, in order to arrive at an understanding of humanity as it is at present.

Irrespective of any external, regulatory force, our capacity for feeling is in itself an insatiable and bottomless abyss.

When this ultimate crisis comes... when there is no way out - that is the very moment when we explode from within and the totally other emerges: the sudden surfacing of a strength, a security of unknown origin, welling up from beyond reason, rational expectation, and hope.

It is society which, fashioning us in its image, fills us with religious, political and moral beliefs that control our actions.

It is said that we do not make the guilty party suffer for the sake of suffering; it is nonetheless true that we find it right that he should suffer.

Crime brings together honest men and concentrates them.

What would hold society together in the absence of the rules and rituals of clan and kin? Durkheim’s answer was the division of labor.

The most barbarous and the most fantastic rites and the strangest myths translate some human need, some aspect of life, either individual or social.

The totality of beliefs and sentiments common to the average members of a society forms a determinate system with a life of its own. It can be termed the collective or creative consciousness.

...Solidarity is, literally something which the society possesses.

Liberty is the daughter of authority properly understood. For to be free is not to do what one pleases; it is to be the master of oneself, it is to know how to act within reason and to do one's duty.

Hence we are the victims of an illusion which leads us to believe we have ourselves produced what has been imposed upon us externally.

Durkheim frequently criticized his contemporaries, such as Freud, who tried to explain morality and religion using only the psychology of individuals and their pairwise relationships. (God is just a father figure, said Freud.) Durkheim argued, in contrast, that Homo sapiens was really Homo duplex, a creature who exists at two levels: as an individual and as part of the larger society.

One cannot long remain so absorbed in contemplation of emptiness without being increasingly attracted to it. In vain one bestows on it the name of infinity; this does not change its nature. When one feels such pleasure in non-existence, one’s inclination can be completely satisfied only by completely ceasing to exist.

Things perceived as real become real in their consequences.

we should not say that an act offends the common consciousness because it is criminal, but that it is criminal because it offends the common consciousness

Religions are moral exoskeletons. If you live in a religious community, you are enmeshed in a set of norms, relationships, and institutions that work primarily on the elephant to influence your behavior. But if you are an atheist living in a looser community with a less binding moral matrix, you might have to rely somewhat more on an internal moral compass, read by the rider. That might sound appealing to rationalists, but it is also a recipe for anomie—Durkheim’s word for what happens to a society that no longer has a shared moral order.63 (It means, literally, “normlessness.”) We evolved to live, trade, and trust within shared moral matrices. When societies lose their grip on individuals, allowing all to do as they please, the result is often a decrease in happiness and an increase in suicide, as Durkheim showed more than a hundred years ago.

An important dictum of cultural psychology is that each culture develops expertise in some aspects of human existence, but no culture can be expert in all aspects. The same goes for the two ends of the political spectrum. My research3 confirms the common perception that liberals are experts in thinking about issues of victimization, equality, autonomy, and the rights of individuals, particularly those of minorities and nonconformists. Conservatives, on the other hand, are experts in thinking about loyalty to the group, respect for authority and tradition, and sacredness.4 When one side overwhelms the other, the results are likely to be ugly. A society without liberals would be harsh and oppressive to many individuals. A society without conservatives would lose many of the social structures and constraints that Durkheim showed are so valuable. Anomie would increase along with freedom. A good place to look for wisdom, therefore, is where you least expect to find it: in the minds of your opponents. You already know the ideas common on your own side. If you can take off the blinders of the myth of pure evil, you might see some good ideas for the first time.

Religion is in a word the system of symbols by means of which society becomes conscious of itself.

People had contested the whole basis of the idea of God’s power on earth, and they had done it with reasoning that was beautiful and compelling. Darwin said creation stories were a fairy tale. Freud said we had power over ourselves. Spinoza said there were no miracles, no angels, no need to pray to anything outside ourselves: God was us, and nature. Emil Durkheim said humans fantasized religion to give themselves a sense of security.

I’ve taken to long-distance walking as a means of dissolving the mechanised matrix which compresses the space-time continuum, and decouples human from physical geography. So this isn’t walking for leisure -- that would be merely frivolous, or even for exercise -- which would be tedious. No, to underscore the seriousness of my project I like a walk which takes me to a meeting or an assignment; that way I can drag other people into my eotechnical world view. ‘How was your journey?’ they say. ‘Not bad,’ I reply. ‘Take long?’ they enquire. ‘About ten hours,’ I admit. ‘I walked here.’ My interlocutor goggles at me; if he took ten hours to get here, they’re undoubtedly thinking, will the meeting have to go on for twenty? As Emile Durkheim so sagely observed, a society’s space-time perceptions are a function of its social rhythm and its territory. So, by walking to the business meeting I have disrupted it just as surely as if I’d appeared stark naked with a peacock’s tail fanning out from my buttocks while mouthing Symbolist poetry.

Social man...is the masterpiece of existence.

Air is no less heavy because we do not detect its weight.

Methodological rules are for science what rules of law and custom are for conduct.

Just as reflection disappears to the extent that thought and action take the form of automatic habits, it awakes only when accepted habits become disorganized.

This is what one of the founding fathers of sociology, Emile Durkheim, meant when he wrote in 1895 that the establishment of a sense of community is facilitated by a class of actors who carry a stigma and sense of stigmatization and are termed 'deviant.' Unity is provided to any collectivity by uniting against those who are seen as a common threat to the social order and morality of a group. Consequently, the stigma and the stigmatization of some persons demarcates a boundary that reinforces the conduct of conformists. Therefore, a collective sense of morality is achieved by the creation of stigma and stigmatization and deviance.

Anyone who has truly practiced a religion knows very well that it is [the set of regularly repeated actions that make up the cult] that stimulates the feelings of joy, inner peace, serenity, and enthusiasm that, for the faithful, stand as experimental proof of their beliefs. The cult is not merely a system of signs by which the faith is outwardly expressed; it is the sum total of means by which that faith is created and recreated periodically. Whether the cult consists of physical operations or mental ones, it is always the cult that is efficacious.

In the nineteenth century, one hundred years before a country called Qatar existed, Emile Durkheim, the French sociologist, wrote of “anomic suicide.” It’s what happens when a society’s moral underpinnings are shaken. And they can be shaken, Durkheim believed, both by great disaster and by great fortune.

Shakespeare was a far better psychologist than Freud, and Jane Austen a far better sociologist than Durkheim

When there is no other aim but to outstrip constantly the point arrived at, how painful to be thrown back!...Since imagination is hungry for novelty, and ungoverned, it gropes at random

At the time that technology was becoming a worldwide unifying force, social scientists such as Durkheim and Masaryk noted that melancholy and suicide increased precisely with the forward movement of civilization.

Durkheim’s idea that we are Homo duplex; we live most of our lives in the ordinary (profane) world, but we achieve our greatest joys in those brief moments of transit to the sacred world, in which we become “simply a part of a whole.

While the State becomes inflated and hypertrophied in order to obtain a firm enough grip upon individuals, but without succeeding, the latter, without mutual relationships, tumble over one another like so many liquid molecules, encountering no central energy to retain, fix and organize them.

In the nineteenth century, Emile Durkheim, the founder of sociology and an early pioneer of the social sciences, ran a thought experiment in one of his books: What if there were no crime? What if there emerged a society where everyone was perfectly respectful and nonviolent and everyone was equal? What if no one lied or hurt each other? What if corruption did not exist? What would happen? Would conflict cease? Would stress evaporate? Would everyone frolic in fields picking daises and singing the "Hallelujah" chorus from Handel's Messiah? Durkheim said no, that in fact the opposite would happen. He suggested that the more comfortable and ethical a society became, the more that small indiscretions would become magnified in our minds. If everyone stopped killing each other, we wouldn't necessarily feel good about it. We'd just get equally upset about the more minor stuff. Developmental psychology has long argued something similar: that protecting people from problems or adversity doesn't make them happier or more secure; it makes them more easily insecure. A young person who has been sheltered form dealing with any challenges or injustices growing up will come to find the slightest inconveniences of adult life intolerable, and will have the childish public meltdown to prove it.

it is a more or less complex system of myths, dogmas, rites and ceremonies.

Religious phenomena are naturally arranged in two fundamental categories: beliefs and rites.

Ora, uma vez que abrimos a porta para as exceções, é difícil fechá-la.

Every time a social phenomenon is directly explained by a psychological phenomenon, we may rest assured that the explanation is false".

Durkheim tells us: “The first and most fundamental rule is: Consider social facts as things.”27 And Weber observes: “Both for sociology in the present sense, and for history, the object of cognition is the subjective meaning-complex of action.”28 These two statements are not contradictory. Society does indeed possess objective facticity. And society is indeed built up by activity that expresses subjective meaning. And, incidentally, Durkheim knew the latter, just as Weber knew the former. It is precisely the dual character of society in terms of objective facticity and subjective meaning that makes its “reality sui generis,” to use another key term of Durkheim’s. The central question for sociological theory can then be put as follows: How is it possible that subjective meanings become objective facticities? Or, in terms appropriate to the aforementioned theoretical positions: How is it possible that human activity (Handeln) should produce a world of things (choses)? In other words, an adequate understanding of the “reality sui generis” of society requires an inquiry into the manner in which this reality is constructed.

Belirli bir gruptaki intihar vakalarının kayda değer bir şekilde artması, bu grup içindeki toplumsal dayanışmanın zayıfladığını ve üyelerin, varoluşsal krizlere karşı grup tarafından artık yeterince korunamadığını gösterir.

neuroscientists monitored guitarists playing a short melody together, they found that patterns in the guitarists’ brain activity became synchronized. Similarly, studies of choir singers have shown that singing aligns performers’ heart rates. Music seems to create a sense of unity on a physiological level. Scientists call this phenomenon synchrony and have found that it can elicit some surprising behaviors. In studies where people sang or moved in a coordinated way with others, researchers found that subjects were significantly more likely to help out a partner with their workload or sacrifice their own gain for the benefit of the group. And when participants rocked in chairs at the same tempo, they performed better on a cooperative task than those who rocked at different rhythms. Synchrony shifts our focus away from our own needs toward the needs of the group. In large social gatherings, this can give rise to a euphoric feeling of oneness—dubbed “collective effervescence” by French sociologist Émile Durkheim—which elicits a blissful, selfless absorption within a community.

The world had six trillion trees, when people showed up. Half remain. Half again more will disappear, in a hundred years. And whatever enough people say that all these vanishing trees are saying is what, in fact, they say. But the question interests Adam. What did the dead Joan of Arc hear? Insight or delusion? Next week he’ll tell his undergrads about Durkheim, Foucault, crypto-normativity: How reason is just another weapon of control. How the invention of the reasonable, the acceptable, the sane, even the human, is greener and more recent than humans suspect.

Society in general, simply by its effect on men's minds, undoubtedly has all that is required to arouse the sensation of the divine. A society is to its members what a god is to its faithful. A god is first of all a being that man conceives of as superior to himself in some respects and one on whom he believes he depends.

We evolved to live, trade, and trust within shared moral matrices. When societies lose their grip on individuals, allowing all to do as they please, the result is often a decrease in happiness and an increase in suicide, as Durkheim showed more than a hundred years ago.64 Societies that forgo the exoskeleton of religion should reflect carefully on what will happen to them over several generations. We don’t really know, because the first atheistic societies have only emerged in Europe in the last few decades. They are the least efficient societies ever known at turning resources (of which they have a lot) into offspring (of which they have few).

Here is the confession once made by a patient to Brierre de Boismont, which perfectly describes the condition: 'I am employed in a business house. I perform my regular duties satisfactorily but like an automaton, and when spoken to, the words sound to me as though echoing in a void. My greatest torment is the thought of suicide, from which I am never free. I have been the victim of this impulse for a year; at first it was insignificant; then for about the last two months it has pursued me everywhere, yet I have no reason to kill myself. . . . My health is good; no one in my family has been similarly afflicted; I have had no financial losses, my income is adequate and permits me the pleasures of people of my age.

In their book American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us, political scientists Robert Putnam and David Campbell analyzed a variety of data sources to describe how religious and nonreligious Americans differ. Common sense would tell you that the more time and money people give to their religious groups, the less they have left over for everything else. But common sense turns out to be wrong. Putnam and Campbell found that the more frequently people attend religious services, the more generous and charitable they become across the board.58 Of course religious people give a lot to religious charities, but they also give as much as or more than secular folk to secular charities such as the American Cancer Society.59 They spend a lot of time in service to their churches and synagogues, but they also spend more time than secular folk serving in neighborhood and civic associations of all sorts. Putnam and Campbell put their findings bluntly: By many different measures religiously observant Americans are better neighbors and better citizens than secular Americans—they are more generous with their time and money, especially in helping the needy, and they are more active in community life.60 Why are religious people better neighbors and citizens? To find out, Putnam and Campbell included on one of their surveys a long list of questions about religious beliefs (e.g., “Do you believe in hell? Do you agree that we will all be called before God to answer for our sins?”) as well as questions about religious practices (e.g., “How often do you read holy scriptures? How often do you pray?”). These beliefs and practices turned out to matter very little. Whether you believe in hell, whether you pray daily, whether you are a Catholic, Protestant, Jew, or Mormon … none of these things correlated with generosity. The only thing that was reliably and powerfully associated with the moral benefits of religion was how enmeshed people were in relationships with their co-religionists. It’s the friendships and group activities, carried out within a moral matrix that emphasizes selflessness. That’s what brings out the best in people. Putnam and Campbell reject the New Atheist emphasis on belief and reach a conclusion straight out of Durkheim: “It is religious belongingness that matters for neighborliness, not religious believing.”61

Conservatives believe that people are inherently imperfect and are prone to act badly when all constraints and accountability are removed (yes, I thought; see Glaucon, Tetlock, and Ariely in chapter 4). Our reasoning is flawed and prone to overconfidence, so it’s dangerous to construct theories based on pure reason, unconstrained by intuition and historical experience (yes; see Hume in chapter 2 and Baron-Cohen on systemizing in chapter 6). Institutions emerge gradually as social facts, which we then respect and even sacralize, but if we strip these institutions of authority and treat them as arbitrary contrivances that exist only for our benefit, we render them less effective. We then expose ourselves to increased anomie and social disorder (yes; see Durkheim in chapters 8 and 11). Based

It is true that we take it as evident that social life depends upon its material foundation and bears its mark, just as the mental life of an individual depends upon his nervous system and in fact his whole organism. But collective consciousness is something more than a mere epiphenomenon of its morphological basis, just as individual consciousness is something more than a simple efflorescence of the nervous system.

In 1978, [sociologist Albert] Bergesen used Durkheim to illuminate the madness that erupted in Beijing in May 1966, when Mao Zedong began warning about the rising threat of infiltration by pro-capitalist enemies. Zealous college students responded by forming the Red Guards to find and punish enemies of the revolution. Universities across the country were shut down for several years. During those years, the Red Guards rooted out any trace they could find- or imagine- of capitalism, foreign influence, or bourgeois values. In practice, this meant that anyone who was successful or accomplished was suspect, and many professors, intellectuals, and campus administrators were imprisoned or murdered... Over the next few years, tens of millions were persecuted, and hundreds of thousands were murdered. How could such an orgy of self-destruction have happened? Bergesen notes that there are three features common to most political witch hunts: they arise very quickly, they involve charges of crimes against the collective, and the offenses that lead to charges are often trivial or fabricated.

O homem procura se instruir e se mata porque a sociedade religiosa de que ele faz parte perdeu sua coesão; mas ele não se mata por se instruir. Também não é a instrução que ele adquire que desorganiza a religião; mas é porque a religião se desorganiza que surge a necessidade de instrução. Esta não é buscada como um meio de destruir as opiniões recebidas, mas porque a destruição delas começou. Sem dúvida, uma vez que a ciência existe, ela pode combater em seu nome e por sua conta e se colocar como adversária dos sentimentos tradicionais. Mas seus ataques seriam sem efeito, ou, mais ainda, nem poderiam se produzir, se esses sentimentos ainda estivessem vivos. Não é com demonstrações dialéticas que se desenraíza a fé; é preciso que ela já esteja profundamente abalada por outras causas para poder não resistir ao choque dos argumentos. (...) É verdade que devemos evitar com o mesmo cuidado considerar a instrução como um objeto que basta em si mesmo, pois ela é apenas um meio. Se não é acorrentando espíritos que poderemos fazê-los desaprender o gosto pela independência, também não basta libertá-los para lhes devolver o equilíbrio. É preciso que eles empreguem essa liberdade conforme convém.

In their eagerness to eliminate from history any reference to individuais and individual events, collectivist authors resorted to a chimerical construction, the group mind or social mind. At the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries German philologists began to study German medieval poetry, which had long since fallen into oblivion. Most of the epics they edited from old manuscripts were imitations of French works. The names of their authors—most of them knightly warriors in the service of dukes or counts—were known. These epics were not much to boast of. But there were two epics of a quite different character, genuinely original works of high literary value, far surpassing the conventional products of the courtiers: the Nibelungenlied and the Gudrun. The former is one of the great books of world literature and undoubtedly the outstanding poem Germany produced before the days of Goethe and Schiller. The names of the authors of these masterpieces were not handed down to posterity. Perhaps the poets belonged to the class of professional entertainers (Spielleute), who not only were snubbed by the nobility but had to endure mortifying legal disabilities. Perhaps they were heretical or Jewish, and the clergy was eager to make people forget them. At any rate the philologists called these two works "people's epics" (Volksepen). This term suggested to naive minds the idea that they were written not by individual authors but by the "people." The same mythical authorship was attributed to popular songs (Volkslieder) whose authors were unknown. Again in Germany, in the years following the Napoleonic wars, the problem of comprehensive legislative codification was brought up for discussion. In this controversy the historical school of jurisprudence, led by Savigny, denied the competence of any age and any persons to write legislation. Like the Volksepen and the Volkslieder, a nation s laws, they declared, are a spontaneous emanation of the Volksgeist, the nations spirit and peculiar character. Genuine laws are not arbitrarily written by legislators; they spring up and thrive organically from the Volksgeist. This Volksgeist doctrine was devised in Germany as a conscious reaction against the ideas of natural law and the "unGerman" spirit of the French Revolution. But it was further developed and elevated to the dignity of a comprehensive social doctrine by the French positivists, many of whom not only were committed to the principies of the most radical among the revolutionary leaders but aimed at completing the "unfinished revolution" by a violent overthrow of the capitalistic mode of production. Émile Durkheim and his school deal with the group mind as if it were a real phenomenon, a distinct agency, thinking and acting. As they see it, not individuais but the group is the subject of history. As a corrective of these fancies the truism must be stressed that only individuais think and act. In dealing with the thoughts and actions of individuais the historian establishes the fact that some individuais influence one another in their thinking and acting more strongly than they influence and are influenced by other individuais. He observes that cooperation and division of labor exist among some, while existing to a lesser extent or not at ali among others. He employs the term "group" to signify an aggregation of individuais who cooperate together more closely.

The positive effects of war on mental health were first noticed by the great sociologist Emile Durkheim, who found that when European countries went to war, suicide rates dropped. Psychiatric wards in Paris were strangely empty during both world wars, and that remained true even as the German army rolled into the city in 1940. Researchers documented a similar phenomenon during civil wars in Spain, Algeria, Lebanon, and Northern Ireland. An Irish psychologist named H. A. Lyons found that suicide rates in Belfast dropped 50 percent during the riots of 1969 and 1970, and homicide and other violent crimes also went down. Depression rates for both men and women declined abruptly during that period, with men experiencing the most extreme drop in the most violent districts. County Derry, on the other hand—which suffered almost no violence at all—saw male depression rates rise rather than fall. Lyons hypothesized that men in the peaceful areas were depressed because they couldn’t help their society by participating in the struggle. “When people are actively engaged in a cause their lives have more purpose… with a resulting improvement in mental health,” Lyons wrote in the Journal of Psychosomatic Research in 1979. “It would be irresponsible to suggest violence as a means of improving mental health, but the Belfast findings suggest that people will feel better psychologically if they have more involvement with their community.

I am a Durkheimian, I think Emil Durkheim got it right. I think you need to see communities as absolutely needing a sense of cohesion, trust, shared values and a sense of who we are. This is why mass immigration can be a bad thing. I'm Jewish and my grandparents came to America in 1905 fleeing pogroms, and I look at the videos and see the kids coming out of Syria and it is the same thing, so I'm sympathetic to the moral case. But you can only have mass immigration if you have mass assimilation, which my grandparents and my parents went through. If you have a society that has the moral resources to say 'This is America, welcome, adapt, learn English', then you can have mass immigration. Immigration clearly boosted America's creativity and economy, so there is plenty of good things with immigration. I'm not saying immigration is bad. But from a Durkheimian perspective, to have massive Muslim immigration into secular European societies where not only do you not have assimilation, you have a political left arguing that assimilation is genocide, which is ridiculous. With an anti-assimilation ethos, Europe is setting itself up for massive failure. Their generous redistributive welfare states can only work if people have a strong sense of social solidarity. Diversity can be divisive, as research has shown. So Europe is in huge trouble and the sociology is worrisome for what Europe is going to be like in one or two generations.

O casamento, com efeito, opera mecanicamente, no conjunto da população, uma espécie de triagem. Não se casa quem quer; tem poucas possibilidades de fundar uma família quem não reúne certas qualidades de saúde, de fortuna e de moralidade. Quem não as tem, a não ser que haja uma convergência excepcionais de consequências favoráveis, é então, queira ou não, relegado à classe dos solteiros, que acaba assim constituída de todo o dejeto humano do país. É nessa classe que se encontram os doentes, os incuráveis, os muito pobres ou notoriamente tarados.

Our understanding of the sociology of knowledge leads to the conclusion that the sociologies of language and religion cannot be considered peripheral specialties of little interest to sociological theory as such, but have essential contributions to make to it. This insight is not new. Durkheim and his school had it, but it was lost for a variety of theoretically irrelevant reasons. We hope we have made it clear that the sociology of knowledge presupposes a sociology of language, and that a sociology of knowledge without a sociology of religion is impossible (and vice versa). Furthermore, we believe that we have shown how the theoretical positions of Weber and Durkheim can be combined in a comprehensive theory of social action that does not lose the inner logic of either. Finally, we would contend that the linkage we have been led to make here between the sociology of knowledge and the theoretical core of the thought of Mead and his school suggests an interesting possibility for what might be called a sociological psychology, that is, a psychology that derives its fundamental perspectives from a sociological understanding of the human condition. The observations made here point to a program that seems to carry theoretical promise. More generally, we would contend that the analysis of the role of knowledge in the dialectic of individual and society, of personal identity and social structure, provides a crucial complementary perspective for all areas of sociology. This is certainly not to deny that purely structural analyses of social phenomena are fully adequate for wide areas of sociological inquiry, ranging from the study of small groups to that of large institutional complexes, such as the economy or politics. Nothing is further from our intentions than the suggestion that a sociology-of-knowledge “angle” ought somehow to be injected into all such analyses. In many cases this would be unnecessary for the cognitive goal at which these studies aim. We are suggesting, however, that the integration of the findings of such analyses into the body of sociological theory requires more than the casual obeisance that might be paid to the “human factor” behind the uncovered structural data. Such integration requires a systematic accounting of the dialectical relation between the structural realities and the human enterprise of constructing reality—in history. We

Durkheim, who said: “What is moral is everything that is a source of solidarity, everything that forces man to … regulate his actions by something other than … his own egoism.”65

Religions are moral exoskeletons. If you live in a religious community, you are enmeshed in a set of norms, relationships, and institutions that work primarily on the elephant to influence your behavior. But if you are an atheist living in a looser community with a less binding moral matrix, you might have to rely somewhat more on an internal moral compass, read by the rider. That might sound appealing to rationalists, but it is also a recipe for anomie—Durkheim’s word for what happens to a society that no longer has a shared moral order.63 (It means, literally, “normlessness.”) We evolved to live, trade, and trust within shared moral matrices. When societies lose their grip on individuals, allowing all to do as they please, the result is often a decrease in happiness and an increase in suicide, as Durkheim showed more than a hundred years ago.64 Societies that forgo the exoskeleton of religion should reflect carefully on what will happen to them over several generations. We don’t really know, because the first atheistic societies have only emerged in Europe in the last few decades. They are the least efficient societies ever known at turning resources (of which they have a lot) into offspring (of which they have few). THE

En général, les hommes n'aspirent à s'instruire que dans la mesure où ils sont affranchis du joug de la tradition; car tant que celle-ci est maîtresse des intelligences, elle suffit à tout et ne tolère pas facilement de puissance rivale.

Avec quelque spontanéité que nous obéissions à la voix qui nous dicte cette abnégation, nous sentons bien qu'elle nous parle sur un ton impératif qui n'est pas celui de l'instinct. C'est pourquoi, quoiqu'elle se fasse entendre à l'intérieur de nos consciences, nous ne pouvons sans contradiction la regarder comme nôtre. Mais nous l'aliénons, comme nous faisons pour nos sensations; nous la projetons au dehors, nous la rapportons à un être que nous concevons comme extérieur et supérieur à nous, puisqu'il nous commande et que nous nous conformons à ses injonctions. Naturellement, tout ce qui nous paraît venir de la même origine participe au même caractère. C'est ainsi que nous avons été nécessités à imaginer un monde au-dessus de celui-ci et à le peupler de réalités d'une autre nature.

Émile Durkheim, the father of modern sociology, said that when societies hit a civilisational break the suicide rate soars.

Half the ideas in this book are probably wrong. The history of human science is not encouraging. Galton's eugenics, Freud's unconscious, Durkheim's sociology, Mead's culture-driven anthropology, Skinner’s behaviorism, Piaget's early learning, and Wilson’s sociobiology all appear in retrospect to be riddled with errors and false perspectives. No doubt the Red Queen's approach is just another chapter in this marred tale. No doubt its politicization and the vested interests ranged against it will do as much damage as was done to previous attempts to understand human nature. The Western cultural revolution that calls itself political correctness will no doubt stifle inquiries it does not like, such as those into the mental differences between men and women. I sometimes feel that we are fated never to understand ourselves because part of our nature is to turn every inquiry into an expression of our own nature: ambitious, illogical, manipulative, and religious. "Never literary attempt was more unfortunate than my Treatise of Human Nature. It fell dead-born from the Press," said David Hume. But then I remember how much progress we have made since Hume and how much nearer to the goal of a complete understanding of human nature we are than ever before. We will never quite reach that goal, and it would perhaps be better if we never did. But as long as we can keep asking why, we have a noble purpose.

Según la Real Academia Española, un prototipo puede ser el ejemplar más perfecto de una virtud o un vicio. Colombia es un ejemplar de desorganización social (Waldmann, 2007), como lo son otros países de América Latina (Waldmann, 2006). Pero, en lugar de referirme a ese tipo de organización como monstruosidad sociológica (Durkheim, 1893/1922) o sociedad anormal (Durkheim, 1895/1938), es mejor considerarlo como una forma particular de orden social del que nos interesa conocer su posible origen y los factores que lo mantienen.

While the science of ethics does not make us indifferent or resigned spectators of reality, at the same time it does teach us to treat it with extreme prudence, imparting to us a conservative attitude. There has been good reason to upbraid certain theories which are thought to be scientific for being destructive and revolutionary; but they are scientific in name only. They construct, but they do not observe. They see in ethics, not a collection of facts to study, but a sort of revocable law-making which each thinker establishes for himself. Ethics as practiced is then considered only as a collection of habits, prejudices valuable only if they conform to the doctrine proposed; and as this doctrine is not induced from observation of the moral facts, but borrowed from outside sciences, it inevitably contradicts the existing moral order on more than one point. But we are less exposed to that danger, for ethics is for us a system of realized facts, bound up in the total world-system. Now, legerdemain does not change a fact, even when this is desirable.

[M]ost social institutions have been handed down to us already fashioned by previous generations; we have had no part in their shaping; consequently it is not by searching within ourselves that we can uncover the causes which have given rise to them. Furthermore, even if we have played a part in producing them, we can hardly glimpse, save in the most confused and often even the most imprecise way, the real reasons which have impelled us to act, or the nature of our action. Already, even regarding merely the steps we have taken personally, we know very inaccurately the relatively simple motives that govern us. We believe ourselves disinterested, whereas our actions are egoistic; we think that we are commanded by hatred whereas we are giving way to love, that we are obedient to reason whereas we are the slaves of irrational prejudices, etc. How therefore could we possess the ability to discern more clearly the causes, of a different order of complexity, which inspire the measures taken by the collectivity? For at the very least each individual shares in only an infinitesimally small part of them; we have a host of fellow-fashioners, and what is occurring in the consciousness of others eludes us.

Traditional structures of social and economic support slowly weakened; no longer was it possible for a man to follow his father and grandfather into a manufacturing job, or to join the union and start on the union ladder of wages. Marriage was no longer the only socially acceptable way to form intimate partnerships, or to rear children. People moved away from the security of legacy religions or the churches of their parents and grandparents, toward churches that emphasized seeking an identity, or replaced membership with the search for connection or economic success (Wuthnow, 1988). These changes left people with less structure when they came to choose their careers, their religion, and the nature of their family lives. When such choices succeed, they are liberating; when they fail, the individual can only hold himself or herself responsible. In the worst cases of failure, this is a Durkheim-like recipe for suicide. We can see this as a failure to meet early expectations or, more fundamentally, as a loss of the structures that give life a meaning.10 Durkheim,

Por el contrario, a medida que el tipo organizado se desenvuelve, la fusión de los diversos segmentos, unos en otros, lleva la de los mercados hacia un mercado único, que abraza, sobre poco más o menos, toda la sociedad. Se extiende incluso más allá y tiende a devenir universal, pues las fronteras que separan a los pueblos desaparecen al mismo tiempo que las que separan a los segmentos de cada uno de ellos. Resulta que cada industria produce para los consumidores que se encuentran dispersos sobre toda la superficie del país o incluso del mundo entero. El contacto no es ya, pues, suficiente. El productor ya no puede abarcar el mercado con la vista ni incluso con el pensamiento; ya no puede representarse los límites, puesto que es, por así decirlo, ilimitado.

…man is double…There are two beings in him: an individual being which has its foundation in the organism and the circle of whose activities is therefore strictly limited, and a social being which represents the highest reality in the intellectual and moral order that we can know by observation – I mean society.

For modern western economies, a rapid expansion of consumer options is the normal experience. What used to be remarkable or a sign of middle-class status is very rapidly trivialized. Standards are never settled. Everything is always in flux, a condition that philosopher Zygmunt Bauman calls “liquid modernity.”32 Rather than a solid sense of what the good life looks like, we are left with ever-shifting values as our choices multiply. The basic principle that Durkheim discovered was that at a certain point, increasing choice actually decreases satisfaction, sometimes precipitously: “Unlimited desires are insatiable by definition and insatiability is rightly considered a sign of morbidity. Being unlimited, they constantly and infinitely surpass the means at their command; they cannot be quenched. Inextinguishable thirst is constantly renewed torture.

if you are an atheist living in a looser community with a less binding moral matrix, you might have to rely somewhat more on an internal moral compass, read by the rider. That might sound appealing to rationalists, but it is also a recipe for anomie—Durkheim’s word for what happens to a society that no longer has a shared moral order.63 (It means, literally, “normlessness.”) We evolved to live, trade, and trust within shared moral matrices. When societies lose their grip on individuals, allowing all to do as they please, the result is often a decrease in happiness and an increase in suicide, as Durkheim showed more than a hundred years ago.64

Emile Durkheim, who warned of the dangers of anomie (normlessness) and wrote, in 1897, that “man cannot become attached to higher aims and submit to a rule if he sees nothing above him to which he belongs.

La complejidad de las sociedades modernas generaría pérdida de sentido (según Max Weber) y desintegración social (según Emile Durkheim)

Papa had no inner life. He was hollow, hollow… profit, acquisition and ticking little social-democratic boxes… his death grew naturally out of his life. Anomic suicide: Durkheim describes it well. Everyone’s death is a fulfilment, really.

Education is a social thing; that is to say, it brings the child into contact with a definite society and not with society in general.

The progress of a science is proven by the progress toward solution of the problems it treats.

A second wonder of life is collective effervescence, a term introduced by French sociologist Émile Durkheim in his analysis of the emotional core of religion. His phrase speaks to the qualities of such experiences: we feel like we are buzzing and crackling with some life force that merges people into a collective self, a tribe, an oceanic “we.” Across the twenty-six cultures, people told stories of collective effervescence at weddings, christenings, quinceañeras, bar and bat mitzvahs, graduations, sports celebrations, funerals, family reunions, and political rallies, as in this one from Russia:

When, in the so-called Feast of the Tabernacles, the Jew set the air in motion by shaking willow branches in a certain rhythm, it was to cause the wind to rise and the rain to fall; and it was believed that the desired phenomenon would result automatically from the rite, provided it were correctly performed.[

Thus the believer, like the delirious man, lives in a world peopled with beings and things which have only a verbal existence.

It is true that mythology has an æsthetic interest as well as one for the history of religions; but it is one of the essential elements of the religious life, nevertheless. If the myth were withdrawn from religion, it would be necessary to withdraw the rite also; for the rites are generally addressed to definite personalities who have a name, a character, determined attributes and a history, and they vary according to the manner in which these personalities are conceived.

We must therefore avoid distinguishing between religious beliefs, keeping some because they seem to us to be true and sane

a classification of all the things, real and ideal, of which men think, into two classes or opposed groups, generally designated by two distinct terms which are translated well enough by the words profane and sacred (profane, sacré).

Finally, rites are the rules of conduct which prescribe how a man should comport himself in the presence of these sacred objects.

Thus a religion cannot be reduced to one single cult generally, but father consists in a system of cults, each endowed with a certain autonomy.

magic and religion.

Thus we arrive at the following definition: A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them.

MacLennan was the first who undertook to attach totemism to the general history of humanity.

but since it is found equally well among the most civilized peoples, it is but natural that they too should be called as witnesses.

social facts vary with the social system of which they form a part; they cannot be understood when detached from it. This is why two facts which come from two different societies cannot be profitably compared merely because they seem to resemble each other; it

A hundred years of further studies have confirmed Durkheim’s diagnosis. If you want to predict how happy someone is, or how long she will live (and if you are not allowed to ask about her genes or personality), you should find out about her social relationships. Having strong social relationships strengthens the immune system, extends life (more than does quitting smoking), speeds recovery from surgery, and reduces the risks of depression and anxiety disorders.53 It’s not just that extroverts are naturally happier and healthier; when introverts are forced to be more outgoing, they usually enjoy it and find that it boosts their mood.54 Even people who think they don’t want a lot of social contact still benefit from it. And it’s not just that “we all need somebody to lean on”; recent work on giving support shows that caring for others is often more beneficial than is receiving help.55 We need to interact and intertwine with others; we need the give and the take; we need to belong.

Todo meio é ele próprio um fim.

Is the mimetic mechanism the original sin? Yes, of course. The original sin is the bad use of mimesis, and the mimetic mechanism is the actual consequence of this use at the collective level. Usually, people don’t see the mimetic mechanism, even when they can identify all sorts of rivalries which are at the base of the development of this very mechanism. The mimetic mechanism produces a complex form of transcendence, which plays a very important role in the dynamic stability of archaic society and therefore one cannot condemn it from an anthropological and sociological standpoint, because it is necessary for the survival and development of humanity. It can be defined as the ‘social transcendence’ in Durkheim’s terms, or the idolatrous transcendence from the point of view of the Judaeo-Christian perspective. It is an illusory and idolatrous form of sacred that, nonetheless, can protect the archaic human community from greater and more disruptive forms of violence. It is what Paul says also regarding powers and principalities,6 meaning the secular powers of this world: they are doomed, and they are going to disappear very quickly, but he doesn’t condemn them in a self-righteous way, he does not demand that they are destroyed with violence, and one has simply to submit to their authority.7 The archaic sacred is ‘Satanic’ when there is nothing to channel it and to keep it at bay, and social institutions are there to do precisely this job, until the Kingdom of God will finally triumph.

seems that modern society has devised other forms of dharma that help to keep violence at bay. Stefano Tomelleri, using Durkheim’s concept of social distance, sees the division of labour as a means of coping with mimetic rivalry through the creation of social distance.12 This is also reminiscent of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, which is a tool to control human behaviour, preventing any form of horizontal communication, meaning any mimetic activity, through an external source of control.13 In both cases the aim is the eradication of violence. How could you envisage a contemporary social order that, although acknowledging the constant presence of violence, tries to cope with it? The division of labour, unlike the caste system, leaves room for the individual, at least in principle. The market may force one to make some choices instead of others, but it is not proper to speak about capitalism, as the Marxists did, in terms of rigidity of social stratification. The division of labour has experienced important changes in the recent years, and I am not sure that I can give a definite explanation to account for this phenomenon. Certainly the organization of labour is particularly relevant for the stability of North American society. When people refer to the so-called ‘American dream’, they certainly exaggerate and overestimate its nature, but it is not entirely deceptive either. If one looks at the nouveaux riches of Silicon Valley, it is true that many of them are really self-made men, and a good percentage are immigrants, mostly from India or China. So, I am not sure I would agree completely that division of labour keeps mimetic rivalry under control, but at the same time it is a very complex subject. There is unquestionably more social mobility in the United States than in Europe. However, we live in a world in which social mobility, although experiencing phases of inhibition and local rigidity, is constantly increasing. Structural injustice, although still present, has been gradually ironed out by Christian ethics, and the market itself asks for a wider circulation of ‘human capital’.

Durkheim be damned, those of us who actually honor the Gods believe that there is more to religion than social mummery.