Transcript 27 Durkheim (11/30)

Émile Durkheim
Sociology 100
“Collective tendencies have an
existence of their own”
Altruistic Suicide
• “In the order of existence, no good is
measureless. A biological quality can fulfill the
purposes it is meant to serve on condition that it
does not transgress certain limits. So with social
phenomena. If, as we have just seen, excessive
individuation leads to suicide, insufficient
individuation has the same effects.
– “When man has become detached from society, he
encounters less resistance to suicide in himself, and he
does so likewise when the social imagination is too
strong.” (217)
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Altruistic Suicide
• “It has sometimes been said that suicide was unknown among
lower [i.e. non-European] societies.” While egoistic suicide is
unknown, “another form exists among them in an endemic state.”
(218)
• Goths believe men “who die a natural death are destined to languish forever
in caverns full of venomous creatures.” (218)
• Women in parts of India burn themselves on husband’s funeral pyre (219)
• Followers and servants kill themselves on death of their leader (219)
• “Now, when a person kills himself, in all these cases, it is not
because he assumes the right to do so but, on the contrary, because
it is his duty. If he fails in this obligation, he is dishonored and also
punished, usually, by religious sanctions.”
– “The weight of society is thus brought to bear on him to lead him to
destroy himself.” (219)
– “A social prestige thus attaches to suicide.” (222)
• Honor and duty, thus “altruistic” (221)
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Altruistic Suicide
• Animated by passion and will, typified by calm feeling of
duty, religious enthusiasm, or peaceful courage (293)
– Imposed for social ends, to enforce the dtrict interdependence
between leaders and followers (220)
– “The destiny of one must be that of the others.”
– Followers must die with leaders; leaders must not be weak
• Status
• “There can be only one cause for this feeble individuation
itself. For the individual to occupy so little place in
collective life he must be almost completely absorbed in
the group and the latter, accordingly, very highly integrated.
For the parts to have so little life of their own, the whole
must indeed be a compact, continuous mass.” (221)
– Not always obligatory, but always valued as a good in itself (224)
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Martyrs
• “There are no suicides with a more defnitively altruistic character.
We actually see the individual in all these cases seek to strip himself
of his personal being in order to be engulfed in something which he
regards as his true essence.” (225)
– Whatever the believer calls it, he seeks to lose himself entirely in what
he believes to be the ultimate truth
• Martyrdom “springs from hope; for it depends on the belief in
beautiful perspectives beyond this life. It even implies enthusiasm
and the spur of a faith egerly seeking satisfaction, affirming itself by
acts of extreme energy.” (225-226)
– A form of suicide that is positively valued even by individualized
cultures, like Christian Europe (226, 227)
– “Though they did not kill themselves, they sought death with all their
power and behaved so as to make it inevitable. (227)
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Altruistic Suicide in the Military
• Altruistic suicide is even commonly found in
modern (1897) Europe, in the special society
that is the military
– Societies within larger societies
• Soldiers are healthy, and fully integrated into a
robustly coherent society, yet suicide is
common among them. (229) Why?
– Commit suicide at rates distinct from the civilian
population (230-231)
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Altruistic Suicide in the Military
• Hate military life?
– But suicide increases with years served, when the
soldier has acclimated (231-232)
– Volunteers and re-enlistees kill themselves more
often than conscripts (233)
– Officers, who live much more comfortable lives
than enlistees, kill themselves more often (233)
• Though non-commissioned officers kill themselves
more than soldiers of any other rank
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Altruistic Suicide in the Military
• “The first quality of the soldier is a sort of
impersonality not to be found anywhere in civilian life
to the same degree. He must be trained to set little
value upon himself, since he must be prepared to
sacrifice himself upon being ordered to do so. (234)
– “Discipline requires him to obey without question and
sometimes even without understanding. For this an
intellectual abnegation hardly consistent with
individualism is required.”
– “He must have but a weak tie binding him to his
individuality, to obey external impulsion so docilely. In
short, a soldier's principle of action is external to himself;
which is the quality of the state of altruism.”
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Altruistic Suicide in the Military
• This explains the pattern of suicide rates in the military
(234)
– The more acclimated to military life, the more de-individuation
takes place
– Even explains why non-commissioned officers have the highest
suicide rates, as they are the most conditioned to passive
obedience
– Enlistees less acclimated, officers must exercise initiative
• Little valuing his own life, “the soldier kills himself at the
least disappointment, for the most futile reasons, for a
refusal of leave, a reprimand, an unjust punishment, a
delay in promotion, a question of honor, a flush of
momentary jealousy or even because other suicides have
occurred before his eyes or to his knowledge.” (239)
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Anomic Suicide
• Anomy
– A-: absent, not, without
– Nomos: law
• Why do people kill themselves during industrial and economic
crises?
– Not because of poverty, as poverty-stricken 1897 Ireland shows has
very low suicide rates. (245)
• “If therefore industrial or financial crises increase suicides, this is
not because the cause poverty, since crises of prosperity have the
same result; it is because they are crises. Every disturbance of the
equilibrium, even though it acheives greater comfort and a
heightening of general vitality, is an impulse to voluntary death.”
(246)
– Why?
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Anomic Suicide
• All limits to human appetites and ambitions are
socially created, there is no organic limitation on
them (248)
– But in times of crisis, these social constraints are
broken, and appetites are without limit
• “To pursue a goal which is by definition unattainable is to
condemn oneself to a state of perpetual unhappiness.”
– Momentary joy of satisfying a need, but never satiated
– Happiness only possible if one is blind to the futility of one’s
actions and one never encounters a an obstacle to acquisition
(248)
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Origins of Anomy
• Social hierarchies act to constrain and limit
desire (250)
– ‘I did pretty good for being a factory worker’s
son!’
• But only if people consider the distributions of
functions and rewards to be just (250)
– Social consensus
– Hierarchy becomes experienced as tyranny or
exploitation when this consensus breaks down
(250-252)
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Origins of Anomy
• In an economic disaster, some are suddenly cast into a lower
economic state than they had been
– “Then they must reduce their requirements, restrain their needs, learn
greater self-control. [...] Their moral education has to be
recommenced.” (252)
• But society as a whole develops slowly, and cannot keep up with
the convulsions of a capitalist economy
– Moral equilibrium cannot be found: “The limits are unknown between
the possible and the impossible, what is just and unjust, legitimate
claims and those which are immoderate. Consequently, there is no
restraint upon aspirations.” (253)
• “Poverty protects against suicide because it is a restraint in itself.”
• “Wealth, on the other hand, by the power it bestows, deceives us into
believing that we depend on ourselves only. Reducing the resistance we
encounter from objects, it suggests the possibility of unlimited success against
them. The less limited one feels, the more intolerable all limitation appears.”
(254)
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Origins of Anomy
• “For a whole century, economic progress has mainly
consisted in freeing industrial relations from all regulation.
Until very recently, it was a function of a whole system of
moral forces to exert this discipline.” (254)
– The economic sphere of life under capitalism produces “a
chronic state” of anomy
• Religion initially checked the behavior of the owners and consoled the
worker, but has lost much of its power due to erosion by market forces
• “Government, instead of regulating economic life, has become its tool
and servant.” (255)
– “The appetites thus excited have become freed from any
limiting authority have become freed of any limiting authority.
By sanctifying them, so to speak, this apotheosis of well-being
has placed them above all human law. Their restraint seems like
a sort of sacrilege.” (255)
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Origins of Anomy
• “Such is the source of the excitement predominating in this part of
society, and which has thence extended to the other parts. There,
the state of crisis and anomy is constant and, so to speak, normal.”
(256)
– “The man who has always pinned all his hopes on the future and lived
with his eyes fixed upon it, has nothing in the past as a comfort against
the present’s afflictions, for the past was nothing to him but a series of
hastily experienced stages. [...] Weariness alone, moreover, is enough
to bring disillusionment, for he cannot in the end escape the futility of
an endless pursuit.” (256)
– The doctrine of progress exalts this pursuit, but cannot guard against
the experience of anomy (257)
• “Anomy, therefore, is a regular and specific factor in our modern
societies; one of the springs from which the annual contingent [of
suicides] feeds.” (258)
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Anomy and Suicide
• Anomic suicide thus “results from man’s activity’s lacking regulation
and his consequent sufferings.” (258)
– Typified by disgust or disappointment. Also commonly characterized
by violent recriminations against life in general or a specific person.
(293)
– As egoistic suicide is common among intellectual classes, anomic
suicide is typical of the world of commerce and industry. (258)
– Human beings need regulation & restraint
• Durkheim’s theory on divorce & anomic suicide rely on the belief
that men ‘naturally’ require a greater regulation of their sexuality,
while women have weaker sex urges and thus don’t need it as
much. (259-276)
– This asserts as natural a socially constructed relationship, and is less
useful for our purposes.
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Suicide as Sociological
Phenomenon
• “The relations of suicide to certain states of social
development are as direct and constant as its relations to
facts of a biological and physical character were seen to be
real and unambiguous. Here at last we are face to face
with real laws, allowing us to attempt a methodological
classification of types of suicide.” (299)
– “The conclusion from all these facts is that the social suiciderate can be explained only sociologically.”
– “This is why there is nothing which cannot serve as an occasion
for suicide. It all depends on the intensity with which
suicidogenic causes have affected the individual.” (300)
– “No unhappiness in life necessarily causes a man to kill himself
unless he is otherwise so inclined.” (306)
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The Social Fact
• “Not merely are there suicides each year, but there are as a general
rule as many each year as in the year preceding. (308)
– “The state of mind which causes men to kill themselves is not purely
and simply transmitted, but—something much more remarkable—
transmitted to an equal number of persons, all in such situations as to
make the state of mind become an act.”
• “Collective tendencies have an existence of their own; they are
forces as real as cosmic forces, though of another sort; they,
likewise, affect the individual from without, though through other
channels. (309)
– “The proof that the reality of collective tendencies is no less than that
of cosmic forces is that this reality is demonstrated in the same way,
by the uniformity of effects.”
• Science
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The Social Fact
• “Individuals by combining form a psychical
existence of a new species, which consequently
has its own manner of thinking and feeling. (310)
– “Of course the elementary qualities of which the
social fact consists are present in germ in individual
minds. But the social fact emerges from them only
when they have been transformed by association
since it is only then that it appears.”
– “Association itself is also an active factor productive of
special effects. In itself it is therefore something new.”
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The Social Fact
• “When the consciousness of individuals,
instead of remaining isolated, becomes
grouped and combined, something in the
world has been altered. (310-311)
– “Naturally, this change produces others, this
novelty engenders other novelties, phenomena
appear whose characteristic qualities are not
found in the elements composing them.”
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