Note-taking for Learning of Culture with Lisa Stulberg
This week, we read another cornerstone of the sociology canon: Émile Durkheim on where religion comes from.
The book is very much a product of its time, with continual and annoying references to “primitive” religions and peoples. No question that Durkheim’s methodology doesn’t pass contemporary muster. But his theoretical insights are on point.
[R]eligion is something eminently social. Religious representations are collective representations which express collective realities; the rites are a manner of acting which take rise in the midst of the assembled groups and which are destined to excite, maintain or recreate certain mental states in these groups (10).
You could substitute the word “music” for “religion” and this paragraph would still be true. This is food for future thought.
Our measurement systems for time and space are examples of the “collective representations” whose origins Durkheim locates in religion.
Collective representations are the result of an immense co-operation, which stretches out not only into space but into time as well; to make them, a multitude of minds have associated, united and combined their ideas and sentiments; for them, long generations have accumulated their experience and their knowledge. A special intellectual activity is therefore concentrated in them which is infinitely richer and complexer than that of the individual (16).
We experience our social consciousness exactly the same way that religious people experience God. We don’t just feel public opinion and social norms as forces acting on us from the outside. They’re bound up in our inner thoughts as well, to the point where we can’t tell our “own” thoughts from the ones planted in us socially. We experience these social thoughts (Durkheim’s “collective categories”) as our abstract reasoning ability.
The categories are no longer considered as primary and unanalysable facts, yet they keep a complexity which falsifies any analysis as ready as that with which the empiricists content themselves. They no longer appear as very simple notions which the first comer can very easily arrange from his own personal observations and which the popular imagination has unluckily complicated, but rather they appear as priceless instruments of thought which the human groups have laboriously forged through the centuries and where they have accumulated the best of their intellectual capital (19).
All religions divide the world into profane and sacred. These, Durkheim says, are actually the individual and the social. Our individual selves are manifested as our grunting, sweating animal bodies. It’s only in social contexts that we can “transcend” our individual bodies and join in the oceanic group mind that we think of as the world of the sacred. This helps explain why not all sacred things are superior to or more important than profane things. Sometimes individuals are subject to the tribe, but sometimes the tribe is subject to individuals. Just as society needs our individual tributes, so do our gods.
[I]f it is true that man depends upon his gods, this dependence is reciprocal. The gods also have need of man; without offerings and sacrifices they would die (38).
Gods are conveniently anthropomorphic mental representations of the tribe.
The god of the clan, the totemic principle, can therefore be nothing else than the clan itself, personified and represented to the imagination under the visible form of the animal or vegetable which serves as totem (206).
The modern world has seen an explosive growth in the totem population: national flags, sports logos, band logos, brands, cartoon characters, Pokémon.
[W]herever we observe the religious life, we find that it has a definite group as its foundation. Even the so-called private cults, such as the domestic cult or the cult of a corporation, satisfy this condition; for they are always celebrated by a group, the family or the corporation (44).
Does he mean, like, a modern corporation? What is the difference between a corporation and a cult? Especially the ones with the really strong company cultures, like Apple or Google.
We don’t just obey social rules out of fear. We obey voluntarily, out of reverence.
Now society also gives us the sensation of a perpetual dependence. Since it has a nature which is peculiar to itself and different from our individual nature, it pursues ends which are likewise special to it; but, as it cannot attain them except through our intermediacy, it imperiously demands our aid. It requires that, forgetful of our own interests, we make ourselves its servitors, and it submits us to every sort of inconvenience, privation and sacrifice, without which social life would be impossible. It is because of this that at every instant we are obliged to submit ourselves to rules of conduct and of thought which we have neither made nor desired, and which are sometimes even contrary to our most fundamental inclinations and instincts… If we yield to its orders, it is not merely because it is strong enough to triumph over our resistance; it is primarily because it is the object of a venerable respect (206-207).
Charismatic leaders are people infused with divine/social energy.
When we obey somebody because of the moral authority which we recognize in him, we follow out his opinions, not because they seem wise, but because a certain sort of physical energy is imminent in the idea that we form of this person, which conquers our will and inclines it in the indicated direction. Respect is the emotion which we experience when we feel this interior and wholly spiritual pressure operating upon us. Then we are not determined by the advantages or inconveniences of the attitude which is prescribed or recommended to us; it is by the way in which we represent to ourselves the person recommending or prescribing it… The representations which express them within each of us have an intensity which no purely private states of consciousness could ever attain; for they have the strength of the innumerable individual representations which have served to form each of them. It is society who speaks through the mouths of those who affirm them in our presence; it is society whom we hear in hearing them; and the voice of all has an accent which that of one alone could never have. The very violence with which society reacts, by way of blame or material suppression, against every attempted dissidence, contributes to strengthening its empire by manifesting the common conviction through this burst of ardour (207-208).
When individuals take on the moral authority of the entire group, sometimes we get Gandhi, and sometimes we get Stalin.
The most controversial aspect of Durkheim’s argument, for me, is his assertion that science and religion are both manifestations of social consensus opinion and are therefore more alike than different. Durkheim answers my objection:
It may be objected that science is often the antagonist of opinion, whose errors it combats and rectifies. But it cannot succeed in this task if it does not have sufficient authority, and it can obtain this authority only from opinion itself. If a people did not have faith in science, all the scientific demonstrations in the world would be without any influence whatsoever over their minds. Even to-day, if science happened to resist a very strong current of public opinion, it would risk losing its credit there (208).
I have to admit that this is a perfect explanation for America’s widespread rejection of evolution and climate change.
Is there any hope? Durkheim thinks that by naming these social forces, we can see them for what they are and resist them more easily. We developed religious mythology as a way to get a grasp on invisible social forces. But if we use sociology to “see” those forces, we are no longer subject to the mythology.
Again, charismatic leaders don’t just get their strength from the feeling of the group being behind them. The group is inside each of us, and that part of us is eager to feed off the leader’s energy.
The man who has obeyed his god and who, for this reason, believes the god is with him, approaches the world with confidence and with the feeling of an increased energy. Likewise, social action does not confine itself to demanding sacrifices, privations and efforts from us. For the collective force is not entirely outside of us; it does not act upon us wholly from without; but rather, since society cannot exist except in and through individual consciousnesses, this force must also penetrate us and organize itself within us; it thus becomes an integral part of our being and by that very fact this is elevated and magnified… There are occasions when this strengthening and vivifying action of society is especially apparent. In the midst of an assembly animated by a common passion, we become susceptible of acts and sentiments of which we are incapable when reduced to our own forces; and when the assembly is dissolved and when, finding ourselves alone again, we fall back to our ordinary level, we are then able to measure the height to which we have been raised above ourselves (209-210).
Durkheim cites the French revolution as examples of social consciousness driving people to extraordinary behavior. I think of Trump rallies and sports riots.
This is the explanation of the particular attitude of a man speaking to a crowd, at least if he has succeeded in entering into communion with it. His language has a grandiloquence that would be ridiculous in ordinary circumstances; his gestures show a certain domination; his very thought is impatient of all rules, and easily falls into all sorts of excesses. It is because he feels within him an abnormal over-supply of force which overflows and tries to burst out from him; sometimes he even has the feeling that he is dominated by a moral force which is greater than he and of which he is only the interpreter. It is by this trait that we are able to recognize what has often been called the demon of oratorical inspiration. Now this exceptional increase of force is something very real; it comes to him from the very group which he addresses. The sentiments provoked by his words come back to him, but enlarged and amplified, and to this degree they strengthen his own sentiment. The passionate energies he arouses re-echo within him and quicken his vital tone. It is no longer a simple individual who speaks; it is a group incarnate and personified (210).
Make America great again!
One can readily conceive how, when arrived at this state of exaltation, a man does not recognize himself any longer. Feeling himself dominated and carried away by some sort of an external power which makes him think and act differently than in normal times, he naturally has the impression of being himself no longer. It seems to him that he has become a new being: the decorations he puts on and the masks that cover his face figure materially in this interior transformation, and to a still greater extent, they aid in determining its nature. And as at the same time all his companions feel themselves transformed in the same way and express this sentiment by their cries, their gestures and their general attitude, everything is just as though he really were transported into a special world, entirely different from the one where he ordinarily lives, and into an environment filled with exceptionally intense forces that take hold of him and metamorphose him. How could such experiences as these, especially when they are repeated every day for weeks, fail to leave in him the conviction that there really exist two heterogeneous and mutually incomparable worlds? One is that where his daily life drags wearily along; but he cannot penetrate into the other without at once entering into relations with extraordinary powers that excite him to the point of frenzy. The first is the profane world, the second, that of sacred things (218).
Durkheim’s definition of religion applies neatly to fandoms. Everything in the world of the fandom is sacred, so much more dramatic and intense than the mundane world. Fandoms even have canons.
Religion ceases to be an inexplicable hallucination and takes a foothold in reality. In fact, we can say that the believer is not deceived when he believes in the existence of a moral power upon which he depends and from which he receives all that is best in himself: this power exists, it is society (225).
So, that’s terrifying. I hope Durkheim is right about sociological study conferring immunity.