Emile Durkheim is the philosopher who can best help us to understand
why capitalism makes us richer and yet frequently more miserable.
He was born in 1858 in the little Frenchtown of Epinal,
near the German border. Before he was forty, Durkheim was appointed to a
powerful and prestigious position as a professor at the Sorbonne in Paris.
Durkheim lived through the immense rapid transformation of France from a
largely traditional agricultural society to an urban industrial economy.
He could see that his country was getting richer, that capitalism was
extraordinarily productive and in certain ways that it was also liberating.
But what particularly struck him and became the focus for his entire scholarly
career was that the economic system was doing something very peculiar
to people's minds.
It was quite literally driving them to suicide in
ever-increasing numbers.
This was the immense insight unveiled in Durkheim's
most important work: "Suicide", published in 1897.
The book chronicled a remarkable and tragic discovery.
That suicide rates seem to shoot up once a nation has become
industrialized and consumer capitalism takes hold.
Durkheim observed that the suicide rate in the Britain of his day
was double that of Italy but in an even richer and more advanced Denmark,
it was four times higher than in the UK.
Durkheim's focus on suicide
was intended to shed light on a more general level of unhappiness
and despair in society.
Suicide ws the horrific tip of the iceberg of mental distress
created by modern capitalism.
Across his career, Durkheim
tried to explain why people had become so unhappy
in modern societies and he isolated five crucial factors.
In traditional societies, people's identities are closely tied to belonging
to a clan or a class.
Few choices are involved.
A person might be a baker a
Lutheran or married to their second cousin without ever having made any self
conscious decisions for themselves.
They can just step into a place created for them by their family
and the existing fabric of society.
But under modern capitalism,
it's the individual that now begins to choose everything;
what job to take, what religion to follow, who to marry,
and where to belong.
If things go well, the individual takes all
the credit, but if things go badly, the individual is in a crueler
place than ever before, for it seemingly means that there's
no one else to blame but they themselves.
Failure becomes a terrible judgment upon the individual.
This is the particular burden of life in modern capitalism.
Capitalism raises hopes.
Everyone with effort can become the boss.
Advertising stokes ambition by showing us limitless
luxury that we could, if we play our cards right,
secure very soon.
The opportunities are said to be
enormous but so too are the possibilities for disappointment.
In modern capitalism, envy grows rife.
Its easy to become deeply dissatisfied with one's lot,
not because it's objectively awful, but because of tormenting thoughts
about all that is almost, but not quite within reach.
The cheery boosterish side of capitalism attracted Durkheim's
particular annoyance.
In his view, modern society struggled to admit
that life just is often quite painful and sad.
Our tendencies to grief and sorrow
are made to look like signs of failure rather than, as should
be the case, a fair response to the arduous fact of the human condition.
One of the complaints against traditional societies strongly
voiced in Romantic literature is that people need more freedom.
Rebellious types used to complain that there were far too many social norms,
norms telling you what to wear, what you're supposed to do on Sunday
afternoons, what parts of an arm its respectable for a woman to reveal.
Capitalism, following the earlier efforts of romantic rebels,
has relentlessly undermined social norms.
Countries have become more complex, more anonymous and
more diverse.
People don't have so much in common with one another any more.
The collective answers to even very important questions
like who you should marry, or how you should bring up your children
have become weaker and less specific.
There's a lot of reliance on the phrase, "Whatever works for you,"
which sounds friendly, but it also means that society doesn't much care what you
do and doesn't feel confident it has good answers to the big
questions of your life.
In upbeat moments we like to think of ourselves as fully up to the task of
reinventing life and working everything out for ourselves, but in reality,
as Durkheim knew, we're often simply too tired, too busy, too
uncertain, and then there is nowhere to turn.
Durkheim was himself an atheist, but he worried that religion had become
implausible, just as its best sides, its communal side, would have been
most useful to prepare the fraying social fabric.
Despite its factual errors and its fantastical dimensions,
Durkheim appreciated religion.
He knew that the sense of community and consolation
that religion offer are highly important to people.
Capitalism has as yet offered nothing to replace this with.
Science certainly doesn't offer the same opportunities for powerful
shared experiences.
The periodic table might well possess a transcendent
beauty and be a marvel of intellectual elegance, but it can't
draw a society together around it.
In the nineteenth century, it had looked AT certain moments as if
the idea of the nation might grow so powerful and intense,
that it could take up the sense of belonging and shared devotion
that had once been supplied by religion.
Admittedly, there were some heroic
moments but they generally didn't work out very well.
Family ,too, seemed for a time to offer
the experience of belonging, that people seem to need.
But today, although we do indeed invest hugely in our families,
they're not as stable as we might hope, and by adulthood, children
are hardly tied to their parents anymore.
They don't expect to work alongside them,
they don't expect their social circles to overlap, and they don't
feel that their parents' honor is in their hands.
Today neither family
nor the nation are well placed to take up the task of giving us a larger sense
of belonging, of giving us the feeling that we're part of something
more valuable than ourselves.
Emile Durkheim was a master diagnostician of our ills.
He shows us that modern economies put tremendous
pressures on individuals and leave them dangerously bereft
of authoritative guidance and communal solace.
We are all Durkheim's heirs, and still have ahead of us the task that
he grappled with; how we can create new ways of belonging, how we
can take some of the pressure off individuals and find a more correct
balance between freedom and solidarity,
How to generate
ideologies that will allow us not to be so tough on ourselves for our
failures and our setbacks.