SOCIOLOGY - Émile Durkheim

Emile Durkheim was a French 19th century sociologist who focused on what modern capitalism does to our minds - and concluded that it might, quite literally, be driving us to an early grave. Please subscribe here: http://tinyurl.com/o28mut7
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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.

The 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 the 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 grieve 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
they 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 have a romantic

rebels, has relentlessly
undermine social norms.

Countries have become more
complex, more anonymous and

more diverse. People don't have
so much in common with one

another anymore. The collective
answers to even very important questions

like who you should marry, or how
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, to

uncertain, and then there is
nowhere to turn.

Durkheim was himself an atheist, but he
worried that religion had become

implausible, just at 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 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 the 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 a
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, and how to generate

ideologies that will allow us not to be
so tough on ourselves for our

failures and our setbacks.