Meditation on Community for 4th of July

MS

On Suicide by Émile Durkheim is not, as one might at first suspect, a depressing book. It’s shares much with the later work The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. It shares a subject: the centrality of community in human life. In that work Durkheim argues that religion marks the beginning of what we could call society. A group’s values and ethical classifications are projected outward onto the world. Religion is the elementary form of society.. or community.

So what does suicide have to do with religion? Everything, since the impulse for killing oneself can be shown to be associated with a person’s connectedness to a community. This goes against the grain in terms of interpreting suicide. We think of suicide as the ultimate personal act of despair, best explained through highly personal details of a life. Durkheim writes what is surely the longest book on suicide that never confronts individual tales of despair. Through his breathtakingly creative reading of state statistics for various European countries he demonstrates that whatever the individual stories of despair, suicide is a regular feature of societies.. and can even be expressed as quotient. The rate of suicide holds more steady than the actual death rate in many cases!

The primary barrier to suicide is connection to community. So Catholic areas had (in the 19th century) a markedly lower rate of suicide than Protestant ones, reflecting in Durkheim’s opinion an individualist strain in Protestantism that breaks down traditional (Catholic) communities. Those who are married have a lower suicide rate.. and those who have children have an even lower one.. pointing to the fact that the closer and more enwrapping the bonds of family, the more life is held onto. Finally, eras of national euphoria, a revolution, say, are marked by downturns of the suicide rate. So there it is: connection to religion, family, and country are the best inoculators to the act of suicide.

This puts religion in a strange place. It is not that case that the doctrinal contents of a religion have any special hold on people (fear of hell, for example). What’s important is that a religion build a strong bond of community. Durkheim makes this argument strongly:

Religion does not owe its effectiveness to the special nature of religious feelings, since domestic and political groups, when strongly integrated, produce the same effects… Conversely, it is not the features that are specific to domestic or political ties that explain the immunity that they confer, because religious communities enjoy the same privilege. The cause must lie in a single property shared by all these groups… And the only quality that satisfies this condition is that they are all strongly integrated social groups. [224]

So there’s no special quality about “religion”; it’s just another way for human beings to organize a community. The actual theological teachings of a community might go some ways toward allowing people to rationalize their stances, and may help to define rituals, but those teachings do not equal the community any more than music on the page equals the music. We study religion just like we study any other group, analyzing a system of symbols that define a community and inculcate common values.

So now I come to the 4th of July, which is the date tonight as I write this. I can see in my own life confirmation of Durkheim’s points: I took my daughter last night (July 3) to our city’s fireworks show. I sat on the green hill with a couple of thousand other people, while many more families sat on the other side of the hill, picnicking together. Alone I wouldn’t have bothered to attend 4th of July festivities, but with a young daughter I couldn’t wait. (It was her first time seeing fireworks!) Likewise when it came to church attendance. I love my Unitarian Fellowship, but I’m not sure if I would have given up a Sunday morning to read if not for my daughter. I feel a pull to socially integrate because of her, and I am hard at work figuring out how to do that in a way that is true to my personal convictions.

The catch comes when it gets hard to integrate with social groups. My sense of scholarship is based on the ideal of standing outside and examining the symbol systems of various communities, be they religious or national. A scholar of American history should not be “patriotic” in the sense of the family down the street that hangs out pro-USA flags and banners. Nor should a scholar of religion be a believer in the sense that he or she really buys into a symbol system as eternal. I don’t mean every scholar must burn bridges to their communities, but our job is to examine and interpret.. not believe.

This makes the scholar the very type of “excessive individualism.” Durkheim writes concerning this person that he gradually breaks out of groups, and “comes to depend on himself and to recognize no other rules except those based on his own private interests” (225). That does not mean one follows Ayn Rand into idiotic selfishness as virtue.. but it is a self-centered way of thinking about life. The self is the ultimate judge. The struggle of liberalism is right at this point. Where fundamentalism works to put the genie back in the bottle and submit to an authority (defended by “Evidence that Demands a Verdict”—note that self is again the implied judge), liberalism works to develop some further version of community. The Unitarian church is an example of this striving to find a mode of community that meets the needs of our time.

Durkheim too is engaged in this process, which so far has no real answer. Knowledge is what separates people from traditional communities (religion, family, country), but it is also the hope for a new community:

Once established beliefs have been swept away by the course of things, they cannot be re-established artificially; only thought can help us to conduct our lives. Once the social instinct is blunted, intelligence is the only guide that we have left and it must serve us to remake our consciences. However perilous the undertaking, we cannot hesitate, because there is no other choice. [176-7]

That is from the book On Suicide! You can see, though, how it’s deepest concern is human connectedness.. and that’s the basis of religion. Although Durkheim gets us to about the same place as Nietzsche, he looks forward toward a new community that makes responsible use of knowledge. Thus Durkheim is a sociologist.