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.
When I was getting into music, really from the 9th grade through the end of high school, it was incredibly important to know what music someone listened to. In gauging friend compatibility I needed to know something about the other person’s taste in music. In the world I remember (this would have been form about 1987 to 1991) young people were split into groups by music. The words we used to describe different groups corresponded to the types of music they listened to. People with long hair and jeans were stoners, their Iron Maiden t-shirt told you all you needed to know. Top 40 listeners could be identified by certain mainstream markers. There was always punk, and that was complemented by new wave—a certain “look” came with the music. Music more or less aligned with an identity.. or sub-culture.
These days during the school year when the weekly Lawrentian comes out I like to browse the “What’s on your ipod section.” I’m curious, but also hoping I discover an artist. Often I am flummoxed by the mixture of choices. The one I copied above is a case in point. What I see is this totally eclectic grouping that moves from Notorious B.I.G. to Cheap Trick to the Beatles to Blues Traveler. Whoa! That’s like four ways of dressing and acting as far as I’m concerned. But it doesn’t mean that for students today. In terms of music there’s no way to pigeon hole students or set them in the kind of groups that I knew growing up.
Why is this? I am going to go out on a limb and dismiss the idea that they are more sophisticated than my generation. I would instead guess that music and identity are being de-coupled.. and therefore the question “what music do you listen to” no longer has the same urgency. It doesn’t tell me much about the person, it just tells me if this person is interested in music. Students still mark themselves and have identities, but those are no longer strongly based on musical styles. Just what those identities are would take me another post.. and some more thought.. but the shift in identity markers has left music free to be appreciated for itself.
Just to get the ball rolling, I wonder if what kind of phone a person is carrying is now more important than the music on their ipod.. in terms of marking an identity.
The recent Mamluk Studies Review (Jan. 2010, pdf available here) contains an essay by Frédéric Bauden on the historical work of Cairo’s great medieval historian al-Maqrizi. This is Bauden’s ninth essay mining the extraordinary rough drafts of al-Maqrizi’s great work, the Khitat. What is extraordinary about these drafts is that they still exist, which is likely due to the very success and popularity of al-Maqrizi. At his death his personal manuscripts were not destroyed but were considered valuable on account of his fame.
This recent essay is a challenging one for a fan of al-Maqrizi, as he is branded something of a plagiarist, though with due consideration for the variable historical meaning of that term. Bauden noticed that 19 leaves (82a-100b) of the manuscript were written in a different hand than that of al-Maqrizi. This section corresponds to the section on madrasas in the Khitat. One possibility would be that al-Maqrizi employed a copyist, but close analysis by Bauden goes a long way toward demonstrating that this is a section from an earlier work by al-Maqrizi’s associate and neighbor al-Awhadi. There is some circumstantial evidence drawn from handwriting, but most important is the nature of the changes made to this section by al-Maqrizi, who introduced changes that made its language more impersonal, most likely so that it could pass as his own work.
The possible use by al-Maqrizi of the earlier work of his colleague al-Awhadi (d. 1408) has been known for some time. A historian of the next generation, al-Sakhawi (d. 1497) made some sharp charges against al-Maqrizi, writing:
[Al-Awhadi] devoted his attention to history, of which he was passionately fond. He wrote a comprehensive draft about the topography of Misr and Cairo on which he worked hard. [With this,] he did a useful work and in an excellent manner. He made a fair copy of part of it. Then Taqi al-Din al-Maqrizi made a fair copy of it [completely] and attributed it to himself [after he had made] additions. [translation Bauden, pg. 162]
This and other similar comments by the same writer are clearly aimed at disparaging the work of al-Maqrizi, insinuating that his work was not original. That al-Maqrizi made some use of the earlier work by al-Awhadi is not in doubt, since he himself tells us about this use in his own biographical entry for al-Awhadi:
…I have jotted down from him heaps of historical data, and I benefited from him a lot in the field of history. God assisted me in providing me with drafts in his own handwriting about the topography of Cairo that I incorporated in my comprehensive book [the Khitat]. [translation Bauden, pg. 170]
This is essentially the same information given to us by al-Sakhawi, only couched in a more favorable light. Obviously the problem is in knowing how to weigh these two different versions of al-Maqrizi’s use of earlier material. The benefit of the doubt has generally gone to al-Maqrizi, since the issue is pretty much insoluble without hard evidence. That is where al-Maqrizi’s rough draft is helpful; it provides the first evidence from which an independent judgment could be made.
I should note that I was skeptical at the beginning of this article that I would find anything disturbing about al-Maqrizi’s methodology. The work of al-Maqrizi strikes some modern readers as not so much a work of history as a cut and paste job. Arabic history, from ibn Ishaq on down to al-Maqrizi, is not so worried about developing a strong narrative arc of “what happened.” It is content to be more fragmented and to present various accounts and possibilities. I’ve grown to love that indeterminacy.. as I think most people who work on this material would agree. Since so much of al-Maqrizi’s Khitat is borrowed from various sources, what could be disturbing about the incorporation of some material from a contemporary? And after all, we’re just talking about 19 leaves of a very lengthy work.
But this essay turned out to be more challenging to the work of al-Maqrizi than I had guessed. To understand this we should be clear about where the originality of al-Maqrizi’s Khitat really lies. It is not in the prose, but rather in the architecture of the work. This is a point that we are re-learning in our own digital era. Where there is a glut of material, curation comes to the fore. The prize goes to the scholar/writer who organizes and sets out material in a fashion that readers can intuitively grasp. The Khitat is not a “great book” in the way we think about, say, the Aeneid or the poetry of Yeats; it is a collection of disparate material that shaped the way Cairo was perceived from the time of al-Maqrizi on down to our own time. That grand curation of past writing on Cairo is the glory of al-Maqrizi. Unlike Virgil or Yeats, his reputation would not inherently plummet if it were discovered that he did not write all of his great book.
And this is exactly where we are. Bauden has shown that al-Maqrizi incorporated large sections of the work of a predecessor, making only minimal (and misleading) emendations. This would not be catastrophic for an admirer of al-Maqrizi, for the reasons I just gave. However, there is more here in the argument of Bauden. The grand architecture itself, it appears, can be attributed to al-Awhadi. Bauden notes:
…finally, a close analysis of the layout of this section, I mean the order in which the madrasahs are enumerated, shows conclusively that al-Maqrizi followed it almost exactly: only eight madrasahs appear to have been moved to another place in al-Maqrizi’s plan, which means that he took al-Awhadi’s general organization of the section on buildings. This is another upsetting element. [199]
In fact, I would argue that this is the most troubling aspect. If the architecture should be attributed to someone else, then our view of al-Maqrizi will have to change. Bauden goes on to show that the draft of al-Awhadi was in a fairly complete state. The section on madrasas began with an excursus on the introduction of the madrasa to Egypt. This use of excurses on various topics, mixed into the section on buildings, is a marked feature of the Khitat, and it is now likely that this should be seen as a contribution of al-Awhadi. Within these 19 leaves there are also references to other sections that have been completed, such as the one on mosques, so possibly al-Maqrizi inherited quite a bit more than these 19 leaves, which he then fair-copied into his own manuscript. The large point here is that the structure of the Khitat can be traced back to al-Awhadi in important details.
While this may change our view of al-Maqrizi as an author, it does not change at all the value of this vast book. I would suggest that the main result of Bauden’s essay will be a revaluation of the Khitat as more of a social text, rather than the product of a single historian. Bauden makes the useful point that it is unlikely that al-Maqrizi conceived of writing the Khitat before the death of his colleague al-Awhadi. Why would he begin working on it when he well knew that his friend was working on a similar project? It appears to have been the premature death of al-Awhadi, and coming into possession of the rough draft, that set al-Maqrizi at work on the Khitat sometime shortly after 1410. We should also mention the death of Ibn Duqmaq at about this same time, who also left behind an unfinished work. So al-Maqrizi should be seen as picking up and completing a project that was more or less “in the air” at his time. From some points of view, that will make the Khitat an even more interesting book to study.
I have a personal connection to the above publication. My great-grandfather Stanley P. Stewart of South Colby, Washington, wrote a lengthy article for the publication, entitled “The History, Objects and Aims of the Anglo-Saxon Christian World Movement.” Not many people know much about the Anglo-Saxon Christian World Movement. It’s one of several groups that have taken an interest in the “lost tribes” of Israel taken into captivity by the Assyrians and who then drop out of world history. This group believes that those tribes made their way into Europe and in particular the British Isles. The upshot of this theory is that the glorious promises directed at Israel in the Hebrew Bible can now be interpreted in reference to Britain and the United States. This theory is presented in crystal clear visual form on page 32 of this magazine:
A unique dynamic in Christianity arises through various attempts to incorporate the “Old Testament” into the New Testament. This process is already fully under way in the New Testament itself, but the fun was only beginning. In some of the most durable theological frameworks (Catholic and Protestant) the church is the inheritor of the promises directed at the nation of Israel, which is seen as a proto-church making use of “shadows” and “signs” instead of participating in the real economy of grace. Other sects would get more creative as they emphasized the disjunction between the Old and New Testaments or tied themselves in a direct way to the people of Israel. Ethiopia built its traditional church on their literal inheritance of the lineage of Solomon.. and the Rastafari take this even further. The Anglo-Saxon Christian World Movement is another version, sanctifying their line through a make-believe history the Anglo-Saxon people descended from the British Isles. Traditional spiritual transference of the promises is neglected in favor of the discovery of a literal blood line.
This past week I was in California for a family gathering to mark my grandmother’s 90th birthday. On Sunday morning she gave a short talk about her life. The talk centered more on her father’s conversion than I expected. He was raised as a Unitarian in Worcester, Massachusetts. He moved west with his new wife and had fairly large family (five kids). In the midst of the Great Depression they were living in Silverdale, British Columbia, barely making ends meet. They gardened and her father picked up odd jobs when possible. During this difficult time my grandmother remembers a man who used to come visit her father. This man smoked a pipe and had a dog. She remembers that pipe vividly because her father usually did not allow anyone who smoked to come into the house, but in this case it was all right, though it sounds like they talked outside. So I imagine warm summer evenings, the poor family visited by something of an intellectual. The conversation was about the truth of the Anglo-Saxon identity with Israel. I imagine much of the Bible suddenly coming alive. It sounded so real and alive after the liberalism of Unitarianism. My great-grandfather accepted this form of Christianity.
Some unusual things come with the acceptance of Anglo-Saxons as latter day Israelites. The food laws, for example, are not abrogated, but must be followed. Worship on Sunday instead of the Sabbath is suspect.. Sabbath would be better. This does not look anything like orthodox Jewish versions of kosher, a system of food laws that have their basis in extended discussions about how to keep the laws of the Torah. My grandmother kept the food laws with an eye toward obvious literalism: don’t eat pork! don’t eat shrimp or other unclean foods! But there was no concern to separate dairy and meats, as would reflect a kosher kitchen. In her summary of her faith, my grandmother emphasized the importance of not eating pork. She also pointedly referenced that bad things (like cancer) come to people who eat pork and unclean foods.
It would be a mistake to think that this is all about food. This yen for separation, I think, is again evident in the way my grandmother has here and there emphasized the importance of not intermarrying with other races. That’s a view to which I never subscribed.. but it’s an obvious result of seeing Anglo-Saxons as Israelites. All those Old Testament verses forbidding marriage with Canaanites can now be applied to whites in America marrying Hispanics or blacks. So an avoidance of pepperoni may, in its deepest sense, be an aspect of a deeply racist creed. Separation is the watchword and the little things mirror the big things in life.
I’ve always struggled with this aspect of my grandmother’s view of the world. I’ve always loved her, and found her a personally kind person, but on the more abstract level of the way she sees the world, I have real problems. In my early twenties I wrote a short story about how my grandmother interacted with the world in a generous way (even with non Anglo-Saxons), but her belief system reflected systematic prejudice. I imagine there are a lot of people who have to work through mixed aspects of their past.
From 570-540 million years ago the earth was inhabited by a form of life known as Ediacaran organisms. They could be quite large. The organism named charnia—shown to the right looking fern-like—could reach five feet in length. In fact, they were the first large and complex organisms in the history of the earth. What fascinates me about these organisms is the way they get incorporated into discussions of Eden and innocence.
Edicaran organisms lived at a time when there were no predators (imagine that!). Marcia Bjornerud writes about them: “They apparently nourished themselves either by drawing nutrients directly from seawater or by hosting symbiont photosynthesizing microorganisms within their bodies” (157). They resembled modern organisms like jellyfish or sea pens, but they are thought to have gone extinct and not left any modern descendants. Given these facts it’s hard not to cast the mind back to Arcadia and golden ages. That Arcadia just falls a LONG time earlier than poets dreamed. But here, if ever, the green leaves hung unchanging in the shallow waters.
The allure of these creatures comes through in a BBC article:
Strange, gentle creatures which lived in peace and harmony with their neighbours millions of years ago may have rivalled or even surpassed Man if they had they not been wiped out by our ancestors, experts have claimed.
You may begin to see the attractiveness of this time period. Things get even more enticing when one considers the possibilities of their further development:
“Ediacarans were on a trajectory in which they would have developed into intelligent life, but it was cut short,” he said in a report published in the New Scientist magazine.
It sets one to daydreaming of a world in which predation never developed.. and our dog-eat-dog world was never known. Of course, it just takes a moment of thinking to realize that at some point resources would become scarce, and then competition would indeed ignite. But it’s nice to think that once upon a time it wasn’t like that. Our great Precambrian golden age came and went and no one ever knew it.
In speaking about the rise of predators, Marcia Bjornerud uses the analogy of monetheism versus polytheism. In that case there is an asymmetry since polytheism can tolerate monotheism but monotheism cannot tolerate polytheism. The result of the asymmetry is that monotheism wipes out polytheism (164-5). The carnivores played a game which transformed the system; before long the Ediacaran organisms were gone. But the use of the polytheism/monotheism metaphor is an example of how quickly facts about the world can get wrapped up in religious concepts.
Alas, all we have now are artists renderings of a world we would (perhaps) love to have been a part of:
I found this heading on a display at Circus World in Baraboo, Wisconsin. It took me back for second to conceive of the circus not as a way-down-the-list variety of entertainment, but as the “premier” variety. It sounds far-fetched. But then looking at posters with their emphasis on the sheer size of the circus, it starts to seem believable. One hundred train cars of exotic stuff?
That image reminds me of the celebrated images of giraffes and monkeys coming back to Egypt from the expedition to Punt (as inscribed on the walls of the ancient temple of Hatshepsut). The emphasis in the text at the end is that the “ten thousand wonders form every land” are coming to your city.
As far as delivering the world goes, the circus is a rather impoverished institution. It hardly competes with the Internet or a hundred other deliverers of the world. The circus survives now more as a historic curiosity of old America.. which is certainly the spirit with which I took my daughter to see Circus World, the historical grounds for the Ringling Brothers Circus. I was glad that my daughter could get an introduction to the arts of the circus, from tigers leaping through hoops to jugglers, clowns, and acrobats.
The grounds were littered with the detritus of circuses past. There were old wagons and railcars.
The stuff had its own allure. It had the look of things that had been designed purely with an eye for immediate effect. The colors are thus vibrant. The words clear. The motifs making reference to the surface of traditions, but never getting at the heart of anything. Circus art is thus the very definition of kitsch.
It is nevertheless hard not to take pleasure in all this. From our vantage point it has a kind of shiny originality. Just as the pipe circus music strikes us now as an evocative time capsule, so do the plumes and golden gestures of the wagons. And any premier form of entertainment cannot just vanish and become a mere sideshow to the three rings of culture. It’s a better bet that the aesthetic of the circus is with us, and governing the entertainment that we most enjoy.
