Okay, I want you to picture something, something
we've, I think, all been in. You walk into a
room. Maybe it's a funeral or, you know, a really
high -stakes board meeting. Or maybe it's just
one of those super fancy dinner parties where
there are way too many forks next to the plate.
Yeah, and you have no idea which one to use.
Exactly. You step across that threshold and you
just, you suddenly feel it. Oh yeah, it's unmistakable.
It really is. It's this heavy, kind of invisible
weight that just presses down on you. It's a
force that tells you how to stand, how loud you're
allowed to talk. What jokes are okay. And definitely
jokes are not okay. It just sort of tells you
how to exist in that space. It feels like there's
a script that everyone else got a copy of, and
you're just terrified you're going to ad lib
a line and, I don't know, ruin the whole show.
And that's a universal human experience. I think
most of us, we just chalk that up to internal
things, right? We say it's anxiety or insecurity
or just good old -fashioned peer pressure. Right.
We think, oh, I'm just being awkward or I need
to read the room better. We turn it inward. But
what if that pressure, what if it isn't just
in our heads? What if that invisible weight is
actually an objective external force? What if
it's as real and as measurable as, I don't know,
a sack of bricks or a gust of wind? And that
question, that is the perfect way to get into
our deep dive today. We are exploring the mind
of the man who argued exactly that. He believed
that these social pressures, they're not just
psychological quirks. He called them social facts.
And he argued that they're forces that exist
completely outside of us, but control us just
as rigidly as like the laws of physics. We were
talking today about Emile Durkheim. Now, I know
the name. It might sound a little dusty to some
people, you know, like an old textbook you forgot
in your high school walker. Yeah, it has that
ring to it. But digging into his life and his
work for this, I realized this guy is basically
the architect of how we see the world today.
He really is. I mean, alongside Karl Marx and
Max Weber, Durkheim is considered one of the
principal architects of modern social science.
They're kind of the Holy Trinity, if you will.
Right. But while Marx was focused on conflict
and economics and Weber was looking at, you know,
meaning and bureaucracy, Durkheim was just obsessed
with a different question. And it's a question
that feels incredibly relevant right now. Which
is? What holds us all together? The glue of society.
Exactly. The glue. Durkheim was writing at a
time when the world was, I mean, it was tearing
itself apart. Traditional religion was fading.
Kings were being overthrown. The Industrial Revolution
was upending every single community in Europe.
He just wanted to know, in a modern world where
we don't all pray to the same god or answer to
the same king, why doesn't society just dissolve
into chaos? And the scary part is, sometimes
it does. And we are going to get into that, too.
We're going to talk about what happens when that
glue fails, a concept he called anime. And then
we're going to look at how he tried to prove
all his theories by studying the most private,
most desperate act a person can commit. Suicide.
It is a heavy topic for sure, but it's an essential
one for understanding his work. We have a huge
stack of sources today, biographical details
from his life in France, his really groundbreaking
books like The Division of Labor and Society,
Suicide, and The Elementary Forms of Religious
Life. And a lot of modern scholars weighing in,
too. Oh, yeah. Plus a lot of commentary from
people who have spent decades just unpacking
his work. So let's go. Let's travel back to the
late 19th century. Who was this guy? I know he's
French, but what's the origin story? Okay, so...
Emile Durkheim was born in April of 1858 in a
town called Epinal. It's in the Lorraine region
of France. And to really get what drove him,
you have to understand his family, his background.
He wasn't just born into a religious family.
He was, for all intents and purposes, born into
a dynasty. A dynasty. Were they royalty? A religious
dynasty. He was the descendant of a very, very
long and unbroken line of rabbis. Oh, wow. Eight
generations. His father was a rabbi. His grandfather
was a rabbi. His great -grandfather. You get
the picture. The expectation for Emil was crystal
clear. He was going to be a rabbi. He was going
to be a rabbi. He even started his education
in a rabbinical school. That is a lot of pressure.
I mean, talk about social facts just weighing
on you from the moment you're born. Here's the
family business that's been running for 200 years,
son. Don't mess it up. It's the perfect example.
But then at a pretty early age, he'd just be.
He made a radical break. He switched schools.
He decided he was going to lead a thoroughly
secular life. He didn't just step away from the
family business. He stepped away from that entire
religious worldview. He wanted to understand
morality and society, but not through divine
law. Through science. Through science. That's
a huge move in the 1800s. Was his family okay
with that? I'm picturing a very tough conversation
at the dinner table. Dad, I'm not going to be
a rabbi. I'm going to be a sociologist, which
wasn't even a thing. Well, what's interesting
is the sources suggest he didn't actually cut
ties. He stayed close to his family and to the
broader Jewish community. A lot of his key collaborators
later on were Jewish, including his nephew Marcel
Mauss, who became a really famous anthropologist
himself. Okay, so it was an intellectual break,
not a personal one. Exactly. Intellectually,
he was on a totally different path. And he was
a brilliant student. He gets into the Ecole Normale
Supérieure, the ENS. And that's like the French
equivalent of, what, Harvard or Oxford? I'd say
it's even more exclusive. It was the intellectual
pressure cooker of the entire French Republic.
And the class he entered in 1879, it's legendary
now. Who was in it? Well, his classmates included
people like Jean Jaurès, who went on to become
this massive figure in French socialism, and
Henri Bergson, the hugely famous philosopher.
So he's in this room with all these geniuses.
He's rejected the family path. What does he actually
want to do? He wants to study society. Scientifically.
But there was a really big problem. There's no
department for that. The French academic system
at the time didn't have a sociology department.
It just didn't exist. You had philosophy, you
had history, literature. And Durkheim, he found
those humanistic studies, frankly, a little uninteresting.
He wanted to apply the scientific method observation,
data, rigorous analysis to ethics and human behavior.
So he didn't just choose a field to go into.
He had to basically build the whole building
he wanted to work in. That's a perfect way to
put it. Some scholars talk about Durkheim's imperialism
of sociology. He's aggressive. He wanted to carve
out a very specific territory for this new science.
And he did it. He eventually set up the first
European Department of Sociology at the University
of Bordeaux in 1895. And he wrote a kind of instruction
manual for it. He did. He wrote a manifesto to
lay out the rules, titled, fittingly, The Rules
of Sociological Method. Okay, and this is where
we get to that key concept you mentioned at the
top, social facts. Because if you're going to
make something a science, you need something
to study. Right. Biologists have cells. Physicists
have atoms. What does a sociologist have? They
have social facts. And Durkheim's definition
was very precise. A social fact is a way of acting,
thinking, or feeling that is, one, external to
the individual. Okay, outside of me. And two,
endowed with the power of coercion. External
and coercive. Okay, let's unpack that. External
means it's not just a feeling I have in my own
head. Correct. Durkheim insisted, and this was
a big deal, that we have to treat social facts
as things. Things. Like, a table or a chair is
a thing. How can a social norm be a thing? That
seems like a stretch. I know, it sounds weird.
But he made a distinction between material social
facts and immaterial ones. The material ones
are easy to get. Laws written down in a book,
the architecture of a city, the way a courtroom
is laid out. You can see them, you can touch
them. Okay, that makes sense. But the immaterial
facts are the tricky ones. Things like morality
or a sense of national pride or what he called
the collective consciousness. So how can a feeling
be a thing? Give me a concrete example. Okay,
the classic word he uses is a flag. Let's think
about a flag. Physically, what is it? A piece
of cloth with some dye on it. On a stick. Exactly.
A material object. You can go to a craft store
and buy the components for, I don't know, a few
bucks. But that object is ingrained with this
immense immaterial meaning, right? Yeah, of course.
It commands respect. If you see your country's
flag, you might feel a surge of pride. If you
see someone setting it on fire, you probably
feel a surge of anger. In the military, you are
required to salute it. The physical flag is a
thing. But the social fact is the power that
it holds over your behavior and your feelings.
And if I decide, hey, you know what? I don't
care about this piece of clock. I use it to wipe
down my car. And you run right into the coercive
part of the definition. You will feel the pushback.
People will yell at you. You might get ostracized
from your community. In some countries, you could
actually be arrested. You didn't invent the rule
that flags are sacred. It existed long before
you were born. That's the external part. And
if you violate that rule, you get punished. That's
the coercive part. For Durkheim, that is the
proof that it's a real objective thing. That
actually makes perfect sense. It's like... You
don't realize gravity is there until you try
to jump off a roof. You don't realize a social
fact is there until you try to break a social
rule. That is the perfect analogy. And for Durkheim,
this was the key. This was what would make sociology
a real science. If these facts are real and observable,
then we can study them, we can measure their
effects, and maybe we can even figure out the
laws that govern them, just like in physics or
biology. So he's got his new science, he's got
his object of study, now he needs to use it to
answer his big question, the one we started with,
the glue. What holds us together? And that takes
us directly to his doctoral dissertation, a huge
book called The Division of Labor and Society,
which he published in 1893. He was looking at
this massive shift that was happening all over
Europe. People were leaving small rural villages
and flooding into huge anonymous industrial cities.
Right. The shift from a world where everyone
knows your name to a world where you're just
another face in the crowd. And Durkheim's argument
was that this wasn't just a change of scenery.
It was a fundamental change in the very nature
of. social solidarity. He identified two basic
types of this glue. He called them mechanical
and organic solidarity. Mechanical and organic.
Let's start with the old way first. Mechanical.
So think of a small traditional village a few
hundred years ago. Durkheim calls this solidarity
mechanical because it works like a simple machine.
It's based entirely on similarity. Everyone is
basically a cog and all the hogs look the same
and do the same thing. You all probably work
in agriculture. You all share the exact same
religious beliefs, the same moral code. You raise
your kids the same way. So the glue holding us
together is the fact that we're all basically
the same person. Our experiences are almost identical.
Essentially, yes. In these kinds of societies,
what he called the collective consciousness,
which is just the sum total of beliefs and sentiments
common to the group, is incredibly strong. It's
intense. It covers almost every aspect of life.
There's very, very little room for individuality.
And what happens if you break a rule in a society
like that? Well, the law is overwhelmingly punitive.
because everyone shares this powerful moral code
an offense against one person or against one
rule is seen as an attack on the entire community
the collective feels violated so the punishment
is usually public it's harsh and its main goal
is to satisfy that collective anger think of
a public hanging Or putting someone in the stocks
in the town square. It's all about repressing
the deviant to reassure the group that the moral
order is still intact. Okay, so that's the village.
Mechanical solidarity. But then we all move to
the city, the factories open up, we get all these
specialized jobs. This is where organic solidarity
comes in. Yes. And here Durkheim switches his
analogy. He starts using a biological analogy.
Think of a complex living body, like a human
being. Your heart does a very different job from
your lungs. Your liver does something totally
different from your brain. They are not similar
at all. No, definitely not. I do not want my
lungs trying to pump my blood. That would be
a mess. It would be a total disaster. But they
are desperately fundamentally dependent on each
other. The heart cannot function without the
oxygen from the lungs. The lungs are useless
without the blood being pumped by the heart.
Okay, I see where he's going. Durkheim argued
that modern, complex society is held together
by this very principle, difference and interdependence.
I'm a podcaster, you're a sociologist, someone
else is a doctor, someone else is a plumber.
We don't really know how to do each other's jobs,
so we need each other to survive. So the glue
shifts. It's not we're all the same. It becomes
I literally cannot get through the week without
you. My car breaks. I need a mechanic. I get
sick. I need a doctor. Exactly. The division
of labor, the specialization of all these different
roles is what creates this new powerful type
of solidarity. And he said it's caused by what
he called dynamic density. Dynamic density. It's
just a fancy term for more people leading to
more interactions, which leads to more competition.
In order to survive in that more competitive
environment, we have to specialize. We have to
find our niche. And how does the law change in
this kind of society? We're not doing as many
public hangings in modern cities. The law becomes
primarily restitutive. Meaning? Its goal is to
restore order, to put things back the way they
were. If you crash your car into mine, we don't
gather the whole neighborhood to publicly shame
you. The court just says you have to pay to fix
my car. We try to repair the damage so that the
complex social machine can keep running smoothly.
The focus shifts from punishing a sin to fixing
a problem. But wait a minute. If we're all becoming
so specialized, so different. Doesn't that make
us more isolated? More individualistic? We talk
about the problem of individualism all the time
today. And that is the amazing paradox that Durkheim
identified. He saw that as society becomes more
complex and organic, the individual actually
becomes sacred. But, and this is the classic
Durkheim twist, he didn't see individualism as
the enemy of society. He didn't? No. He believed
that modern individualism is a product of modern
society. Wait. Society created the individual.
That seems backwards. It does, but think about
it. He has this amazing quote where he says,
society instituted it and made of man the god
whose servant it is. We have a cult of the individual.
We worship individual rights, individual expression,
individual achievement. But why? Because modern
organic society requires us to be distinct individuals
in order to function. The cult of the individual
is itself a social fact. That is a head -scratcher.
We are individualistic because the collective
forces us to be. It connects right back to that
external coercive pressure. You feel pressure
from society to be yourself, to find your unique
passion, to stand out from the crowd. That pressure
doesn't come from inside you. It comes from the
collective. Wow. Okay. So we have this organic
society, this body with all its different organs
working together, but bodies get sick. organisms
get diseases. They absolutely do. And Durkheim
was very much thinking like a doctor for society.
He was what we call a functionalist. He believed
every part of society, every institution serves
a function to keep the whole organism healthy.
But sometimes it develops pathologies. It gets
sick. And the number one diagnosis he came up
with is a word that I think is so incredibly
useful for understanding the world today. That
word is enemy. Enemy. Yes. It's often translated
from the French as normlessness. Normlessness.
So like no rules. The purge. Total chaos. Not
necessarily no rules at all. It's more like a
breakdown of the norms that give us guidance
and meaning. Durkheim argued that NME happens
when social change occurs too quickly. Think
of a sudden chaotic economic boom or a devastating
depression or a massive wave of migration. So
the connections between people, the shared understanding
of the world, it all just kind of breaks? Yes.
The old rules don't apply anymore, but new ones
haven't formed yet. Groups lose contact, the
shared understanding of what is expected of me
or what can I reasonably hope to achieve. It
all dissolves. He has this really haunting quote.
He says that without regulated relationships
and common objectives, society is nothing more
than a pile of sand waiting to be scattered by
the wind. A pile of sand. That's such a lonely,
bleak image. Billions of individual grains just
touching each other, but with no real connection.
That is the feeling of anime. It's the feeling
of being morally adrift. You don't know your
place in the world. You don't know what's enough.
Durkheim believed that human desires are naturally
infinite. It's society's job to regulate them,
to give us a sense of limits. When those regulations
disappear, our desires become a source of torment
because they can never be satisfied. He also
mentioned another pathology, right? The forced
division of labor. What did he mean by that?
That's his term for when the system of specialization
goes wrong. It's when an unfair system based
on power or inherited wealth forces people into
jobs and roles that they aren't naturally suited
for. If you have a society where your future
is determined by the class you were born into
rather than your actual talents and abilities,
that creates deep -seated tension and unhappiness.
It's like forcing a heart cell to try and function
like a kidney cell. It just makes the whole organism
sick and unstable. Here's something in the notes
that really made me do a double take. We're talking
about the sicknesses of society. But Durkheim
actually argued that crime is not a sickness.
He said crime is normal, functional even. That
just sounds wrong. I mean, how can murder or
theft possibly be good for society? It's one
of his most provocative arguments, isn't it?
But if you follow his logic, it starts to make
a strange kind of sense. He argued that crime
is, and this is a quote, bound up with the fundamental
conditions of all social life. In other words,
you simply cannot have a society without deviance.
It's impossible. But why? What possible good
does a criminal do for the rest of us? He says
crime serves at least three crucial functions.
First, deviance challenges the status quo and,
in doing so, opens the door for social change.
He uses the example of Socrates. Socrates, the
great philosopher. To the authorities in ancient
Athens, Socrates was a criminal. He was officially
charged with corrupting the youth and not respecting
the city's gods, and they executed him for it.
But his crime, his radical independence of thought,
was what paved the way for a whole new morality,
a new philosophy. Without the criminal, who dares
to be different, society stagnates and dies.
Okay, I can see that. It's the troublemaker,
the heretic, who ends up inventing the future.
What's the second function? Crime reaffirms our
collective norms and values. This goes back to
that idea of punitive justice. When a crime is
committed and the community comes together to
punish the criminal, it draws a bright, clear
line in the sand. It brings all the law -abiding
people closer together and reminds everyone,
this is the boundary. We are the people who stay
on the side of it. It's like when everyone in
an office bonds because they're all complaining
about the one guy who keeps stealing lunches
from the fridge. That is a perfect modern example.
It creates camaraderie. And that's really the
third function. The collective reaction to deviance
increases social cohesion among the so -called
good people. It reinforces our sense of being
a we because we are united against them, the
rule breakers. He had this amazing thought experiment
to prove this point. The Society of Saints. Can
you walk us through that? Because I just love
this image. It's brilliant. So he says, imagine
a monastery. a cloister populated by perfect
morally exemplary individuals saints in this
community there's no murder no theft no violence
you would think okay in this society there is
no crime right Yeah, that would be the definition
of a society of saints. Durkheim says no. He
says that in that society, faults that seem completely
trivial to us, like, say, being a little too
sharp in conversation or showing up five seconds
late to prayer or maybe letting out an inappropriate
chuckle, those tiny faults would create the exact
same scandal and outrage that a serious felony
creates in our society. So they would just lower
the bar for what they consider to be a crime.
Precisely. They would magnify those tiny imperfections
to the level of major crimes because society
needs that process of judgment and boundary setting
to exist. Society needs to define something,
anything, as bad so that it can collectively
define itself as good. That's kind of a dark
thought. We will always find a witch to hunt
because we need the hunt itself to feel like
a community. That is the dark implication, yes.
Okay, so we've looked at the big picture of society.
Now we are going to zoom in. Way, way in. We're
going to talk about Durkheim's most famous, most
controversial, and probably his most intense
work. The book is simply titled Suicide. And
this book, which came out in 1897, was a methodological
masterpiece. You have to remember, at the time,
suicide was seen as either a purely personal
tragedy. a result of individual psychology or
mental illness. Or sometimes people blame things
like the weather. Yeah, there were theories that
rainy climates caused higher suicide rates. It
was seen as an individual or natural act. And
Durkheim's goal was to prove that even this.
This most lonely, private, individual decision
a person can make is actually determined by social
facts. Yes, this was his ultimate test case.
If he could show that suicide rates were governed
by social forces, he would prove the power of
his new science of sociology once and for all.
And his method was to use quantitative data statistics.
He compared official suicide rates across different
countries, different religions, different social
groups. He was doing data science before it was
cool. And what did the data start to show him?
He found these incredibly clear, persistent patterns.
For instance, across Europe, Protestants consistently
had significantly higher suicide rates than Catholics.
Okay, why? Was there something about the theology,
like the view on salvation? He argued it wasn't
about the specific beliefs so much as the social
structure of the community. He created this brilliant
model. He plotted suicide rates along two key
social axes, integration and regulation. Integration
and regulation. Integration is about how attached
you feel to a group. the strength of your social
bonds regulation is about the extent to which
your life is controlled by norms and rules and
based on these two axes he identified four distinct
types of suicide let's go through them because
this framework it just explains so much about
the human condition let's start with type one
egoistic suicide. Okay. So egoistic suicide happens
when integration is too low. Too few social bonds.
Exactly. The individual feels detached from society.
They feel like they don't matter to the group
and the group doesn't matter to them. This is
what he believed was happening in the Protestant
communities. Because Protestantism, with its
focus on free inquiry, is more individualistic.
Yes. The whole idea is it's just you and the
Bible. You interpret the sacred text for yourself.
Catholicism by contract is much more communal.
You have rituals, confession, a priest, a rigid
hierarchy. All of these things bind you more
tightly into the group. For Durkheim, that lower
level of integration among Protestants left individuals
more vulnerable when they face personal hardship.
It's the suicide of excessive individualism.
The thought process is something like I am alone
and my life makes no difference to anyone. Okay,
so that's too little integration. What's on the
other end of the spectrum? What happens when
there's too much integration? That leads to the
second type, altruistic suicide. This is where
the group completely dominates the individual.
The person's own life is seen as meaningless
compared to the needs of the whole. Like a soldier
jumping on a grenade to save his platoon. That's
the classic example. or suicide bombers, or members
of a doomsday cult who commit mass suicide. They
don't do it out of sadness or loneliness. They
do it because they believe it is their sacred
duty to the group. The I has been completely
erased by the we. They are so integrated that
they cease to exist as separate individuals.
Got it. Okay, so that's the integration axis
from egoistic to altruistic. Now let's look at
the regulation axis, the rules. What happens
when regulation is too low? This is anomic suicide,
and this is the one that really surprises people.
This type of suicide occurs during times of massive
social and economic disruption. Now, we'd expect
it to happen during a depression, right? People
lose their jobs, their homes, they fall into
despair. Sure, that makes intuitive sense. But
Durkheim's data showed that suicide rates also
spiked during periods of sudden economic booms.
Wait, when people are getting rich, getting everything
they ever wanted, why would that lead to suicide?
Because the regulations have disappeared. The
old rules have changed. In a stable society,
you have a pretty good sense of what you can
reasonably hope for. I'm a baker, so I can hope
to one day own a slightly bigger shop. But if
the economy goes crazy and suddenly anything
seems possible, your desires become limitless.
You no longer know what is enough. You achieve
one goal and immediately a hundred new ones appear.
That normlessness, that enemy, leads to a very
specific kind of despair. The despair that comes
from infinite... unsatisfiable ambition. That
is profound. It's like the lottery winner's curse.
When anything is possible, nothing is ever satisfying.
Precisely. You're constantly chasing a horizon
that keeps moving away from you. And the final
type. The other end of the spectrum. Too much
regulation. That he called fatalistic suicide.
This is the suicide of the person whose future
is pitilessly blocked, whose passions are violently
choked by oppressive discipline. There is no
hope of ever changing your situation. The examples
he gives are people who are enslaved or prisoners
serving a life sentence. Their lives are so overregulated
that they see no way out but death. So egoistic,
altruistic. Anomic and fatalistic. It's like
a map of all the ways society can crush us, either
by holding on too tight or by letting go completely.
It really is. Now, it's important to mention
that modern scholars have some very valid critiques
of this particular study. I was going to ask,
has this held up? Well, there's a big methodological
issue called the ecological fallacy. It's the
mistake of using data from a large group to draw
conclusions about individuals within that group.
So just because Protestant regions had higher
suicide rates doesn't definitively prove that
it was the individual Protestants who were committing
suicide. It could have been, say, Catholics living
as a small minority in a Protestant area who
felt isolated and alone. Ah, I see that. And
I also read somewhere that the data itself might
have been been unreliable because Catholic communities
where suicide was seen as a mortal sin might
have been more likely to cover it up, to list
the cause of death as something else. That's
another huge and very valid point. Suicide reporting
was notoriously messy in the 19th century. But
even with all those data issues, the theoretical
framework, this idea that human beings need a
healthy balance of integration and regulation
to thrive, that remains an incredibly powerful
and influential idea for understanding mental
health even today. Absolutely. Okay, let's move
on to his final major work. He's tackled the
division of labor. He's tackled suicide. Now
he decides to take on God. the elementary forms
of religious life. Or, more accurately, he decides
to take on the social origin of God. This book,
published in 1912, was his last great masterpiece.
He wanted to find the common denominator of all
religion, the most basic essential form. So he
decided to study what he considered to be the
simplest, most primitive societies, specifically
Australian Aboriginal tribes and their practice
of totemism. And he had a very particular way
of defining religion. It wasn't about a belief
in a supernatural being, was it? No, because
he pointed out that many major religions, like
Buddhism, don't really have a god in the Western
sense. So his definition was different. He said
all religion is based on a fundamental division
of the world into two domains. The sacred and
the profane. The sacred and the profane. The
special and the everyday. Exactly. The profane
is just ordinary, mundane, life -working, eating,
sleeping. The sacred are those things that are
set apart, that are forbidden, that are surrounded
by rituals and inspire awe. So for him, a religion
is a unified system of beliefs and practices
related to sacred things, which unite all their
followers into a single moral community, which
he called a church. Okay, so here we go. The
big reveal. The huge plot twist of Durkheim's
entire career. When these aboriginal tribes are
gathered together worshipping their totem, which
is usually an animal or a plant that represents
their clan, what are they actually worshipping?
Durkheim's conclusion is stunning. He says the
totem is the flag of the clan. When they are
worshipping the totem, they are, in fact, unknowingly
worshipping the selective power of the clan itself.
God is society. That is the big reveal. God is
society. Personified. Think about it. What are
the attributes of God? It's a force that is greater
than you, that existed before you were born,
that will exist long after you die, that gives
you your moral rules and that has the power to
punish you or to lift you up. To Durkheim, that
is a perfect description of society. So we basically
invented God as a symbol, as a way to visualize
the power of our own group. That's the argument.
And he has this amazing concept to explain how
this happens, how this feeling is generated.
He calls it collective effervescence. I love
that phrase, collective effervescence. It sounds
like a fancy soda. It's much more intoxicating
than that. He says, imagine the clan is scattered
across the landscape for most of the year, hunting
and gathering. Life is dull. It's hard. It's
profane. But then they all come together for
a big ceremony, a ritual. They dance all night.
They sing. They chant. They paint their bodies.
The energy in the group builds and builds. It
becomes electric. in that moment you feel carried
away you feel stronger more powerful more alive
than your ordinary self it's like being in the
middle of a mosh pit at a concert or in a stadium
when your team scores the winning goal yes it's
that exact feeling you feel a power moving through
you that does not feel like it's coming from
you And since these early humans didn't have
a concept of social psychology, they attributed
that powerful external energy to their sacred
object, the totem. They thought the spirit of
the totem is here. It's moving through us. But
for Durkheim, that spirit was just the supercharged
energy of the group itself. So all religious
ritual is basically society getting together
to worship itself just to recharge its batteries
and keep the social bond strong. That was his
radical argument. And he took it even one step
further into what he called the sociology of
knowledge. He argued that even our most basic
categories of thought, our concepts of time,
space, causality, are social constructs. They
are collective representations. Wait, hold on.
Time is a social construct. I mean, the sun rises
and the sun sets. That's not social. But the
concept of time, of a week, a month, a year,
an hour, where does that come from? He argues
it comes from the rhythm of social life. We have
a calendar because we need to coordinate when
the next festival or ritual is. We understand
the concept of space because of the way the clan
arranges its camp into sacred and profane areas.
Even language itself is the ultimate collective
representation. You didn't invent the words you're
speaking right now. They contain the accumulated
wisdom and categories of your society. for thousands
of years. So we are literally thinking through
the filter that society provides for us. There's
no escaping it. We cannot escape it. We are social
animals down to the very bedrock of our minds.
This is all so brilliant, but we have to talk
about how it all ends for him. Because Durkheim's
life, it didn't end with a quiet, comfortable
retirement surrounded by his books. No, it ended
in absolute tragedy. World War I breaks out in
1914. Now, Durkheim was a French patriot. He
deeply believed in the French Republic in a secular,
rational state. But he was also a prominent intellectual,
a Jew, and he had a German -sounding name. Not
a good combination in the middle of a nationalist
war frenzy against Germany. No. The ascendant
political right in France attacked him viciously.
They smeared his new science of sociology as
a German invention. They attacked his Jewish
background. He was trying to contribute to the
war effort, writing patriotic pamphlets, but
he was being attacked from all sides. And then
the truly personal blow came. His son, André,
Berkheim had poured all his hopes into him. André
was a brilliant linguist, a rising academic star.
He was sent to the Balkan front in late 1915.
he was reported missing and then he was confirmed
dead. And Durkheim just fell apart. He was completely
devastated. By all accounts, he was never the
same. He withdrew from his work. He stopped writing
anything major. Friends said he never recovered
from the grief. He had a stroke in late 1917
and died at the age of just 59. That's just tragic.
The man who spent his entire life studying how
society holds individuals together and keeps
them safe was ultimately crushed by a massive
failure of society. The war and the loss it caused
him personally. It's a deeply somber ending.
But his legacy, of course, is immense. The whole
school of thought called structural functionalism,
which dominated American sociology for decades
with figures like Talcott Parsons and Robert
Merton, that comes directly from Durkheim. His
ideas about rituals were still hugely influential
today. And there's still some academic beef about
him today, right? Something about the philosopher
John Searle. Oh, yes. The Durkheim -Contra Searle
debate. So John Searle is a very famous philosopher
who wrote a book in the 1990s called The Construction
of Social Reality. In it, he talks about concepts
like institutional facts and collective intentionality.
Which sounds an awful lot like social facts and
the collective consciousness. It sounds exactly
like it. especially the sociologist Neil Gross,
pointed out that Searle had basically just reconstituted
Durkheim's entire theory from scratch without
giving him proper credit. Searle later admitted
he hadn't really read Durkheim because he thought
his work was impoverished. It became a bit of
an academic scandal, but it just goes to show
that Durkheim's ideas are so powerful that people
keep reinventing them, even by accident. So let's
bring this all home. After this deep dive, what's
the big takeaway for us, for the listener sitting
here right now? I think Durkheim forces us to
look in the mirror and realize that we are not
islands. We in the modern West, we love to think
of ourselves as these autonomous free agents
making our own rational choices. But Durkheim's
work shows us page after page that we are profoundly
shaped by these invisible forces, these social
facts that we ourselves created, often unconsciously,
but which now hold power over us. It's really
humbling. And it explains that feeling we talked
about right at the very beginning, that invisible
pressure you feel when you walk into a room.
That's it. That's the weight of the collective.
And in our world today, this digital world where
all the traditional tribes, religion, nation,
local community are dissolving and we're forming
these new, strange and often very angry digital
tribes. Well, Durkheim's questions about integration
and regulation are more urgent than ever. We
are seeing enemy all around us. We are seeing
altruistic suicide and radicalized online groups.
Durkheim didn't just diagnose the problems of
his time. He gave us the diagnostic manual for
hours. He really did. And here's the thought
I want to leave everyone with. Durkheim believed
that traditional religion was fading, that it
would be replaced by science and what he called
the cult of the individual. But he also insisted
that society needs the sacred. It needs moments
of collective effervescence to survive, to recharge
its moral batteries. Yes. We can't live on the
profane, the mundane alone. So the question for
all of us is, if we're not going to church or
the synagogue or the temple as much anymore,
and if the old town square is gone, where are
we getting our fix? Where are we finding our
collective effervescence today? Is it at a Taylor
Swift concert? Is it at a political rally? Is
it in a chaotic, all -consuming Twitter mob?
Or... Are we actually starving for it? And is
that why so often we feel like a pile of sand?
That is the question Durkheim leaves us with.
Something to think about the next time you feel
that invisible pressure. Thank you for diving
in with us. It was a pleasure.