Belonging and the four ingredients of community — from Emile Durkheim’s study of suicide.

Summary:

What is the optimal function of society? Emile Durkheim provided a glimpse in his famous work on suicide in which he disclosed two primary factors of social dysfunction — individualism and autonomy. The remedy to this social problem is best understood with a technical definition of community.

Overview:

Sociological perspectives on social dysfunction.
Normal function of society versus individualism and autonomy.
Durkheim’s discourse on suicide within capitalism and industrialism — modernism was achieved at the expense of collective belonging.
The technical definition of community and its four necessary ingredients as a solution to modernism’s dis-ease.

Introduction

How do you determine if a social reality is positive or negative? Is it all relative — only being good or bad if it happens to agree with your preference at the moment? Or is there a means to objectively critique various societal effects?

It depends on who you ask.

Without getting into social ethics and the various philosophies of moral determination, there was a sociologist named Emile Durkheim who offered not only a concrete take on the subject but a practical explanation with a real-life example.

Emile Durkheim is often regarded as one of the founders of sociology and his most astounding contribution might just be the research he did on the sociology of suicide. For Durkheim, suicide was not just a psychological phenomenon, but an effect of social realities. Because humans exist socially and are developed in response to their social reality, suicide could be connected to a social cause, not just an individual one.

Suicide, therefore, became Durkheim’s primary example of social dysfunction and his results may help us take note of social dysfunction today and help us determine how we might deem certain social realities as negative.

For us, we have to consider if our current society has any social dysfunction. If it does, is there a remedy? Further, is this remedy even possible within the gratification of modernism’s glamor?

Part One — Social Dysfunction

Durkheim explained social dysfunction as anything that impedes normal function. This is because he approached society as an organism. Dysfunction, then, was a disease.

It is worth noting that the indicator of “normal function” is a bit subjective. Who determines what is normal? Who gets to say that what is normal is good? What if our perspective or normal is just what’s been conditioned — what we are used to — and what if that is actually detrimental? These are all great questions that are worth asking. This is also an endeavor in social ethics which is not what Durkheim was overtly concerned about.

Durkheim’s definition is not primarily about morality. For example, Durkheim said that crime wasn’t a social dysfunction unless it became excessive. It doesn’t imply crime is good, it’s just that social dysfunction is seen through a different lens than morality.

What, then, is the normal function of society according to Emile Durkheim?

A collective that belongs together for mutual survival while becoming and developing toward a collective ideal.

Anything that counters or negates that is dysfunction. Anything that strengths the collective belonging for mutual survival captures the normal function of society.

Durkheim said that crime could potentially strengthen collective consciousness by revealing the undeveloped parts of current reality and catalyzing people to stop unideal behavior. I don’t expect you to agree with that, however, the point is that the real issues — the social dysfunctions — are limited to impeding the normal functions of belonging and becoming as a collective.

And, yes, you could certainly use Durkheim’s logic to argue that crime is a dysfunction.

What, however, are the social dysfunctions Durkheim pointed out?

And what does it have to do with suicide in 19th and 20th century Europe?

And how could his point be well-suited for our analyzing our society today?

Part Two — The Effects of Industrial Capitalism

Durkheim noticed an interesting correlation — everywhere in Europe that had experienced an economic shift toward capitalist industrialism, suicide exponentially increased.

He wanted to find out why.

Because the answer, in his mind, would reveal a foundational truth about society and human nature.

What were the dysfunctions catalyzed by capitalism and industrialism in modern Europe? The problems came down to two causes:

Individualism.
Autonomy.

Traditionally, pre-modern societies created very intimate belonging as a collective by being in constant proximity with a sense of shared history and future permanence. In fact, many pre-modern communities were based on collectivism (something commonly reserved to describe Eastern societies) where one person was simply viewed as a part of the whole. You didn’t pursue self-preservation at the expense of the group nor did you seek to view the world primarily through your perspective (preferring ethnocentrism to egocentrism). Your identity was entangled with the collective’s and such lack of individualism and lack of autonomy came with an increase of intimacy, connection, loyalty, affection, corporate responsibility, and shared knowledge.

What changed? Modernism presented an opportunity to transcend the collective.

Marshall McLuhan, in discussing his work Media Ecology, points out how this is comparable to change in cultural forms of media and technology — literature, for example, allowed a person to access the world outside of their immediate group in the present moment of one location. For the first time, you could correspond with multiple periods of history and multiple places of existence.

And you could do it alone.

No longer was your knowledge of the world dependent on your tribe; nor was your survival. The market and machines could offer more than your tribe or family ever could.

A person was their own individual with their own apparent power and autonomy.

While shortening a sociological phenomenon into a couple of brief sentences is neither fair nor conclusive, we must forego a full treatment of anthropological history from the classical era to the modern (one that spans over a millennium and, at least, three continents) to see what Durkheim thought this created.

First, industrialism and capitalism liberated individuals from their constraints.

Social conventions, norms, and interdependent community in proximity were no longer necessary. The caveats of collectivism — relational connection, shared responsibility for survival, and essentially being stuck with a small group of people — could be ignored. Yet, it also meant the loss of a social network and intimate connections that often created an identity outside of oneself. Loyalty and affection were burdens to be liberated from. Yet, autonomy gives us exactly what we ask for — to be alone. We become anonymous. We are not bound to anyone but ourselves.

The difference between collectivism and individualism is not meant to be a comparison of which is better. Rather, these two modes of society are a package deal. With certain ways of being and certain economic and social perspectives comes a certain experience of life in the world. Certain parts of that experience may be preferred or dispreferred, but neither is necessarily right or wrong and both have their advantages and their difficulties. One must simply decide which package deal is worth it.

However, another interesting phenomenon was visibly affecting this new world of the modern West.

Second, industrialism and capitalism removed all limitations.

Possibilities became infinite as the world advertised success and wealth to stoke a limitless ambition. One of the interesting side-effects is that a sort of paradisical perfection appeared to be in reach; but what happens if you fail to reach it?

Under different economic settings, the constraints and limits were quite real, but failing to achieve a particular standing was also not your fault. Whether under the dire economics of feudalism or whether constrained by the limitations of your primitive tribe, your life was dedicated by a world you did not choose.

Now, you not only were prone to be envious of others’ success and dissatisfied with your own life that constantly fell short of the world you were told is possible, but also failing to achieve that could be no one’s fault but your own. The potential reward is certainly higher — the possibilities are, in fact, infinite — but with it also comes the risk of failure and the reality that the blame and judgment will fall on you. Capitalism and industrialism portrayed an unreal life as your expectation which simply brought about unrealistic attempts to reinvent life to an apparent achievable perfection that was, quite contrarily, unachievable.

The result of individualism and social autonomy in the pursuit of unprecedented access to extravagance was that society could pursue limitless wealth, success, and meaning. It also inherently removed the necessary ingredients for the meaning human beings, according to Durkheim, required:

Belonging.

Part Three — Society’s Normal Function of Belonging

Durkheim’s conclusion was that loneliness and failure were the sociological outcomes of this new modern era. Individualism and the pure freedom of isolated, disconnected autonomy became signifiers of the disease of social dysfunction.

The perspective was that societal decline resulted from the unhappiness and despair in modern society that resulted from the increased luxury and wealth, but also because of dissonance created by hopeful expectation versus disconnected reality.

You no longer had to be limited by their tribe and the rudimentary experience of life associated with such constraints.

Yet, you were also walking alone in a world that seemed constantly out of reach.

Society, for Durkheim, had made a deal in modernism — they chose economic, technological, and cultural progress which produced ease, convenience, comfort, material access, and the potential for freedom from constraints alongside of unlimited possibilities in exchange for the apparent burden of collective belonging.

Maybe such opportunities could still be utilized without all of the detrimental side effects. Maybe modernism isn’t inherently wrong or negative but was just used poorly. The objective problem, however, was that such individualism and autonomy happened at the expense of what Durkheim considered as a core necessity: Collective belonging.

The normal function of society was lost.

The symptom of this disease was, quite simply, an exponential rise in suicide.

If such a culture still exists, what, then, is the remedy?

Part Four — The Four Ingredients to Community

What is interesting about Durkheim’s articulation of modernism is that it is not too far removed from our current sociological climate. In fact, the current social reality might just be a case study in which Durkheim’s critiques continued unhindered for another century and kept gaining a head of steam.

With the onset of the diseases of wealthy and industrialized societies that now range from obesity and suicide to cardiovascular disease and exponentially rising rates of cancer — not to mention the rampant mental health decline that Durkheim’s age seems to have just been the start of — the stage is set for Durkheim’s processes to again wonder if the social dysfunction of individualism and autonomy at the hands of economic, technological, and cultural progress is still awaiting mitigation. While the sociological scope in no way presumes causation of these statements, the correlation is notable, just as it was when Durkheim wrote on suicide.

The remedy ought to, again, be considered in our current social moment — what ought to occur to revive normal social function?

In a word — albeit an overly used, abstractly considered indication of trendy hipsterdom — the antidote is community.

The necessary discourse, however, is a specific enactment of community that necessitates the belonging and collective development that marks, for Durkheim, a normal social function attuned to the needs of humans as social creatures.

If it is true that modern progress has been at the expense of that which offers belonging — namely loyalty, cooperation, togetherness, neighborliness, being known, having voice, and other descriptors that imply relational connection and dependency— then recovering these experiences is essential in solving the problems of the deal we made in order to be affluent, mobile, transient, comfortable, globalized, autonomous, and independent.

We no longer must subsist through labor nor put up with those pestering, complicated issues called relationships. We’re no longer confined to the same group of people and the same geographic and chronological place in society. But the notable challenge would be that we may have lost more health than we’ve created. Essentially, in foregoing the arrangement of actual community — including its messy parts and annoying regularities — we’ve lost that which offers belonging.

Actual community, then, is that which requires us to forego some of the emphases of modernism and individualism. Remember, it’s a package deal.

This also implies that, first, actual community has very little to do with the romanticized notion put forth by those, “Just looking for community.” Secondly, this is a way of being that we are not in a great position to prefer. Removing the economic and structural advantages paired with capitalism and progress are, in my opinion, way too engrained to be removed. Our society isn’t even willing to switch to the metric system because of the massive overhaul it would cause. What makes us think we would trade in an economic and social reality just for the sake of community — which is not all that wonderful in the first place.

Alas, the technical definition of community may be necessary to consider, even if we’re not likely to choose it or embody it. Quite literally, as opposed to the catchphrase usage of popular culture, community requires four basic ingredients:

Shared History — consistently developing experience over time.
Proximity — the actual, physical presence of people.
Permanence — a committed rootedness and promised connection for the indefinite continuation of the group’s identity.
Shared Vision — or shared imagination; a common direction or vision that gives a bond, purpose, and identity to the group.

This is how social beings belong to one another.

When you live amongst the constraints of what we may call a pre-modern society, these are a given. You are born amongst a group of people with whom you will share almost every single moment with. You will watch them grow old and die. New generations will come and share in your survival and love, your grief and pain. You have little choice but to endure together, working for a potential thriving, sustenance, and proliferation of life that is dependent on these other beings and will require much of all of you, together.

Community transcends the individual, even a single generation; it functions according to memory, heritage, longevity, physical presence, and responsibility — all of which is unnecessary in a transient world of abstract wealth and technological ease. But anything less will not only leave us wanting — it will leave us in a world where we are physically and existentially alone.

Our ancestors were unfortunate in thousands of ways, but they also might have had the one thing we desperately need:

To belong.

But it is a package deal. Primitive societies were marked by a lack of excess, a lack of innovation, and a lack of surplus — and not because they were mentally deficient but because those modes of being countered the priority of community.

I simply do not think we would be willing to forego the advantages of modern access and excess for what Durkheim recommends. Maybe we’re too far gone. Maybe it’s too late. Maybe this mode of society actually is better.

However, what we can attempt is to find ways to incorporate those four ingredients into a modern world quite literally designed to avoid them. Can we have modern benefits as well as Durkheim’s normal social functions?

I don’t know.

But we may want to try.