myths and counter-myths

A while back I wrote a brief essay on the relevance of Emile Durkheim’s sociology to an understanding of our present social tensions. For the last year or two I’ve been reading a lot of sociology and anthropology from the first half of the 20th century, because, on the one hand, the social sciences had not at that time fallen under the sway of a compulsion to quantify: they were willing to think analytically about culture without needing calculations and charts. On the other hand, they also differentiated themselves from earlier humanistic thought in some interesting and useful ways.

One of the key such differentiations is the emphasis, in early sociology and anthropology, on the continuities of human experience. That is, though these thinkers were certainly highly aware of the dramatically different social practices that could be found in the cultures of the world, and researched those varying practices with great care and thoroughness, they nevertheless believed that there were certain permanent human impulses that make their way into every culture.

The most important conclusion to be drawn from that insight is that our belief in ourselves as modern persons, or rational persons, different from the primitives who preceded us and who still might persist in strange corners of the world, is an illusion. We are driven by the same needs as all others humans past and present.

I gestured at this point a few years ago in an essay I wrote called “Wokeness and Myth on Campus.” As I’ve said before, I don’t use the word “woke” any more, but I am still fascinated by Leszek Kołakowski’s idea that in every culture there is a technological core and a mythical core. As a culture develops it does not cease to engage with mythical experience, though the specific content of the myths may change and the ways we articulate our myths to ourselves may change. One of Kołakowski’s main points is that we have rarely understood the mythical core of our culture because we have a tendency to deny that we still experience the world mythically. The great value of these early sociologists and anthropologists is that they understood that we do indeed always experience the world mythically as well as rationally, and they try to unpack that.

So, back to Durkheim. In his early book The Division of Labor in Society, he makes a few points that are worth reflecting on. Let’s start with this: “The totality of beliefs and sentiments common to the average members of a society forms a determinate system with a life of its own. It can be termed the collective or common consciousness” (63). This is one of Durkheim’s most famous ideas. He turns from this definition to a definition of crime or criminal action: “an act is criminal when it offends the strong, well defined states of the collective consciousness” (64). And he goes on to say on that same page that “we should not say that an act offends the common consciousness because it is criminal, but that it is criminal because it offends that consciousness. We do not condemn it because it is a crime, but it is a crime because we condemn it.… An act is socially evil because it is rejected by society.”

Now, all of this is related to the argument that Durkheim develops at length in a later book, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, in which he says that religion is essentially a means of producing, sustaining, and extending social solidarity. And one of the primary social functions of crime (Durkheim always thinks functionally about these matters) is also to produce, sustain, and extend social solidarity. That is, one of the ways in which we define the collective consciousness is by pointing to acts that violate it, persons that transgress it. It is therefore necessary for social cohesion that we punish malefactors. That punishment is, as Durkheim says “an act of vengeance” (69), but the key purpose of such vengeance is a passionate confirmation of social solidarity.

It was this idea that Kai Erickson extended and confirmed in his book Wayward Puritans: A Study in the Sociology of Deviance. What Erickson wanted to show was that

the deviant act … creates a sense of mutuality among the people of a community by supplying a focus for group feeling. Like a war, a flood, or some other emergency, deviance makes people more alert to the interests they share in common and draws attention to those values which constitute the “collective conscience” of the community. Unless the rhythm of group life is punctuated by occasional moments of deviant behavior, presumably, social organization would be impossible. (4)

The whole purpose of Erickson’s book is to show in great detail how the Durkheimian understanding of deviance helps us to understand what happened in the Salem witch trials.

At the very end of his book, Erickson points out that in our thinking about crime and punishment Americans find themselves in positions similar to those of their ancestors:

Now, as then, we leave few return routes open to people who try to resume a normal social life after a period of time spent on the community’s boundaries, because most of us feel that anyone whose skids off into the more severe forms of aberrant expression is displaying a serious defect of character, a deep blemish which cannot easily be erased. We may learn to think of such people as “sick” rather than “reprobate,” but a single logic governs both of these labels, for they imply that nothing less than an important change of heart, a spiritual conversion or a clinical cure, can eliminate that inner seed which leads one to behave in a deviant fashion (204–05).

But are there “inner seeds” that cannot be extracted? I have often commented that our society today has many means of punishment but no means of restoration. And that has a lot to do with the essentialism with which so many people think about race and ethnicity, and even in some circumstances sex. There is a kind of taint to whiteness or maleness or cishetness that cannot be eradicated. So what possible avenue of restoration to the community might there be? None, I think. Instead, there can only be a perpetual enforcement of a perpetual shame — because that’s what confirms solidarity among those who want to be in solidarity with one another. Precisely the same thing happens in white separatist and nationalist environments; and indeed in several other subcultures that have an illusory sense of themselves as complete and whole.

If we want to push back against such fragmentations of our social order, we need counter-myths. Even my project of Invitation and Repair probably requires me to articulate my ideas in ways that will be mythically compelling (in Kołakowski’s sense). Unfortunately, I don’t have those skills; but I know of some writers who do, and I’ll draw on them.