Here is a site not to miss : . Religion News Today EIN NEWS . the guardian newspaper . Some editor, or editors, at the Guardian really got things right. The paper's religion section now has available a number of "in depth" overviews of various philosophies of religion and philosophy per se, by important thinkers in these areas. Included is a 7 part series on Nietzsche, an 8 part series on Hume, 8 parts for Kierkegaard, 8 for Aquinas, 8 for Machiavelli, 7 parts on the subject of religion and evolution by Andrew Brown in his analysis of Robert Bellah, and 8 parts about the Book of Job by Alexander Goldberg. There are still other multi-part studies. Some are shorter, like the following 4 part serious about Durkheim. . This is an excellent resource. . Billy . . . 4 part series by : Gordon Lynch December 2012 _________________________________________________ Emile Durkheim: religion – the very idea, part 1: the analysis of moral life In the same way that Sigmund Freud created a way of making sense of the dynamics and passions of the human psyche, the pioneering French sociologist, _Emile Durkheim_ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Émile_Durkheim) , created a language for understanding our collective moral passions. Like Freud, Durkheim was a secular Jew, committed to what he understood to be scientific methods of enquiry. Like Freud as well, Durkheim's "science" of moral life was intended not merely to generate abstract knowledge but had a broadly therapeutic intent. For Durkheim, the sociology of moral life played an important role in diagnosing social life, which for him carried over into his influential work in developing a curriculum for a secular moral education across the French school system. Working in the spirit of this Durkheimian project, the Yale cultural sociologist _Jeffrey Alexander_ (http://www.yale.edu/sociology/faculty/pages/alexander/) has referred to this as a "cultural psychoanalysis" through which we might become more aware of the myths and values that move our lives, for good and for ill. Durkheim's first key move in analysing moral life was to locate it not in the private inner conscience of the superego, but in collective life. He understood the fundamental beliefs which shaped human life as essentially social phenomena. In his classic study, _The Elementary Forms of Religious Life_ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elementary_Forms_of_the_Religious_Life) , published 100 years ago this year, Durkheim wrote that individuals who make up a social group "'feel bound to one another because of their common beliefs". Belief, as he argued, was not a matter of personal opinion or private religious experience, but "belongs to the group and unites it". For our highly individualised, post-reformation culture, in which we naturally think of belief in terms of deep inner conviction, Durkheim's perspective can be challenging. It draws us away from thinking about the inner authenticity of a person's beliefs to thinking about belief as a form of social practice. It opens up the possibility that, rather than being like a piece of software code that runs consistently in the mind of the individual, belief may be an intense but sporadic social experience dependent on particular kinds of group activity. The second key move in his analysis of moral life was to argue that the most fundamental structure for human belief was the distinction between the sacred and the profane. A decade before completing The Elementary Forms, Durkheim had published a short book on Primitive Classification with his nephew, Marcel Mauss. In the conclusion, they argued that all early attempts by human cultures to categorise the world were ultimately organised in relation to a fundamental category of sacred things. Moreover, this human tendency to regard particular things as sacred persisted, albeit often in less obvious ways, in modern, scientific modes of thinking. In The Elementary Forms, Durkheim developed this understanding of the sacred much further. Rather than simply being a particular way of making sense of the world, the sacred was something that evoked deep emotions in people, giving them a deep sense of moral energy and conviction. It was something experienced through special forms of collective action that drew groups together around a sacred object in ways that deepened people's sense of group identity and morality. Durkheim's sacred was not some kind of abstract reference to God, or a universal mystical presence. It was a living social reality, dependent on social interaction to charge it up as a powerful force, but which when energised could release a powerful, structuring influence on social life. Why does this matter? Arguably, it is because Durkheim's work on the sacred offers the starting point for a public language for thinking about that which people take to be fundamental moral realities which exert an unquestionable claim over society. The concept of the profane can similarly help us to think about the role of symbolic representations of evil in social life. But to think about moral realities, such as deep convictions that one should not abuse a child or violate fundamental human rights, as norms produced through social practice can induce a particular kind of moral nausea. It seems to leave us prey to an empty moral relativism in which our deepest moral sentiments are reduced to transient social constructions. Durkheim was no postmodern ironist, though, overturning the tapestry of social life simply to see how it had been threaded together. As we shall see in later posts in this series, he was a committed social and political activist, who believed that it was necessary to understand the deep moral forces of social life precisely so that these could be harnessed in constructive ways. The past century has given ample testimony of the power of these forces, inspiring not only civil rights protests and the global humanitarian movement, but also being used to legitimise totalitarian government and systematic genocide. By taking up Durkheim's intellectual project, we may begin to develop clearer ways of understanding the roots and forms of these powerful moral forces, as well as their enduring power in our lives today. _______________________________________________ Emile Durkheim: religion – the very idea, part 2: new forms of the sacred Two of the most important founders of modern sociological thought, _Max Weber_ (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/weber/) and _Emile Durkheim_ (http://www.emile-durkheim.com/) agreed on a key point. To understand modern society, they argued, required careful analysis of the role of religion in shaping social life. For Weber, this influence was to be found primarily in the past. In his classic work, _The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism_ (http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=4&ved=0CFMQFjAD&url=http://www.d.umn.edu/cla/faculty/jhamlin/1095/The%20Protestant%2 0Ethic%20and%20the%20Spirit%20of%20Capitalism.pdf&ei=EzHLUIrVM4aW0QWgxoCYBg& usg=AFQjCNFSTkZ4cF-Dl1SkVnzjXs7RUbjilg&bvm=bv.1355325884,d.d2k&cad=rja) , he suggested that the origins of modern capitalism lay in an ethos of Protestant asceticism that encouraged a sense of thrift and duty in one's work as visible moral markers of the otherwise invisible state of personal salvation. The hard work, careful management of resources, and aversion to conspicuous consumption inspired by this Protestant ethic enabled the development of an economic system built on the reinvestment of capital in increasingly sophisticated systems of production. Over time, though, the religious foundations of this capitalist system faded. The visible signs of material success, which was a cloak adorning the true motivation of inner sanctity, had now become the "iron cage" of a capitalist system of which human beings were servants not the creators. Durkheim shared Weber's view that modern society was one in which traditional forms of religion were in terminal decline. Weber saw modernity in terms of the rise of secular, rationalised and bureaucratic social systems. Durkheim described it as an age in which the influence of the old gods of traditional religion was being replaced by new, more scientific ways of understanding the world. Durkheim was no mere passive observer of these processes. An ardent secularist, he was committed to the construction of the secular state of the French Third Republic and saw the emerging discipline of sociology as a more objective way of understanding the powerful realities of social life which traditional religious language had previously sought to articulate through symbol and myth. Traditional religion, in his view, had little to offer intellectually, morally or socially to a truly modern society. Weber and Durkheim's firm belief in the secularisation of society proved deeply influential, not only on later sociological theory, but for subsequent generations of scholars and public thinkers who assumed that religion was an increasingly marginal force in modern social life. This confidence has clearly come under considerable challenge in recent times, with renewed public interest in the place of religion in today's world accompanied by a number of publicly-funded research programmes on this subject. In one sense, the greater public visibility of questions concerning religion today does not contradict Weber and Durkheim's convictions about the secular turn of modernity. In Britain, it is precisely because far fewer people identify with traditional religious beliefs and institutions (particularly the Church of England) that issues of the appropriate role and influence of religion in public life have moved from being an unthought consensus to a matter of considerable contention. But at the same time, Weber and Durkheim failed to perceive the extent to which modern societies would function as part of a globalised system of markets, media and migration. The secular ethos of western Europe they described in their work is now increasingly challenged by flows of people, money and ideas from other, more religiously vitalised parts of the world. The influence of traditional religion thus persists more than either of them could have imagined. Arguably what is most important, though, is not what Weber and Durkheim shared in terms of their beliefs about the inevitable decline of traditional religion in modern society, but what they disagreed about. While Weber saw the rise of a soulless, rationalised society ("specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart"), Durkheim believed the society of his day to be in a transitional moment in which the old gods might have faded, but new forms of the sacred were emerging. Religion might be dying, in its traditional forms, but sacred passions were not. We might, in Durkheim's terms, be living in a more secular age, but not in a desacralised one. This disagreement goes to the heart of whether Durkheim's work has any relevance for us still today. If we believe, as Weber did, that modern society is defined by the secular machinery of capitalism, then the challenge becomes how to make that rationalised machinery work better, or rediscover a prophetic spirit that enables us to reconnect with what it is to be truly human and to design an alternative social system. If Durkheim was right, though, this opens up the possibility that there are already powerful currents of moral sentiment that run through modern society with the capacity to overturn the rationalised systems of markets and bureaucracies, for example by forcing a market-leading tabloid newspaper to close within a week of a public scandal breaking around it. If Durkheim's analysis was more accurate than Weber's on this score then it would arguably be grounds for hope and fear about the power of these moral forces, and certainly grounds for curiosity to learn more about them. __________________________________________________ Emile Durkheim: religion – the very idea, part 3: ritual, ancient and modern If Durkheim was right to claim that the sacred remains a powerful social force in the modern world, where can we find it? One obvious answer is the collective symbols that people gather around as they experience some form of shared moral sentiment: the flag of the nation, the image of the abused child, or the grave of the revolutionary hero. These symbols aren't simply ideas. Their social and cultural power is always bound up by the ways in which they take material form, such as the imprints on coins, the architecture of public buildings, and the images on our walls or television screens. Durkheim himself tended to have a rather reductive view of the importance of such material objects, seeing them simply as things on to which the all-important symbolic meaning had been projected. But despite this, his accounts of "primitive" religion in _The Elementary Forms of Religious Life_ (http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/The_Elementary_Forms_of_Religious_Life.html?id=3j5tyWkEZSYC) continually give graphic illustration of how the sacred is made real through the things people eat, the material objects (including living things) that they venerate, the way people mark out special spaces and the things they do with their bodies. The real physical "stuff" of the sacred matters for how it works as a focus for collective moral emotion. In The Elementary Forms, Durkheim understands these sacred actions as rituals, differentiating between "positive" rites celebrating or venerating a sacred object, and "negative" rites protecting a sacred object from impurity. The numerous examples he gives of these follow a common structure. A select group of people (usually excluding women and children) goes to a special (sometimes secret) place, to perform a defined set of actions in relation to a sacred object. The collective experience generated by such rituals is so powerful that it gives the participants a profound sense of connectedness to each other and a deep moral vitality that transforms the way in which they feel about themselves and their world. There are, of course, a number of practical problems with this understanding of ritual. As Mary Daly pointed out, there is no guarantee that people will actually experience ritual in such compelling ways. Rituals can just as equally be experienced as empty, dull and formulaic. Perhaps more importantly, though, this notion of ritual sets too many limits on the kind of actions that we might think of as having sacred significance today. If we think just in terms of the distinct and highly structured rituals that Durkheim described, our attention will naturally be drawn to events such as coronations, funerals and other public ceremonies. But public action which evokes the sacred today takes a much wider variety of forms than this. It's helpful here to take a step back and to remember our working definition of the sacred as that which people take to be unquestionable moral realities. A broader understanding of "sacred ritual" could then be anything that people do that reminds them of, and renews their identification with, these deep moral realities. In that sense, Durkheim's theory of the sacred is perhaps best understood as a theory of a particular kind of public communication. It points our attention towards social acts that convey powerful moral meanings in ways that are meant to draw a sympathetic public audience around them. In this sense, the most common forms of sacred communication are not occasional public ceremonies that reflect the kind of rituals that Durkheim wrote about. They are found in the morally charged stories that circulate through our various forms of public and social media. People in contemporary society do not usually encounter the sacred and the evil-profane by taking themselves off to a remote location to perform some kind of arcane ritual. They experience them through news stories about the abuse and killing of _Baby P_ (http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/may/22/baby-p-timeline) , demonstrations of public mourning at Wootton Bassett, performances of patriotism in the speeches of presidential candidates or various forms of humanitarian disaster. Or not. Because one of the effects of the circulation of these sacred meanings through our media is that we can be exposed to a wide range of sacred sentiments, some of which we identify with and some which we do not. Some of which we regard as cynical attempts to make us feel, vote or give money in particular ways, and some of which we just experience as powerful reminders of moral truth. We live in a world now in which we do not simply encounter the sacred through periodic ritual. We experience it instead through a continual flow of mediated stories and images, which evoke in us complex rhythms of moral passion, cynicism and indifference. ____________________________________________ Emile Durkheim: religion – the very idea, part 4: moral sense and sensibility As the few surviving photographs we have of him suggest, Emile Durkheim was by all accounts a somewhat stern man. His moral seriousness was such that his nephew, Marcel Mauss, was reportedly struck by a deep panic at almost being discovered by his uncle while in the midst of the venal pleasure of enjoying an afternoon beer outside a Parisian cafe. Yet within Durkheim's unflinching commitment to la vie serieuse, there is a striking dichotomy. On the one hand, he was utterly committed to what he understood to be the scientific foundations of the sociological method to which he was committed. He believed that a scientific approach to understanding human life could be the basis of a new public morality. Unlike more recent attempts to understand morality through cognitive or neuro sciences though, exemplified by writers like Jonathan Haidt or Sam Harris, Durkheim's emphasis was on a social science that could understand morality in terms of the processes and structures of society. He was utterly committed to rational scholarship, describing (however inaccurately) his argument in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life in terms of an experiment, and his conclusions as confidently proven by scientific method. At the same time, Durkheim was a man of moral passions. He was, like many others of his day, deeply exercised by the _Dreyfus Affair_ (http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/171538/Dreyfus-affair) , and the obvious miscarriage of justice meted out on a Jewish officer scapegoated by his military superiors for a crime he did not commit. At the height of this affair, Durkheim found himself drawn into a public war of words with a conservative "anti-Dreyfusard" polemicist, Ferdinand Bruntière. In an enraged response to Emile Zola's J'Accuse, Bruntière had disparaged those liberal intellectuals and artists who dared to challenge the moral authority of the army on the basis of a regard for the individual that he considered "the great sickness of the present time". In an article responding to Bruntière, Durkheim wrote:
"The human person, whose definition serves as the touchstone according to which good must be distinguished from evil, is considered as sacred, in what one might call the ritual sense of the word. It has something of that transcendental majesty which the churches of all times have given to their Gods. It is conceived as being invested with that mysterious property which creates an empty space around holy objects, which keeps them away from profane contacts … Whoever makes an attempt on a man's life, on a man's liberty, on a man's honour inspires us with a feeling of horror in every way analogous to that which the believer experiences when he sees his idol profaned." Here, then, is a curious tension. On the one hand, Durkheim shrouded his work with claims of scientific authority. Yet at the same time, his heart beat with moral passions that could be expressed in most articulate form through a poetic language of the sacred. This tension goes to the heart of Durkheim's project of developing a sociological understanding of the sacred. On one hand, the aim of this project is to develop a more rational, reflexive understanding of the nature and influence of the sacred on social life. In doing so, it offers the potential for us ask where these moral certainties have come from, and what their effects on society are. Yet while promising the possibility of greater rational detachment, we can never really be freed from moral passions if we are to remain genuinely social, or indeed ethical, beings. We might, for example, be able to understand rationally the historical conditions under which the care of children has come to have sacred significance, and how this creates its own negative consequences from unwieldy regulations over contact with children to the ritual scapegoating of over-stretched social work professionals. But, however clear our rational gaze on the origins and implications of this particular form of the sacred might be, we would still feel less than human if we saw an image of an abused and neglected child and were not deeply moved by it. Such sentiment seems necessary to motivate serious collective action against that which morally troubles us. This dichotomy is not, ultimately, a problem to be solved, however, but a tension to be lived through. There is no real prospect of social life being organised around purely rational knowledge – however appealing that Enlightenment ideal might be to some people. Our knowledge of our social relations is always as much, if not more, felt than thought about. But equally, a society based on uncritical moral passion, or in which sacred passion forms an unholy and unchallengeable alliance with political power, has repeatedly been shown through history to have lethal consequences. We must learn to live with a creative movement between rational reflection and moral passion – even if that rationality may at times feel like it profanes our deepest sacred sentiments. For without both moral sense and moral sensibility, we will never manage successfully the always flawed project of managing ethically a shared, collective life. -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org
