Durkheim Revisited

As a writer, I have long resorted to putting thoughts and reflections down on paper. Today, the paper is often virtual, of course, as electronic forms of recorded communication increasingly supplant traditional archival tools & data recording methodologies.

Over the past several years I have used Author’s Den as the repository venue for the aggregate of my various ponderings, where they may or may not be shared with others, depending upon whether those ‘others’ find concepts contained therein to be noteworthy enough to review. I did so for a number of reasons, not least of them being the fact that this habit of mine serves as a personal reflecting mirror, a place where I can attempt to order my own world-view. In a certain sense my habitual recording of thoughts, outlooks and opinions is a form of vanity, an exercise in obsessing over my own conflicting efforts to understand and make sense of this complex and endlessly confusing process we all refer to as (for lack of a better expression, most probably) ‘the human experience’.

However, time has had an impact on my desire & willingness to share these thoughts, not just with others but with my own self. Dylan (Bob) phrased it brilliantly in the lyrics of his song ‘Things have changed…’, a single track written & released in 2000, but taken from the music for the film soundtrack score of ‘Wonder Boys’. The song itself, like all Bob Dylan compositions is hauntingly evocative, but in my case the lyrics resonate with the corrosive effects that time & experience have visited upon me personally, as the decades continue to fly by. The disembodied refrain from that song seems to echo disturbingly ever so slightly out of reach of my peripheral senses: “I used to care, but things have changed”.

For I truly used to care, about all things, about the bastardised quality of life we have been forced to accept in modern America, about the increasing shear effects of social discord and cultural disharmonies that constitute the broth of our personal awarenesses in 2015, and about the tremendous (but failed) potential of humanity to rise to greater heights. I find myself now caring less and less about nearly everything, a dynamic that even impacts my former willingness to analyse this mess we call American life and set my reflections down in semi-permanent form. I find myself asking myself “Why should I even bother, when it’s clear enough that no one else cares about what I think?” It is a growing sense of social anomie within that I now realise I have been fighting off for decades.

Emile Durkheim investigated the essence of social anomie exhaustively in his many studies of the human social condition as far back as the turn of the previous century (1893), although at that time he originally was examining the disconnect between guild labor and radically evolving social needs. As the new century dawned, the definition of anomie evolved and to embrace the side effects of the entire exponential process of expanding science & technology (a subject well covered in Theodore Kaczynski’s seminal collected works; you’ll obviously recall Kaczynski by the FBI’s favored sobriquet ‘The Un-abomber’). [Note: Kaczynski’s writings were in 2010 collectively published under the title ‘Technological Slavery: The Collected Writings of Theodore J. Kaczynski, a.k.a. "The Unabomber"’. Interestingly, I actually knew Kaczynski as a student, while in Berkeley in the late 60s. Although I didn’t take any courses from him (he was a faculty professor on the UCB campus, teaching undergrad courses), I knew of him thanks to my liaisons with certain student groups on the campus. He was then still merely a brilliantly gifted professor and not yet a notorious political terrorist.]

Durkheim (in concert with certain contemporaneous psychologists) hypothesised the novel idea that human beings, marvelous as their minds are, have certain limits to accommodate change beyond specific (if largely undeterminable) levels; that is to say, based upon the complexity of factors that constitute each individual’s inventory of core assets (read: genetic components, serving as a bio-physiological foundation upon which to receive and absorb the often stressful forces of change). Each individual is, of course, totally unique in the manner in which all those assets have been put together thanks to the randomness of the procreative urge that drives all physical forms of biological life. That is, each of us is so different that there is no uniform standard by which those forces may attempt to be withstood, much less meaningfully quantified & predicted. It is this uncertainty that makes human behavior such a frustrating force in the world, especially when you extract that ineradicable and unalterable aspect of each ‘unique individual’ and multiply it by exponential factors (think: a society comprised of tens, hundred, thousands, millions and now even billions of human beings collectively identifying with cultural ‘norms’, traditions, customs, habits and practices; in short, a seething, ever dynamic and unpredictable mass).

When one reflects upon the ineluctable fact that every person is a radically different, often seething cauldron of impressions, concepts, outlooks, awarenesses and understandings, it becomes a bit easier to understand how any attempt to organise human beings becomes a bit like trying to herd cats. Consequently, establishing and controlling large groups of individuals through agendas, dogmas & doctrines takes on enormous, near monumental implications. Due to the fact that there is usually little commonality from person to person in an absolute sense, human beings are typically collectivised to think and act congruently by the use of highly artificial means such as information & data manipulation (think: propaganda and careful control of informational access, via exposure to highly partisan audiovisual media). Today’s commercial marketing and advertising forces are perhaps the best example of these ‘artificial means’ that are used to orchestrate mass human behavior, although I’d venture to bet that few fat, dumb & happy ‘materialist consumers’ waste as much as a nanosecond reflecting on how radically they are constantly and thoroughly they are being bombarded by these thought-formulating processes while they indulge in supposedly free-will personal economic actions (i.e. ‘buying commercial material stuff’).

Today, in our modern era of personal electronic social hiving (networking), as the forces of cultural, ethnic, social, religious and philosophic diversity continue to disintegrate and fragment formerly durable customs & practices, one of the most insidious new components of this cultural disengagement we are all experiencing consists of the electronic communications revolution (think: the microprocessor age) we are increasingly becoming subjugated to. As older, theoretically (note I say ‘theoretically’) wiser members of society die off, so too are traditional constraints, morals, ethics and behavioral values are disappearing that in earlier decades were the strong underlying behavioral backbone of America. Values that were formerly transmitted by direct parental contact are now commonly transmitted to younger generations via the tools of corporate marketing (read: advertising, entertainment media…chiefly television…and puerile social networking venues, as in FACEBOOK). When one factors in the exponential impact on American society of all forms of social & cultural diversity, there should be little wonder that so many people are simply coming unglued, becoming critically detached from any form of consensual moral or ethical constraint, to the point where they spontaneously decompensate (engage in what ‘normal’ people, and I use that term advisedly, would regard as ‘crazed’ or highly aberrant behavior).

In many instances those ‘crazed’ acts of antisocial enormity are preceded by a growing sense of social anomie, again the classic Durkheim quantification but couched in modern cultural contexts. When deprived of identifying social, cultural and group connections (qualities that define the innate need for humans to ‘belong’), that anomie can take on the form of stark despondency, turning often enough into idiopathic social pathologies most often taking initial form as substance abuse and depression.

All it takes is a look around the American scene, especially as economic factors have polarized radically, leaving tremendously disproportionate wealth in the hands of a privileged few, while 90% of the population to suffer economic deprivations of varying types and degrees. As a credit (perhaps ironically) to the persistent human desire to establish order out of the utter chaos of human life, religions still thrive with their promises of SOME sort of higher meaning, amidst and despite the savagery of basic human behavior. Those that do subscribe to the various range of religious balms and soothsaying tend to be older, of course, and those who are younger believers in some sort of Ultimate Deity (regardless of what one might define that as being) have been handed that belief on a platter by conservative parents who take their responsibilities (or providing moral guidance) seriously (so they think). The fact that moral & ethical guidance doesn’t implicitly need to be based upon a systematic set of religious beliefs occurs to far fewer people that one would expect, given that only half of any given population are ‘below average’ in terms of their intellectual curiosity and the consequently heightened sense of wonder at the myriad possibilities challenging us that higher intelligence presupposes.

At any rate, anomie as a discordant thread in America, has grown alarmingly. Leftist intellectuals, in their haste to embrace ALL in a uniform spirit of acceptance, have simply damaged the process further by institutionalizing that wretched form of thought control we all know as ‘political correctness’ (you know what I’m referring to here: catch phrases such as ‘Diversity is a blessing’, et al…which ironically enough is actually a curse, rather than a blessing, in terms of its drastic furthering of social-cultural schizophrenia).

What brought on this present personal outlook of mine, you might well ask? Aside from the fact that I have been laboring under the effects of psycho-social anomie for decades (as America continues to come apart at the seams) and excluding the fact that I am and never have been possessed of ‘conventional’ spiritual values (read: a believer in a specific religion or ‘church’ theology), when I recently stopped to wonder about my present state of spiritual anomie it occurred to me, while stumbling across an obituary of 60s era post-Bohemian Richard Brautigan (who took his own life in 1984, with a .44 S&W handgun at his Bolinas, CA, residence), that a great preponderance of my personal ‘heroes’ and role-models in life have committed suicide! Jack Kerouac, Richard Brautigan, Ernest Hemingway, Hunter S. Thompson, etc., all of these highly creative individuals and many more ultimately became so overwhelmed with the sad futility of human life that they elected to take a quick exit from it. They too, had originally been youthfully optimistic, wistful romantics who felt that humanity would ultimately rise above its wretched primitive excesses and evolve productively and positively!

Although their various motivations for so doing were somewhat divergent, almost all felt that they had somehow lost that critical link to the collective spirit of rational humanity as the years passed, evidencing the hopelessness of their soaring inspirations. Of course the fact that all were extraordinarily sensitive to the basic absurdity of the human condition (almost a prerequisite for being a creative writer, artist, poet, what have you) had much to do with this, but all eventually reached the personal conclusion that a voluntary early (or premature) departure from conscious life was preferable to prolonged suffering from the futility of it all.

Kerouac certainly felt this as the nihilistic Beats gave way to the optimistic Flower Generation, Brautigan experienced it profoundly as changes in times & tastes resulted in a diminished market for his unique form of expressive genius, Thompson likewise realised that he could never quite connect with the herd-like masses, and so forth. When simple substance-induced diversion of conscious pain & mental anguish either failed to deaden the pain or created even greater pain of different kinds, suicide seemed a reasonable option to avail.

The above is simply an explanation from myself to myself why I am presently discovering just how deeply immersed I am in this classical sense of anomie referred to here. It doesn’t mean that I plan any time soon to jump off the mortal coil in a manner similar to that chosen by the above individuals, but it does help put several realisations into sharper focus: 1) The growing sense of collective anomie helps explain why America is becoming so highly angst-pressurized that a socio-cultural meltdown is no longer an inconceivable future possibility. 2) My personal sense of detachment, recognisably aided & abetted by the bitter social exclusions that advanced age brings with it in our youth-obsessed culture (thank you, corporate capitalist elements of the economy!), stems from the fact that no one is actually, genuinely interested in problems like this. The average person in America is now so totally submerged in personal concerns and responsibilities that require far more time & breathing space than he has available to problem-solve and sort through life’s perplexities that he simply CAN’T care about those who threaten to fall by the wayside. It’s a simple matter of applied social Darwinism, to a great extent.

“Sorry to hear you’re unhappy, bud!” That’s about as much consolation as anyone suffering from this sort of affliction is likely to receive from others…even the closest of friends…since each individual is again singularly & completely isolated from all others, physically, mentally and figuratively. No one person can understand another’s afflictions completely, anyway, even if he had the time to allow an attempt. Therefore, in today’s world, one either goes quietly mad and circumspectly keeps it to one’s self, or one naively seeks ‘professional’ help and merely ends up in a dossier of ‘potentially dangerous people’ (either to self or others) on the desk of god-knows how many agencies and organisations, for future reference when the ceiling finally falls in. Given the fact that this sort of socio-cultural anomie is so rampant in today’s world, there are hardly enough therapeutic resources to avail, anyway. The most common method of treating social anomie today, due to the sheer burden imposed on increasingly strained health care agencies, is pseudo prophylacsis: You can’t cure mental dysfunction, even if you had the time & inclination to do so, so just put the person down on a ‘watch’ list and wait for the implosion, hoping not to be splattered in the process. After all, both psychotic & self-destructive urges are invariably messy and no one really or truly wants (or cares) to ‘help’ anyone else…although they’d never admit it, erstwhile ‘professionals’ just want to stay as safely removed from the inevitable resulting messiness as humanly possible. It’s a sad fact of our highly complex, massively convoluted and radically fragmentized social culture.

How sad, really. So saying, as my own anomie grows, I find myself less & less inclined to put my thoughts down on paper (virtual as it may be), or to share the unique outlook on life that belongs to me alone with others. In the end none of this matters anyway, as the dreary cycles of human life repeat themselves cyclically, in perfect accordance with George Santayana’s famed admonishment about the repetitious nature of all human experience. The strong-willed (if perhaps terminally stupid) survive and those more fragile (if perhaps more aware) souls will drop away.

I’ve made it to the verge of my 7^th decade (god-knows how!) so far, so perhaps I still have a few years left, after all. Reflecting on the above on this sunny Spring day, I am reminded of that terrible old chestnut of a joke about a fellow who jumps off the highest floor of the Empire State Building and says, as he passes each floor on the way down: “So far, so good…..”