Ping Pong 42:The Elements In Between
Is it possible to define something that runs between all humans, and yet is real enough and tangible enough to be open to scientific investigation? What could such a ‘between’ status looks like? How could one divine its presence? This is the problem that the founding father of modern sociology, Durkheim, considered in detail. He realized that the best way to uncover such an element lay in statistical analysis. His conjecture was simple enough: that on the level of numbers and statistics, simple rules might appear, rules that were indiscernible in individual life, but true nonetheless. In order that he might investigate such a conjecture, he looked at the suicide rate in France. He found that he could use this method to demonstrate a relatively tight correlation between the suicide rate and the economic cycle. The suicide rate always appeared to go up at times of uncertainty, and to level off in good times and bad. Here was then a tangible ‘fact’ which Durkheim called a ‘social fact’. That is, some rule, which one might not predict on the ground, and yet which appeared to have an established reality for all that.
With the invention of the social fact, Durkhiem inaugurated not just a new discipline, but also the modern system of government. Governments need, in a democracy, to demonstrate their effectiveness. As they cannot do this on the level of personal (and unstable) circumstances, then they are going to have to demonstrate it on the level of statistics. So that in practice, what they are going to affect, what they are aiming to govern, is the level of social facts. - Those nebulous elements created by our collective reactions to the world. This factor has two further effects. On the one hand it means that a government, as it is governing for ‘all of Britain’ cannot afford to worry about individual cases or even mass sentiment, if that sentiment is other than the social fact. (Sentiment might suggest that suicide rates increase in a depression, or that knife crime is always everywhere continually rising). The problem is of course, that this blindness to the particular is utterly impossible. The effect is that the government is torn then, between two very different levels; they attempt to govern the statistical, and yet endlessly need to bend and make concessions to the particular.
On other hand, the connections between the policies of a government and any one set of social facts, is likely to be highly problematic and textured. Policies will not necessarily have a direct impact and the ‘key indicators’ which a government has chosen, might not have the impact that has been forecast for it. Or again affecting this or that social fact might well not be the panacea that the government hoped it would be. The exact connections and inter-reactions between social facts (which affects which) need not after all, follow rational and logical lines. To affect one element is likely enough to force consequences elsewhere.
Durkheim at least was a great enough thinker to realize this last point. Social facts by themselves are rather a passive phenomenon. They are merely the last point of a process. -The order, the effect that one can see; exactly what they mean and how they might be directly useful is then not clear. It was this lack of clarity that Durkheim considered in his second great book, on ‘The Elementary Structures of Religion’. He argues that social facts need to be installed, in the form of a religious gathering or ritual. These factors are felt within the minds of the participants in the form of religious devotions and beliefs. The divine is the name which one gives to the social. - The element beyond every one of us, which percolates all of us, and indirectly forms our minds. A religion was therefore formed in the cloudy vision which we had of the social fact that underlay that belief, and in the rituals necessary for the establishing of those facts.
This bold theory rendered social facts proactive in three directions. Firstly every social fact was itself the product of a collective action or ritual. The acts therefore were not simply floating over a society, they needed to be created at a certain time and in a certain set of actions. Secondly every such fact blends elements of society with elements of reality. One did not directly feel a social fact, but rather was caught up in it and reflected it back into one’s theory of the natural world. One’s society became a divine force of nature, and nature became itself expressed in terms of social rules. Thirdly such facts were themselves highly interventionist. They therefore very directly acted upon the minds that created them, obliging them to act in certain ways, and at certain times. The world that we create across all our minds, becomes then a weight or burden in each and every one of us. It acts upon us, and forces us to be what we are.
It is through a detailed examination of these three forces, that the rest of this Rant will run.
It is clear enough that the rules and patterns of ritual are very much a part of modernity. What else is (or was) the Stock Market, but an elaborate ritual designed to confer on a certain substance (money) a near mythical value. We lived, up until the last few months therefore, in the world which our collective belief in money created for us, and the meta-substance par excellence. This belief came not only with mystic substance but also with all the elaborate paraphernalia of priests (economists) and mysticism (economic theory) that went with such a set of beliefs.
The belief carried its own power. What is after all, is the real difference between a pyramid selling scheme and normal banking? The only real difference is that normal banking and investment blends into the real world at some point. The figures somewhere therefore have an effect, and direct the process onwards or at least sideways, while the pyramid selling scheme remains in the pure realm of belief and fantasy (the money in it is merely notional).
Money was always therefore a name for a collective creation, a collective act of trust or a social fact. Our current woes are in part created because we have lost sight of the basic collectivity which rivets the entire system together. That is, we have lost faith in its priests, the economists and the bankers, and therefore no longer trust it as a means to express our very collectivity through it. The problem is, that once this faith has gone, the power of money is no more. Which is then of course what the state is doing supporting bankers. It is lending its power as the product of a set of social facts in itself, to support and maintain the social fact of money.
The state in thereby taking up the challenge of debt, is lending to money its own power, from its own set of social facts. The problem is of course whether this set will really be enough to have an affect. This question is real enough. On the one hand, one has the set of social facts that build individual nations; and on the other, the vast ocean of facts that produce the global money markets. The problem that globalization always posed was whether the latter rendered the former irrelevant. What we are testing currently is this fact in the hardest and most extreme of manners. If a state still has power on the global stage, then our economic fate will go one way; while if it is already as powerless as some think, then we will go the other…
The second factor mentioned above, concerned the confusing of the social with the natural. Social facts were such that society’s hopes and aspirations were rendered into natural forces. A highly porous membrane was thereby set up inbetween society and the natural world. Society was naturalized, and nature was expressed and made something human (given divine personality). The effect was of course that a highly complex locus was set up. Human thought was at once natural and social, social and natural, and one could move between the two as circumstances suited. A volcanic eruption or a lightning strike became also a social force, at the same time that a matrilineal kin structure became the mandate of heaven.
Religion marks the point at which human society and the natural world run together naturally, so that one can no longer be quite sure which is talking to which, and when they are doing so. We are naturalized, at the same moment that the natural is sociologized (and given personality). The modern equivalent to this texturing of society and nature is very clearly the concern which we all currently have about the state of the climate. Here one needs to be so careful. There is no doubt that the climate is not degrading in such a manner as is likely to render our current lifestyle problematic. In a sense therefore, one might claim that Nature is casting its long judgements on our society, and all our actions. At the same time this concern about the planet is always talking to the social issue about the kind of world and the kind of problems, and the kind of solutions that inhabit the ‘global village’. In the Environment, we are therefore attempting to map out the rules by which communities which are widely separated by geography, but bound to one another none the less, can chart their interaction and inter relations. Environmentalism is the rubric, the language, the set of rituals we are using, to map out this highly problematic territory.
It is therefore the power and value of Durkheim's conjectures that these two last points need not be opposed to one another. Every act about the environment is simultaneously a statement about the natural world, but also a statement about the global community. However of course there is a mismatch in this nexus. Currently (though perhaps this will change), the social statements are clearly way way behind the natural one. That is, our current environment is degrading fast, far faster than our apparent ability to make up new social facts, appears to fathom. We are left therefore, merely window dressing. Or perhaps to be a little more cynical, certain existing powers (nation states, but also global capitalists) that traditionally carry our social facts, have proved rather unwilling to allow for the creation and evolution of a new social reality. They oppose it, and attempt to mobilize the particualiarist forces of democracy (individual greed) to do so. Of course, if we are lucky, one of the effects of the current economic turmoil will be that this resistance will be overwhelmed, before it leads to our all being overwhelmed in environmental collapse.
The third factor mentioned above concerned the power of the social fact to directly pattern behaviour in the world. One is moral therefore in the name of a God, hence one’s belief is therefore communicated to action. This example is a relatively direct one. It is however perfectly possible to understand such an affect on a wider level. Durkheim might well claim that certain societies think as they do, because of the deep power of social facts to pattern their minds. Certain thoughts become unthinkable, and others commonplace, as the rules of society enter into our deepest mental patterning. We live in a world full of irreducible (and yet social) truths: We have a God given right to expect some power (society or nature) to ensure that we have a car and a happy life. That there might be no such right becomes a tricky thought for us to encompass.
On a deeper level, we expect the natural world or the powers of the beyond to interfere with our world and make things right or wrong. We therefore expect the state to step in at times of crisis (or do at least in part). Or, more darkly, at a time when our affect upon the environment is very problematic, we expect that there will be a natural limiter imposed upon us from without. It becomes therefore impossible to think of not being at ‘peak oil’ that is the point that nature imposes its own limit to what we can or cannot do. Whether or not we are actually at peak oil ‘objectively’ is of course rather problematic. What defines it are after all ‘geological limitations’ on supply (there is more oil, the question is getting at it), and not therefore any hard set of rules (different production methods, and different economic situations might well change the picture). In a sense though, this ‘are we or are we not?’ is secondary affair. What matters, what is significant, is that we feel that once again, nature is breaking into our collective acts, and forcing us to behave otherwise, to behave responsibly. The gods are once again demanding morality from us.
Durkheim therefore created a single nexus in which society, people and the natural were all thrown together, and made to bounce off one another. In doing so, he allowed for a single register for thought and belief, a register at once social and natural. Humans acted in their own world, and yet felt in a very real sense how they were patterned by the world beyond (a world or universe that moreover strangely reflected their own hopes and aspirations): To be a citizen in a society became also to be defined in relation to the wider world. And yet there is a problem in this method. It fundamentally muddles up cause and effect. Social facts are everywhere, and are at once the cause of a series of actions, but also the effects of others, and no rule (beyond other social factors) appears to allow one to separate these aspects. How does one really know after all what is acting and what is passive? What social algebra can allow for that distinction? And if so how? A problem which the next Rant will turn to.
