07b. Appendices
Appendix 1: Community and Personality in Historical Perspective
As we look around the complex industrial society that we inhabit, occasionally we should stop to consider the very different kind of society that preceded it. The Industrial Revolution transformed society in ways that the so-called information revolution can only dream of. That transformation was dramatic and abrupt. It was painful for many individuals, but particularly for those alienated intellectuals in the nineteenth century that yearned for a more cohesive and meaningful society. For many intellectuals, industrial, and by implication technological, society is a mixed blessing at best.
The prelude to industrialization was anything but gloomy. The dominant ethos of the eighteenth-century was optimism. As Mozart’s music precisely captured, the world was evolving into a nice, pleasant and progressive place. Science would lengthen our lives; wars would cease or be confined; trade and commerce would increase the wealth of all nations.
By the early nineteenth-century, this motif was beginning to wear thin. German writers, in particular, began to question the values of modern industrial society and to contrast them with the more positive characteristics of the world we have lost. Max Weber, in particular, bemoaned the increasing rationalization of social life and the disenchantment of the West and, eventually, the world. But the man who described the transition to modernity most intently was named Ferdinand Toennies. This powerful thinker created what became the ideal types of the past and present. Past societies he labeled Gemeinschafts or genuine communities characterized by close emotional bonds. People not only knew one another, but felt that they belonged to the collective. Common communal rituals, a distinctive religious and normative structure, close kinship ties, and a group affinity with the natural environment characterized the societies of the past.
Modern society, on the other hand was a Gessellschaft. Gessellschafts are highly impersonal places. People do not know one another, and relate as strangers. Emotional bonds were loosened in the wider community and circumscribed and intensified within the nuclear family. Gessellschafts are highly fragmented with weak affinal ties; in other words, they are lonely places. The increased freedom of the individual comes at the enormous cost of alienation and dissatisfaction.
Like many other German writers, Toennies had a particular interest in the transition to modernity. Germany industrialized late and felt the full effects of an abrupt dislocation from the past. The transition was much more difficult in Germany than in England and France. The recent past was replaced by an alien present, with powerful psychological effects on the literati who went from artists/secretaries/advisors to aristocratic families to normal citizens. While their loss of status and identity added to their proclivity towards cultural despair, or at least a strong distaste for modernity, their insights into social change were invariably interesting and occasionally profound. They began to ask the questions that preoccupy us still: 1) do industrialization and technological efficiency destroy what is truly human; 2) are individualism and competition a healthy foundation for a human society; 3) is science a beneficial or destructive force; 4) are modern societies characterized by conflict or consensus?
These questions were asked long before cultural anthropology began to show us how pre-modern societies really operated. The insights of that discipline have done little to dilute the force of the original questions. In fact, it was the German social theorists who first alerted us to the fact that the cultural values and integrity of so called primitive societies included many valuable characteristics that modernity has erased. In particular, the small-scale societies of the past and present were remarkable in placing communal, spiritual and environmental values above economic, competitive, and environmentally destructive systems.
For example, although money or currency was used in many small-scale societies, it never supported greed or personal accumulation. It was merely a token or a vehicle for facilitating trade between tribes. Even the term trade is a misnomer, since exchange often took place at feasts in which the host’s major purpose was to demonstrate generosity. Eventually, the other tribe would reciprocate the feast as a social event, not in ways that supported efficiency and accumulation, but in ways that strengthened relationships.
In other words, in small-scale and pre-industrial societies, the economy was deeply submerged in and supported the values of community. The market did not organize community, as it does in modern society, where human beings become commodities whose labour can be bought and sold. Pre-industrial societies would have found abhorrent the notion that a man or woman’s labour should be alienated from himself, from his community, and from the environment, only to be reduced to a self-centred economic exchange.
For the pre-industrial man and woman, life is an integrated whole. Everything is connected and mutually supportive. A man might worship his ancestors in an extended family relationship. Ancestor worship in turn supports, confirms and amplifies the familial experience. Good are distributed in ways that reinforce the values of the family and that ensure the stability of its weakest link. Thus, economic activity is redistributive, ensuring the ongoing validity of the kinship group and reinforcing collective bonds.
German socio-cultural thinkers like Toennies were the among the first to suggest that economic progress destroyed the bonds of community and fragmented society into disconnected parts. Specialization or the division of labour further fragmented the individual. A tribesman could be a hunter, a singer, an elder and a participant in religious ceremonies. He understood his culture and integrated it into all aspects of his life. He controlled himself and his society to the extent that he was an active participant in a variety of its aspects. His mind was not numbed by the division of labour, but was able to entertain a variety of ideas, social roles, and natural connections. For the tribesman, everything is personal, individualized and pre-eminently human. Contrary to the popular misconception, the tribesman could be viewed as a holistic entity, more of a real person, than his modern counterpart.
Despite the so-called freedoms of our modern age, we lack the rootedness and connectedness of an organic society. While the precursors of modern sociology could not speak with authority about small-scale societies, they were well versed in medieval literature and thought. They were among the first to view medieval society in positive terms rather than to stereotype the period as the dark ages. In particular, they were impressed by the organic nature of medieval society, as a flourishing communal culture with a common identity that was reflected in agriculture, architecture and religion. What made medieval society so special was its social stratification or great chain of being. Everyone was connected and had their place in this chain.
Industrial society broke the links in the chain. It was fragmented and competitive. Whereas everyone partook of medieval culture, modern culture was characterized by the conflict between classes, a relentless desire for social mobility, and the twisting of culture to the needs of the market. Whereas medieval society was able to proclaim its symbolic identity in cathedrals that still remain wonders of architectural splendour, the edifices of modern society were crudely and efficiently utilitarian.
The disgust with industrial society certainly was not confined to German writers, although they hated capitalism and commerce the most fiercely. In Great Britain, the romantics, the industrial novelists, and the arts and crafts movement all looked for inspiration from the world of the past. They found little of value in the world of the present, which was so devoid of creativity, imagination and fancy. The crudely utilitarian attitudes of the rising middle class bore no comparison to the richly symbolic world of the past, where God and the angels were in every dew drop and where every enchanting little village had its own unique identity, rituals and myths.
The first analyses of community (Gemeinschaft), therefore, were intensely critical of modern society (Gesselschaft). German, British and many other western writers contrasted the former aristocratic agrarian societies with life in the urban cities and factories. Agricultural society was tied to the soil and the seasons; it was simultaneously natural and organic — nature sustaining humanity and human beings living in harmony with nature. Aristocratic society proscribed roles for the aristocracy as statesmen, warriors and patrons of learning. Industrial society was linked to the rhythms of the machine and the clock; and the satanic mills often ran through the night in defiance of natural light. The captains of industrial society owed their position to nothing other than their capital. They were not required or even expected to appreciate culture, to defend the state, or to nurture or protect their employees.
The critique of industrial society often contrasted the richly interwoven tapestries of medieval society with the crude cash nexus of advancing capitalism. It posted the ever-increasing size of capitalists’ wallets with the impoverishment of the individual and the communal soul. French writers, in particular, relentlessly documented the shallowness, pettiness and envy of the emerging capitalist classes and lamented the loss of the increasingly anachronistic, but still captivating, aristocracy.
The British lamented the disconnection between country and city, and the dislocation that occurred in society when people were forced to move from an organic rural environment into a mechanical urban domain. For a least two centuries, British literary writers of any consequence have elevated rural values and deplored the division of labour that removed men and women from nature and more natural relationships with one another.
The German intelligenzia so loathed industrial society that they developed the most lasting stereotypes of industrial society and the capitalist classes as greedy, conniving individuals without any sense of responsibility to the collectivity. They also linked the worst aspects of industrial society with the Jewish community, who they continually accused of selling out the German nation and destroying its soul. This often racist German intelligenzia, who soon entrenched themselves within the German civil service and educational institutions, pined for a hero who would espouse the genuine spirit of the nation and either create a new society or go down in a blaze of glory in a last ditch struggle against the mechanical society and its capitalist allies. German writers and thinkers embodied a cultural despair that simultaneously cried out for a charismatic hero or retreated into the mists of largely fictitious communal legends.
We should remember that the contrast between the organic world of the past and the mechanical world of the present, between nature and artifice, between nurturing relationships and the crude cash nexus was shared by many of the most important writers of the age. This distaste for the present did stimulate a genuine interest in the historical past; it also contributed mightily to the development of the sociological imagination and cultural anthropology. However, it could also be extremely unrealistic and irresponsible, especially in the hands of those who lacked the genius or the capacity for more balanced comparisons between the past and the present.
What makes E-mile Durkheim so special is the fact that, although he was a German living in France, he was able to embrace and dissect modern life. He turned the notions of Gesselschaft and Gemeinschaft on their heads by arguing that modern life was much more organic, in the best sense, than the mechanical world of the past. He was able to see the division of labour, not as a simplistic social reification of the machine or the factory, but as a sophisticated set of interdependent relationships.
But, without the debate on community and society initiated by writers like Toennies, it would have been difficult for a thinker like Durkheim to develop the analytical tools and creative insights without which we probably would not have the discipline of sociology today. The problem that both Toennies and Durkheim faced was to assess the significance of specialization and industrialization for humanity. The discussion and the debate was played out between the concepts of society and community as these emerged from their early industrial cocoon.
Appendix Two: E-mile Durkheim on Suicide and the Family
(which includes acute observations on marriage, separation, divorce, dating and the rituals of modern life, with a eye to enlightening the male of the species on the most effective way to counteract the distinctive advantages of mature single, divorced or uncommitted women and to provide an effective counter strategy for those unfortunate and naive males who have suffered the blandishments of those decidedly diabolical women who pretend to be exploring commitment in a relationship, but who really want to rub the noses of men in their unfortunately limitless sexual needs.)
For Durkheim, suicide is a social rather than an individual fact. It takes place in human communities and reflects what is going on in those communities. The smallest of all communities is the family. The nuclear family is the tiniest of all kinship groups and, therefore, the social unit best suited to an individualistic society. Large kinship groups, including uncles, aunts and the rest don’t fit very well into our modern highly self-centered agendas. Since suicide is a social fact, any comprehensive study of this phenomenon, therefore, must pay attention to the family unit. Durkheim’s discussion of familial relations and their relation to incidences of suicide is more controversial, but just as fascinating, as you would expect from the most creative all social thinkers.
What is more, despite all its chauvinistic biases and mid-Victorian patriarchal values. Durkheim’s statistical analysis has stood the test of time pretty well. After completing a painstaking analysis of all available statistical data, Durkheim concluded that marriage is a huge contributor to the mental health of males. Married men are far less likely to commit suicide than their single, divorced or widowed counterparts. However, marriage is not a good deal for women, unless you take into account another significant variable. The larger the familial group — in other words, the more children that the woman pumps out — the better off the mother is, at least in terms of her propensity to commit or refrain from committing suicide. Conjugal bliss, which I define as marriage without the annoyance of children (a personal prejudice to be sure), is really, really, really good for the man, but pretty bad for the woman. This conclusion is not affected in any way by the male’s lovemaking technique (sorry guys; the statistical data is conclusive on this point).
Divorce is very bad for men in terms of suicide rates. We tend to knock ourselves off with statistical regularity, whether or not our spouses take the sweat stained shirts from our backs. Surprise, surprise, however; it is not at anywhere near as bad for women, even when they don’t get alimony or child support. Whereas children seem to be good for women’s mental health; husbands most definitely are not. Husbands or the equivalent rank right up there with cigarettes and obesity as a female health risk. This is an important point and one that helps to explain the courtship rituals of divorced or separated women. I will return to this point later in my analysis.
It is important to remember that women have rather low suicide rates generally. There are several ways that one could explain this. Durkheim’s explanation may be offensive to many women. Hell, most modern liberated males would disavow Mr. Durkheim’s stereotype of women (while perhaps secretly agree with E-mile on some substantive points). He suggests that women tend to be homebodies with little interest in the larger picture of society. They are far less socially oriented and, what amounts to the same thing for Durkheim, they are men’s intellectual inferiors. Hey, I didn’t say it; don’t blame me! Durkheim’s woman is primarily a biological entity, whose simple needs are easily satisfied. Men are more socially constructed creatures than women; this suggests that they are more intellectual, but also far less easy to satisfy. This explains why men are more anxious and whiney than women; they are much more vulnerable to social change. They can be affected by both egoistic and anomic criteria (these are terms that sociologists use routinely but nobody has any idea what they mean; that’s how academic disciplines are created). But I digress. Let’s cut to the chase, divorced men commit suicide way more often than divorced women do.
In anomic terms, men’s sexual appetites are socially derived and virtually limitless. In other words, men have a deep, dark, delicious desire (not so much innate as socially constructed remember) to screw around all the time. But this leaves them (perhaps women might think deservedly) unhappy, since they can never hope to satisfy their needs. Given any real choice, men are usually very happy to give up the supposed freedom of bachelor hood in order to impose some social limits on their desires. Alternating between being tired or horny all the time is not what it’s sometimes cracked up to be. This is precisely the function of marriage for the male. We restrict our adventures to the real of fantasy (or the occasional drunken disaster, which reminds us exactly why we got married in the first place).
Women, on the other hand, receive relatively few benefits from marriage. They do not desire sexual intimacy nearly as much as their husbands, so a formal conjugal relationship doesn’t serve a critical limiting function. Less intellectual than men, they don’t have the same need to limit their needs. The marriage relationship, therefore, is not nearly such a positive experience for them. The anecdotal evidence supports this contention:
Conversation between two women:
First woman: What do you like better — sex or chocolate cake?
Second woman: What kind of chocolate cake?
Selected female advice to male experiencing limitless desires:
- Why don’t you just buy your hand some flowers and take it out on a date?
- I think that sex is highly overrated in a relationship, don’t you?
When a long-term relationship soured in the past, it was difficult to stop the bleeding with out a papal annulment or flight to foreign land complete with name change. The ease of modern divorce works completely to the advantage of women. Statistically, in the overwhelming majority of cases, it is the woman who seeks the divorce rather than her husband. This should be a warning to males that divorce needs to be avoided at all costs. The availability of divorce in our modern world does not serve men’s needs very well if at all. Whereas marriage is mildly life threatening for the female, divorce is a death sentence for many males. When divorce became much more common during the nineteenth century, male suicides skyrocketed. The incidence of female suicide went down.
Give Durkheim credit. While he may have stereotyped women as sex kittens in search of a lobotomy, at least he had the guts to say that the patriarchal Victorian family was a bad deal for a woman, unless she had a brood of children to deflect her attention from the failings of her husband. If the marriage was childless, women were not at all happy. Whatever happened, men remained as happy and secure as clams, at least until they received the divorce papers.
I have no idea what modern statistics reveal about marriage, divorce and suicide. Besides, being ignorant allows me to bandy about stereotypes in a whimsical and amusing way. For example, my ignorance of statistics lets me bash government bureaucrats and economic scholars with relative impunity. To whit, modern governments and their lackeys are very industrious, maddeningly so, at compiling useless statistics. The anxious dreams of separated or divorced males are continually interrupted by the only phone calls we ever seem to get (government opinion surveys). What makes these calls even more offensive is that the voice at the other end of the line may be the only cheerful female voice that you’ve heard in ages.
None of these interviewers ever ask you questions like: 1) are you desperately unhappy?; 2) are you thinking of committing suicide?; 3) would you marry me if you got the chance? You betcha; sight unseen. Just don’t ask me any more questions about: 1) how many people there are in my present household (one, and that includes the weekend); 2) how much I spend on meals outside the home (all my discretionary income, which isn’t much); 3) how many dependents I provide support to (only one; if I’d paid attention to Durkheim, I’d have wound up my ex.’s biological clock on every conceivable occasion).
In absolute ignorance, I can say with confidence that the statistical literature on suicide in marriage is non existent. I can even provide a plausible rationale. To whit, suicide has ceased to be the criminal offence that once kept it on police record books. And even if the statistics were available, no one in the government has the imagination to interpret them properly. Durkheim is dead and most modern bureaucrats have the all the brain matter of a slug whose spotted a saucer full of beer.
Let me go out on yet another limb and suggest that nothing much has changed since the nineteenth century. Women still get the worst end of the stick in marriage. Men not only get a much better deal, but, because they are the more intelligent gender, they’re smart enough, not only to remarry, but also to do so at the earliest possibility. Women will hum and haw before they’ll ever enter into a new commitment. Divorced women, or those who have left long term relationships, have a very comprehensive list of requirements that must be met before they will step into that river again. The length and rigor of some of these lists makes me suspect that these women are not really interested in genuine commitments, but more concerned that they might miss out on that one in a million ‘good guy’ that never really ever existed. But perhaps I’m projecting in attributing so much intelligence to women.
Women are still the ones who tend to initiate divorce proceedings, or who trick their men into leaving and immediately change the locks before the male comes to his senses. Consequently, (especially when the key no longer fits the door) men remain much more bitter about divorce than their spouses do. Ironically, it’s never the men who enjoy playing the field, whereas women appear to relish the experience and their renewed sense of power, as anyone who has ever experienced the dating scene can attest. In my humble experience, blind dates were created solely to allow women to wreak emotional havoc and get their revenge on the other half the species. Who ever would have imagined how many things a woman could find wrong with her date between mouthfuls of the meal that the male has paid for. When women suggest that they like to get the most out their blind dates, they really mean it. Picture her as a female Shylock in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and you’ll have a much more accurate understanding of what’s at stake.
Of course, male revenge is a dish best served cold. Some of my recently divorced or separated male friends take a false pleasure in working their buts off to get the woman to like them before dumping them. Personally, I want much better odds. Besides dumping women is totally counter productive. They might be unhappy or angry for a day or two; but the longer you are out of sight, the more they realized that they were saved from near disaster. The sociological evidence is irrefutable. There’s only one foolproof way to get even with women, and that’s to marry them.