My old friend Emile

I have written a lot about Emile Durkheim over the years. I feel rather indebted to him for having aided me in getting a thesis accepted and approved in the discipline. His presence in my early academic work certainly helped legitimate some moves I was making (attacking politically correct social science, looking at religion in a way that didn’t start with rejection of any truth or utility it might contain) that otherwise might have made it harder for me to advance professionally in a discipline that was already then deeply infected with the prejudices that now fully drive just about everything it does.

I have now come to understand that he will be one of those thinkers I will periodically go back to for the rest of my life, to recall old insights, to see if I can discover something fresh or different from those previous readings, to convene, as it were, with an old friend whose opinion you respect and treasure, even if you don’t always agree with him. It’s funny how that happens. I remember imagining, 25 years ago in the midst of writing my thesis, that as soon as it was finished, I was moving on to the 20 other projects I had in my head then and I’d bid adieu to Durkheim.

He wouldn’t leave.

I’m thinking of him now because he became, more or less by act of God, the theoretical underpinning of a new course I’m teaching this semester on social problems. By ‘act of God,’ I mean I was sitting at the computer, trying to come up with a unifying structure for a course for which I had some substantive topics and readings but nothing to hold it all together, and in two minutes it all came to me. The substantive books I wanted them to read were Mark Regnerus’ Cheap Sex, a look at how what sociologists call ‘marriage markets’ have been revolutionized by new sexual moralities and practices, with some serious negative consequences, ironically, especially for women; Charles Murray’s Coming Apart, which examines the ‘two Americas’ class divide and chastises the elites for preaching values that are destroying the lower classes while in their lives acting in ways contrary to those values; and George Borjas’ We Wanted Workers, which just goes through the data on immigration to show that post-’65 immigrants as a group are assimilating less and harming the economic interests of significant numbers of Americans, especially poorer Americans, even while the people who claim to be advocates for those poor Americans angrily denounce people like Borjas who insist on saying true things about the topic as ‘racists.’

Without explicitly having to think about it, the things I wanted to give students as social problems fit Durkheim’s frame perfectly.

We spent the first week and a half of the course just reading snatches of old Emile, on how to sociologically distinguish normal and pathological social structures and facts, on human nature and our deep incapacity in many situations to act in ways most beneficial to us without external moral regulation, on how the need for social solidarity produces normative systems that we protect and, when they are contravened, avenge with vigorous energy, and on why ‘the sacred’ is a perfect scientific, theoretical term for describing the most important things, practices, and ideas of a human society.

I get asked to write ‘Intro to Durkheim’ things from time to time, and these days I turn them all down, in large part because I already did that, and my thinking hasn’t changed enough from the writing of that book to take the same topic on again. But there might be another engagement with him left in me, later down the line, should I get the time (he died only a few years older than I am at present, so one does have to remember what we’re guaranteed: nothing).

I find myself wondering what the current crop of students are making of the Durkheim view, given that every single one of them has already heard dozens of people in authority tell them nothing is pathological (and only bad people think some things are), morality is wholly your individual affair, and nothing is sacred.