Religion and Education as Social Forces: Durkheim on the ...



Religion and Education as Social Forces: Durkheim on the Origin and Development of Mental LifeJ?rn Bjerre, PhDDepartment of Education,University of Aarhusjbje@dpu.dkReligion and Education as Social Forces: Durkheim on the Origin and Development of Mental LifeThis paper is on Durkheim. It is about what may be gained by reading Durkheim from an evolutionary perspective. It is not my intention to Darwinize Durkheim, as I’ve heard it expressed. There is no need to do that, since Durkheim already took Darwin’s contribution into account. In fact, Durkheim was well aware that his own research agenda only touched upon what he - in his lectures on philosophy - called “one chapter of the famous doctrine that follows from Darwin’s hypothesis – evolutionism” (Durkheim, 1871] 2010, p. 110). This chapter to which Durkheim refers is the chapter on mental life. With respect to the evolution of mental life, this is Durkheim’s argument: Darwin’s model is not adequate. Mental life follows different rules than biological life. It is a force in its own right, a force that has causal effects on its environment.In my view, Durkheim makes an important point: the origin of the human mind cannot be explained by natural forces, and the human mind did not evolve through the process of variation, selection, and heritage supposed by Darwin.Durkheim was an exponent of what today’s scholars call “a big bang theory” of mental life (Leary & Buttermore, 2003, pp. 385-389). According to this theory, culture is not just a factor in the environment, as supposed by contemporary, so-called second-generation Social Darwinists (Machalek & Martin, 2004; Dunbar, 2007). According to the big bang theorist, something happened; something intervened in biological evolution, which took evolution to a different level. According to Durkheim, what happened was religion.So, what I’m presenting here is Durkheim’s theory of how social forces emerged with religious experience and how mental life originated through this process of emergence. In my view, Durkheim’s understanding social forces and how these forces influenced the process of natural selection is an important contribution to the understanding of human evolution. Mental life is a consequence not of natural or social forces alone but of the encounter - the conflictual but dynamic encounter - of natural and social forces, as discussed in his concept of homo duplex.However different this model is from Darwin’s, the task, in my view, is to reconcile the two different models.In the following, I will focus on Durkheim’s model, his theory of the origin and development of mental life, which I claim was developed parallel with his sociology of religion and education. During the years Durkheim worked on The Elementary Forms, he frequently lectured on education. A parallel reading of Durkheim’s writings on religion and education will demonstrate that Durkheim’s study of religion and education contributes to a more general investigation of the origin and development of mental life. Mental life was generated by religious rituals, but with the development of society and its store of knowledge, education came to play an important role as the institution through which the structures of mental life that were generated were stored, retrieved, and passed on. Education, as I will argue, came to play the societal equivalent of genetics in biology. In the following, I shall present Durkheim’s concept of social force and, then, account for how Durkheim applies the concept of social force to the domain of religion and education.Durkheim’s Concept of Social ForceLike Darwin, Durkheim attributes a rather significant role to what I choose to call the affective system (Fisk, 2005, pp. 162-63). But Durkheim argues that, while affects in themselves might be the consequence of evolution, the arousal of affects and affective responses generates forces that cannot be reduced to their components; because they are forces in their own right - social forces.While indeed being a part of the natural and biological world, the cause-and-effect structure of social force could not be explained by either Newton’s theory of natural forces or Darwin’s theories of biological forces. Because social forces are forces of a different type, science needs a different type of model to be able to account for them. This is basically why Durkheim was convinced that a sociological approach was a necessary part of the scientific study of human forms of life. According to Durkheim, social forces are forces generated by the action and interaction of individuals with each other – forces that are amplified when coordinated into conformed patterns and symbolized, as they are in ritual behaviour. In The Elementary Forms, Durkheim explains (1) the emergence of this force, (2) the development of religion as a social institution, and (3) the process of social causation through which social reality affects biological life. Affects, Mind, and Symbols In order to account for Durkheim’s theory of the origin of mind, I shall speak of an interplay among three systemic structures: Affects, mind, and symbols.According to Durkheim’s theory, the system of affects is not only transformed by evolutionary variation and selection but by a type of experience that is different from all other experiences caused by the environment – that is, the experience of the group. Thus, the process of evolution does not proceed by adaptation to the natural environment alone but also by adaptation to the social environment created by affects and aroused by the dynamics of group life and the experience of being in a group. According to Durkheim, these dynamics, when aroused, become social forces – that is, forces that do not only affect people from the outside but also from the inside. Mental life evolved from the correspondence between internal responses caused by group dynamics and a symbolisation of these internal states; it was this correspondence that caused an opening of the inner representational life of man. Mental life emerged as the inner experience of symbolically-fixed, collectively-generated affects. Durkheim accounts for this process in chapter 7 of Book II of The Elementary Forms in which he discusses the notion of mana (pp. 221-22):The group structure ‘awakens in its members the idea of external forces that dominate and exalt it’Feelings evoked by one spread contagiously to the other.This contagion… is much more complete and more pronounced whenever the symbol is something simple.The symbol takes the place of the thing, and the emotions aroused are transferred to the symbol. The symbol is treated as reality. The individual feels ‘lifted above himself’ by this reality.In my interpretation, Durkheim is accounting for the process in which mental life originated in a process through which social forces superimposed themselves on biological life.A System Theory of EmergenceI will recapitulate Durkheim’s description by interpreting it as an early system theory of the emergence of mind. The mind emerged as independent reality or system in response to the dynamic interplay between two other independent systems: As the contagion of aroused affects became reified by symbols, a second, systemic reality was generated: the symbolic system. And it was out of the interaction between the affective and the symbolic system that the mental faculties of man were generated as a systemic reality of the mind in the brain. Mental life may be interpreted as a systemic response of the organism to social interaction as it is perceived through a resonance between the affective and symbolic system. The origin of the mind is explained as the implosion of the organism as a response to social forces. The Idea of ‘Force’ in Religion and EducationAlthough Durkheim can account for the social forces involved in the emergence of mental life by studying religion, it is in his lectures on the evolution of educational thought and moral education that Durkheim demonstrates how mental life is stored, retrieved, and passed on. With the emergence of education, we should not only see the emergence of an entirely new social system, as Durkheim clearly states, the central aspect of religion and education is the same, in the sense that both represent the moral power of society (p. 11-12). Through the development of society, the function of structuring, storing, and passing on social knowledge emerged out of religion as a more and more independent system of education. In his lectures on The Evolution of Educational Thought, we find Durkheim’s most complex analysis of this process.The Development of Mental LifeDurkheim’s lectures on The Evolution of Educational Thought served as an introduction to pedagogy. However, they contain much more than a mere introduction. Durkheim is investigating the origin and evolution of a certain type of thought and morality that had come to influence modern society in general. Since I don’t have time to go into Durkheim’s complex account here, I shall, therefore, focus on the outcome: Theoretical or scientific culture.In The Evolution, Durkheim demonstrates that education, like religion, had the function of promoting and justifying ideals, which could serve as general models of behaviour in society. Both religion and education give societal ideals and values concrete form by organizing systems of ritualized behaviour, which aims at transforming individuals from behaving according to biological laws into behaving according to social laws.When Durkheim speaks of the teacher, he argues that the teacher must represent the essential moral ideals of society, and he or she must, therefore, stand between his or her students and society, just as the priest stands between god and man.The schoolmaster, feeling that he was speaking in the name of a superior reality elevated himself, invested himself with an extra energy. If we do not succeed in preserving this sense of self and mission for him… we risk having nothing more than a moral education without prestige and without life. (p. 11) Durkheim focuses on the feeling the teacher must be able to create by representing a moral reality that surpasses him as well as the central ideas that are passed on (1961, p. 155). In Durkheim’s understanding of education, we observe the same systemic reality that we observed in The Elementary Forms – but now in a very different form: - symbolic reality consists of ideas, not material symbols - interaction consists of language rituals - not bodily, affectual rituals - transcendent reality consists of the history of mental life, not extra-empirical beings.What this shows is that, as education takes over the function of religion, the affectual response system is sensitized; it now becomes a matter of relating feelings to ideas rather than letting feelings connect with movements, while creating a collective effervescence.Theoretical KnowledgeHistorically, this sensitized process takes form as society and, thus, mental life, which originated in religion, develop in complexity, differentiate, and new types of knowledge evolve. The role of storing, structuring, and passing information on becomes an increasingly independent institution. Through the development of education as an independent institution, mental life undergoes an important change. It is forced to become theoretical. Thus, not only science but education forces a development of mental life. While social forces may in themselves create social learning from experience, as this social learning becomes structured, stored, and passed on, it changes form. This is what I mean when I argue that it becomes the social equivalent of genetics. In order to structure and code mental life, certain rules must be applied that are different from the rules of social learning. As social learning becomes structured, stored, and systematically spread, it becomes more and more theoretical. So, the evolutionary force of education is connected to a process in which theoretical knowledge takes the place of sense perception, experience, social learning, and narrative. An Evolutionary Interpretation of Durkheim’s Sociology of Religion and EducationThe result of reading Durkheim’s work from an evolutionary perspective may be summarized in the argument that it was Durkheim’s hypothesis that (1) the origin of mental life was to be found in and around religious ritual and that (2), as the reproduction of mental life expanded in complexity, the need for a social institution that was responsible for the structuring, storage, and transmission of mental life evolved. This is basically what education always was, and what education still is today. Education is the social equivalent of genetics. Both are systems that structure inheritance.Just as genetics may account for the patterns of biological inheritance from parent to offspring, education in Durkheim’s definition is accounted for as the institution by which social inheritance from one generation to the next takes form. It may be argued here that I’m presenting Durkheim as a meme theorist. I’m not an expert on meme theory, but from what I can read (Blackmore, 1999), the important difference is that meme theory focuses on the dissemination aspect of genetics; it focuses on the passing on and copying of ideas. Memes are cultural units, which spread, like genes, in a virus-like manner. Durkheim’s focus is on the aspect of inheritance. This parallels genetics in quite another sense than meme theory, since genetics is also about storing, structuring, and passing on information, which is how Durkheim views education: the cultivation of certain mental, physical, and moral understandings.According to Durkheim, society does not spread like a virus; it constitutes itself in the social use of maxims, rules, laws, and other forms of authority, as well as the conceptual structures through which the world is perceived and bodily postures through which man expresses him- or herself.As argued by Durkheim, it is the function of education to arouse in the child a certain number of physical, moral, and mental states; and since he says that society can survive only if there exists among its members a sufficient degree of homogeneity, education becomes the central institution, because education perpetuates and reinforces this homogeneity by fixing in the child, from the beginning, the essential similarities that collective life demands.These physical, moral, and mental states that are passed on through education, Durkheim argues, are the product of a cultural evolution, which carries biological evolution within it as an echo [comme l’écho de tout l’évolution biologique dont ils sont l’aboutissement]. ConclusionSumming up, it is the argument of this paper that both Durkheim’s theory of religion and his theory of education should be read as contributions to a more general theorizing about the evolution of mental life. Thus, whereas the symbolic structuring of society originated within religion, the function of religion, as it developed, was progressively taken over by the educational system. Returning to The Elementary Form, I argue, therefore, that Durkheim did not set out to understand religion for its own sake. Durkheim turned to religion in the same way that Darwin turned to the fossil records in order to understand the laws of biological life. Durkheim believed that understanding religion held the key to understanding the laws of social life. Understanding religion was viewed as the precondition for modern man’s understanding of himself and for meeting the challenges of secular society – among other things, in order to make educational reforms. This key was the dynamic of social forces.This analysis of the concept of force may be summed up by arguing that Durkheim’s work may be seen as a contribution to a larger scientific agenda of understanding the forces affecting and directing social behaviour. Whereas Newton’s theory described natural forces and Darwin’s theory described the forces of evolution, Durkheim’s contribution begins accounting for the laws according to which social forces affect human behaviour. References:Bellah, R. N. (1973). Durkheim on Morality and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Bjerre, J. (forthcoming). The Origin of the Inner Voice. Durkheim, Christianity and the Greeks. Journal of Classical Sociology, 13.Blackmore, S. (1999). The Meme Machine. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Darwin, C. ([1871] 2010). The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. New York: Dover Publications, Inc.Dunbar, R.I.M. 2007. Evolution and the Social Sciences. History of the Human Sciences, 20, pp. 29-50,Durkheim, E. (2004). Durkheim’s Philosophy Lectures. Notes from the Lycee de Sens Course 1883-84. Neil Gross & Robert Alun Jones (Eds.). New York: Cambridge University Press. Durkheim, E. (1977). The Evolution of Educational Thought. London: Rutledge and Kegan Paul.Durkheim, E. ([1912] 1995). The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. New York: The Free Press.Durkheim, E. ([1922] 1995). Education et sociologie. Paris : PUF.Durkheim, E. ([1938] 1990). L’évolution pédagogique en France. Paris : PUF.Durkheim, E. (1961). Moral Education. New York: Dover Publications, Inc.Fisk, J.S. (2005). Defending the Durkheimian Tradition. Religion, Emotion and Morality. Ashgate Publishing Company: Burlington.Leary, M.R. & Buttermore, N.R., (2003). The Evolution of the Human Self: Tracing the Natural History of Self-awareness. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 33, 365-404.Mithen, S. (1995). Understanding Mind and Culture: Evolutionary Psychology or Social Anthropology? Anthropology Today, Vol. 11, No. 6 (Dec., 1995), pp. 3-7.Rawls, Anne W. (2004). Epistemology and Practice: Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sanderson, S. K. 2008. The Impact of Darwinism on Sociology. An Historical and Critical Overview, Chapter 1, pp. 9-25, in Heinz-Juergen Niedenzu, Tamas Meleghy, and Peter Meyer, (eds.), The New Evolutionary Social Science: Human Nature, Social Behavior, and Social Change. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers.Turner, J. H. (2001). The Origins of Positivism: The Contributions of Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer, in: Ritzer, Georg & Berry Smart (Eds.). Handbook of Social Theory (pp. 30-42). Sage Publications: London. ................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download