It was time for Durkheim in "Theorizing Religion" today, one of the thinkers I've been struggling to do justice to in past years - and one year I simply forgot! The problem is Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, his magnum opus on religion, which you really need more time than I can afford to really engage with; if you just include the introductory section students will wonder if he didn't already know what he was going to "find" in the accounts of Aboriginal Australia he goes on to analyze - and rightly so. Convincing students that there's value in the kind of primitivist view he offers is queasy-making too. So this year I skipped it, instead assigning to earlier works. One was the religion chapter from Suicide (1897), which I've used before and proves a good way to introduce the promise of sociology.
The other was an 1898 essay I remember being assigned my first semester in graduate school, "Individualism and the Intellectuals," Durkheim's response to the Dreyfus affair and one of the most inspiring celebrations of liberalism you can imagine. The argument, in a nutshell, is that as societies become more complicated, traditional religions will loses their capacity to ground us - but the need for religion, understood as a grounding collective experience, remains. A "religion of humanity" dedicated to the value of individuals is our best hope. It's an unexpected and interesting argument to got through, not least in this moment where we're hoping to face down the misanthropic cynicism of Trumpism. But I'd forgotten just how many religious buzzwords Durkheim manages to use in making his argument!
This ideal [individualism] goes so far beyond the limit of utilitarian ends that it appears to those who aspire to it as marked with a religious character. The human person, whose definition serves as the touchstone according to which good must be distinguished from evil, is considered as sacred, in what one might call the ritual sense of the word. It has something of that transcendental majesty which the churches of all times have given to their Gods. It is conceived as being invested with that mysterious property which creates an empty space around holy objects, which keeps them away from profane contacts and which draws them away from ordinary life. And it is exactly this feature which induces the respect of which it is the object. Whoever makes an attempt on a man's life, on a man's liberty, on a man's honour inspires us with a feeling of horror, in every way analogous to that which the believer experiences when he sees his idol profaned. Such a morality is therefore not simply a hygienic discipline or a wise principle of economy. It is a religion of which man is, at the same time, both believer and God. [emphasis added!]
