JonRappoport January 9 2014
You may or not be interested in the sexual practices of Trobriand Islanders. You may or not be interested in what some tribe in the Amazon jungle is doing on a slow Thursday.
But what sociologists and anthropologists have written about such subjects is as much science as you sitting in a park and writing notes on what people are doing in the playground.
One of the founders of sociology, Emile Durkheim (1858-1917), coined the phrase “collective consciousness.” Durkheim insisted there were “inherent” qualities that existed in society apart from individuals. Exposing his own absurd theory, he went so far as to claim suicide was one of those qualities, as if the “phenomenon” were present beyond any individual choice to end life.
He wrote: “Man is the more vulnerable to self-destruction the more he is detached from any collectivity, that is to say, the more he lives as an egoist.”
In other words, according to Durkheim, the individual who rejects the norms of society must be wrapped up in himself in some morally repugnant way. There are no other alternatives.
In his book, The Division of Labour in Society (1893)(wikipedia), Durkheim spun moral conscience in the following fashion: “…Make yourself usefully fulfill a determinate function.” He cited this as a kind of command issued by collective consciousness. This is the presentation of the individual human as machine-cog.
From the mud of sociology’s beginnings, the long sordid history of the academic discipline brings us to something like this. Peter Callero, of the department of sociology, Western Oregon University, has written a book titled: The Myth of Individualism: How Social Forces Shape Our Lives (2013, 2nd Ed):
“Most people today believe that an individual is a person with an independent and distinct identification. This, however, is a myth.”