Last night during class Dr. Seligman asked a question that has remained unasked all semester: “Did you read this?” He didn’t of course ask me in particular, but the whole class. And when did he ask this? The one class for which I hadn’t read every single word assigned. In fact, I only read one article — a bit from Durkheim’s Sociology and Philosophy. It was a little embarrassing. “This won’t do,” he said when he saw how few hands went up for the Parson’s reading. “No, it won’t,” I though, and I immediately felt like an idiot for not having gotten my packet or readings earlier.
One of the things he talked about during class that wasn’t in the reading was Durkheim on suicide. Durkheim found within the notion and statistics of suicide a “proof” that society exists. There are those — Margaret Thatcher among them — even today who feel that we’re just a collection of individuals, that “society doesn’t exist.” (I won’t really comment on how shockingly medieval such a notion seems to me.) Durkheim points out that suicide is the most personal of acts imaginable. There is nothing more intimate and individual than the taking of one’s life. If there is no such thing as society, then the distribution within suicide rates should be completely random. There shouldn’t be different levels of suicide within different cultures — or between different groups of the same culture. However, there are. More Protestants tend to kill themselves than Catholics, for example. This shows that even in the most intimate of acts, there are social forces at work.
“Well, this is just illustrative of differences in theology,” one might argue. But it’s more than that, I think. Both Catholics and Protestants (by and large) believe that suicides go to hell — not much difference in theology there. But look at the differences in social stigma: a Catholic suicide won’t get a church funeral in some places; a Catholic suicide isn’t buried in the main, “blessed” portion of the cemetery but in a corner designated for the “sin” of suicide; Catholicism (though now a stereotype) plays more heavily on guilt than Protestantism. And so on. This shows that there is something at work other than the individual’s thoughts and desperation. It’s really quite ingenious.
Dr. Seligman said something else — more in passing than anything else — which stuck in my mind. He was discussing the fact that sociology and other social sciences deal with “facts” in a way that the humanities don’t. Facts, data, statistics — whatever. At any rate, he said, “If John [Clayton] were here, I would add, ‘Not like those in the humanities, who just tell stories.’”’ This leads me back to my thoughts concerning philosophy of religion versus sociology of religion. I really need to talk to someone about this to see if in the latter I could still deal with the issues of the former which interest me: knowledge, language, &c. I was going to talk to Dr. Seligman about this, but I still haven’t emailed him to set up some kind of appointment. I should do that today — this week at the very latest.