Suicides....dogs and cats....hermits. Oh, my.

This one was really difficult to put together, so please struggle with it. I have let it ripen for a couple of weeks. That seems to help.

The number of suicides, in any country, is remarkably similar year-to-year. How can this possibly be??? If there are not enough suicides by December 15, is there a rush to the noose, or overdose, or Golden Gate Bridge? Suicide, in so many ways the ultimate act of self-centered individualism, turns out to be a form of social compliance. Who knew???

This is what Emile Durkheim, a 19th century French All-Star utility intellectual, called a "social fact". Alert Reader will have caught on already. But, surprise, I will somehow force myself to go on about it at great length.*

"Mind" is a social fact of the Durkheim sort. It exists outside the individual, just as suicide does. Mind-type stuff lives in language. We speak of people "making up their minds" about suicide. I just don't think it works this way. "Making up our minds" is a social fact, not an event located inside an individual. Someone may experience making a decision; however, like all mind-type facts, the net spreads far wider, and has to do with judgments by self and others, by the social reality of a person in a group. Removing oneself from the tribe is just that, and speaks to participating in the language of the group. Tricky stuff; we are not used to locating such things in a broad context.

Or, how about this: I don't rob banks. But, I have never decided not to rob a bank. Bank robbing is not part of my life, or my talk. Neither is suicide. And, if someone asked me why I don't rob banks, I would just shrug. I would probably say something about bank robbery being wrong. But, really,I don't know why I don't rob banks. Non-bank-robbery, for me is a social fact, not individual decision. Same way I don't kill myself. Social fact. I also never lived in a setting in which bank robber was discussed. But I have seen, as we all have, how something becomes a fad, even a dreadful fad. iPods were a benevolent fad. Drug overdoses, in some places, a malevolent fad. You can bet, though, that both iPods and drug overdoses started with one act, and the next step was talk. And so on.

There are certainly "group values" which live independent of any individual. In the US, typically we think of the first amendment rights as group values. Any particular person might disagree about any particular instance, but, this is what Durkheim would call social fact. I am always charmed by atomic individualists who apparently think that all social values begin and end with them...that there is no group life independent of each individual life. Just silly, but very American.

Where do social facts live? In my head? Nope -- if I am dead and gone, the social facts still exist.

Once again, we bump into a fundamental problem in thinking about "mind". We still want "mind" to be inside us, not part of social facts. I continue to think that social fact, and "my" mind, are located in our group utterances. I don't want to limit myself; any communication between entities is language. But let's limit ourselves to humans.

The minute we speak a language, say ma-ma or da-da, or, before that, howl or coo, we are declaring that we are a part of social fact. Language is where to find social fact; it exists only between people, in the same way that the first amendment does. And, so it is with mind.

But, let's backtrack. I'm thinking a lot about the suicide rate of dogs and cats. Suicide is apparently not part of the language between cats and dogs, not the way it is for us. Even terribly depressed dogs don't sit in the corner trying to decide whether to end it all. But, as any dog owner will attest, dogs often sit in the corner planning how to get the next meal. The meal is part of the language of the dog, then. Dog "minds" are severely limited; dog language, too. Odd coincidence.

I remember sitting at dinner with a group of friends. For some silly reason, I said that I would like the conversation to consist only of facts -- no judgments or opinions allowed. There was silence until someone told me to stuff it, and then the conversation went on, blissfully fact-free. They were right, I was wrong. And now, finally, I get it: people talk to hear and express judgments, not facts. They talk to place themselves in the tribe, in some place or other. When I requested a judgment free discussion, I was suggesting we dissolve the tribe. Not a good thing to do at a dinner party. I could have jumped up, denounced all their beliefs -- fine, I was just placing myself in a particular place in the tribe.

Not so easy to go out in the desert for 40 days.

Now, all we have to do is figure out how social fact relates to individual fact.

Probably the best way is to think of languages, and how some languages are shared by very, very small groups, and some very large groups. And how, when someone dies, what remains of them is the conversations they had with others. Social facts. We may live on, but we are not eternal.

But more later.....


*Durkheim also talked a lot about being alienated from social life, and the resulting state, which he called "anomie". This word was widely popular in the intellectual circles in the US in the 50s and 60s. And, also led to a very good joke:

"Remember, the last part of 'autonomy' is "anomie". Works better if read out loud. Well, I think it's funny. Really. Philosophy joke. Another one next time. Much funnier.