enthusiasm

           Emile Durkheim was an atheistic scholar who wrote some things that became very influential in the early days of the science of sociology. He did a study of suicide rates in France that was cited in sociology textbooks as a model of research. He wrote a very influential book with the title The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, published in 1911.

His book was a study of religious practices among aboriginal people in Australia. He never actually went to Australia, but he used written accounts by anthropologists of how aboriginal people lived. He came up with the following theory:

Aboriginal communities in Australia are held together by religious beliefs. Their beliefs and rituals are centered on totems, which are animals or people or objects that each group considers sacred to itself. For example, the group might consider the kangaroo sacred. The kangaroo is sacred only to that particular group. That group will not touch the animal, or harm it in any way. It will honor the animal symbolically. The group knows that other groups have different totems, and those groups  might kill and eat kangaroos, but that doesn't bother them. They are the people of the kangaroo, and for them the kangaroo is sacred.

Durkheim's theory was that the people are not really worshipping the kangaroo. They are symbolically acknowledging that something is greater than the individuals in the group. What Durkheim speculated was that what the people were worshipping was not the totem, but the group itself. It was the group that was superior to the individual, outside the individual, and demanding respect and deference. The totem could be anything. For each group of people, some object or person symbolized a force greater than the individuals in the group. Since the totem was greater than the individuals, the perception of the participants was that the totem is greater than the group itself.

What religion does for people is to provide them a symbolic way of expressing their dependence on something outside themselves. The religious attitude is "I am not master of my own universe. My universe has a master greater than me." The individualism of modern cultures teaches people to say "I am master of my own universe. There is nothing that can put limits on what I can or cannot do."

Note that in Durkheim's understanding, the individual cannot live by a religious attitude without the involvement of a group. I cannot be my own religion. I have to unite with other people, through ritual and other group activities, if I want to live with zest and enthusiasm.

The zest and enthusiasm idea was central to Durkheim's theory. Religion does not just provide limits on people. It creates moments of excitement that take people out of themselves and gives them reason to live everyday life with some excitement. Religious rituals interrupt everyday life with moments of group enthusiasm. People need that.

Our society does seem to have a lot of people who lack enthusiasm for living. People seem vulnerable to all kinds of victimization--online bullying, rip-offs in everyday exchanges with other people, violence within forms of intimate contact. There is nothing greater than the individual which can put limits on how people should treat each other. We are all our own religion. We are limitless, free, and wandering in search of enthusiasm.

Wikipedia says "The word [enthusiasm] was originally used to refer to a person possessed by God, or someone who exhibited intense piety. It implies that something outside the individual has taken hold of a person."

There seem to be moments in our society when people experience such possession. Concerts by famous musicians come to my mind. But that kind of enthusiasm is not enough to sustain everyday living. People have to go back to their everyday environments, which no longer provide weekly, even though much less intense, moments of being taken out of themselves. Just gathering among other people on a regular basis can do a lot for people. What religious communities do is to systematize such gathering and make it predictable and controllable. That is reassuring to people.

But it is on the international, geopolitical level that the absence of a sense of "something outside oneself" is most felt. When a nation or warlord does not see itself limited by something outside itself, there are no limits on behavior. International law, the Geneva Conventions, or the rules of war are no longer relevant to the group's behavior.

Durkheim's theory originally shook my religious faith. If my worship is really only worship of the group of people that surround me, is my faith based on illusion? Perhaps I am just rationalizing my own prejudices. But I reason that the sense that we humans have of a need for something beyond ourselves could be written into our constitutions just as much as my body is sustained by mechanisms written into my biology. Maybe those functions originated out of evolution, but evolution itself could have been authored by a force or being characterized by wisdom and love.

I can't prove that it was authored that way, but no one else can prove that it wasn't. I choose to believe that it was. That is my faith. That is what faith means. But it sure helps when other people share that faith with me, and share it on a regular basis.