Collective Effervescence

From the Wikipedia, on the mood-altering effect of crowd membership:

Collective effervescence (CE) is the energy formed by a gathering of people as might be experienced at a sporting event, a carnival, or a riot. This energy can cause people to act differently than in their everyday life.

Collective effervescence is the basis for Émile Durkheim's theory of religion as laid out in his 1912 volume Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. This book is largely based on studies of the aboriginal tribes.

Durkheim argues that the universal religious dichotomy of profane and sacred results from the lives of these tribe members: most of their life is spent performing menial tasks such as hunting and gathering. These tasks are profane. The rare occasions on which the entire tribe gathers together becomes sacred, and the high energy level associated with these events gets directed onto physical objects or people which then become sacred.

For Durkheim, religion is a fundamentally social phenomenon. The beliefs and practices of the sacred are a method of social organization. According to Durkheim:

'god and society are one of the same… the god of the clan… can be none other than the clan itself, but the clan transfigured and imagined in the physical form of a plant or animal that serves as a totem.'

Which goes a long way towards explaining the behavior of English football louts and the fervent, violent and downright bizarre way in which they worship football teams. The players themselves are idolized, in the way that religions hold up prophets or people of special sanctity, but the main focus is on the much vaguer concept of the team itself, removed from any particular player or manager. It's less about the football and more about the louts themselves, an 'I am' statement to define in-group and 'other'. It's almost exactly the same as a tribal identity, with blind adherence to conformity with the in-group that has members voluntarily adpoting a tribal dress, tribal chanting, ritual, assuming of 'moral' superiority and discouraging intergroup socializing and courtship.

When there is conflict between groups, often involving unprovoked violence by a mob against supporters of a different team, or between two mobs directly, both sides will assume all beliefs they have and any actions they take are moral and right, while the actions of the other are despicable and immoral. And both sides are correct, because the groups morality is based on the sacred they have created in their own image. It is a rare coincidence that behavior which is moral is also behavior that is ethical in humanist terms.

Some overpaid, coked up athlete kicks a ball into a net - a completely arbitrary action with no value or significance to the world - results in badge-wearing chavs seriously assaulting some other badge-wearing chav, or even a random kid wearing the 'wrong' clothes, and feeling completely morally justified within themselves for doing so.

This is a good model for nationalism and religion in all their forms, and highlights the dubious nature of 'morals' espoused by religious or patriotic people.

/me steps down from soap box

See also: Thought terminating cliche

Cites: Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, 1912 ISBN 0-02-907937-3

Created 2007-02-25 23:54:43 by 109 and filed under stuff