A Durkheimian View of Social Violence: A Scientifically (In)correct Approach
Durkheim's law of social gravity (Collins, 1994) is not usually seen—or applied—in conjunction with the equally important “moral agency” role imputed by Durkheim to social groupings, as adaptive and constructive mechanisms of (socio)moral life.
Thus, what is frequently taken from Durkheim is the notion that little social integration through shared social norms (not necessarily reflected in the legal systems) is associated with general non- integrative behavior such as anomic suicides. Similarly, weak ties of the individual to the group in terms of specific kinds and degrees of acceptance of norms are associated with egotistic suicide. Yet, the regenerative capacity of social group morality by solidarity effects from its internal contacts and from its ritualistic intermittent “effervescence” is much less known and applied. Such regenerative capacity seems crucial for understanding the dynamics of la violencia.This is not the place to review Durkheim's law of gravity and laws of notion for moral life. For our purposes it suffices to recall that for many reasons, either endogenous to his historical trajectory model of social morality (such as division of labor) or exogenous to it (such as the siege and fall of biblical Jericho in the Durkheimian reference) (1951), social groups can lose their moral fabric and enter a state of aggravated anomie and egotism (leading in turn to mass suicides and other forms of non-integrative behavior.) The moral reconstruction of the group can take place, and will take place, given certain “functional requirements” (not derived from any “functionalistic” theory of society, but from a structure of logical causes and consequences, pertinent to each case). The group thus provides interindividual contacts (and its integrative multiplying effects), effervescence rituals (and their maintaining and/or generative morality), and its moral (re)construction tendencies, all derived from its social-gravity and moral motion forces.
Yet, the group is also subject to random and unpredictable contextual factors, which may or may not permit the operation of the moral forces it possesses, and thus may (or not) block the final and more permanent reconstruction and development of its moral life. If the larger context ends up blocking off moral (re)construction at a certain point in its trajectory, then the morals of the movements dissolve in the face of their “demonstrated” (by praxis) utopism back into an original egotism, from where, by moral mobilization and given adequate conditions, they re-take the path of moral re-construction. This is how the moral cycle of egotistic and altruistic violence can be perpetuated, as it is argued here for the Colombian case.Not always explicit, then, there is in Durkheim a historical trajectory model of moral life which relates, in a causal sense, relative states of social anomie (lack of group moral density), (socio)moral gravity tendencies, group moral generating and maintenance mechanisms (ritual, mechanical, and contractual), altruistic and egotistic character of collective consciousness, and specific observable patterns of individual behavior, such as suicide or violent crime. “Social bandits” and Hobsbawm's “primitive rebels” (1965) can be seen as illustrative instances of a critical turning point in Durkheim's implicit model. It should be indicated here that the historical trajectory model of Durkheim in The Division of Labor (1933) relating mechanic and organic solidarity to epochal changes in the division of labor is not the one referred to here, even although some of the genial insights from that work are consistent and make explicit some of the elements of the moral life model here utilized, especially the case of the multiplicative effect of individual contacts on group solidarity.
It is never an exaggeration to emphasize that “anomie,” “egotism,” and “altruism” here are social or group rather than individual categories, and that the observable forms of individual behavior are taken as individual-level consequences of the former.
Similarly, for the lesser-versed reader in Durkheim's moral integration theory, it should be clear that the connotation of the word “moral” in this context is quite specific and separate from other theoretical or commonsense meaning of the term. A lack of understanding of the specificity of the term here would lead to gross misinterpretations of the overall argument.Some important characteristics of such a model should be pointed out here:
a) The model as such is not meant to predict specific historical patterns, due to the unavailability of endogenous forms of inclusion of external and/or contextual factors, such as cultural patterns or global forces. The model is strictly a tool that contributes to understanding and predicting group patterns of moral behavior. Each case then has to be analyzed in conjunction with the presence of whatever exogenous factors, and taking into account the availability of logical functional requirements. No attempt is made here to specify the peculiar group traits and contextual location of the groups linked to la violencia, and which would make the analysis complete, even though these would be essential elements of a wider research agenda for la violencia.
b) From “a” above it follows that specific historical groups, like some peasant, craft and small-trade groups in Colombia, exhibit particular historical patterns of moral behavior, such as the—here argued—“circular” pattern of historical violence in that country. In Colombia, as we will show, egotistic and altruistic forms of violence end up exhibiting such a circular pattern. This happens as moral (re)construction trends within those specific groups (however limited or even primitive in their content), encounter, down the line, a “structural” blocking-off obstacle in the form of the power of the state. The power of the state counteracts and dissipates the moral reconstruction (revolutionary) trends, and thus sets the moral life of the (now) atomized aggregate back into the low end of the moral cycle.
At that point, due to the location of the groups within the larger socio-economic and political establishment, and in conjunction with their peculiar habitus and cultural makeup, those groups, and more importantly their morally dismantled offspring, begin their new (socio)moral ascension. In other words, with the dissolution of the originally “revolutionary” (or “for itself”) group (due to its long-run impotence in the face of the political and military power of the state), its moral fabric naturally disintegrates, followed by highly anomic and egotistic forms of violence, sometimes (and earlier here) referred to as “anarchistic violence.” As the group slowly begins to recompose itself by its moral gravity force, a new moral cycle re-starts, which, in turn, may or may not encounter again the same or new contextual or structural blocking-off forces.c) The marginal groups undergoing or undertaking again their moral aggregation, however, need not remain constant (and eventually do change), subject as they are to all kinds of internally differentiating contextual pressures, producing structural rearrangements and “moral contamination,” especially when the larger blocking obstacles prove insurmountable. Group-dividing ethical dilemmas may surface, like the Catholic church clergy participation in the Sandinista revolutionary state bureaucracy, or the alleged coalition of leftist guerrillas with illegal drug trade ventures. In such scenarios, moral cycles may be redesigned or interrupted as their social base (the original moral groups) changes. The demographic social base from where la violencia results has seemingly being very consistent for more than a century, disturbed only by the inter-regional and rural-urban migrations in the country.
d) The social-construction nature of moral life in Durkheim makes any given form of social behavior and social relation ethically relative to its moral context. Ethical relativism is avoided only by placing the analyst himself (herself) in a given moral context.
In relation to this, all classical social theories, including Marx, are in agreement. In this sense, the sociomoral evaluation of the Colombian guerrillas derived from Durkheim's model is not in principle more or less condemning than that of the state policies or the “bourgeois” opposite groups. Yet, the moral context of our day is a point of reference that certainly makes downright condemnable the egotistical and many instances of the altruistic violence practices there encountered. Our purpose here is not to articulate any such evaluation. A long-lasting peace in any genuinely social conflict, however, depends on the realization of the moral dynamics and moral context premises of moral evaluation. This essay ultimately aims at that kind of contribution.e) The blocking-off obstacles to group moral ascension can be external or internal. For instance, for many Latin American minds, excluded from participation in a meaningful way in the economic and political life of their nations (or in solidarity with those unable to participate), socialism constituted a alternative for the moral (re)construction of the national social bodies. Here it is timely to recall the Durkheimian view of socialism where, in spite of its “economic” content at the substantive level, it is still a moral phenomenon (and then a social fact), as it intends to submit the economic sphere to the public/normative realm of society’s norms and authority, in the hands of the state, as opposed to the liberal view of leaving the economic unregulated.
Now, for some time many believed that the industrial-financial capitalism of the first world was the basic (external) obstacle separating Latin American societies from the realization of their socialist development dreams. Yet, as it turned out, internal elements of the socialist project, particularly its bureaucratic and communal property inefficiencies, “demonstrated” by the fall of the Berlin wall and the whole collapse of the second world, proved to be more convincing objections and deterrents to the socialist way of economic and moral (re)construction.
Internal rather than external inconsistencies of the Soviet socialist moral project prevailed in 1989.Yet, external factors can account as well for the historical elimination of a moral group, as in the cited case of Jericho, where it was simply a prolonged military siege that provoked the fall of that ancient city, and which triggered massive suicides in the face of the physical impossibility of continuing the practice of moral life, as they defined it, on the part of its citizens (Durkheim 1951).
In the present essay we simply make an outline of the moral (re)construction model as can be applied to la violencia, but no attempt is made to evaluate possible or likely internal inconsistencies of the guerrillas’ project(s), nor to identify and evaluate “moral contaminations,” frequently alleged (especially related to drug trade involvement), that the model allows for. The overall question here in focus is a highly complex one, and we intend only to outline its analytical parameters.
f) In spite of the “deterministic” inputs of the model (factors known to operate in certain ways), and of the possibilities of logical prediction in conjunction with external factors and theoretical functional requirements, certainly (and because of those), there is a key place for human agency. Yet this aspect of the question is again out of our present scope.