Robin:

Hello, Agnes.

Agnes:

Hi, Robin.

Robin:

We're gonna talk about Durkheim and the division of labor.

Agnes:

Yes. We're gonna talk about his book called The Division of Labor in Society, which I suggested that you read, um, because it's ... He struck me as somebody who is thinking on your level, at your scale, about, um, both the progress of civilization and, um, s- what social forces are and how they work.

Robin:

It certainly seems like he has pointed out a key thing that happened over, you know, recent millennia. A trend, uh, especially lately, of the switch between what he calls mechanical and organic solidarity. Um, and he says basically division of labor is what's causing-- increasing division of labor is what's causing this new heightened organic solidarity. And, and he seems roughly right that long ago there wasn't as much of a division of labor, and so people more related by living very similar lives, and then law and culture basically enforced a similarity and gave them a feeling of bonding by feeling similar. That is, they felt the people around them agreed with them, and they felt that they lived pretty much similar lives, and that bound them together in a strong way. And then when somebody violated some of their sense of how they should all do things, they had a really strong reaction to that, a very negative reaction, and they're willing to create and enforce pretty strict laws expressing their strong emotions about how they didn't like people to deviate from their sense of how they should live together. And then over time, the division of labor produces differences. Different people do different things in society, and that reduces this mechanical solidarity and replaces it with what he calls an organic solidarity. And it is certainly true that, I guess, then the morals you have with respect to other people are less about just the concrete, you know, reality of living the same lives, and more about some abstract principles. Uh, morality and law become more abstract, and that's a trend over, you know, certainly accelerated in the last few centuries. Um, I wonder to what extent is this alternative kind of solidarity that you have with the division of labor actually solidarity at all? That was m- I was wondering. That is, I, you can certainly see the strength of emotion of the mechanical solidarity in terms of people just get really mad about other people breaking laws. They feel tied and bound together with people who are like them and live li- lives like them. And then maybe foreigners seem like scary, strange things 'cause they live different lives. But in our world today, we, we trade with everybody in the world. Are, do we, are we feeling solidarity with everybody in the world because we are exchanging with everybody in the world? Is, is there no outside anymore?

Agnes:

Um, okay, so let me, like, add a few things to your summary of the book. I don't think Durkheim thinks that, um, organic, um, that this kind of organic solidarity, like, does produce the substitute for what we have with the mechanical. I think he thinks it relies on it and, in fact, there's a problem. He thinks that solidarity overall decreases, and it's, it creates a big problem. So I don't think he's asserting that it just substitutes for it. Um, but just a few things, but overall I think it's similar.

Robin:

Please.

Agnes:

Um, but so one thing is that he distinguishes between two kinds of law.

Robin:

Yeah.

Agnes:

Roughly speaking, something like criminal law and something like contract law.

Robin:

Yep.

Agnes:

And those are not his words, but ... And he thinks that criminal law is the law that, um, most directly pertains to mechanical solidarity, which is the solidarity of the group that stays together by being sim- similar.

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

And the punishment sort of expresses the wrath of the group against the violation of its norms, and that at the stage where mechanical solidarity is dominant, a lot of law is religious law. Um, and that religious law is part of the criminal law. Um, and then in a, um, uh, in, as organic solidarity, um, starts to dominate over mechanical solidarity, you get more of the other kind of law, um, contract law, um, which is less about, um, punishment-

Robin:

Outrage

Agnes:

... more just about restitution. Um, uh, and okay, so that's just one of his points.

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

Um, uh, uh, and I-

Robin:

And I think that's fair in that I think much of modern law is dealing with all these complications which show up because of the division of labor, and then we have administrative law and contract law and things like that, and they're just things that kinda need to happen to have things function. But it's not because ordinary people feel this strong passion about them. They're not going into the courts and just being really mad and trying to, you know, punish people who violated them. They mostly don't even know about them. Mo- most people don't know mo- many, most of these complicated contract and administrative rules, but some people know about them and think they need to be there to function. And other people have accepted that, but, uh, they don't f- you know, so that's why they don't really have the strong punitive character.

Agnes:

Right. And, um, another claim that he makes that I thought was just interesting, uh, that jumped out at me in the rereading that I just did today, is that, um, one feature of the mechanical society is that it is segmentary. So it has, like, these-- it's everybody's similar to everyone else, but they also group into these clumps, and you can lose the segments and the whole thing's still okay. Like an earthworm, you can chop it in half- And then that is something that changes with organic solidarity. Um, so-

Robin:

Right

Agnes:

... a society can be halved, the old kind-

Robin:

Right

Agnes:

... could be halved and it would be fine. But if you lost your entire, um, farming half or something, you'd be screwed. Um-

Robin:

Yeah, I thought it was a insightful but sort of paradoxical observation that in this world of tight bonding and, um, mechanical solidarity, if you had a warrior or something, he could just leave the society and go to another one and swap in pretty easily. So their solidarity wasn't a loyalty that kept people together necessarily, because-

Agnes:

Right

Robin:

... but whereas with the division of labor, you really need everybody to have their separate parts, and if somebody were to leave and leave that spot open, you'd be more in trouble, and so now there's more of a reason to prevent people from leaving or to entice them to stay under this less passionate form of solidarity.

Agnes:

Right. So I thought that was significant because what it does is suggest a difference in kind in what it is for people to be glued together to one another. Like, there's a way in which they were glued together with a stronger force. In mechanical solidarity it is a stronger force, but it's not irreplaceability, and you get something like irreplaceability with organic solidarity. And that is, you very much feel that that's the model that people have for having respect in their jobs or something, is that like-

Robin:

Right

Agnes:

... nobody else could do what I do, or not quite the way I do it, or whatever. That's-

Robin:

They need me

Agnes:

... Durkheim would say that that's, that's part of the model of organic solidarity. It's part of how it works. Um, okay, so I think the first-- Before we ask whether it's solidarity at all, I think we have to evaluate his hypothesis about how this change happened. So he spends a while arguing against, uh, another hypothesis, which is just, um, oh, organic solidarity offered people rewards that made them happier, and so they just moved in the direction of greater happiness. And he claims that, you know, the, the desires that are getting satisfied by organic soli-solidarity are mostly generated by it, and, um, that, um, the people who are gonna benefit are not the people who are, um, going in for the change. And so his claim is that we have to explain it actually at a group level rather than saying that given individuals had, like, incentives to move in the direction of organic solidarity out of self-interest.

Robin:

I, I don't remember where exactly, but later on in the book, I believe he introduces what the usual economist story would be, which may be why he didn't focus on this topic so much, which is just as new technologies appear that make it possible to divide labor further, it produces more productivity, and that's a pretty irresistible force for local people to switch to a more productive versions even if they aren't happier. And that he roughly says that's one of the motive forces of the increasing in, of the division of labor, is just finding more, better ways to divide labor.

Agnes:

Right, but, um, uh, he doesn't think people have some kind of inherent drive towards that kind of productivity. And also, new technologies don't just appear out of nowhere. That's not just a thing that happens. And he has a theory that would explain why it wouldn't tend to happen in, under organic solidarity, right? So he has this discussion about how when people live in these communities, um, like, the young people are governed by the older people who don't want any kind of change. It's when people start to move to towns, which are-

Robin:

Yeah

Agnes:

... peopled by, like, immigrants, that the young people can start doing things in new ways. But s- And, and thus you're gonna get-

Robin:

Yes

Agnes:

... innovation in technology, whatever. But the point is, you have to explain how all that arises. And, uh, uh, yeah, he, in a couple of different places, and I wanted us to talk about this as well, he pushes back against a certain, um, uh, economist way of thinking about this. Um, in ter- a general-- I think he thinks economists in general have a bad theory of how societies work. We'll get to that. But before we get to that, uh, I, I just wanted to examine his alternative hypothesis, which is not that, um, people move towards organic solidarity because they're individually better off with that move. They're individually worse off, in his view. Um, but they move, they can't help but move that way, on his view, as society becomes, um, more, like, dense. Uh, as you get more people and more different encounters-

Robin:

Right

Agnes:

... um, his theory is-

Robin:

But-

Agnes:

Sorry, go ahead.

Robin:

But density would only happen due to some growth in something. So we would have to have some other force to produce a higher density. But yes, higher density also naturally produces a higher division of labor. That is, bigger cities tend to have more kinds of restaurants, et cetera. Standard story that bigger density just naturally-

Agnes:

Well, he has a, he has a story. He has a causal story. He doesn't think it's just a straightforward thing. That is, the-- You're, you've pointed to a cor-correlation, but he has a causal story about exactly how higher density produces more division of labor, and I think it's one of the most interesting claims. That's right, it's one of the most interesting claims in the book. Which is that if you just take two organisms that are, like, in the same space, they, um, and are competing for some resource, they, um, either have to find out how to stay out of each other's way so that the one uses, like, one side of the rock and the other uses the other side of the rock, or whatever the one eats, like, stuff that's low down and the other eats stuff that's l- s- sort of, like, so that they're, they're, they might be physically proximate, but they are, they actually, uh, are consuming a diff- a slightly different resource. Or they move away from each other and they become physically distant from each other. So that in nature, when you're competing over a resource, those are your only two options. But he thinks that human beings, when they compete over resources, when you have, like, um, two barbers or something in the city n- not big enough, uh, you know, to sort of sustain that, what you will get is maybe one of them wins out, but he maybe wins such a big market share that he can't quite handle it and the other becomes a subordinate. So, and he thinks that happens, that is that kind of subordination- Um, happens because, um, only if antecedently there was some kind of a bond between them that allowed them to not take the option of moving away from each other. And th- this is important because it's a way in which the, the organic solidarity is predicated on the preexistence of the mechanical solidarity. So he thinks if the two creatures started out in a bond of mechanical solidarity, then when they start competing, there's gonna be this option opened for, um, for it not to be that, like, the victor takes all, but for a, some kind of a subordination relationship and a, like, division of functions to emerge.

Robin:

So if this barber can have a barber boss and a barber subordinate who then differentiates somewhat in their role in this now larger barber enterprise-

Agnes:

Right

Robin:

... that sounds like a productive efficiency story that it, they weren't ef- as efficient. They couldn't in fact have two separate barbers at their single barber scale, but they could have a single enterprise that had the two of them because that enterprise was more efficient by having a new division of labor within it. Um-

Agnes:

I, I think he just would deny that people gravitate towards efficiency universally always.

Robin:

But, I mean-

Agnes:

That is, I think it's not a good explanation.

Robin:

But I, I will just accept his overall claim that in fact societies can't just exist because there's, say, some efficient exchange that's possible. There does have to be some degree of sympathy and solidarity and, you know, connection among the people. That, that's one of his main... He, he likes to dump on Spencer a lot apparently. Uh, I guess was prominent at the time, and so he's really complaining that Spencer is neglecting these other important processes, which to his credit, he elaborates much more in the rest of his career, and, and is, you know, has done a great job on helping you understand how in fact societies bind together through some of these other processes that aren't in the usual economist's, uh, you know, set of mechanisms. But, um, still, uh, it seems to me, you know, we can, we can see both of these things. That is, uh, that is corporations can exist because people don't just get really mad that somebody's the boss and they're not the boss. They find ways to, you know, get along together, and the ability of people to get along together is clearly part of what allows the division of labor to happen. Uh, but-

Agnes:

Right. So let me read a quote that I think is important. So this is where he's criticizing not just Spencer, but sort of the utilitarian point of view, which he sometimes associates with economists. Um, "If mutual interest draw men, draws men closer..." I'm sorry, I don't have a page number because I-

Robin:

Okay

Agnes:

... copied them into another document. "If mutual interest draws men closer, it is never more than for a few moments. It can create between them only an external bond. In the fact of exchange, the various agents involved remain apart from one another, and once the operation is over, each one finds himself again reassuming his self in its entirety. The different consciousness are only superficially in contact," blah, blah, blah. Uh, "In fact, if we look to the heart of the matter, we shall see that every harmony of interests conceals a latent conflict or one that is simply deferred, for where interest alone reigns, as nothing arises to check the egoisms confronting one another, each self finds itself in a relation to the other on a war footing, and any truce in this perpetual antagonism cannot be of long duration. Self-interest is indeed the least constant thing in the world." So his thought is this idea, this, like, cheerful economist of idea of, oh, like, oh, gains from trade, is we need something to draw people together and to hold them together that is more powerful than the thought that a given interaction is in your interest. And, um, I think he is not gonna deny that if you have that, you are then are gonna be able to get this, uh, gains from trade stuff going, right? Um, but he thinks the whole, like, theory, the whole discipline of economics is like a sub-discipline of a certain kind of sociology. It's like economics explains how people in organic societies can relate to each other because of special features of the organic societies. And the thing that you said earlier about, it's relevant to the thing about the bosses, right? Which is that Durkheim, um, draws to our attention this fact, I guess, that people didn't used to be resentful of their bosses. That is-

Robin:

Right

Agnes:

... before, like, the 16th century or something.

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

Um, people felt that their bosses had their best interests at heart, and you didn't have this kind of push towards, um, rebellion, unionization, et cetera, that, um, you know, then becomes a major force i- through the Industrial Revolution. And so the thought is, like, at the early stages of the division of labor, there was still enough affective bond to, for love to be part of what, um, governed the relationship between the employer and the employee, and over time that erodes. And that's very significant from his point of view because he thinks something else is gonna have to... We can't just keep eroding and eroding. Society's falling apart.

Robin:

Except we have just keep eroding. Society hasn't fallen apart. But, um, so I'm really struck by how, like, he really insists that, say, the economist view is missing something important, and he says, "Here's the solidarity thing. It's important. It happens when people are like each other and near each other."

Agnes:

Yeah.

Robin:

And that it has all these important abilities to make other things work, but he has almost nothing else to say about it other than it happens when people are like each other and near each other. And the, he thinks it's really important, but he really can't say much more about it. And then later on in his career he goes on to say more, but I think it's just really remarkable how much he's trying to get out of this one observation. ... really that there is this thing that happens when people are near each other and f- are similar to each other, that they like each other enough to let stuff happen.

Agnes:

I think that he thinks that that observation is similar to the observation of how, you know, if a baby that has, like, small hands eats food, the hand will grow bigger. Like, the cell-

Robin:

Yeah

Agnes:

... right, you'll get more. Somehow the food-

Robin:

Yeah

Agnes:

... gets turned into hand, and you get more hand, and that's part of what it is for the baby to be one thing, to be a certain kind of unity. That you- when you add stuff to it, you don't just slap some food onto the hand and get, like, hand food. You just, you get bigger hands. And I think that, um, so, like, I think you're right that there, there could be more done to explain that, and I agree with you. That's part of what he's gonna do in his... Like, what he says somewhere along here is like, look, any time the group has any belief that is important to itself as a collectivity, that's religion, right? So, and, and that's what he's gonna develop-

Robin:

Right

Agnes:

... his book on religion. But I think that the... H- here's a quote, um, that I really like that pertains to this point. "A society made up of an infinite scattering of disparate individuals which an overgrown state attempts to limit and restrain constitutes a veritable sociological monstrosity." So his thought is that there is, like, this, um, that, that, um, people forming groups is a natural thing. It's natural in the same way that the cells of your body, like, forming into hands is natural. And, um, and that in some sense that's all you gotta say for a certain kind of explanation, is it's natural for people to, um, um, combine in these ways.

Robin:

So there's a set of related observations about humans as social animals-

Agnes:

Yeah

Robin:

... compared to other animals. So there is this common observation that most animals aren't actually very suitable for domestication. It's only a limited number of mammals who can be domesticated, and it's the mammals who have certain kind of social groups such that they tend to defer to their, uh, high-status members of their group and tend to get along with them such that humans can slip in and be basically the high-status member of a group, and then domesticate the animals. But most animals won't accept that, because they're too focused on their ego and fighting to basically allow their group to sort of coordinate on larger scales and just go along with a larger... way of the crowd does. So humans are like herd animals in this way, and that's, I think, what Durkheim is pointing to. This trade wouldn't work if humans weren't also herd animals that, in fact, get along with each other as a herd and are willing to defer to leaders of the herd in ways that most other animals aren't. And then that sort of herd of humans can then start to do division of labor, but if the division of labor were to undermine our herdness, then we might have a problem, and that's, as you say, what he seems to be worried about, but it doesn't seem like... I, I guess his predictions are, what, more suicide or something? I mean, you know, since it's been a century and a half, it doesn't seem like... W- we have been continuing with division of labor, going wild with it.

Agnes:

I think a lot of people would say our social world is deeply unhealthy. People are unhappy. Fertility is dropping. Sex is dropping. Um, there's a lot of, like, uh, p- political polarization, what- Like, I don't think people would find his claim that society is going to be falling apart to be such a terrible prediction of the world that we live in. And especially if you keep in mind that it's like, um, you might say, well, we're not at war. That is, we are maybe at war, uh, with some other country-

Robin:

Right

Agnes:

... involved in those wars, but we're not all at war with one another. But he thinks that, like, war is, you know, that, in a way, if we were all together at war against some other country, like, that would actually be a sign of solidarity. So it's not-

Robin:

Right

Agnes:

... in the absence of war that you're gonna see this solidarity. Um, it's going to be, from his point of view, it's, it's gonna be in a certain kind of moral sense, and he thinks, like, the new frontier is social justice and, uh, morality, which we're gonna talk about in a minute. But before we get to that, I want to talk about the herd thing. Um, 'cause I, I do wanna talk about... I mean, the, the, the ending of the book is very striking, right? Um, where he's like, um, basically it's like we all have to be social justice warriors. That's the ending of it. It's kind of amazing. Um, but, um, okay, so, like, the deferring to the leader. So I thought it was interesting that Durkheim sees that as already a move towards organic solidarity. That is, the very existence-

Robin:

Right

Agnes:

... of a leader suggests differentiation-

Robin:

Division

Agnes:

... in function, because one guy is not doing what everybody else does because they're the leader. And he thinks that in an even more primitive form of mechanical solidarity, there is no leader. There's just that much similarity that everyone just has the same thought, and I think this is important because he wa-

Robin:

That's true of herds, literally. I mean-

Agnes:

Right. Yeah

Robin:

... a school of fish or whatever, they don't have a leader.

Agnes:

Exactly. So I think he thinks we are herd-like, but I think that he thinks that what keeps us in our herds is beliefs, which maybe might distinguish us from some animals. Um, that is, we have a certain belief about, you know, the sacred tree or whatever. Sacred tree doesn't come up here, but that sort of a thing. And, you know, like, don't kill each other or something. And then that, those beliefs which, um, you know, are sort of in no way private. That is, people don't have a sense of having their own opinions or, like, their own individual interiority or mental life, um, so that they don't experience this herd likeness as a form of oppression. And when a leader emerges and then kind of enforces the morality of the group, they're not experiencing that as kind of, like, totalitarian, um-

Robin:

Right

Agnes:

... domination. Because they didn't, and that we're inclined to see it that way, but that's because we're projecting our individualism and our fondness for having private distinctive beliefs onto a form of human that doesn't have that yet.

Robin:

You're right. Um, I, I, I don't disagree.

Agnes:

Yeah, I, I'm just adding that because I thought it's interesting that he sort of thinks that this organic solidarity parallels the development of interiority. Um-

Robin:

Now, if the idea is that as we feel more similar to each other, we are more bonded with this, um, thing, and we're losing that, then you might think the rise of mass media would have been a somewhat of a salve or fix a bit for it. That is, to the extent everybody watched the same movie and same TV show or s- listened to the same song, and they felt the same thing there. You might think that was moving us back more toward the mechanical solidarity, and that there's more of that in his future than at his time, actually.

Agnes:

Right.

Robin:

The, you know, mass media rose later, and radio, et cetera. Um...

Agnes:

I, I think that's right. So I think that there... I mean, his, you know, um, um, sort of, um, prediction at the end is that we're going to be in some ways gravitating towards things like that to keep us together, and that they would appeal to us. Even just like the way in which like today politics kind of obsesses the nation and everybody looks at the front page of The New York Times to see like what did Trump do today.

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

That's a form of solidarity. It's a way that we can all bond with each other in the nation. So he would sort of, um, it might be that the sort of hunting out of those kind of avenues of solidarity, um, is, uh, something that makes sense on his framework even if he didn't specifically predict that these new avenues

Robin:

Right

Agnes:

... would

Robin:

But over the half-century after his book, there was this rise in mass media and mass culture.

Agnes:

Right.

Robin:

But then in the last half-century, there's been this fading away of it which makes less sense on his prediction. Like, wh- why in fact would we have fragmented culture over the last half-century and no longer want and celebrate and want our own small individual subcultures rather than these larger shared?

Agnes:

Well, it might be that, um, the kind of mechanism of division of labor gets re- redeployed in new arenas, and so it actually gets deployed in culture. And we start to... It just, it's not because we like it or because we have an, um, incentive to improve our immediate situation-

Robin:

Right

Agnes:

... by taking a step in division of labor. But, b- it w- his theory would be just because there is greater information transfer which puts people in contact with more people, it creates more contact points, which doesn't have to mean, it doesn't have to be the population gets more dense. But if there's more contact points, it's gonna be the same effect, which in fact has happened. And then that's gonna undermine some of the, um, you know, let's say progress towards the division of labor, apr- away from the division of labor-

Robin:

So-

Agnes:

... towards solidarity that the mass media made

Robin:

... a comment on the division of labor. So years ago when I first started to study evolutionary psychology, and I was using that in, to supporting my, you know, account of medicine, I remember talking to an anthropologist who, you know, was focused on a particular community and analyzing their behavior, and he made the following claim, which I thought was plausible at the time. He said, in a forager group, they actually specialize their roles more than would be productively efficient because they each want to have their own unique role that makes everybody f- feel like everybody needs them.

Agnes:

Mm-hmm.

Robin:

The desire to be needed pushes people to, to be more unique in their roles than would actually be ef- efficient. And that was how he characterized typical forager, um, social groups so that there is this inclination toward a division of labor much before the f-

Agnes:

Mm

Robin:

... farming peasants that Durkheim was thinking of as our, you know, previous role. So that would be a resource that could then support the d- rise of the division of labor, that it wasn't a completely alien thing. There had been a key form of it even before farming. And so I think that makes us think that there might be sort of key emotional resources to be obtained from the division of labor. So if we think about people's pride in being a skilled professional, uh, mu- much of the modern world has replaced, say, pride of, you know, s- being in a community or a family with the pride of having your professional role, and that there's some strong emotional bonds that are produced by that kind of emotional role which might come from the d- ancient forager days. It's a different kind of bond and maybe less overt, but plausibly it's strong. Maybe not as strong as the mechanical solidarity. But I think maybe we just need to understand, well, what, what is this new sort of kind of solidarity, and how does it work, and where does it make you feel most attached, and what does it make you most willing to put up with?

Agnes:

Right. So the, I mean, that, yeah, you know, Durkheim doesn't know about that. Um, but, um, um, but it's consistent with his story. It just slightly complicates his story to say that there was already some proto form of the division of labor. I mean, I think the, you know... He re- he really wants like, um, uh, the male-female division of labor to be like late in ways that seem a little-

Robin:

Not plausible, yeah

Agnes:

... far-fetched. Right?

Robin:

Yeah.

Agnes:

Um, uh-

Robin:

No

Agnes:

... so re- like, uh, and, and-

Robin:

Gender division of labor goes way back.

Agnes:

Right. And so I think that, um, you know, it, I mean, it does make sense that in a group that's like very, very, um- ... close to subsistence, you know, maybe you're gonna get a little bit less of it. Um, but, um, as you're not gonna be too picky about it or something. But, um, um, right. But I think that, I mean, one thing that he says about the division of labor is that it presupposes constant communication. That is, when two parties have to specialize-

Robin:

Right

Agnes:

... um, they have to coordinate, and they have to sort of be continu- Like, let's say the-

Robin:

Right

Agnes:

... let's say the wife is doing the cooking and the husband is doing the going out and hunting, and, you know, he needs to hunt the sorts of things she can cook, or she needs to learn how to cook the sorts of things he can hunt or whatever.

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

And it's plausible that in a household or in a family there is constant communication. And then, um, maybe one of the things that changes in terms of increased density is, um, the cultivation of better communication methods through f- some forms of technology that allow you to be in more constant communication with people outside of the, your immediate people that you live with, and then that's gonna trigger that division of labor impulse happening on a bigger scale.

Robin:

I th- he talks about sort of the rise of envy and complaint in our larger world as part of a thing that happens with the rise of the division of labor. But I mean, in some sense it goes against this idea that once you pick a sp- a specialized role in the world, you can be proud of that role even if it isn't the highest status role.

Agnes:

Yeah. I-

Robin:

And that, that was often a thing that happened even in peasant communities. People could be proud of their role that was necessary, and the world couldn't function without them in that role, even if it wasn't the most celebrated role. And that's somewhat at odds with the idea that they would then resent being in that less celebrated role.

Agnes:

I think it's just that at a certain point you get, like, the cog in the machine stage, um, where, um, uh, you know, someone is like-

Robin:

Well-

Agnes:

... put doing one tiny part of a pin over and over again and they are like a lifeless cog that an external force sets-

Robin:

Well, he, he argues against that. He says people have accused that, but he says most people in a specialized role, they're just not cogs in a machine. They do have a lot of complexity and, that goes in their role, and I think he's right about that. I think most people don't think they are cogs in a machine unless other people tell them they are, and they feel ashamed for this description that other people are making of them.

Agnes:

Uh, so okay. I'll tell you, I am on page 418. Um-

Robin:

Okay. Let me find that.

Agnes:

Uh.

Robin:

418. Okay.

Agnes:

Okay. So here I do think he is raising this objection, but I don't know that he's totally dismissing it. Um, um, so, um, s- in the middle of the page, um, um, "He is no longer the living cell of a living organism moved continually-

Robin:

Right

Agnes:

... by contact with neighboring cells. He is no more than a lifeless cog, which an external force sets in motion and impels always in the same direction and in the same fashion. Plainly, no matter how one represents the moral ideal, one cannot remain indifferent to such a debasement of human nature. If the aim of morality is individual perfection, it cannot allow the individual to be so utterly ruined, and if it has society as its end, it cannot let the very source of society, of social life dry up. The evil threatens not only economic functions but all the social functions, no matter how elevated they might be." Uh, and then he says, "Well, maybe people should be educated. Um, uh, but that's not gonna solve it. It remains wrong that he should be treated like a machine." Um, uh, but-

Robin:

But if you think about, like, a peasant farmer, there's, you know, peasant farming is an extremely rote role, but that was for thousands of years before this. The idea that any particular factory job in this world would be more rote than a simple peasant farmer seems relatively implausible. Uh, somehow it's about maybe the tiny p- part in a big system or something, the cog in the machine, but merely the roteness or routineness of it, uh, can't be the key issue.

Agnes:

I don't think being a peasant farmer is so rote. For instance, you do different things in different seasons. It's not always you're doing the same thing. Like, I think that the, the image here is supposed to be, um, the person who works in the pin factory. They're literally doing the same movement over and over again 1,000 times a day. That's very different from a peasant farmer.

Robin:

I, I feel like I'm finding the text here that he, that basically says, but, you know, people are in fact varying their jobs. Um-

Agnes:

Well, I think what he's saying is that this is actually a social need, and the economists have ignored the fact that we need to make it not be the case that people are, uh-

Robin:

But, I mean-

Agnes:

... have the kind of job that you have in the pin factory. That's one of the social demands.

Robin:

But I would say economists, you know, talk, show that in fact employers try to give employees variety because for employees demand it. It's part of what employees want, so they typically face a trade-off of giving them a higher wage or giving them more variety on the job, and that sh-

Agnes:

Right, but-

Robin:

Workers choose one or the other

Agnes:

... it's not as, it's not just that this is a thing that people want. It's that, um, that solidarity that allowed the division of labor in the first place is predicated on, like, a kind of moral sensibility that allows you to, like, believe in the world that you're in and believe in the group and its positive goals. And there's ways that your job can be such that you would stop believing in those things, and that will undermine the- Um, the thing that the, the trades rely on

Robin:

I feel like I've had actually- So we have this basic explanatory problem in a situation like this, which is we say, in the past, the world was structured a certain way, and it gave people what they needed in some way. But individuals weren't choosing in order to make that happen.

Agnes:

Right.

Robin:

The world gave them what they needed accidentally, in some sense, given the world they were in, and then the world changes and maybe now the world doesn't give people what they need, but they're not choosing to get what they need. The process that gives people what they need is just separate from the choices they make. In which case, we don't expect people, by making better choices, to get what they need. We think of people getting what they need as an accident of the structure they were in. Which case we ask, well, why in the past were they getting what they need? How did that accident happen to come about? And that's where I might think of a cultural evolution story of saying, well, the past tried lots of different things, some of which didn't give people what they needed, and then those societies broke apart somehow, got invaded, didn't support wars effectively, whatever, and that that's why the past happened to be this arrangement where people locally made choices which didn't cause them to get what they need, but somehow the arrangement was such that they got what they needed so that it worked, and that now if we're threatening that, it's the threat of a process of change that didn't do that whole cultural selection process to make sure that it went well. And now Durkheim is maybe saying, "Gee, we need to do something," but of course his readers can't really do much about this, and neither can we. And so here we are in a world, we can observe maybe that the world has changed and we're not getting what we need. But, um, that... If so, that's this accident of this process that none of us controls, and nobody initiated or planned, but we're noticing that cultural evolution can go wrong.

Agnes:

I, right, I don't, um, uh... I think that it's right that the sort of point of view of the sociologist is not one that l- actually lends itself very well to activism. Um, uh, but he does have a suggestion about how to improve everything, um, that's in the preface that I told you not to read because I thought it-

Robin:

But, but I have read it-

Agnes:

Oh, good

Robin:

... after I read the rest.

Agnes:

Good. Good, good. So he thinks that, um, unions, or not, not unions, that's the wrong word.

Robin:

He calls in corporations.

Agnes:

Professional organizations, basically, um, that is, that we could restore solidarity through the avenue of profession given that it's been lost through the avenue of religion and the family. Um, and he thinks that you could have, like, professional ethics that belong-

Robin:

Right. Right

Agnes:

... like, kind of like what we have for lawyers or doctors, but, like, for everybody.

Robin:

But because he has such a thin theory of how his solidarity works, he can't really say much more about how to do this.

Agnes:

Right.

Robin:

He just says, "Gee, I sure like if these professional organizations felt more solidarity."

Agnes:

Well, he thinks this is, like, a possible solution.

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

Like, it, it at least conceptually fits in some way the problem.

Robin:

But he doesn't have any levers to make it happen, 'cause he doesn't have a model of how this process works. He just has, knows that sometimes you get solidarity by being similar and being close to people, and professionals are already similar and close to each other. So what more could you do? But apparently that wasn't enough.

Agnes:

Right. But I, I think it's, I mean, I, I, I think that you're right that he doesn't have a lot by way of how do we fix this. Um, and I think that's because he senses the kind of problem that it is. Um, uh, but I think that he has, uh, an interesting diagnosis of the problem, which is that, um, you know, the kind of solidarity that we are now relying on in this organic social formation replaces, like, religion and the family with, like, justice and egalitarianism, and that we don't feel that, um, contracts are fair unless, and, and we don't feel that exchanges are fair unless the person is, like, getting what they deserve, getting a fair price or whatever. Where, for example, I kept thinking of, like, um, you know, people selling water at, like, where the hurricane is or whatever, and, like, like, where, where he's-

Robin:

Right

Agnes:

... articulating the intuition behind what, what makes that feel unfair. Um, and-

Robin:

But I don't think his theory really predicts this very well. That is, I, I think if you'd s- Look, in the past, people mostly felt solidarity with people in their own village or something, not necessarily with people hundreds of mile away. It was the people-

Agnes:

Right

Robin:

... they were interacting with. But now, when people are specializing in their profession, they have a similar number of people close to them who are similarly similar in the past in their profession, but somehow that's not enough. So the question is, why isn't that as adequate substitute for having, you know-

Agnes:

I, I'm right now not talking about his solution. I'm just like-

Robin:

No, I'm just talking about explaining the problem. Like, you might not think, you might think there wouldn't be a problem if in fact your professional associates could give you the same feeling of solidarity that previously your village mates had.

Agnes:

Right. I think his thought is that the reason they can't is because we don't have, like, codified, like, s- professional ethics and stuff. So I think he might think that, like, let's say hairdressers-

Robin:

But-

Agnes:

... having, like, to pass tests. They have-

Robin:

The, the peasants never had peasant ethics. They didn't codify that. They felt a solidarity-

Agnes:

They didn't have, they didn't have laws

Robin:

... by being close. But though-

Agnes:

No

Robin:

... there weren't very many of them, and there's a similar number of laws with the professionals already, I'd say. Like, he talks about how laws greatly expanded. The old peasant communities had relatively few laws. And-

Agnes:

But they had relig- they had religion and the family and law, and those things all, um, expressed their collective bond. And I think he thinks that the professional organization would have to grow and develop into this form of solidarity, for instance, by having certain c- like, codifications of laws in the way that he thinks that, let's say, lawyers and doctors do sort of have.

Robin:

I think it might be more just the instability of it all. That is, peasants lived in a very stable world, and so you could accumulate very specific rules about very specific behaviors that would be pretty stable over time. And the new professional worlds, they are just changing rapidly, and you really can't make the very specific rules that would be analogous to the peasant rules. You have to have more abstract rules, and they won't, you know, have to cover pretty dramatically changing circumstances.

Agnes:

Right. Right. Um, but his- But he does have a thought about what's the kind of principle that then, um, uh... is the kind of abstract principle that could serve to bind together people in this situation. And, um, his answer is, like, equity and justice. Uh-

Robin:

But it seems to me like any abstract principles would serve as well there. Those happen to maybe be the abstract principles that our society has latched onto and focused on, but I don't see from his story they had to be those principles. They could be any of a wide range of principles.

Agnes:

I mean, it's pretty striking. He's writing this in, like, the 19th century. When, when, when is this text from? It's pre-1900, right?

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

Um-

Robin:

1880, something like that.

Agnes:

Yeah. Okay. So, like-

Robin:

But there w- there had been a trend toward rights in the p- p- I mean, he was not-

Agnes:

Yeah

Robin:

... making up a future trends. He's, he's actually describing a trend-

Agnes:

Okay, but

Robin:

... that had been happening up to his point of view.

Agnes:

Um, um-

Robin:

The French Revolution, the American Revolution. I'm sorry, the American Civil War. These were, in fact, big movements toward rights in his world at the time.

Agnes:

Right. But, like, there's certainly, um, in his world, there's certainly social class. There are differences in wealth, um, that are very, um, marked, and people live very different lives if they have different amounts of wealth. And he is saying, well, th- that's gonna produce a social problem, and he's right about that. He's ri- he, like-

Robin:

Right, but he's reflecting that's the things people were talking about then, they were complaining about. And he's saying, you know, he's, he's saying, yes, that, that is something that's energizing people, and they will use their opinions on that to find bonds with each other, which they have. But that's not about predicting the future. That's about, you know, reacting to his actual world.

Agnes:

There can be no rich and poor by birth without there being unjust contracts. That someone is saying that in the 19th century, uh, like, that's, that's a strike, that's a striking claim. It's not a striking claim now. Uh, I, I get there's-

Robin:

It was a common claim in his world then.

Agnes:

I get that there's a trend of that, but there's also plenty of, um, plenty of aristocracy and acceptance of aristocracy still in the 19th century, as we know from reading Zola. Um, uh, and so what he's doing is he's isolating a particular strand that he sees as, like, the only moral ideal that has the hope of creating the kind of solidarity that would apply to this organic being. And on that point, he's turned out to be right in that that is the form of solidarity that people tend to look for today.

Robin:

I mean, he's right in that he pointed to a trend at his time, and that trend has continued. So he-

Agnes:

Yeah

Robin:

... you know, but I think it was a real trend at his time, so he wasn't, he was in fact saying-

Agnes:

There were many-

Robin:

Embracing that trend

Agnes:

... trends at that time. There were many, many trends, and he's picking out one of them that had nowhere near the dominance at his time than it does in ours. Like here, I'm just gonna give you another line. "Just as ancient peoples had above all need of a common faith to live by, so do we have need of justice." That, he's living at a time where there's plenty of religion and plenty of religious-

Robin:

Right

Agnes:

... observance as being pretty, um-

Robin:

Right. But I mean, socialism was popular in his world at the time. There's a world of intellectuals that he was in wherein these ideas were much more common. Yes, they weren't as common among ordinary people at the time, but he, he is an intellectual here talking among other intellectuals.

Agnes:

O- Okay, but, like, um, uh, I guess I think, well, what are the other candidates? What are the other i- abstract ideas that could bind people together in solidarity in-

Robin:

Well, I mean, he was criticizing Spencer, who was in fact offering another set of candidate ideas, but-

Agnes:

What is the abstract ideal?

Robin:

Well, Spencer's ideal was freedom, and, uh, freedom of contract and freedom, you know, producing exchange through contract and he, you know. That's the, in fact, other point of view that Durkheim most highlights and tries to criticize.

Agnes:

Right. Um, uh... Right. Good. I think that, um, you're right, that he's very, he's very down on freedom because he thinks it tends to... He, the valorization of freedom tends to come from a, um, uh, a failure to understand how social human beings are. Um-

Robin:

Right. So it's a, it's, but these are competing views of i- abstract ideals that-

Agnes:

Yeah

Robin:

... have been competing over the last century. I mean, the feud of, the alternative freedom view still has people who like it over the-

Agnes:

Yeah

Robin:

... equality of outcome view, but-

Agnes:

W- um, okay. Um, we only have about, like, 10 minutes left. So, um, you found this text frustrating, and so I wanna hear why.

Robin:

Well, I, I, I think he had some key insights, but then there is, you know, 400 odd pages here, and I felt like he just repeated himself a lot and then had lots of sort of sidetracks that didn't really go anywhere that interesting. And so, and he wasn't, you know, that logically coherent in the sense of, like, laying clear his assumptions, et cetera. So it was... But this is true of many, many thinkers, including of this era, that they would be less sort of clear on their assumptions and their relations to conclusions than-

Agnes:

So you just kind of-

Robin:

... maybe viewed today

Agnes:

... increased.

Robin:

Yeah. Ex- exactly. And-

Agnes:

Okay. That's-

Robin:

But also, you know, not being sure if I understand it or not. Like, he keeps saying things and I think he's keep repeating the same thing, but how carefully do I read each sentence to unders- to check whether he's actually saying something different now or just repeating himself again, and that's tedious. I, I was tempted to skim many of these things just 'cause he looked like he kept repeating himself, but then I wasn't sure if he was repeating himself or maybe somehow making new points.

Agnes:

I think sometimes he was repeating himself and sometimes he was making new points.

Robin:

Well, right, but that's what's frustrating.

Agnes:

So one of the, um... Okay, fine, it's just a stylistic thing. I thought you had actual, like, substantive objection. Um-

Robin:

Well, again, I, I, um, I would-- There's things he says that I just might not disagree with, but I don't c- I don't think they matter that much.

Agnes:

Yeah. But, uh-

Robin:

He had some core things he said that I thought made sense, so it's fine

Agnes:

... what is his most significant claim that you disagree with?

Robin:

Well, I thought he, he just-- he's dismissing these alternative views of Spencer pr- too, too quickly. I, I... You know, it's fine to say that humans need this, you know, bonding together, but that doesn't mean most of Spencer's claims couldn't still als- also be true, adding in this habit of h- human herd bonding. Um, but, you know-

Agnes:

I mean, he doesn't dismiss Spencer quickly. He spends, like, at least 100 pages of this book- ... quoting Spencer and responding to the claim. So if anyone has ever-

Robin:

But, but they're-

Agnes:

... not-

Robin:

Okay, but-

Agnes:

... Spencer-

Robin:

But, but they're all of the form, "Spencer assumes this simple model of human behavior, but you need solidarity add to it, and therefore Spencer's wrong." But that last step doesn't follow. Yeah. Yes, Spencer doesn't talk about solidarity. Yes, it's real, and Durkheim's right that it's real, but it doesn't follow that therefore Spencer's claims aren't true, even if you add solidarity.

Agnes:

Well, I think that, um, um, the, um, uh... I think that Durkheim does a, like, i- a lot to try to show that, um, contracts are, um, have, like, a precondition, and then, um, you know-

Robin:

That-- Right, and that's true, but it doesn't mean that Spencer's claims were wrong. But-

Agnes:

Well, that's the claim that Spencer makes that Durkheim thinks is wrong.

Robin:

And I'd have to read Spencer more carefully to know if that's true.

Agnes:

The problem with Spencer, I, I don't think Durkheim is claiming Spencer, everything Spencer said was false. I think that, um, he thinks that Spencer is a good figurehead-

Robin:

Right

Agnes:

... for a view of, um, s- the social world as just a bunch of individuals who are, like, each independently seeking satisfaction, and they're just, like, kinda in the same place. He-- That's, that's-- Spencer represents-

Robin:

But-

Agnes:

... that view, and Durkheim wants to argue against that view. So Spencer-

Robin:

And s-

Agnes:

... could believe other things that...

Robin:

But Spencer is famously someone for whom, at least in the following cen- half-century or century, many people just dramatically misrepresented because of his social Darwinist thing. So I would wanna see what Spencer actually said and see whether Durkheim said that, and I haven't done that research. The-

Agnes:

Like-

Robin:

But I d- I didn't see those quotes as actually def- supporting this view that you just claimed that he thought Spencer had, that there's only contract and nothing else, and there's only a relation of individuals, right? That, that's what you... Obviously, Spencer is talking about individuals having contracts and relationships, but whether he's talking about only is the thing I'd have to look it up. But even then, I'm not sure I care that much about this dispute between Durkheim and Spencer. I, I care about the insight I can get from Durkheim, and I'm happy to admit this point that people mostly were similar to each other, lived similar lives, did similar things, and had a bond through that, and then over time, the division of labor created a different kind of relationship between people. That's the core insight of the book, and it's true, and I want to-- I mainly want to ask, well, what does that imply? You know, is it s- do we still think it's true? Like, is there everything we learned since then? There's anything that would undermine it? And, uh, in fact, it has influenced blog post I did a few days ago thinking about sort of the long arc of history. I definitely make sure to include this idea of the slow rise of the division of labor and how that's changed things in that picture. And, um, I, I'm, I, I accept his key claims.

Agnes:

Okay. I mean, one, um, I guess, like, one thought is the question that you asked at the very beginning, which is something like, is organic solidarity a form of solidarity? And, um-

Robin:

Will it make people fight a war together, for example?

Agnes:

Right. And, and the sort of, um, like, the worry here is if organic solidarity is sort of parasitic on mechanical solidarity, then it's like we are, um, uh, we're using up a certain resource over time-

Robin:

Right

Agnes:

... such that the early stages of it, employees could still love their employers and vice versa. And then over time, you're getting this resentment, um, and this, um, unwillingness to be subordinated, unwillingness to have a division of labor, right? Um, so it-- I guess that's the sort of-- The worry that it raises is really the question about whether, um, organic solidarity is a form of solidarity at all, or is a kind of way of exploiting mechanical solidarity for a little while until it runs out-

Robin:

Right

Agnes:

... and then we all just fall apart.

Robin:

And again, I think one way to think about that is on the global scale. At the moment, the world is interdependent. That is, m- very few nations are self-sufficient anymore. They rely on trade across the world. Does that really create this bond across the world? I mean, to what extent are we feel bonded to the Chinese or Russians because we trade a lot with them? Or when a war shows up, do we just feel like we should be hostile in the same way mechanical solidarity might say, oh, they're Chinese, they look different, they talk different, and so they're suspicious outsiders? Um, there is this story that- Countries that trade a lot with each other don't go to war as much with each other because in some sense, you know, you'll lose these trading partners. But, you know, how strong of a bond is that? How strong is the world bonded together by m- our trading with each other? Uh, I think we're more bonded by sharing culture, by say, sh- sharing movies and songs and mass media, rather than bonding by merely trading. So I think those are ways in which we are bonding by having a thing in common , a way which have a common experience by watching the same movies, uh, rather than the bond through the division of labor where Chinese people make something different than we make here and we trade with them. I don't actually see that much bond that produces in people. So yes, we, we would just be losing, losing the mechanical solidarity, not having a social, a organic solidarity that is of the same magnitude to produce the bonds, the same level of bonds. But that's apparently a si- a situation we can continue with for a long time.

Agnes:

Maybe. Um, right? Or maybe-

Robin:

Right

Agnes:

... maybe not.

Robin:

Things will fall apart, right.

Agnes:

Um, um-

Robin:

Right, so this, this is a common but correct critique of modernity really, which is just to say, look, look at the past world. Look at all these intricate things that were interconnected that all built and worked together, and then the modern world, that changes a bunch of those and it breaks some of these bonds between things that were depending on each other in our psychology and in our social relationships. And then to say, how can we be sure that this modern world will function? Maybe it's just got a slow decay. When you broke these things, it'll take some time for them to fall apart, and that's just been a worry about the modern world for quite some time, and it's a worry about social media, it's a worry about, you know, divorce, it's a worry about all sorts of aspects of society. People have noticed, oh, you're changing something that was interconnected in so many different ways with other practices in the past, and you're just changing 'em without noticing or caring that much about all those interconnections. Aren't you worried you're messing something up? And yes, you, you should worry you're messing something up. On the other hand, if you had allowed that argument full weight all along, you just wouldn't have allowed much change, and most people think they like a, a lot of the change we've had. So, so what do you do? It's pouring rain here. Uh, you probably can't hear, but it's just heavy, heavy pouring. In fact, I see hail coming down.

Agnes:

I feel like our audience is gonna be less interested in the-

Robin:

Okay. Perhaps so. They, they-

Agnes:

Yeah

Robin:

... they might be a little charmed by a little personal facts about our lives, but maybe not too much.

Agnes:

Okay. Well, we should probably stop there.

Robin:

Okay. Nice talking.

Agnes:

Bye.