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Distinguishing The Normal From The Pathological – Sociology Notes – For W.B.C.S. Examination.
Sociology has turned out as a vital part of General Studies paper well as optional paper in Civil Services Mains Examination. Being one of the easiest optional subjects, many aspirants take Sociology yearly as their optional for W.B.C.S. Mains Exam. The syllabus of sociology optional subject for WBCS Mains can be tackled if approached with right strategies.Like, other optional subjects sociology has two papers. Paper I of Sociology deals with the fundamentals of Sociology where Papaer II of Sociology optional deals with the Indian society, its structure, and change.According to Goode and Hatt, fact is ‘an empirically verifiable observation’. Thus, facts are those situations or circumstances concerning which there does not seem to be valid room for disagreement.Continue Reading Distinguishing The Normal From The Pathological – Sociology Notes – For W.B.C.S. Examination.
As indicated in Book Three of The Division of Labor, however Durkheim felt that social facts exhibit both normal and pathological forms; and he now added that it was an important part of sociological method to provide rules for distinguishing between them. The primary objection to such a provision, of course, was that such judgments of value have no place in science, whose sole purpose is to tell us how causes produce their effects, but not what ends we ought to pursue. The practical utility of social science would thus be limited to revealing which causes produce which effects, thus offering us the means to produce causes at will.
The ends resulting from these causes might then be pursued and achieved for reasons beyond those of science itself. Durkheim’s response was that there are always several means to the achievement of any end, and that the determination of the former is thus no less an act of will than that of the latter.8 Science, in short, must guide us in the determination of our highest goals. The problem is to find an objective criterion, externally ascertainable yet inherent in social facts themselves, which will allow us to distinguish scientifically between social health and social illness.
This was a problem not easily solved, and it was only after a tedious search that Durkheim’s criterion was discovered in the ordinary distinction between that which is general and that which is exceptional. Social facts which are “normal,” by this criterion, would simply be those found in most, if not all, individuals, within narrow limits of variation. Social facts which are “pathological,” by contrast, would be those encountered only in a minority of cases, and only for brief periods in the lifetime of the individual even where they occur.If we adopt the term average type to refer to that purely hypothetical entity containing the most frequently occurring characteristics of the species in their most frequently occurring forms, therefore, a social fact would be “normal” in so far as it approximates that type, and “pathological” in so far as it deviates therefrom. And from this criterion, it is clear that what is normal or pathological can be so only in relation to a given species and, if that species varies over time, in relation to a specific stage in its development.Hence Durkheim’s first rule for the distinction of the normal from the pathological: A social fact is normal for a given social type, viewed at a given phase of its development, when it occurs in the average society of that species, considered at the corresponding phase of its evolution.
But if “generality” is thus the criterion by which we recognize the normality of a social fact, this criterion itself still requires an explanation. Durkheim’s initial request for such an explanation was accompanied by two rather pragmatic observations: first, that the normality of the phenomenon would be less doubtful if it could be shown that its external sign (generality) was not merely “apparent,” but “grounded in the nature of things”; and, second, that the practical application of the knowledge thus acquired would be facilitated by knowing not simply what we want, but why we want it. But Durkheim’s more fundamental motivation was derived from his recognition that, in certain “transition periods” (such as that through which he was manifestly living), a fact of extraordinary generality can persist, through force of blind habit, despite its lack of any correspondence with the new conditions of existence. Having established by observation that a fact is general, therefore, the sociologist must still reconstruct the conditions which determined this general fact and decide whether they still pertain or, on the contrary, have changed; in the first case the fact is “normal,” while in the second, its normality is “merely apparent.”Hence Durkheim’s second rule: The results of the preceding method can be verified by demonstrating that the general character of the phenomenon is related to the general conditions of collective life in the social type under consideration.Also Read , Environment Notes On – Ecotone – For W.B.C.S. Examination.
It was Durkheim’s illustration of these rules, however, which provoked the immediate interest of his contemporaries; for the example he selected was crime, whose “pathological” character, by almost any other criterion, appeared indisputable. Nonetheless Durkheim observed, crime exists in all societies of all kinds, and despite centuries of effort at its annihilation, has rather increased with the growth of civilization; thus, “there is no phenomenon which represents more incontrovertibly all the symptoms of normality, since it appears to be closely bound up with the conditions of all collective life.”But for Durkheim to describe crime as normal did not mean resignation to a necessary evil; on the contrary, it meant that crime was useful, “a factor in public health, an integrative element in any healthy society.”
Consider first its necessity. In Book One of The Division of Labor, Durkheim had shown that “crime” consists of an action which offends strong, well-defined collective feelings. For such actions to cease therefore, those feelings would have to be reinforced in each and every individual to the degree of strength required to counteract the opposite feelings. But if this occurred, Durkheim added, those weaker states of the conscience collective, whose milder reactions previously acknowledged mere breaches of convention, would also be reinforced, and what was unconventional would thereby become criminal; and the elevation of all collective sentiments to a strength sufficient to stifle all dissentient voices was simply incompatible with the enormous diversity of those environments which condition the commensurate variability of individual consciences. Since there cannot be a society in which individuals do not diverge to some extent from the conscience collective, it is equally necessary that some of these deviations assume a criminal character.
Durkheim’s more scandalous argument, however, was that crime is also useful, in both a direct and an indirect sense. The argument for indirect utility appeared again in The Division of Labor, where Durkheim had shown that the gradual evolution of law and morality itself reflects more fundamental transformations in a society’s collective sentiments. For such sentiments to change, however, they can be only moderately intense, while the only condition under which crime could cease (see above) must necessarily be one in which collective sentiments had attained an unprecedented intensity. For moral consciousness to evolve at all, therefore, individual creativity must be permitted. The criminal thus becomes the price we pay for the idealist. More directly, as in the case of Socrates, the criminal and the idealist are sometimes the same, and the crime proves to be the anticipation of that morality still to come.
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