Durkheim Meltdown

October 22, 2018

The French sociologist Émile Durkheim believed that one defining feature of a profession is that the attitudes and behaviors that count as "professional" within it are of no interest to the general public. My recent experiences suggest that whatever Durkheim was referring to has changed a lot since the time of his writing. First, consider his description and explanation of professional morals in Professional Ethics and Civic Morals:

The distinctive feature of this kind of morals and what differentiates it from other branches of ethics, is the sort of unconcern with which the public consciousness regards it. There are no moral rules whose infringement, in general at least, is looked on with so much indulgence by public opinion. The transgressions which have only to do with the practice of the profession, come in merely for a rather vague censure outside the strictly professional field.... ...a book-keeper who is complacent about the rules of scrupulous accounting, or an official who as a rule lacks energy in carrying out his duties, does not give the impression of a guilty person, although he is treated as such in the organization to which he belongs. This feature of professional ethics can moreover easily be explained. They cannot be of deep concern to the common consciousness precisely because they are not common to all members of the society and because, to put it in another way, they are rather outside the common consciousness. It is exactly because they govern functions not performed

by everyone, that not everyone is able to have a sense of what these functions are, of what they ought to be, or of what special relations should exist between the individuals concerned with applying them. All this escapes public opinion in a greater or lesser degree... It is this very fact which is a pointer to the fundamental condition without which no professional ethics can exist. A system of morals is always the affair of a group and can operate only if this group protects them by its authority... Émile Durkheim in Professional Ethics and Civic Morals

Professionals today — if they are so cursed to have their professionalism called into question — may be surprised how many members of the general public have quite refined and passionate views on what should be counted as professional within a range of different professions! The reason why Durkheim's description of professional morals now rings false is because the professions are no longer "outside the common consciousness."

Through the collapse of distance that characterizes modernity, all of our increasingly concentrated social molecules heat up: professions that once enjoyed relative detachment and autonomy from the masses, increasingly find their edges melting down from the friction of everyone pressed up against the gates on the outside. In our epoch, pitchforks will never appear, the great estates will not be set aflame, the Winter Palace will not be stormed. The traditional negentropic structures will be melted down by the heat of cross-cutting social expectations, claims, and obligations from which they were relatively insulated during the period of their emergence. Capable and interested people have historically enforced different forms of order in different professions, for particular social purposes as well as for their own status and payment, before handing power on to the next generation of capable and interested agents, according to stringent professional criteria. As more and more people see, hear, judge, and gain leverage to make claims on the resources that circulate in and out of the professions, more and more people will "have their say" at the cost of these structures no longer providing their negentropic quotient. They will neither dissolve nor be revolutionized, they will simply be melted, like a standing steel building might be melted into a wide and shallow but equally impressive pool of boiling silver. The people will get what they ask for, but then it won't be what they wanted.