Lesson 4 Flashcards
Humanistic conscience
In Durkheim’s view, the aspect of conscience that has an intuitive knowledge of what is human and inhuman; of what makes life flourish and what destroys it.
Durkheim main beliefs
-Conscience is social conditioning; it informs of identity and sense of belonging.
-It is sanctions that the group brings to bear on the individual.
-God does not exist but is a useful idea to bind society together.
-Conscience is about loyalty to a group.
-The collective conscience plays a crucial role in maintaining social order and cohesion.
-It also serves as a regulatory force, guiding individual behaviour and ensuring that people conform to societal norms and values.
-Deviation from the collective conscience can result in social sanctions and disapproval. Guilt is the conscience fearing that their society is judging their actions.
Religion and collective conscience
-Durkheim argued that religion serves as a fundamental institution in society, providing a sense of collective identity, moral values, and social cohesion.
-According to Durkheim, religious rituals and beliefs play a crucial role in maintaining social order and integration.
-While Durkheim did not personally advocate for religious beliefs, he saw religion as a natural and essential part of human culture and society, even if he approached it from a secular and sociological perspective.
Collective conscience
Collective conscience: beliefs agreed on by those in the same society. Acts are bad because society disapproves of them. The collective consciousness is formed through social interaction and binds individuals together, creating social cohesion.
Evolutionary conscience
allows society to grow stronger; it is a survival mechanism developed by people sharing the same moral values.
What does Durkheim believe about god
God is a useful idea in society, giving us a moral obligation to obey society’s demands. Conscience is part of our loyalty to society and fear of judgment from others.
Mechanical conscience
-Imagine you live in a small town where everyone has similar beliefs and values. In this type of society, if someone does something different, they might be strongly criticized or feel guilt, because everyone expects them to follow the same rules.
-In these societies, people share similar values, beliefs, and norms, and there is a high degree of collective consciousness.
Organic conscience
Now, think about a bigger city where people have different jobs and ways of life.
In this place, it’s okay for people to have their own beliefs and values because everyone relies on each other in different ways.
So, even if you have different ideas, you can still work together and live peacefully.
Mechanical Conscience and Moral Decisions
In a society with a strong mechanical conscience, people tend to have very similar moral values and beliefs.
If you go against these shared values, you might feel guilty or judged by others.
So, your moral decisions are heavily influenced by what your society expects.
Organic Conscience and Moral Decisions:
In a society with an organic conscience, there’s more room for different moral perspectives because people have diverse roles and beliefs.
This means your moral decisions might be more flexible and individualized.
You’re less likely to feel guilty for having different values, as long as you respect others’ rights and cooperate with them.
Religion as a Mechanism for the Collective Conscience:
In many traditional societies, religion plays a significant role in shaping the collective conscience (mechanical).
Religious beliefs and rituals often provide a shared moral framework for the community, and deviating from religious norms can result in social sanctions.
So, in this context, religious beliefs and God can be seen as part of the mechanical conscience that helps maintain social order.
Transition to Organic Conscience:
In modern societies, there’s often greater religious diversity and individualism.
In such cases, religion might play a less central role in shaping the collective conscience, and people may have more freedom to hold diverse religious or non-religious beliefs.
Collective conscious defined
-Collective consciousness is a fundamental sociological concept that refers to the set of shared beliefs, ideas, attitudes, and knowledge that are common to a social group or society.
-The collective consciousness informs our sense of belonging and identity, and our behavior.
-Founding sociologist Émile Durkheim developed this concept to explain how unique individuals are bound together into collective units like social groups and societies.
How collective consciousness holds society together?
-concluded that society exists because unique individuals feel a sense of solidarity with each other.
-This is why we can form collectives and work together to achieve community and functional societies.
-The collective consciousness, is the source of this solidarity.
-Durkheim explains that the phenomenon is “the totality of beliefs and sentiments common to the average members of a society.”
-Durkheim observed that in traditional or primitive societies, religious symbols, discourse, beliefs, and rituals fostered the collective consciousness.
Social institution produce collective consciousness
-other institutions include the state, news and popular media, education, and the police and judiciary,among others.
-primitive or modern societies—collective consciousness is something “common to the whole of society,” as Durkheim put it.
-It is not an individual condition or phenomenon, but a social one.
-As a social phenomenon, it is “diffused across society as a whole,” and “has a life of its own.”
-It is through collective consciousness that values, beliefs, and traditions can be passed down through generations.
-Though individual people live and die, this collection of intangible things, including the social norms connected to them, are cemented in our social institutions.
-Most important to understand is that collective consciousness is the result of social forces that are external to the individual, that course through society, and that work together to create the social phenomenon of the shared set of beliefs, values, and ideas that compose it.
-We, as individuals, internalize these and make the collective consciousness a reality by doing so, and we reaffirm and reproduce it by living in ways that reflect it.
