Sociologists Emile Durkheim and Robert Nisbet are influential yet understudied today given the rise of social science methodology within that discipline. I think they would have much that is valuable to say were they alive now, and much that would conform to Catholic thought. Justice, they thought, requires virtuous forms of life from all members of society. Humans are ritual creatures – ritualizing a divine with or without Christ. In the pursuit of honors, riches, lust, and fame, we fill the void of those fantasies with some manner of creative work and an often perverted marking of birth, marriage, work, and death. Driven by appetite, by the longings for affection and attention and love, humans in their communities gravitate toward order; and an order without virtuous members can descend into unlimited appetite to maximize illusionary, unfulfilling desires. Durkheim and Nisbet insisted that the complex web of social relationships, of the social environment into which we are born and by which we perform our rituals, are irreplaceable, essential, and fundamental. These limit and guide behavior by the accumulated wisdom of generations. And yet human environments change – herein is the dislocation, the invitation to dysfunction. These sociologists, examining wide stretches of history, suggested that personal and communal health is located in the slow and the organic. Choas and anomie breed where institutionalization has yet to take root and where moral guides lose legitimacy. All communities, traditional and revolutionary, depend upon this justification: the ability to sustain interest and to provide meaning. Let us find our meanings in our families, the imitation of the Holy Trinity, and in the Eucharist, the source and summit of our human existence.
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