If a 17 year old takes offence at police searching his bedroom in his absence, without authority or permission, and then takes a knife to the police responsible and gets shot for his trouble - however he has no knowledge of Islam, or so-called terror plots - what is he suffering from? Sociology provides a ready term for his condition: anomie (ano-mee) Anomie describes a person who feels alone and anxious because there doesnt seem to be anyone in charge of keeping order. Anomie comes from the Greek anomos meaning lawless, so anomie identifies a person who experiences a sense of being surrounded, in a cultural context of anonymous and troubling lawlessness, or sometimes the anxiety that comes from being in what he regards as a lawless place. In particular, it means that the individual considers his own sense of what is right is not being observed by those around him. As a consequence he believes all actions are futile, that he is up against it. His responses may become erratic, numb and sullen, unable to function. He may even contemplate suicide or plan an outburst of violence. His inner experience of contradiction means he cannot conform to societal norms he feels are being manipulated and abused by powerful forces in ways that make no discernible sense. The term was introduced by the French sociologist Émile Durkheim in his study of suicide. He believed that one type of suicide (anomic) resulted from the breakdown of the social standards necessary for regulating behaviour. When a social system is in a state of anomie, common values and common meanings are no longer understood or accepted, and new values and meanings have not developed. This places the individual in between a rock and a hard place. According to Durkheim, such a society that lacks clear and sensible priorities, and which, in its demands and prohibitions, seems confused, hypocritical and contradictory, produces, in many of its members, psychological states characterized by a sense of futility, lack of purpose, and emotional emptiness and despair. Striving is considered useless, because there is no accepted definition of what is desirable. In the novel The Stranger by Albert Camus, the narrator doesnt appear to react like a normal person. When his mother dies and he is put on trial for murdering a man, he responds in an oddly numb way, expressing a sense of anomie. In suburban Melbourne, a young mans most private space is violated by well-meaning but insensitive agents of authority, working from a set of rules that dont take the young mans rights into account, and the young man snaps. Nothing to do with Islam, everything to do with the inherent ugly alienation of Australian life, its cold and shallow bleakness, its drab and squalid suburban ghettos of the heart, its ignorance, its conformist suspicion of difference, and its barely concealed anger and despair.
Posted on: Mon, 29 Sep 2014 03:21:14 +0000
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