How are social pathologies made the norm?

Yeni Şafak · Yasin Aktay - How are social pathologies being made the norm?

From the beginning, sociologists have pictured society as a structure that works within a certain consistency of order, a bodily wholeness, a systemic compatibility. They also try to explain that, although this structure, system or body is in constant change, it reproduces and repeats itself with all its elements at every stage of change. Whether this change occurs through sharp ruptures or transformations of the revolutionary kind or gradually, and even whether sharp breaks from tradition are experienced through the revolutions that take place, or whether many things are nonetheless transmitted from tradition into the new structures that emerge, are the unresolved questions of these debates on change.

Every rapid change creates in people worries of "where are we going?" For seeing with one's own eyes that familiar relations, orders, institutions and structures are changing disturbs one's peace. Peace of mind, as the name itself suggests, depends on a stillness, a comfort, a stability, an unchangingness, both in time and in space. The peace that everyone demands wants this unchangingness, this continuity, to some extent.

In the sociologists' conception of society, sociological institutions are in fact elements that resist history. Institutions are patterns of behavior that we can find in whatever period of history and in whatever part of the world we go to. Everywhere it is these patterns that make up the structure we call society. Family, economy, religion, politics, education and leisure are the common behavioral patterns of all societies, old and new, advanced and backward.

In the world we live in, although the speed of the changes experienced in all these behavioral patterns, that is, in sociological institutions, is dizzying, the institutions continue to exist. Institutions change shape, change content, but continue as the elements that make up society.

The institutions whose change generally arouses the most worry are religion and the family. As people's understandings of religion and habits change, some form worries that "religion is slipping away." Of course, apart from the segments for whom religion has become "something in hand, a property," there is nothing here that would require falling prey to this worry. Unless, that is, religion has become a property, a field of power, for some.

In fact, throughout history things are not moving to a place very different from people's margins of relation to religion. In times of prosperity people incline too much toward the world and fall into a state of indifference toward their creator.

Secularism and atheism develop not as a philosophical conclusion but as the result of feelings suited to ways of life. Developing philosophical arguments against it has always been a basic concern of the religious, but after a point all philosophical arguments, proofs and efforts strike not an empty mind but an indifferent, insensitive heart. The sages of religion who live and feel religiosity as it deserves have no anxiety about the rise and fall of religion. Religion is God's, and people's being at peace with their creator in this world means being at peace with themselves as well.

The rise of religion is not, and cannot be, a door to profit for the religious person. To the extent that it is, "the slipping away of religion" becomes a more serious source of worry. Yet the religious person's worry is the possibility that people who are not at peace and acquainted with their creator will oppress both themselves and one another and make the world unlivable. The welfare society does not bring, as is supposed, people's being at peace with themselves and with one another; it also brings insatiability, competition, narcissism and intolerance of others.

The institution of the family, too, is exposed to a change in the world we live in that causes great worries. It is not possible not to agree with the worries on this subject. But this subject too, in spite of all the unique aspects of the world we live in, is a matter of a historical cycle.

The sensational and routinized broadcasting, on some television channels, of incidents of a kind that could be described as pathological in any society, can give the impression that the institution of the family and its values have changed completely, even been utterly exhausted. It is impossible for keeping relations of a perversity beyond the human mind's comprehension on the agenda of the whole society for days and weeks, with the viewers also taking part in the discussion, not to have a norm-changing effect.

Perhaps everyone watching, by characterizing the incidents as a perversion, is also confirming the pathological dimension of the incident, but the abundance of the programs and their attention-grabbing presentations create the impression of the continuity and prevalence of such incidents, and have an effect that thoroughly destroys family norms too.

Psychiatrist Arif Verimli, who has for years served as a consultant to these programs, by saying "What is going on there does not reflect the reality of society. They bring in a handful of people with behavioral disorders and have a thousand people watch them. That is not society," in fact also points to a sociological reality. Even in modernist conceptions of society, in Durkheim for instance, it has been said that pathological situations, together with the norms of society, are an inevitable characteristic of every society. But, as Ali Osman Aydın of the Akit newspaper rightly asks, are you not aware of the power of the profit coveted by constantly holding these pathological situations before the eyes of society to spread the pathology with a carcinogenic effect?

In history, too, all societies have been aware of their own pathological structures and have somehow found ways of isolating them so that they do not affect the mental and bodily health of society. The society we live in accepts without any questioning the superstitions of talking about everything, disclosing and exhibiting, making sure everyone sees, confessing, and confronting. Thanks to these superstitions, every kind of evil obtains the privilege of spreading shamelessly and increasingly without meeting any reaction or objection.

Advertising evil, even in the name of good, is evil's greatest opportunity.