Suicide is society and civilization at work. Suicide is sociological.
Published in 1897, Le Suicide is the defining sociological study of its concern. Durkheim’s troika established a taxonomy and serves as penetrating lenses and social probes: egoistic self-destruction as the cost of self-authentication and self-absorption; altruistic suicide as the all-consuming force of society; and anomic suicide, by one who is cast out to sea. Durkheim was a pioneer but not without forerunners.
In 1879, Enrico Morselli published Il suicidio: Saggio di statistica Morale comparata, or Suicide: An Essay on Comparative Moral Statistics. Morselli presents his formulation and framing in the Introduction. He begins:
Suicide is one of the voluntary human acts upon which statistical work has dwelt with special predilection, and is one of the chief subjects of social physics. The psychological meaning of this moral fact has always been enveloped in great metaphysical obscurity, because suicide appears less susceptible of positive appreciation than all other expressions of the human will.[1]
For Morselli, suicide has been a philosophical and religious darkness: the eternal question asked with never a true answer. He continues:
But it is certain that the subject of self-destruction did not enter into its positive phase until after statistical researches.
This new aspect of suicide could not become clear where metaphysical systems prevailed; it was necessary to collect all the facts, to unite them together, to consider their analogy and difference, to do … precisely the reverse of what philosophy had done up to that time.
For the phenomena of social life this aim can only be attained by statistics.
From this was brought to light that perpetual element of force and development, the principle of organic and functional transformation, or the dynamics of population.
The old philosophy of individualism had given to suicide the character of liberty and spontaneity, but now it became necessary to study it no longer as the expression of individual and independent faculties, but certainly as a social phenomenon allied with all other racial forces.[2]
For Morselli, this is the science of moral statisics as concern and method. Despite his objection to a priori reasoning, the work proceeds under two familiar rubrics: the analytic first and then the synthetic.
In his analysis, Morselli places the phenomena of suicide into five categories: cosmic or natural; ethnic or demographic; social; individual-biological; and individual-psychological.
Morselli recognizes the limitation of his results: the difficulty of collecting complete and reliable data; the problem of distinguishing between cause, correlation, and coincidence; and the inability of social phenomena to reveal “individual motives” — the “inward phenomena of conscience,” the “individual mental state or psychical movement” that “statistics cannot presume to learn.”[3]
He concludes his Introduction: “Statistics may be compared to a two-edged weapon, murderous to the inexperienced or malicious” and invaluable to those who “bring to bear practice, moderation, and prudence.”[4]
Morselli turns to the synthetic with the following:
Suicide is not an act depending on the personal spontaneity of man but … is a social fact. Laws, universal and constant, and necessary, restrain within the narrowest limits the path of action assigned to each individual and show that the psychical activities are obedient to the same influences and slow transformations of time and space to which all the other activities of living organism and species are subject …[5]
How then to confront what he calls an “epidemic” and the “fatal disease of civilized people”? Is suicide nothing but an unassailable plague that will run its own course as it wishes? What then of the prophylactic and therapeutic to which Morselli refers?
By volume, the analytic is lengthy, running 350 pages; the synthetic spans twenty-two. Of these pages, nineteen establish the etiology of suicide — the very source of the phenomenon. Where the savage dies by homicide, the civilized man or woman dies by suicide. Yet the root is the same: weakness at heart, weakness in mind, weakness of character.
Moreover, the environment of the primitive and civilized is essentially the same, one of competition to survive and thrive. The civilized man or woman, he observes, is filled with wild needs and desires far beyond the savage. Only some will realize their aspirations. The others — the weak minded and spirited — end up as suicides, as well as the poor, criminals, prostitutes, and the insane.[6]
Four decades before Freud’s theory of social neurosis made manifest in individuals, Morselli advanced the thesis that civilization itself maims and even kills in the individual. By contrast, however, Morselli does not view suicide as the mark of a diseased civilization. Suicide is an evolutionary function of sorting and culling: nothing but the physics of the struggle and the failure of staying alive, staying alive.
What is to be done if one likens suicide to a social disease or merely seeks to overturn the laws of social physics? In the final three pages, Morselli conveys one simple lesson: moral fortitude through moral education — not simply of individuals, but of society as a whole.
In moral and political philosophy, from Plato to Machiavelli to Rousseau, society is or becomes healthy because healthy individuals are charged to help to make it so. The science of moral statistics as social engineering achieves a reversal. Now, only a healthy society can fashion healthy individuals and therein lies the true evolution. The body social must be morally strong to cure its social disease in order to cure the individual. How this comes about, Morselli does not say, nor could he, in a manner of speaking. Nevertheless: Behold! the artificial man, greater in stature and strength than the natural.
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Enrico Morselli, Suicide: An Essay on Comparative Moral Statistics (New York: Appleton, 1882).