Collective effervescence: Durkheim's idea and the evidence

Every day at 00:00 UTC, Anima Mundis opens an appointment: one hour in which everyone is invited to tune in at once. It looks like a product decision. It is really an older idea, and it has an author: the French sociologist Émile Durkheim, who wrote in 1912 that gathering at the same time awakens in people something none of them has alone, and that a society needs to gather again at regular intervals in order to keep being one.

Durkheim's question

In 1912 Durkheim published The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. He wanted to understand what religion is and, to see it without ornament, he studied the one he considered the simplest then known: that of the Aboriginal peoples of Australia, for whom he used the ethnographic data available.² His descriptions of ceremonies come from the ethnographers Spencer and Gillen, whom he cites page by page.¹

It is worth saying from the start. What he tells was written by European observers from outside, not by those who lived those ceremonies, and Durkheim himself speaks of "the primitives" with the words and the prejudices of his time. No description of those rituals is repeated here: the idea is.

Two phases: dispersion and concentration

In those descriptions, Durkheim saw that the life of those peoples alternates between two phases. In one, the population breaks up into small groups that go about independently, each family seeking its own sustenance. In the other, "the population concentrates and gathers at determined points for a length of time varying from several days to several months". And he writes: "These two phases are contrasted with each other in the sharpest way."¹

From that opposition he draws what he is best remembered for. There is a world where daily life "drags wearily along", and another that can only be entered by "entering into relations with extraordinary powers that excite him to the point of frenzy". The first is the profane world and the second that of sacred things.¹

Effervescence

The word that stuck to him is effervescence: the bubbling of a liquid that is being stirred. Durkheim uses it for what happens when people come together. He believes that the mere fact of concentration "acts as an exceptionally powerful stimulant": when they come together "a sort of electricity is formed", and every sentiment expressed is re-echoed by the others, so that the initial impulse grows as it goes, "as an avalanche grows in its advance".¹

And he does not limit it to distant peoples. His nearest example is an orator: the sentiments his words provoke come back to him enlarged by the audience, and then "it is no longer a simple individual who speaks; it is a group incarnate and personified". And more generally: "There are periods in history when, under the influence of some great collective shock, social interactions have become much more frequent and active. Men look for each other and assemble together more than ever. That general effervescence results which is characteristic of revolutionary or creative epochs."¹

It is not praise without shadows. Under that exaltation, he says, "we see the most mediocre and inoffensive bourgeois become either a hero or a butcher", and he cites the Crusades and the French Revolution, with scenes "either sublime or savage".¹ And he adds something anyone recognises in a stadium or at a concert: since a collective sentiment can only express itself collectively if it keeps some order that allows movements in unison, the cries and gestures "tend to become rhythmic and regular; hence come songs and dances".¹

The regular appointment

What makes effervescence an idea about calendars, and not only about crowds, is what Durkheim writes at the end of the book: "There can be no society which does not feel the need of upholding and reaffirming at regular intervals the collective sentiments and the collective ideas which make its unity and its personality." He adds that this moral remaking can only be achieved by "reunions, assemblies and meetings" in which people, closely united to one another, reaffirm in common their common sentiments.¹

For him it need not be religious: he asks what essential difference there is between an assembly of Christians celebrating the principal dates of the life of Christ and a reunion of citizens commemorating some great event in the national life. His example is the French Revolution, which established a whole cycle of holidays to keep its principles "in a state of perpetual youth". If that institution quickly fell away, he says, it was because the revolutionary faith lasted but a moment and disappointments came fast.¹

And he dares a prediction. The old gods are growing old or already dead, and others are not yet born, but "a day will come when our societies will know again those hours of creative effervescence, in the course of which new ideas arise and new formulæ are found", and afterwards people will feel the need of reliving them from time to time, "keeping alive their memory by means of celebrations which regularly reproduce their fruits".¹

What his critics dispute

Durkheim's theory has serious detractors, who criticise, among other things, his methodology and his interpretation of the ethnographic data.² That he based a general theory of religion on data others had gathered about one group of peoples is precisely what his critics reproach. And what an outside observer tells of a ceremony is not the only possible reading of it; calling those peoples "primitive", today, does not hold up.

One clarification that matters in this Diary: when Durkheim speaks of collective forces, he is not speaking of a hidden field or of a signal an instrument could pick up, as the Global Consciousness Project sought. For him society is a reality that is born when people interact, and that is not reducible to any of them.² It is sociology, not physics.

What has been measured since

Almost a hundred years later, someone went to measure it. Konvalinka and colleagues recorded the pulse of 38 people during the 30 minutes of a fire-walking ritual in Spain. They found that the heart rate of those walking on the embers synchronised with that of the spectators they had a bond with, but not with that of spectators unrelated to them, even though the bodily behaviour of both was very different. So the authors suggest that the mechanism may be informational and not mere imitation.³

And in three experiments, Wiltermuth and Heath found that people who acted in synchrony with others cooperated more afterwards in group economic exercises, even when cooperating cost something, and that the synchrony did not need to produce positive emotions.⁴

These are specific studies, with small groups, and they do not prove what Durkheim said. But they bring a part of his intuition to a measurement: doing something at the same time as others leaves traces that can be measured.

The arithmetic of an appointment

Anima Mundis has a very practical reason to care about all this. A chamber forms with 3, 5 or 7 people who are on the same frequency and in the same language, a "bucket", and who arrived within the last ten minutes. If three do not arrive within that time, whoever arrived waits and, after ten minutes, expires. Visits are not enough: there has to be coincidence.

The block below simulates a bucket with the engine's real pairing rule and random arrivals, and lets you move the day's visits and the languages. The grey bars are what would happen with visits spread across the whole day; the violet ones, with the world hour, assuming that 25% of visits fall in that hour, and the amber one is the appointment hour.

With 450 visits a day and eight languages, spread out, about three people an hour reach the largest bucket and only one in five enters a chamber. If 25% of those visits coincide in one hour, about eighteen arrive in that hour and nine in ten enter. To achieve the same with visits spread across the whole day would take about 2,700. The advantage of concentrating shows with few visits; with thousands a day, spread out or concentrated makes almost no difference.

A warning: these are not measurements. Anima Mundis does not count visits, by promise, and the simulation's proportions are assumptions. What is exact is the mechanics, and that I did check against the engine itself.

What we do with this

The world hour is exactly what Durkheim describes in other words: an appointment that repeats at regular intervals, with a phase of dispersion and one of concentration. It happens every day at 00:00 UTC, for one hour, at the same instant for the whole planet. The page shows the countdown and the local time of whoever is looking, calculated by their browser and never sent, and there is a "remind me" that generates a calendar file in the browser itself. It changes not a single rule of the engine: it is an appointment, not a mode of operation.

What we do not do is claim that there is effervescence here. Durkheim spoke of bodies together, of songs and dances; this is people who cannot see or know each other, in front of a screen, typing. If at 00:00 UTC the Observatory's pulse rises, it will be because many people coincided, and that can be counted. What happened inside each of them, we neither know nor measure.