4 - The Form that the Collective Consciousness(es) of Society Takes in a Late-Industrial Society: I. Macro-sociological or ‘General’ Characteristics

Summary

The history of the twentieth century is the history of the decay of values and the status system of Victorian Britain.

(Halsey 1981, 43; cited in Scott 1996, 238)

If it is unfortunate to begin any discussion of this kind with a negative observation, it is nevertheless just as important to say what is not part of the collective consciousness of any particular society as it is to say what is. The first thing we can say in trying to identify the form of the collective consciousness in an ‘organic’ society like contemporary Britain – that is to say, a largely post-industrial society characterized by a highly developed division of labour – is that the collective consciousness of such a society no longer takes the form of an organized religion. Organized religions may well continue to exist in such societies, and may even be quite influential, but they no longer perform the function of the collective consciousness of those societies characterized by a highly developed division of labour. Durkheim is quite clear about this (2002, 103-7) and in fact, as I have already said, it was the entire point of his lectures on Moral Education to develop in place of a formal religion a collective consciousness appropriate to a secular society.

If it was obvious to Durkheim, writing at the beginning of the twentieth century, that the collective consciousness of even a still predominantly agricultural society like modern France was not religious in character, then this is even more obvious to us today in early twenty-first century Britain.