It appears that disgraced academic Jason Arday has committed suicide. He was found at an address in Battersea, south London, on Friday afternoon. His family is blaming those behind Arday’s termination. “The campaign of misinformation was too much for Jason, who was a gentle man and who always wanted to see the best in everyone.” Should the campaigners have affirmed his identity as a university professor? Of course not. Doing the right thing can cause emotional torment. Doing the right thing takes precedent. The right thing is the most important thing, and one’s feelings have to come to terms with this.
French sociologist Émile Durkheim would likely have described Arday’s death as a case of anomie. For Durkheim, anomie occurs when the norms and expectations that ordinarily regulate people’s lives become disrupted. Anomie is thus a state of normlessness in which the person is disconnected from his moral foundation and alienated from his survival instinct. (See Accounting for Disordered Personalities in Altruistic Suicide: A Note On Durkheim’s Typology.)
In The Sacred Canopy (1967), which builds directly upon the sociology of knowledge that he and fellow sociologist Thomas Luckmann developed in their foundational text The Social Construction of Reality (1966), Peter Berger takes Durkheim’s concept of anomie and develops it phenomenologically. Berger’s elaboration may help the reader understand the situation Arday was in.
Berger argues that society provides individuals with a nomos—a taken-for-granted world of identity, meaning, and order. People ordinarily do not experience nomos as something society has constructed; it simply feels like reality. When that nomos collapses, the result isn’t merely confusion. The ultimate danger is meaninglessness—what Berger characterizes as the “nightmare par excellence,” in which identity and reality themselves are distorted and terrifying. Anomie, Berger contends, can become unbearable to the point that an individual may seek death in preference to it.
Think about it. A person has a socially defined identity of great reputational import—Arday was a professor, scholar, respected member of an institution—and understands what’s expected of him. If that identity suddenly collapses, as it did in Arday’s case, his relationship to the social order can become profoundly destabilized. Death is preferable to the emotional torment of social rupture.
Arday’s case has all the ingredients of such a rupture. He went from being celebrated as a Cambridge professor and academic marvel (and allegedly marvelous at other things, such as athletics and fundraising) to having his scholarly credentials publicly scrutinized, his biography questioned, and resigning his position—all in a compressed period of time. Arday was a star, so his fall was predictably far. The revelations about his biography and career weren’t edge cases. It appears that he invented a fictitious person: Jason Arday.
One might say that Arday’s situation was something like that of the manufactured pop group Milli Vanilli. For those who missed this epic scandal, Milli Vanilli were a German duo exposed for faking their hit record and live performance. It was a dramatic fall from stardom I shan’t recount here. However, it is relevant that one of the pair, Robert Pilatus, appears to have committed suicide on the eve of the promotional tour for the album—which was never released—on which he and Fab Morvan actually perform their vocal parts. The point is that, when the constructed self has been destroyed, and it is that person’s core identity, self-annihilation becomes an escape route.
There is an important lesson to be learned in cases like this. If a person you know suffers such a degree of social destabilization, it is important to watch them, even sit with them and encourage them to seek help. You may think they are the last person in the world to commit suicide, but that misunderstands the nature of suicide. I have heard too many people say, “But he wasn’t suicidal.” No, not when everything was in place. But Arday was out of place. And he felt he had nowhere to go. For somebody whose identity is everything, losing it is a kind of death itself.
The reality is that surveys find that a large plurality of next-of-kin have no idea that a family member was suicidal. An even larger plurality of those who eventually commit suicide did not admit to suicidal thoughts when examined by health care professionals. Arday was probably not suicidal—until he was found out and resigned (same for Pilatus, having to prove he was something he wasn’t). That is when a man needs those around him the most. Despite what Arday did, he was a human being. Somebody should have regarded him on those terms.
freedom and reason 