Social Complexity Modernity and Suicide: An Assessment of Durkheim’s Suicide from the Perspective of a Non-linear Analysis of Complex Social Systems

Can we share even today the same vision of modernity which Durkheim left us byits suicide analysis? or can society ‘surprise us’? The answer to these questions can be inspired by several studies which found that beginning the second half of the twentiethcentury suicides in western countries more industrialized and modernized do notincrease in a constant, linear way as modernization and social fragmentation processincreases, as well as Durkheim’s theory seems to lead us to predict. Despite continued modernizing process, they found stabilizing or falling overall suicide rate trends. Therefore,a gradual process of adaptation to the stress of modernization associated to low social integration levels seems to be activated in modern society. Assuming this perspective,the paper highlights as this tendency may be understood in the light of the new concept of social systems as complex adaptive systems, systems which are able to adapt to environmental perturbations and generate as a whole surprising, emergent effects due to nonlinear interactions among their components. So, in the frame of Nonlinear Dynamical System Modeling, we formalize the logic of suicide decisionmakingprocess responsible for changes at aggregate level in suicide growth rates by anonlinear differential equation structured in a logistic way, and in so doing we attempt to capture the mechanism underlying the change process in suicide growth rate and to test the hypothesis that system’s dynamics exhibits a restrained increase process as expression of an adaptation process to the liquidity of social ties in modern society. In particular, a Nonlinear Logistic Map is applied to suicide data in a modern society such as the Italian one from 1875 to 2010. The analytic results, seeming to confirm the ideaof the activation of an adaptation process to the liquidity of social ties, constitutes an opportunity for a more general reflection on the current configuration of modern society,by relating the Durkheimian Theory with the Halbwachs’ Theory and most currentvisions of modernity such as the Baumanian one. Complexity completes the interpretativeframework by rooting the generating mechanism of adaptation process in theprecondition of a new General Theory of Systems making the non linearity propertyof social system’s interactions and surprise the functioning and evolution rule of social systems.