WHY SUICIDE?
An examination of the Temple cannot omit the question of why so
many folks would commit suicide in the name of their new faith (or
at the behest of a single man). Jones, apparently, saw the suicide
as a revolutionary act, and in the last years of the Temple, an
emphasis on religious ideas, particularly those of mainstream Christianity,
was replaced by an emphasis on the political nature of the group.
Weightman discusses the concept of revolutionary suicide in greater
depth in her book than we can here. However it is important to recognize
that revolutionary suicide is not a concept that can be found in
the writings of Karl Marx. Suicide cannot be revolutionary for Marx
because suicide, particularly en masse, by an oppressed people effectively
eliminates the very people who would be revolting. The self inflicted
deaths of the revolutionaries eliminates the need for revolution
and the means of production remain in the hands of the oppressors.
Of course, Marx, as a materialist, sees the goals of life as entirely
tied to this world, this life. The Peoples Temple members, as religious
people, believed in some notion of an after-life.
That stated, is there another explanation for the suicides? Emil
Durkheim's concept of "altruistic suicide" is a good match.
In this classification of suicide, those who kill themselves feel
more closely tied to a sub-group than to mainstream society and
their "basis for existence seems situated beyond life itself"
(Durkheim,Lemert 90).
Again, Weightman probes deeply into the question of precisely why
913 people would terminate their own lives and her book includes
a discussion of the resocialization of the Temple members. Also,
Jonathan Smith, in Imagining Religion, sheds some light on this
primary problem by placing the Peoples Temple into the larger framework
of Religious Tradition. Smith compares the Peoples Temple to the
Dionysic cults of Western antiquity as well as to the cargo cults
in the New Hebrides Islands in this |
