Conclusion: Knowledge, Truth, and the Problem of Useless Knowledge

Abstract

From a Durkheimian perspective, the partition of Ireland was virtually inevitable and wholly comprehensible and the divisions and sectarian violence in Northern Ireland are wholly explicable. That Catholics and Protestants should form different national identities and aspire to different nation-states is highly rational from a sociological and nationalism perspective, where religion is merely the symbolic representation of two different societies/nations, with different social structures, “conscious collectives,” and opposed systems of knowledge. These conform almost precisely to Durkheim‘s criteria for different societies/nations and also represent the core characteristics for his division between mechanical (Catholic nationalist) and organic (Protestant industrial), which are fundamentally incompatible because they produce truth and knowledge that contradict each other.