Before I start defining the idea of a social construct, I’m going to put this right here:
A conservative mandate
1. The fundamental assumptions of Western Civilization are valid.
2. Peaceful social being is preferable to isolation and war. In consequence, it justifiably demands some sacrifice of individual impulse and idiosyncrasy.
3. Hierarchies of competence are desirable and should be promoted.
4. Borders are reasonable. Likewise, limits on immigration are reasonable. Further it should not be assumed that citizens of societies that have not evolved functional individual rights dedicated policies will have values in keeping with such policies.
5. People should be paid so that they are willing and able to perform socially useful and desirable duties.
6. Citizens have the inalienable right to benefit from their honest labor.
7. It is more noble to teach about responsibilities than rights.
8. It is better to do what has always been done unless you have some extraordinarily valid reason to do otherwise.
9. Radical change should always be viewed with suspicion. Especially in a time of radical change.
10. The government, local and distant, should leave people to their own devices as much as possible.
11. Intact heterosexual two parent families constitute the necessary bedrock of a stable society.
12. We should judge our political system in comparison to other actual political systems and not to hypothetical utopias.
This was posted by a conservative acquaintance and I’ll get back to it in a hot minute. First, let’s define social constructionism. A much easier task than defining emotion! Probably because it’s a relatively new idea (compared to emotion which has been around in one form or fashion since there have been people) and can be narrowed down to a single source. Well, kind of.
We could start with the “Cogito, ergo sum”. The Latin proposition by 1600s philosopher René Descartes of “I think, therefore I am” that bases the existence of reality in our ability to think. (Yes, this is a simplified interpretation.) Then there is Alfred Schutz and his book, The Meaningful Structure of the Social World or Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt in the original German. He, in turn, influenced the writers of The Social Construction of Reality. Originally published in the mid 1960s by sociologists Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckman.
Berger and Luckman conceptualize the idea that over time people interacting in a society create over all concepts of the meaning of each other’s actions. These understandings become habit and eventually become part of that society. Which brings us to Vivien Burr and the 1995 book, An Introduction to Social Constructionism. Note, this is from a sociological perspective. There is also a psychological perspective that I will not engage here.
A social construct exists because we humans in our particular society agree that it exists. A social construct is something that is created through the repetition of social beliefs and practices – traditions. By structuring what we see and experience into categories we order the world around us. Which, among other things, makes all systems of categorization social constructs.
One major criticism of the concept of social constructs is that there are nonnegotiable features of the world. This is true. Social constructs form as we designate and conceive them through language and arrangements of classification that are inherently subjective. The fact that we, as a society, create them doesn’t mean they are not real. As a matter of fact, the reality of social constructs is absolutely integral to their functionality.
The most oft pulled example of a social construct is money. Money is real in that I can hold it in my hand but the fact that I can exchange pieces of colored paper and small metal disks for goods and services is only because the people in my society deem it so. Countries and the governments that run them are also obvious social constructs. In the US the story of the government’s creation as different from all that came before it as well as our great expansion through Manifest Destiny are an important part of American mythology. Then there are all of the other countries birthed by European colonization. Despite the fact that their borders are defined not by the language or culture of the people within them, but by the desires and convenience of the European colonizers, many of those borders continue to exist hundreds of years later.
Marriage is also a social construct. The concept changes or simply does not exist from society to society. Even within cultures. There are polygamous, polyandrous, and mixed-orientation marriages. Why people get married varies greatly. As does the importance of love in a marriage. Some say it should come first, others say it will come at last, still others say it’s irrelevant. How families will be connected after marriage differs as well. In some cultures, a woman leaves her family to join her husband’s. In others marriage joins the entire families of the married persons. Then there is the question of who can get married. The LBGTQIA+ community is still waiting for full access to marriage throughout the world. All of these things differ from culture to culture.
What constitutes a family also varies from culture to culture and over time. In the US and much of the West an extended, multigenerational idea has given over to the ideal of nuclear family of a man, wife, and two children. How and what we learn, our education, is socially constructed and constantly changing. Gender and race will probably get their own posts. Gender fluctuates from country to country, region to region. Many societies have multiple genders and what is ascribed as feminine or masculine changes over time and geography. Race, as we know it, came into being to justify the transatlantic slave trade. Even if you believe in God, as I do, it is impossible not to see organized religion as a construct of man.
Even what is abnormal is not the same everywhere. My home state in the US only recently, like this month, June, of 2019, established a minimum age of 16 for marriage. And there are lawmakers who continue to argue vehemently for no minimum age at all. The national age for sexual consent for ‘females’ is 13 in Japan. 13! Circumcision, tattoos, piercing, being omnivorous, all of these things are viewed as unorthodox to positively deviant in one culture or another. What is normal in one part of the world may, and often does, clash with the norm of another culture.
All of these are systems of classification which makes them social constructs. Ways in which we categorize peoples and things. Too often when people claim a thing is a social construct they imply, or even state, this makes them “fake” or “not real”. To them the opposite of socially constructed would be something immutable. Something prescribed, generally by nature or by God. There are three concepts that tend to surround conversations about social constructionism. One, that an idea is dependent on community actions and arrangements. If these actions and arrangements were different, then we would have different ideas. This is the basis of the social construct. The ideas we tend to focus on are the ones we want to change. Things that are unjust. The conversation continues that because these things are social constructs, they are malleable. More there is the idea that eradicating the construct will eliminate the harm. In those last two therein lies the rub.
Social constructs make up very important features of our worlds. While they are completely arbitrary social constructs are also very real. It is true that they are flexible in that though social constructs reference concrete, observable characteristics of the world, how these features are categorized depends of a plethora of random interactions. But a lot of these features, these ideas, are held by millions upon millions of people who have held them for countless generations. Nations, money, religion – these are all social constructs, but they are also ideas that people kill and die for every damned day.
A social construct is created through the repetition of communal principles and customs – traditions. As I wrote in Traditions, I am a big fan. Traditions, rituals, a shared culture and language- they tie communities together and pass time-honored values to subsequent generations. Even those that appear senseless from the outside may fulfill a function for those who practice them. The Conservative Mandate above is, among other things, the viewpoint of a person for whom the world is nonarbitrary. Each is a social construct imbued by its believers with the power of Truth. This is a reason that there is such resistance to the idea of social constructs. It is also an example of how it is often easier to alter things that are biological or nonarbitrary than to change a person’s ideas about the world, about themselves. This is in part because losing hold of our traditions has real consequences. People who have had their traditions stripped from them, like just about any peoples who found themselves at the gentle mercy of European colonists up to and through the 19th century, face a continuous struggle into the present to cobble together the surviving pieces of who they, we, are.
Naming something a social construct often comes with the insinuation that it is something dangerous or suspicious, but social constructs are not innately bad or wrong. A social construct is a reality in which cultures apply characteristics to groups and creating identities that are then framed by the thoughts and actions of people in that society. As it is constructed by active participants of a society these thoughts and actions change over time as views around identities evolve. The social construct of race, in of itself, is not a negative thing. It is racism, the grotesque child of race – how we chose to categorize based on race – that causes problems. There are social constructs that are absolutely necessary for our society to function. But there are others that eat away at our physical, psychological, and spiritual health. That corrode our integrity and, ultimately, damage our society as a whole.
There is no such thing as an unbiased observation of the world. Acknowledging something as a social construct means interacting analytically with structures of categorization to recognize when they are not working for us. There will always be some conflict here but, an ideal social structure is one that minimizes suffering. Which means we get rid of entire systems of categorization or we may decide to keep some elements and dump others. What we can’t do is take for granted our ways of understanding the world and ourselves.
These are all constructs that, one way or another, exist outside of ourselves. What about when someone claims something within us is socially constructed? What if our very emotions are social constructs? More on that next week.
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