by Martin Butler
Behind many debates in contemporary culture lie two opposed perspectives on the human world. One argues that ordinary life consists largely of ‘social constructs’ in a sense ‘made up’ by human beings. They have no fixed reality beyond the human cultures and institutions in which they exist. Obvious examples are marriage, money and national borders. Others are more controversial: gender, standards of beauty, ethnicity, patriarchy, religious belief, adolescence, and so on. On the other side of the argument is the view that at least some of these concepts have a factual reality, whether based in biology, human nature, genetics, human evolution or some other deeper reality, an essential nature which is not merely the product of human culture. The term ‘essentialism’ is often used to describe this approach.
Social constructivism is a theory that has its home within the social sciences, it is not meant as a philosophical theory on a par with idealism, for example, which provides a global account of the nature of reality. Presumably describing something as a social construction contrasts it with what is not constructed. Few would want to argue that the atomic mass of carbon is a social construction. So social constructivism is a theory that sits within a broadly naturalistic account of reality. Despite appearances it has this much in common with at least the more scientific (usually biological) forms of essentialism. The debate, then, is presented as being about where to place the divide between the natural and the specifically human. We might say that money is uncontroversially a social construction and the atomic mass of carbon is uncontroversially not a human construction. The controversy exists in the middle ground.
I think this opposition distorts the issue. The language of ‘constructions’ obscures the fact that the human world is composed for the most part of normative practices. Normative practices are about what we do and say as we interact with each other and the world around us. A simple example is how we greet each other, something which shows considerable cultural variation. Crucially there is an appropriate and inappropriate way to greet someone, depending on relationship and context, and this is what makes such a practice normative. A construction of any sort suggests a static entity in the way that a chair is a physical construction, but it is these practices that matter and there is no sense in which they are static, nor do they ‘construct’ entities.
More importantly, the language of ‘constructions’ suggests artificiality in some sense, as if these constructions lack the reality of the natural world. Surely this is an empty comparison. To claim that national borders or marriage are only ‘constructions’ suggests a level of deception in cultures that treat these things seriously. To look reality squarely in the face, it is implied, is to recognise that they are not ‘real’. However, we may represent borders as lines on a map and regard these lines as in some sense fictional, but in no way does this get to the core of what a national border actually is. To understand this we must recognise the complex practices surrounding the use of passports, national governments and so on, none of which is fictional or somehow lacking in reality. Normative practices are of course distinctively human, but we must resist the idea that the natural world is the measure of reality. By this standard any cultural practice is bound to fall short, not because it is less real but because it is a different kind of phenomenon altogether. To reverse the point we might claim that natural phenomena are lacking when compared to cultural practices because they have no normative authority. Chalk is clearly lacking in cheesiness but both chalk and cheese are real.
The social constructionist might argue that calling something a ‘social construction’ simply emphasises the point that things don’t have to be a particular way. History and anthropology show us that cultures come in all shapes and sizes. What is often associated with this claim is the idea that we have the freedom to create better social constructions according to a rational, more ethical plan, just as town planners in the 1960s reconstructed city centres to replace previously higgledy-piggledy layouts. However, the fact that cultural practices show wide variations does not mean they can be moulded at will according to a rational plan or vision, nor does it even imply that we have the power to decide to change these practices at all. It might even be argued that changing the natural world is easier than changing cultural practices.
We can, of course, improve the way we live and the practices that we take for granted – many aspects of the way we live now are without doubt better than they were two hundred years ago – but it is surely not an easy or obvious process. Unintended consequences abound at every turn – as they did with the town planning of the 60s (in the UK at least). In any case, human cultures, certainly in the modern world, are intrinsically dynamic and follow a logic that is not always easy to grasp or predict. It is not a purely theoretical issue, and it’s a mistake to assume that what we can represent to ourselves in the abstract can become a sustainable cultural practice. Change usually takes place without our self-conscious consent or even awareness, and preserving valued practices is often as much of an issue as challenging the status quo.
The language of ‘constructions’ is not helpful here. It suggests the issue at stake is the existence of something, when it surely is not, and it presents an overly rationalistic image that borrows from the way in which physical constructions such as town centres are planned and created. It’s also worth remembering that the ethical concepts – such as equality or individual rights – which often motivate the call for change, can be regarded as ‘social constructions’ just as much as those we want to change. The purported property of being a ‘social construction’ thus becomes quite redundant.
So much for social constructionism, but there are problems with essentialism too. Again, the key point is missed: that human culture is about normative practices. This is what distinguishes human culture from the natural phenomena studied by science. In a culture, we live in what is known as the ‘space of reasons’.[1] Human beings act rather than just behave. The distinctive feature of an action is that we can be held responsible for it and be expected to have reasons that justify it. Actions can be seen as mere behaviour but this perspective leaves out the distinctively human element. Even to say ‘I couldn’t help myself from doing X’ is still a reason, even if it’s viewed as inadequate. Most of the time of course there’s no need for an explicit justification for our actions because the reason is obvious, but unusual or out of character action may well mean a justification is called for. It is because of this normative nature of culture that human beings have a history, unlike other animals. Cultures change as practices change, and to understand this it is necessary (although perhaps not sufficient) to get to grips with the changes in the kinds of reasoning a culture employs to justify its practices. This is clearly not a biological process.
This is not to deny that human beings are part of the physical world and that our biology clearly affects the way we act. What is denied is that it’s possible to deduce what a social practice must look like from a knowledge of biology, genetics, hormone levels or anything else. Our biology may well put limits on the kinds of practices that a human culture can display, but it’s not clear how we could ever know where these limits might be. The essentialist might argue, for example, that human culture is inevitability hierarchical because of our biology, and this may well be true; but we can’t read this off from our knowledge of biology. It would be a purely speculative claim based on hitherto existing cultures, not on biology. And in a sense, knowledge of biology is irrelevant here since the biological facts will make themselves evident whether we like it or not, or whether we have a knowledge of these facts or not. If the essentialist is right then his argument is redundant.
Perhaps more importantly, biology cannot tell us what our cultural practices ought to be. Even without a hard division between what is and what ought to be, it is surely clear that biology cannot provide us with ethical prescriptions for our cultural practices. Much of the best in humanity has involved countering biological mechanisms. Infant mortality, for example, is naturally high but human beings have developed practices to reduce it. In fact much of human culture has been about mitigating the effects of biology, and the natural can certainly not be equated with the good. The idea that practices ought to conform in some sense to some set of biological facts is surely to fall foul of the same overly rationalistic tendency that tempts us to reconstruct cultural practices according to an idealised ethical vision (as in John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’, or such theoretical ideologies as libertarianism or communism).
For modernity (i.e. the post-enlightenment world) the very idea of normativity is paradoxical. On the one hand, the recognition that cultures come in all shapes and sizes tends to undermine the normative force of any practice of which we are a part. Marriage, for example, is a practice within our culture, and as such it must have a normative force that requires us to take it seriously. But we can’t help but see marriage as ‘just another practice’ – the common expression that marriage is ‘just a piece of paper’ epitomises this thought. And this of course is what social constructionism implies. It produces a kind of cultural vertigo, a sense that nothing really has the normative force that it apparently ought to have; the sense that nothing really matters. So there is a strong temptation to try and ground a culture in something solid, something that will provide a firm foundation and allow us to overcome this vertigo. We tend to see-saw between ‘lacking all conviction’ and being ‘filled with a passionate intensity’.[2] The social constructionist might look to some idealised vision based on reason (or perhaps religious belief – often fundamentalist) that can be bought into being through sheer force of will, while the essentialist looks towards the solid ‘facts’ of biology which can form a template for how we must live. So in a sense, social constructionism and biological essentialism are really two sides of the same coin.
The trick we need to pull to escape this predicament is to fully grasp that the floating nature of cultural practices does not need to undermine their reality or authority.
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[1] This is an expression first used by Wilfred Sellars in his essay ‘Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind’.
[2] This is a reference to Yeats’s poem ‘The Second Coming’.