Social Construction

Walter Truett Anderson suggests that postmodernism takes is rise from the recognition of the social construction of reality. This means: The institutions, practices, and habits that make up the contents of social life are made by human beings; and even natural reality is known and experienced through a linguistic and intellectual framework that is a social product.

Some react to the discovery that the social world is a matter of artifice with anger. Anderson cites an account of Johnny Rotten and the Sex Pistols: "Damning God and the state, work and leisure, home and family, sex and play, the audience and itself, the music briefly made it possible to experience all those things as if they were not natural facts but ideological constructs: things that had been made and therefore could be altered, or done away with altogether."

In keeping with their Romantic pursuit of the natural behind the artifice, Punk rockers assaulted conventional standards of polite behavior, spitting on their audiences and being spit on in turn. They attempted to batter through the artifice with acts of "brutality, violence, and outrageously bad taste." The problem, of course, is that punk itself became a social construct, with its own conventions, habits, and practices. To be truly revolutionary, one has to keep ahead of the game, assaulting one's own actions as soon as they get hardened into custom. In the end, the revolutionary thing to do might be to croon quiet songs to acoustic guitars before a politely seated audience.

Punk rock makes the point with particular clarity, but the point is broader, and it's this: It seems that the discovery of the social construction of social conventions is a source of anger, vertigo, and disillusionment only if social conventions themselves are seen as tragic additions to nature. These additions may be necessary, but they are tragic necessities.

(And they are necessities. That's so for many reason, but one is the problem of social expectations. We have to have some confidence that our neighbors' actions are going to run along certain ruts if we are going to live together at all. When I extend my hand in greeting, I want to know that it's going to be shaken rather than smashes with a sledge hammer. Even "back to nature" is a convention, an artifice. Nudists dispense with clothing; but since people have been wearing clothes for quite a long time, nudism has become a sartorial convention, deriving its significance from what it rejects.)

If the cultural supplement to nature is always already there, and if it's simply a fact of human existence that the supplement is always already there, then the "discovery" of the social construction of social reality is a huge yawner. Of course it's constructed; and of course it's there before we are; and of course it's the world in which we live and move. So it should be for Christian anthropology: Adam was created in a garden, a supplmental cultural organization of nature that pre-existed Adam himself - Yahweh planted the garden and placed Adam in it. Supplements to nature are not secondary; supplement is at the origin.

Of course, for Christian theology the social is never "merely social," never only immanent. Society is not capped with an impenetrable roof. A "pure" social realm, untouched by religious belief or theology, is itself an ideological construct of modernity. God has spoken, and the institutions and practices and classification systems and languages human beings construct are always responses to His revelation. God is at work within, and above, all social action and institutions.

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, November 08, 2006 at 05:29 PM

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