Cathderals of the Eye and Tongue: Notes on Social Construction

I’ve been trying to step back from doing quite so many political pieces on this blog, because while the political philosophy tends to play well, I’m more interested in art. Granted, I can rant about politics until my fingertips are worn down to nubs of polished bone, but a facility with getting angry and typing fast doesn’t nuanced or insightful commentary make.

All of this being said, I wanted to discuss the issue of social construction today. It seems to me that this is one of those topics which people intuitively get but which falls apart when they look at it too closely. It’s also a topic I’ve danced around several times before, notably in my discussions of contingency, gender, metaphor, and the phenomenon I call protagonization. It could easily be said that much of what I talk about on this website is tied up in issues of social construction.

Here’s the UK cover of The Death of Truth, presented because it lacks the subtitle I don’t want to print on my website for SEO purposes.

For background, this piece is based loosely on the Michiko Kakutani book The Death of Truth (there is also a subtitle, but it would mess up my SEO to mention the name of the current president, so I’m leaving it out.) In this book, Kakutani, a perfectly fine literary critic, makes the mistaken assertion that postmodernism, marxism, fascism, and contemporary American right-wing thinking are all water drawn from the same well. She asserts that they all hinge upon the removal of “truth” from the equation and the substitution of a fluid set of falsehoods.

This is a perfectly fine rhetorical move for an establishment liberal attempting to define a set of “us” versus “them” but it is a shamefully lazy move for someone claiming to be a public intellectual. It hinges upon the parallelism of propaganda and deconstruction, which are different intellectual moves, and it’s a blatant bit of legerdemain for someone engaged in propaganda to make.

So, instead of getting angry and biting into my phone like an apple, which delivered this book to me, and would be expensive, painful, and toxic to bite in such a manner, I’m going to explain social construction so that other people don’t fall into the same trap that I charitably assume Kakutani did (the other being that she’s throwing postmodernism under the bus with the thinking of the contemporary American right.)

To answer Kakutani: Social Construction doesn’t mean “made up.” People who discuss things being socially constructed don’t believe that gender is a pyramid scheme, that race is a fiction made up by one guy who lived in Holland, or that words are invented from whole cloth by publishers to sell new editions of dictionaries.

This is only partially related, but one of my favorite medievalists wrote a book about the construction of Cathedrals and the social conditions around the process — I need to get a copy.

Social Construction is less like building a shed in your back yard and more like the process by which stone carvers and carpenters and artisans of all stripes built up a medieval cathedral. Each one adds their own twist to it, reinterpreting a master plan that was conceived of before they were born and would be realized long after they die. It is not construction in the sense of the finished building but in the sense of an ongoing process. But, much as lazy work by someone in the first generation might go unnoticed and uncorrected for decades, we cannot assume that every portion of this construction is necessarily sound from the first principles. Perhaps this beam has a fault in it that will not allow it to take the weight it is supposed to bear, perhaps that statue is placed off-center, perhaps the floors are not level.

Our social institutions are ongoing constructions that we are all taking part in, and so we have a duty to handle it properly. This is the key thing to keep in mind when discussing Social Construction.

For yet further background, a regular discussion group that I go to got roped into a discussion that I took to be the question of transcendence versus immanence. The other people in the group were stuck on the pragmatics of the particular question, which don’t interest me much, but when I asserted that I didn’t really believe in transcendence, the young man who asked the question appeared to get where I was coming from, but to be on the opposite side of the question. To sum up: much of so-called western philosophy has held there to be a transcendent truth. Consider the Platonic Forms, the Aristotelian Essences, the Abrahamic divinity. All of these are a transcendent grounding for the muck of day-to-day existence. They are apart from that existence, unchanging and eternal.

Heraclitus, as depicted by Luca Giordano. He was also known as “The Weeping Philospher”, because he was more than a bit of a pessimist, and “The Obscure”, because no one knew what he meant.

I, on the other hand, am much more in the Heraclitean camp. Everything flows. Everything is changeable, and the question of the transcendent doesn’t matter much to me. This strand is called “Process Philosophy” and it can be a bit of a leap to move over to that.

When I made this case, his rejoinder was to ask about mathematics. Did the change observed in material things invalidate an equation that perfectly describes the phenomenon? Clearly, to him, the equation was the more fundamental thing.

Thankfully, there was a math professor there that pointed out that mathematics is a system of representation. It doesn’t preexist the physical phenomenon, it instead describes it.

So, in honor of this point, I’m going to do my best to describe Social Construction in terms of mathematics to the best of my abilities. I feel that this will be easier for some people to get instead of talking about gender right off the bat.

So, consider: numbers as we think of them exist. 0 is nothing. 1 is something. 2 is double something. This much we can all agree on. All of the numbers you can think of exist (I’m not getting into imaginary numbers here, so you just put that i away.) But the way that they are rendered is a social construct. Consider, at the tenth number (10), we move away from creating new glyphs and instead render them as a combination of glyphs. This is the decimal system.

There is nothing natural about the decimal system. The only natural thing that comes in tens is the number of fingers the average human being possesses. The year doesn’t comfortably divide into tenths; the day doesn’t either.

Why do we use the base-10 system instead of a more mathematically viable base, like 12? You can easily count to twelve on your fingers (hold out one hand, touch your thumb to the tip of the smallest finger. That’s one. Move down to the next segment of the finger, between the first and second knuckle for two. At four, move on to the next-largest finger. There, you can now count to twelve on one hand.)

There are some advantages – you get rid of those pesky repeating numbers when you convert one-third or two-thirds into duodecimal (one-third is simply .4; two-thirds is simply .8, because it counts up to twelve before you write “10” as we currently do.)

The Babylonian Numerals used here are a derived system with a sub-base of 10: at 60, they would just render the “one” numeral again, much larger.

The answer is that we have socially constructed a system of mathematics that hinges around the number ten, and the effort of switching to a duodecimal system. This doesn’t mean that we’ve always used base ten. The Ancient Sumerians used a sexagesimal system, meaning that it was base-60 (the thought was that it was a compromise between a base-10 and base-12 system,) and we still have the remnants of this in our geometry and our time keeping (sixty seconds to a minute; sixty minutes to an hour, etc.)

So, numbers are real. Numbering systems...also real. Just socially constructed. They’re changeable, with effort.

So, now that you understand Social Construction, let’s look at some other things that are socially constructed. Race, for example, is socially constructed. The Ancient Greeks thought more highly of the civilized Egyptians and Ethiopians than of the barbaric (blue-eyed) Thracians, for example. Of course, to them, anyone not Greek was starting out behind the eight ball, and we don’t really think that the Macedonians are Greek, do we?

If you go by language, identity gets complicated. Right click and “view image” for a larger view.

Likewise, within the history of the United States of America, the definition of “whiteness” has been expanded to include not just the English and Scottish, but the French, Germans, and Scandinavians, and then, finally the various Mediterranean peoples and the Irish. But why stop there? What biological differences exist between the people of the south of Spain and the northern portion of Algeria? If Sanskrit shares root words with Norse, Gaelic, Old Church Slavonic, and Latin, then why is one set categorized as White and one as not-white?

Because race, as has long been conceived in the west doesn’t exist. Ethnic groups do. Cultures do. Race doesn’t.

For that matter, “the west” doesn’t exist. Get a time machine, put a Greek poet, a Viking, a French Aristocrat, and a Scotsman in the same room and none of them will recognize any shared commonality.

So, lastly, we get to gender.

Basically, when people try to define masculinity, they come up with this image. Which is a great image, but it’s not for everybody. That’s the point.

No one is disagreeing that genitals of at least two varieties exist. What discourse on the social construction of gender is getting at is that there is no reason to think that outward-oriented genitals make one predisposed towards mechanical tasks, dirt, team sports, brown liquor, or fart jokes; nor is there any reason to think that inward-oriented genitals make one predisposed towards pink, ruffles, cooking, or housekeeping. All of these things have been packaged together as “genders” in our culture, and what people are getting at is that they didn’t pick a particular set of genitals when they were born, and so didn’t have a choice to buy in to the package.

So they decided to just do whatever. It’s not an attack on your person, it’s just people going their own way.

The floor isn’t level, they’re taking a look at it. Or maybe they’re leaving the cathedral altogether to work on a different project. It doesn’t make your project any less meaningful. Perhaps, and I say this as someone lucky enough to identify with the majority of the gender I was assigned at birth, it just suggests that perhaps what we have constructed doesn’t need to be the way that it is. The way that someone else lives doesn’t have to have anything to do with how you live.

Everything is contingent, everything is temporary, and that means that we can annotate, critique, and revise the blueprints if we so choose – just because someone with a beard wants to paint their nails doesn’t mean that you’re not allowed to like football; just because someone has given birth wants to change their own oil doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to like baking; just because someone wants to be called “they” instead of “he” or “she” doesn’t mean you have to stop enjoying the things you do.

Just recognize that their way of living differing from your own doesn’t mean that either of you is wrong.

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