What just happened illustrates a basic aspect of social life that makes it possible. My body had a series of experiences—vibrations hitting my ears, light entering my eyes, electrical impulses going to my brain. But I did not leave it at that, as I used words to make sense of the vibrations and the light. I named the rumble ‘thunder’ and the dark sky ‘rain clouds,’ and together they became in my mind a thunder and lightning storm on its way. By themselves, the sensations did not make me do anything. I responded to the words and what they meant to me.
When I used words to make what I heard and saw mean something, I constructed a reality on top of the physical sensations. I started thinking about what might happen even though it wasn’t actually happening at the time. ‘The storm’ existed only in my imagination and in the words I used to think about it and the damage it might cause. My behavior was based entirely on what I thought. I know this because if I had thought different words—such as, ‘The gods are angry and it’s me they’re angry at’— I would have acted quite differently.
We tend to think that we live in the world as it ‘really’ is. When I hear a rumble and think ‘thunder,’ it doesn’t occur to me in that moment that I’m involved in a creative process. I don’t realize that I am choosing a word and using it to attach a particular meaning to the sound. Instead, I act as though the word and the sound are one and the same thing—that is, the sound is ‘thunder.’
In other words, the reality that really matters to me is not the sound itself—the moving air that hits my eardrum—but the words and ideas I use to describe that reality and make it mean something. And that reality is something I carry inside my head. If I used different words to describe the sound—say, ‘suicide bomber’— I would create a different reality. I don’t mean that I create the sound itself when I name it. It is whatever it is. What I do construct is what I think the sound means and therefore what it is to me, and I use words to do so.
Where do I get the words and the ideas that go along with them that prompt me to do one thing rather than another? The answer is that I participate in a society that has a culture, and that culture contains words and ideas that people use to name and interpret what they experience. If I lived in a different society with a different culture, then I might have associated that sound with ideas about supernatural beings rather than simply ‘weather.’ But I don’t, and so I didn’t.
One of the most remarkable things about human beings is our ability to use culture to create the world we actually live in, to make up our world from scratch. Most of what we take for reality consists not of things as they ‘really’ are but of ideas people have developed about things as they think they are. Culture is where all those ideas wind up, and culture is what we look to for the tools we need to make sense of things, including ourselves.
Constructing Reality
Every social system has a culture. A college class has one. So does the Internet, and so does Canada. Culture consists primarily of symbols—especially the words contained in language—and various kinds of ideas that shape how we think about everything from relationships with other people to the meaning of life. It also includes such practices as music, art, dance, and religious rituals. It includes how we shape the physical world around us, from using sand to make silicon that goes into computer chips to building cities to arranging flowers and plants in that familiar form known as a garden. Culture is both material (the physical ‘stuff’ of social life) and nonmaterial (the symbols and ideas we use to think and give meaning to just about everything).
Symbols make culture possible, because they are what we use to give something meaning beyond what it otherwise ‘is.’ Symbols are building blocks that we use to make sentences, and sentences are what make such ideas as ‘Thunder means a storm is coming’ or ‘Capitalism is the best economic system in the world.’ In the simplest sense, when we give something a name—such as ‘thunder’—we create a relationship with it by making it have something to do with us. If we do not have a name for it, we tend not to notice it and not live in relation to it. It doesn’t ‘matter.’ When we call a dot of light in the sky a ‘star,’ for example, we make it part of a cultural reality. In that sense, we make it real to us in ways that it otherwise wouldn’t be, even though that dot of light would still exist up there in the sky.
As a species, we miss most of what is around us because there is so much of it and it’s impossible to pay attention to more than a tiny portion of it. We use symbols to name things as a way to focus our attention and build a reality to live in. As philosopher Susanne Langer puts it, using symbols to construct reality lies at the heart of what makes us human:
Only a small part of reality, for a human being, is what is actually going on; the greater part is what he imagines in connection with the sights and sounds of the moment. . . . It means that his world is bigger than the stimuli which surround him, and the measure of it is the reach of his coherent and steady imagination. An animal’s environment consists of the things that act on his senses. . . . He does not live in a world of unbroken space and time, filled with events even when he is not present or when he is not interested; his “world” has a fragmentary, intermittent existence, arising and collapsing with his activities. A human being’s world hangs together, its events fit into each other; no matter how devious their connections, there always are connections, in one big framework of time and space. . . . The world is something human.1
Before going any further, notice the words Langer uses in this passage to refer to people. Every time she uses a pronoun to refer to human beings, it is a masculine ‘he,’ ‘him,’ or ‘his.’ She never uses feminine pronouns or gender-neutral pronouns, such as ‘they’ or ‘them.’ Imagine that she had written the passage in this way:
Only a small part of reality, for human beings, is what is actually going on; the greater part is what they imagine in connection with the sights and sounds of the moment. . . . It means that their world is bigger than the stimuli which surround them, and the measure of it is the reach of their coherent and steady imagination. An animal’s environment consists of the things that act on the senses. . . . Animals do not live in a world of unbroken space and time, filled with events even when they are not present or when they are not interested; their “world” has a fragmentary, intermittent existence, arising and collapsing with their activities. A human being’s world hangs together, its events fit into each other; no matter how devious their connections, there always are connections, in one big framework of time and space. . . . The world is something human.
In the first version, men are explicitly included by equating ‘human’ with ‘male,’ while women are not. Since words are what we use to construct reality, what is the reality these words help construct? They construct a world in which men and their actions are at the center of attention (male centered) and in which men are used as the standard against which ‘human’ is measured and judged (male-identified). They also help construct a world in which women are relatively invisible and thereby devalued and subordinate (male-dominated). It is easy for me as a man to see myself in the first version, but for a woman to see herself, she has to make a mental leap between what are clearly masculine pronouns to a thought like, “Well, it really means people in general, which includes me, since I’m a person.” As a man, I don’t have to go through those mental gymnastics to locate myself in what we call ‘humanity,’ and that simplicity is part of male privilege in a patriarchal world.
Rather than rush to fault Langer for her use of language, it is important to note that she is writing this passage in 1962, in a society whose culture offered little that would make her aware of what she was doing. She is using language as most people around her used it and creates a reality in her prose that fits comfortably with the reality of the society she lived and wrote in, a society in which male privilege and the oppression of women played a prominent role in everyday life. Male privilege, of course, is still alive and well, but since Langer’s writing of these words, var
ious women’s movements have managed to shift the political landscape and distribution of power enough to create a greater awareness of the dynamics of gender. As a result, what Langer ‘sees’ when she is writing in 1962 is different from what I ‘see’ when I read her words now, which is precisely her point and mine.
We can use language to construct all kinds of reality, including what we cannot experience through our senses. We cannot hear or smell or touch what we call love, for example, like we can a banana. We can see how people treat us, and we might interpret that behavior to mean they love us, but the behavior itself is not love. The behavior is what we take to mean that the person loves us. What we call love is something we think exists beneath what we can see and hear. Love is about how people see us and think and feel about us, none of which we can actually observe directly. Someone can say, “I love you” or “I feel deeply for you,” but the words are not the love or the feeling. They are about the love and the feeling.
We use words to construct something we take to be real—the person loves us—and, most importantly, we act as though what we have created is as real as a chair or a piano. And although—or perhaps because—we cannot see or hear what the words represent, we may organize our lives around getting someone to say them to us and prove they really mean what they seem.
Unlike love, an atom is something scientists may be able to see someday, but even if they do, for most people it won’t exist except as an idea about what the word ‘atom’ supposedly represents. Before the word was coined, what we now think of as the atom simply did not exist for anyone. Now, however, an atom is real for anyone who has ever taken a high school science class, even though we have never actually seen one. All we’ve seen are words written by people who claim that atoms exist, and the words are enough to construct what we then take to be reality. There is this object that I cannot see and never will, but a word that names it somehow connects me to it. I can think of my hand, for example, or my dog as something composed of atoms. It is this way with all the words that we use, like slender threads connecting us to whatever they point to and name. The words weave a reality and then connect us to it.
In this sense, the power of symbols goes far beyond labeling things— this is a sugar maple tree, this is love, this is Einstein’s theory of relativity. Symbols are also what we use to feel connected to a reality outside ourselves. Without symbols, a great deal of what we ‘know’ and experience would not exist for us. There would be no memory of what we call the past, except in the form of sensations, such as visual imagery or smells. There would be no thinking in the present and no wondering about what we call the future.
Not only would we lose most of our connection to our own past experience, but we would also have no way to share in the experience of others. This is essentially what storytelling traditions are about in many societies and what history is about in others. Back in the 1970s, for example, in my introductory sociology class, I described the 1968 Democratic Presidential Convention in Chicago to illustrate how people can perceive the same event in different ways, depending on the position they occupy in the social system. Massive antiwar demonstrations took place in Chicago, and the confrontations between demonstrators and police resulted in mayhem and violence. As I watched the events unfold on live television, it seemed to me that the police were rioting and out of control as they attacked nonviolent demonstrators. But when I picked up the next day’s edition of a Chicago newspaper, the headlines announced a riot by antiwar demonstrators that was put down by courageous police officers doing their duty.2
In my early years of teaching, I needed to only mention the 1968 Democratic Convention for my students to know what I was talking about. But as time passed, there came a day when my new class just sat there without a flicker of recognition. They had no idea what I was talking about, and so I had to tell them a story, string out a river of words to connect them to something that happened beyond their own experience. I had to construct something that they could then look upon as a chunk of reality, knowing, of course, that a Chicago police officer might have told them a very different story. Later, if someone mentioned the 1968 Democratic Convention, my students could say, “I know about that,” even though they were not there or even alive when it happened. That event became real to them, where before it did not even exist. And mere words made it so.
Beliefs: “I’ll See It When I Believe It”
The first purpose of every culture is to provide a way to know what to consider true and what to consider false, and this is what beliefs are about. Notice the difference between ‘what to consider true’ and ’what is true,’ since what is treated as truth in one culture or historical period may be dismissed as myth, fantasy, or propaganda in another. In Christianity and Judaism, for example, the idea that God exists is obviously true, but for Zen Buddhists, Confucians, and animists, the idea of God is not part of religious life or anything else.
In a sense, symbols are the simplest kind of belief statement, for every dictionary definition declares that something or other is real and exists. If there is a word for something, we are much more likely to see and treat it as real. As recently as a century ago, for example, the word ‘homosexual’ was never used to describe a kind of person, as in ‘He’s a homosexual.’ It was used instead to describe a kind of sexual behavior without indicating something about a person’s social identity. In that sense, homosexuals did not exist, although many people engaged in homosexual behavior of one kind or another. Where before people saw only sexual behavior, now people are more likely to see ‘gays,’ ‘lesbians,’ ‘bisexuals,’ and ‘straights’ as distinct types of people.
Such changes don’t just come out of the blue but accompany a shift in social relationships, in this case serving as a basis for privileging heterosexuals above everyone else—an arrangement that is closely related to male privilege. As a result, what people see now differs from what people saw then, because the cultural truth of sexual orientation today looks quite different from the truth of sexual orientation then.
Our dependence on beliefs to determine what is real turns on its head the old expression ‘I’ll believe it when I see it’ or its equivalent, ‘Seeing is believing.’ ‘I’ll see it when I believe it’ may be closer to the way things really are.
When we string words together to make more complex beliefs, we fashion the world and our place in it. Unlike many Native American cultures, for example, typical European-based cultures see humans and animals as altogether different. The ‘natural world’ and what goes on in it do not include humans. Birds building nests are doing something ‘natural,’ but people building houses are not. The distinction is completely arbitrary, since in each case a species is using its natural abilities to make something that suits it. The fact that we can use our opposable thumbs to manipulate such objects as hammers and nails or our brains to invent physics and engineering is no less natural than a beaver’s ability to chew tree trunks clean through or design a lodge that can withstand a flood.
In Western cultures, however, there is nature on the one hand and humanity on the other, a kind of denial that sets us up to see ourselves as separate from other living things. Such denial justifies a controlling and exploitative relationship between humans and the rest of the natural world and gets us into a lot of trouble by encouraging us to live as though we have no deep roots in our environment, the Earth, and the cycles of nature. It encourages us to think of ourselves as above the ‘laws of nature’ (since we are not part of nature) and to suppose that we can get away with things that other species cannot. We act as though we can pollute the environment with chemicals and waste, destroy the ozone layer in the atmosphere and fill it with greenhouse gases that raise global temperatures, exhaust the soil, and cut down the forests and still survive and even prosper as other species go extinct all around us. Such arrogance makes us dangerous not only to other species but also to ourselves. We may not believe we are animals that are as subject to the ‘laws’ of nature as any bird, b
ut that belief does not mean the kinds of consequences that other animal species cannot escape will pass us by and leave us unaffected.
Some years ago, W. I. Thomas and Dorothy Swain Thomas made the classic statement that when cultures define something as real, the act has real consequences, regardless of whether it is actually true. But we also need to consider Robert K. Merton’s corollary that what is real has consequences whether we define it as real or not.3
Having a set of cultural beliefs allows us to live with a taken-for-granted sense of how things are and to treat the ‘facts’ of our existence as obvious. What we call ‘obvious,’ however, is not necessarily what is true. It is only assumed to be true beyond doubt in a particular culture. Without a sense of the obvious, social life loses its predictability, and we lose our basis for feeling secure, but the obvious also blinds us to the possibility that what is ‘obviously’ true may be false.
In this sense, when I hear people accuse sociologists of focusing on the obvious, I feel moved to thank them for their recognition and support, because someone should be paying attention to what we all go around assuming to be true. What we do not know often gets us into trouble, but what is right under our noses—including what we think we know but don’t—can be even more serious. We feel invested in its being true and defend it rather than asking whether we might have it wrong.
U.S. culture, for example, takes it to be obvious that the country is a political democracy and that capitalist ‘free enterprise’ is democracy’s economic equivalent. These beliefs are so powerful that no politician would dare say otherwise, knowing it would be political suicide even to suggest that something might be basically wrong with capitalism. No politician could hope to be elected after pointing out that, in practice, capitalism is anything but democratic, since it concentrates economic power in so few hands that enterprise is ‘free’ primarily, if not only, for them.4 The politician would be attacked as disloyal, if not a heretical socialist or communist, for questioning basic beliefs and sacred institutions. And the attacks would come most prominently from the mass media, corporate leaders, privately funded think tanks, and other politicians and government officials, all of whom have a substantial interest in preserving the status quo (including the lopsided distribution of power and wealth), because any challenge to the status quo would antagonize the upper classes on whom they depend. This held true even after the catastrophic financial meltdown of 2008 revealed the extent of reckless misconduct and illegal activity by senior managers in the financial industry.
The Forest and the Trees Page 5
