The Book:
Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization
By John R. Searle
Oxford University Press
2010
The Talk:
“Imagination rules the world.” ~ Napoleon
Most of the important things in life are imaginary. That is to say, the things that matter to us, that occupy our thoughts and time and energy, the things that control us and force our choices, exist only in the minds of human beings.
Food is not imaginary—but everything that surrounds it is: Land ownership for farmers, corporations for semi trucks, food safety laws, consumer brands, grocery stores, restaurants, meal times, recipes.
If there were no people, there would be no jobs, no money, no marriages, no laws, no banks, no libraries, no nations. These exist only because we collectively agree that they exist. They are social constructs. They consist of facts that can be true or false. (What day is Christmas? How many quarters make a dollar?) They are hard enough to hurt you, to get you thrown in jail, to change your life expectancy. But they are relative to the community or society in which they exist.
We often take these social constructs simply as given, as natural, as the way things are, perhaps the way things have always been. The common sense point of view.
That is, until something rattles the cage. Money is often considered more “real” than other kinds of social institutions, and yet money itself is, historically, incredibly fragile. Many times throughout history, when people in a society stop believing in money, money stops being money.
We take it all for granted, and then suddenly panic when we realize this whole society is held together by belief, trust, words, imagination. The 2008 financial crisis occurred in part due to the creation of financial products that people just made up. And then money had to be created (by announcing that it was created) in order to preserve trust in the system, so that the whole economy didn’t come to screeching halt.
Don’t stop believing
When we stop believing in money, there is no money.
When we stop believing in democracy, democracy stops.
The ground that seems firm is made of cloud, and we are walking on air. It feels like the whole of civilization is simply a fiction, a collective hallucination. Nothing more than a playground game.
Often the term “social construct” is used as an epithet. We call things social constructs, rhetorically speaking, as a way to deprive them of power. We mean that the thing we don’t like is arbitrary, imaginary, ephemeral, lacking in substance. It isn’t real. If we have one kind of social construct, why can’t we have a different one? Instead of playing tag, let’s play hopscotch. Why this society and not another? If something is true only as long as we believe it, why don’t we just stop believing? (Or to put it another way, why can’t we stop believing?)
If social institutions are arbitrary, then we are equally justified in following them or ignoring them. Why can’t I make up my own reality? If everybody’s just making shit up all the time, how is any of this real? How does it even matter? What’s the difference between civilization and an improv show? Or as philosopher John Searle puts it:
How can there be an epistemically objective set of statements about a reality which is ontologically subjective?
What grounds social reality
In his 2010 book Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization Searle attempts to give an account of how the social world connects to the physical world. For Searle, there is just one world that goes from atoms to cells to brains to language to laws to nation-states. And so Searle needs to give a plausible account of how something as wily-nily as human imagination, which can seemingly go on forever, and its invisible products are ultimately rooted in the physical world.
Given his view, social reality can’t be arbitrary because there’s a direct causal chain from the physical world to the social one. On the other hand, human societies have incredible variety. So isn’t that part arbitrary?
Arbitrary can be hard to define, so to set the terms, let’s posit a set of different definitions and see if we can’t address each of them.
When we say something is arbitrary, we mean one of more of the following:
It’s up to personal preference or whim.
It’s chosen randomly or erratically.
It’s not based on reasons or justifications.
It’s my view that Searle would say that social reality doesn’t fit these criteria of arbitrariness. Let’s explore why.
1. Social reality isn’t up to personal preference. It requires collective intentionality.
“Stop trying to make fetch happen.” ~ Mean Girls
One of the most salient characteristics of social reality is its incorrigibility to individual desires. You don’t get to become President of the United States by saying “I’m the President”—or even believing it very strongly. You can imagine being many things, but you cannot be those things in fact unless you are recognized by others as that thing. And that is really hard to do.
So one of the necessary foundations for social institutions, Searle argues, is collective intentionality. As recognition (not necessarily acceptance) grows, the social institution becomes tougher to transgress or ignore. Searle writes:
Cars and shirts wear out after much usage. Universities, ski teams, and governments do not wear out. The more they are used, the stronger they get.
Collective intentionality can be tricky to get your head around because we spend so much of our time thinking about individual intentionality (see #2). But Searle believes that collective intentionality is a necessary prelinguistic ability to make social realities possible, and that this kind of intentionality is present in other animals. In flocks or herds, individual animals do their part as part of the group, but the herd or flock is not merely the sum of a random set of individuals and their actions. There are shared goals “beyond the range of my individual causation,” as Searle puts it, and thus beyond the range of my individual intention.
2. Social reality commits us to truth and action. It makes our behavior less random.
“Man is a creature who makes pictures of himself and then comes to resemble the pictures.” ~ Iris Murdoch
In Searle’s conception, it is the addition of human language, which goes beyond mere collective intentionality, that provides the basis for all social institutions. One of Searle’s interesting (perhaps controversial) claims is that language by its very function commits us to making true statements.
For example, if I say, “It’s raining.” I’m making a social commitment that it is in fact raining. If it’s not raining, I’m lying or mistaken. I can’t simply say, “All I did was make the noise, ‘It’s raining’—I didn’t actually mean it’s raining.” To speak it is to make a public commitment to the truth of it.
Furthermore, in the case of promises, when we make a promise, we are making a public social commitment about our future actions. There’s no way to make a promise without making a social commitment. Speaking a promise, in this case, is the act of committing.
Thus, the nature of language itself gives us desire-independent reasons for actions, in the words of Searle. I may imagine many things, but when I speak, I commit to telling true statements. I may desire many things, now and in the future, but when I promise, I commit to doing something regardless of my desires at the time.
From signing for a loan to accepting a job offer to inviting friends to a party to “define the relationship” conversations, these social commitments through language hem in our behaviors and make us more predicable and reliable. Rather than being random or erratic, social reality is a way to structure human actions collectively in ways that are more (but not entirely) reasonable, predictable, and systematic.
3. The purpose of social reality is to give us powers we otherwise would not have. Thus, it has reasons.
“Corporations are people, my friend.” ~ Mitt Romney
Basically everyone hates the way social realities make us do things we don’t want to do. And if we stopped here, we could tell a story about how all of social reality is just a way for certain people to maintain control over other people. Society is nothing more than a conspiracy of the few against the many.
So what does social reality get us? What is it good for? Why do we have the social institutions we have? According to Searle, the benefit of social institutions is that it gives a community new powers to do things that it couldn’t do before.
Imagine a society under threat by an enemy. Everybody could simply grab a weapon and start fighting. That would get you one kind of result. But imagine instead you decided to invent an army: Give different people roles. Appoint leaders to coordinate teams. Train people on what tactics work best. Assign specific tasks. Design uniforms for identification. Create rewards to increase courage. Make battle plans. Once you’ve done all that, there’s a lot more you can do together. You can do things together (and individually) that you couldn’t do before by inventing a social institution. You’ve not just invented a social construct, you’ve invented new possibilities. Searle writes:
Human institutions are, above all, enabling, and human institutional facts give us enormous sets of powers that we would not otherwise have.
Searle does not make this further point, but to me it is clear that something has to necessitate both the invention of and collective recognition of social institutions (e.g., the enemy on the horizon). Some social institutions may be created to balance other social institutions, but some social institutions are basic, must be invented to address some kind of material need, opportunity, or reality. The invention of a fire department follows from the danger of fire. A new power is needed.
Revolutionary communities
“Gonna start a revolution from my bed” ~ Oasis
Hopefully I’ve made a plausible case for why our society, although imaginary and existent only in human minds, is not arbitrary. It’s not an improv show. It’s not a game. It’s not whatever you want it to be.
But I don’t mean to imply all social institutions are justified, good, or correct. Social institutions exist for reasons; that doesn’t mean they are always right or don’t have unintended consequences.
On the contrary, we always live within a social reality that was built to fight the last war (or scandal or pandemic or financial crisis or natural disaster or demographic change). Your perception of how much or how fast the world is changing directly affects how much you think current institutions are no longer sufficient. It may even lead you to believe that they are no longer justified or legitimate.
So how do you reform old institutions or replace them? Perhaps Searle’s conception of the creation of social reality provides a kind of roadmap to revolution.
First of all, social institutions are not replaced by individuals, but by communities. Some kind of seed of collective intentionality must be grown. This is perhaps the hardest part.
Second, the community must develop an alternative language (including symbols, practices, rituals) to the status quo. New language defines the community and also generates individual commitment to future action in the face of resistance.
Third, new institutions must be justified by making the imagined structures the solution to a need or opportunity—a solution that current institutions are incapable of providing. New institutions must make new powers available, powers that the broader society sees as essential and necessary. Simultaneously, if the goal is to remove an institution, not just augment it, it will also remove a collective power (not just individual power) and this must be addressed; society will no longer be able to do something it could do before.
Scary or exciting, it is worth considering this fact: Every social institution was once a social revolution.
Related:
I love this! Sounds like a book I should've read a long time ago. Very relevant to transness, which is both made-up and very real.