When Reality Itself Becomes A Social Construct

When Reality Itself Becomes A Social Construct

Let's start with the idea that almost everything is a social construct. Critical theory is particularly prone to make that conclusion, due to an inheritance from the Western Marxist tradition. Marx had a general belief that all the culture, including all the social and political institutions, and all the dominant ideas of each era, were a product of the underlying economic system, and worked to benefit the dominant class of the system. Later Marxist thinkers, most notably Antonio Gramsci, expanded this idea further, suggesting that the culture and institutions of the advanced capitalist West were responsible for keeping the workers in their place and preventing revolution. Thus, the Western Marxist tradition in which critical theory is rooted has a strong tendency to question every part of the status quo, and to suspect that it is all a construct in the service of the powerful and privileged. Postmodern philosophy in particular takes this view to the extreme: it denies even the fundamental faith in scientific truth that has underpinned Western intellectualism since the Enlightenment, instead favoring the use of critical theorystyle power analysis when comparing competing subjective narratives. This ultimately leads to a meaningless relativism, where everything is valid, where I can have 'my truth' and you can have 'your truth', and any attempt to introduce objectivity is seen as an exercise in power and oppression.

Where I think the problem lies is a fundamental confusion between language and reality. All human language is, by

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definition, a social construct, but the reality it describes is not. Language is not reality itself, but rather an attempt to describe reality, as closely as possible, based on our collective understanding of the world (at this particular stage of history). In a society where people are truly free, and where there is a commitment to the pursuit of truth, the use of language must describe the underlying reality as closely as possible. Indeed, when our understanding of the reality changes, for example via new scientific discovery, language must also change. On the other hand, language should ever only change whenever our understanding of the reality changes. Otherwise, we risk developing something like the Newspeak in Orwell's 1984.

However, postmodern philosophy gets this totally backwards. Postmodernism often confuses discourse (which is made up of language) with reality itself. This leads to the false view that, if we change the language used in the discourse, we can change reality itself. This view is probably what motivates the move in recent years towards an ever more extreme form of political correctness. Of course, this view is both untrue and dangerous. Even if we force everyone to say that the sun rises in the West, it will still rise in the East tomorrow. Moreover, manipulating language to distort the public perception of reality is a favorite tactic of authoritarian regimes throughout history.

Anyway, since postmodern philosophy often conflates language with reality, and since language is always a social

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