Social constructs are real
Contrary to popular belief (and the belief of some very smart philosophers), social constructs are "real" things
It is frequently asked whether or not some phenomenon is real or a social construct. Is gender real, or is it a social construct? Is race real, or is it a social construct? Are species real, or are they social constructs? All these questions presuppose that if something is a social construct, it is by definition unreal. It is something merely made up, and as something that is made up, it has no material reality to it. This is an intuitive assumption to make. After all, if a thing were socially constructed, it would be just a set of ideas in the heads of a bunch of people and not a discrete entity that can be identified in the world. Yet on a fundamental level, this is a mistaken assumption. Social constructs are very real, and the reality of them confronts us daily.
What is true is that a social construct is not “real” in the way that the construct itself claims. Race, for instance, claims to be a biological, genetic category in the way that diseases, cell structures, and genetic inheritence is real (or at least, “race science” as a project claims that it is such). Importantly, race is not real in that way (if you believe race is real in a biological sense, bear with me in not explaining why as it goes beyond the point of this short essay), but it does have a different kind of reality to it. It is even real in a certain material sense, if not in the sense of clear genetically distinct categories.
In what way are social constructs real? Perhaps it would be useful to begin with an example. The best example of a social construct we have is money. It’s the best because we all use and depend on it, we all know what it is, and we all know how to use it.
Money is a social construct in the sense that people invented it some time ago, over the course of many generations. Thus, it owes its existence to society and the individuals within that society accepting it as a medium of exchange. There are different stories for how this construction took place, from the just-so stories of Adam Smith explaining how people began bartering and decided to use money instead because it was more efficient, to other more modern theories that explain it politically or through debt or some other social need. Yet it certainly was created by people at particular moments of history.
It’s also something whose existence emerged in different places and in different ways. Many civilizations settled on gold or silver because they are effectively chemically inert and relatively easy to purify. This means they do not corrode and can be measured very precisely. In Africa, some tribes settled on iron (which is less inert but more useful than gold) or cows (which were the foundation of pastoral nations across the continent). In the pre-colombian Americas, stuff like Cacao seeds or sea shells often served as type of money.
Money has also changed drastically over time. During the modern period, the dominance of European trading powers and the wealth of India and China ensured that gold and silver would come to dominate as effective global currencies. By the 19th century, this increasingly took the form of the British pound, which was set to the value of gold. As the British was the largest trading empire in the world, the pound could serve as a universal currency of international trade alongside the multitude of national currencies across the globe. By the 20th century, the rise of the American economy meant that the US dollar took the place of the pound as a global currency. There were other ideas too, as Keynes suggested the Bancor as an alternative to having a single national currency serve as the global medium of exchange (the Bancor was a kind of supranational global reserve currency that didn’t depend on the fiscal policy of any one state). Soviet-aligned states often tried to use currency in other ways too in ways more adequate for their centrally planned economy. Finally, fiat currency would go on to replace currency backed by the value of gold after Nixon led the US off of the gold standard.
All this is to say, money is a kind of thing that has evoled alongside the evolution of society. As people’s needs, ideas, resources, and interests changed, the way people used money and its very conceptual structure shifted too. This makes sense. As a society changes, so too should its social constructs (sometimes in imperceptibly slight ways, and sometimes in rather extreme and hard-to-ignore ways).
Yet money most certainly is real. It wouldn’t be real without us, but we certainly created it, and by creating it we did make something that actually exists. It is real because it has real effects on the world. If I go to the coffee shop with $5 and buy a latte that costs $5, I now have a latte. If I go to a computer store with $5 and try to use it to buy a $500 computer, they won’t give it to me. If I pay the $5 anyways and walk out of the store with the computer, they will probably call the police and I will either have to escape or I will end up spending some time in jail. Thus, money is a social construct that has real material consequences for people. A lack of money can cause eviction, bankruptcy, famine, and death.
Money is real because we all accept its existence, whether or not we like that it exists, and we all more or less play along by using it. Even a hardline anti-capitalist who believes that money should be abolished still needs to use it to pay the bills, thus they play along. Even some anarchist who rejects the use of money in principle will have to adopt a highly specific lifestyle to get by without it (almost certainly involving crime of some sort), or depend on others who are willing to “play along” (perhaps by couch surfing at their friends’ houses and dumpster diving behind supermarkets). In that way, the social norms present in a society ensure that money isn’t going anywhere.
The social norms in this case serve to reify money. To reify means to make a thing real, and the etymology comes from the latin Res or Rei which means object or thing. In other words, reification is literally bring an object into being through mutually accepted social norms. Again, the acceptance of the social norms doesn’t mean we believe in them or support them, simply that we know they are there and alter our behavior accordingly.
Thus, when we socially create money, we create a real thing that leads us to organize society in new ways. This new organization serves to reinforce the existence of the concept and further habituate us to its use. It ultimately serves to change our nature, by which I mean by being habituated into the use of something like money, we develop a new natural disposition.
This is the case with something like race as well. Race might not be biologically real in the sense that race scientists say it is, but when we redline, segregate, impose apartheid and differential laws along racial lines, we do reify race. In reifying race, it then can go on and end up changing our biology (again, in ways rather different from the way race scientists think this happens). For instance, by imposing inferior medical care on racial minorities, racial minorities will end up with tangibly worse health outcomes. Or, by situating the neighborhoods of racial minorities closer to industrial plants that spew out lead-laden particulates into the air, we are going to alter their biology.
The racial dimension of this was noted by Franz Fanon in his Wretched of the Earth, as he describes the way in which colonial society produces racial difference. As a black French citizen and critic of race, Fanon wanted to overcome it as a social barrier, but he still recognized it as a brute empirical fact created by the material world. As he explains:
The colonial world is a world divided into compartments. It is probably unnecessary to recall the existence of native quarters and European quarters, of schools for natives and schools for Europeans; in the same way we need not recall apartheid in South Africa. Yet, if we examine closely this system of compartments, we will at least be able to reveal the lines of force it implies. This approach to the colonial world, its ordering and its geographical layout will allow us to mark out the lines on which a decolonized society will be reorganized.
The colonial world is a world cut in two. The dividing line, the frontiers are shown by barracks and police stations. In the colonies it is the policeman and the soldier who are the official, instituted go-betweens, the spokesmen of the settler and his rule of oppression. In capitalist societies the educational system, whether lay or clerical, the structure of moral reflexes handed down from father to son, the exemplary honesty of workers who are given a medal after fifty years of good and loyal service, and the affection which springs from harmonious relations and good behavior—all these aesthetic expressions of respect for the established order serve to create around the exploited person an atmosphere of submission and of inhibition which lightens the task of policing considerably.
Thus, race is made real through the existence of geographical and social boundaries. It might begin as a legal fiction, but through the material consequences of the norms we adopt it will go on to be all too real for the victims of racial violence and oppression.
Thus, we ought to reject the simple dichotomy that social constructivism in a form of anti-realism. There is a certain kind of anti-realism in the claim of social construction. We’ve already seen how the claim that race is a social construction does reject the reality of clear genetic boundaries and types. Yet it still has a certain form of reality. This is rather different from the debate between social constructivists and realists in the philosophy of science where questions like “are electrons a social construct” rests heavily on whether a category like “electron” exists in the world, or is just a way of conceptualizing the world (though some philosophers of science like Ian Hacking do challenge the hard distinction between “natural kinds” and “social constructs”).
This means when there’s some social institution like money, race, gender, sex, the state, law, or religion that we want to challenge or reject, we cannot simply do so through our thinking. We cannot simply eliminate race, money, etc by not believing in these things anymore. We need to change the world such that our norms shift, and only then can these categories cease to be. This takes us away from the simple question of whether or not we should believe in “race”, and to the much harder but more important question of what the world would have to be like such that arbitrary racial boundaries no longer determine the course of our lives.