Recognizing that my world is a social construction just went to a deeper level for me. I’ve been generally aware of how I am surrounded by countless forms of cultural forms and expectations. My awareness of what is going on around me is constantly shaped by expectations, mine and all those I have absorbed from my culture. However, listening to poet Clint Smith talk about the world being a social construction helped bring my awareness into sharper focus.
All the world around me has been shaped by social initiatives of humans. Nothing occurs or exists outside the social constructs shaped by humans. The very physicality of the world shows the mark of human social perspectives. If in remote places the shape of what I see doesn’t have the mark of human intervention, then the way I see it is shaped and focused through a lens of human perspective.
For me, it is not only the landscape that has the marks of social construction. For the most part, the landscape has been altered by social efforts to meet human aspirations and perspectives. Most strikingly, the whole life-supporting bubble to which we have evolved has been reshaped, constructed anew by human intervention. The impact of social construction is apparent in the climatic changes that promise chaos for humans. There is nowhere in the earth bubble, nowhere in our home, that any of us can go where the impact of human construction is not likely to be felt. This is tending to be disasterous.
Social construction is a huge force in the way humans interact. Hardly anything we do is outside the realm of social construction. The shootings, the robberies, the human suffering, the great accomplishments, the demonstration of compassion are all shaped by a mixture of social influences.
Nothing we do to one another is outside the realm of human intervention and influence. Every human interaction has meaning only when seen in the context of social construction. Nothing humans do to one another can be truly understood or has meaning apart from the inclusion of the social construction that has shaped that interaction.
It is a challenge for me to keep in mind the dominating influence of social construction. I am glad to have some appreciation of its influence.