Crossing the Macon County Line

Imagine a wall between one city and another. This wall, everyone from both cities agrees, is a door. With some frequency, people on either side run headlong into the wall, turn around, and proceed backwards down the path they just ran, fully certain they have gone through a door. You are an alien from — Venus, or a different continent — somewhere that doors and walls are different, at any rate. You look at these people with contempt, but after some time you begin to realize that the difference between a wall and a door is far more imaginary than you expected. How are you to be sure that a door is a door and a wall is a wall after all? At what point was it decided how you decide where you are?

Doesn’t that sound like a great premise for a book? Or how about this one: at first you think you’re reading a scifi novel about a universe where time travel has been invented, but gradually you realize it’s just our universe and people have divorced the idea of time travel from anything externally verifiable. They aren’t traveling through time at all, but if a character dares to suggest such a thing, they will be socially ostracized.

Or…how about one where everyone is absolutely certain that earth is the center of the universe, and one guy tries to argue it’s actually the sun, and it gets really messy for him.

Here’s the thing. The consequences for the fact of fact can be socially disastrous, but it does not mean that nothing is real. The consequences for letting yourself be carried by the tide of social construct devotees will be far worse long term.

First things first: a social construct is meant to indicate things we choose together, which is not the same as things the way we see them which itself is not the same as things as they are. The second distinction — between things the way we see them and things as they are — is fairly well understood I think. That is, it’s no super controversial to state that each of us sees the world through our own perspective, individual perception, that is a filter, and that we cannot actually see anything as-it-is. Kant called things as-they-are noumena. We do not have access to the noumena, we have only our filtered perceptions.

However, a distinction that is presently in need of clarification, I believe, is the difference between things that we choose together and things the way we see them, the first is a social construct, the second is not. We choose as a society what gender is, but not what anatomy is. We choose as a society what race is, but not what genetics are. The two things are often connected, but they aren’t interchangeable. As of late, the question has been floated as to whether we can choose to end the existence of a social construct, can we deconstruct it. For example, many people want to argue that race is genetics and that the social construct of race simply doesn’t exist. Ironically enough, this flex which people often identify as anti-social-construct is an inherent part of the constructive process, insisting that a social construct does not exist is as much a method of social construction as insisting that something is a social construct. Further the notion that a certain race is genetically predisposed to certain behaviors is a sociopolitical position, but in a world of adaptation, all factors in every environment contribute to the evolution of genetics, including social ones. We must make particular of use of the art of distinction here: genetics are not socially constructed; the use of genetics in politics is not the same thing as the fact of genetics. Positions are socially constructed. Facts are not. Categorization (gender, race) is social construction, experience is not. Our experience of facts is not socially constructed, or categorization of them, and our beliefs about them, are. Furthermore, those things which are real — say, a tree — can be made unreal (chopped down) by humans; a species can go extinct thanks to human action; new animal breeds, or fruits, or flowers can come into existence because of our actions; and thus we do have mutually constitutive relationship with reality itself, its just not a socially constructive one. If you chop down a tree, you can’t decide it isn’t chopped down later.

Death is not a social construct, but the death penalty is. Even at its darkest, social constructs are the agency we have collectively to connect the consequences of our lives to the facts of our condition. A common pickle people get themselves into, for example, is citing an IQ score as a fact, nevermind that IQ itself is a construct. Thinking about this is hard. You could easily conduct a scientific study that refers entirely to human classification systems, that is to say, at no point proceeds to an underlying layer to address a fact. Yet science is the business of facts!

So you, like me, probably know a number of people who are confused about what is real, if anything is real, and are feeling some type of way about that. It’s more than just a matter of comfort or reassurance to remind people that there is a consistent reality that is external to us, because when we cease to believe we are accountable to it, we enter into a state of mass delusion.

This is what I think is happening in the United States right now - nothing short of widespread mental illness, born from the false premise that nothing is real.

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So whether or not we notice this consciously, most of what constitutes reality as we perceive it is relationships, that is, the way we relate to:
1) social constructs
2) facts

Social constructs mediate facts for us a group. Social constructs are usually broad categorizations or apply to large group. Laws are social constructs; gender is a social construct.

Gender is a good example, it is a broadly defining role that is socially understood. Some people argue that it is a role which is assigned to groups of people based on their anatomical parts; others argue that “anatomical parts,” in this case, aren’t facts but are themselves a construction that has diverged from the fact of the anatomy to be a political representation (a social construct). Let’s break that down further.

Gender = Anatomical part (things as we see them) <—> social role (things we choose together) OR
Gender = Political representation of anatomical part (things we choose together)<—> social role (things we choose together)

???? = anatomical part (things as we see them) < — > political representation of anatomical part (things we choose together)

The mass delusion comes in when we try to solve for ????, because instead of being treated as a < — >, it’s treated as a ||. It’s either the anatomical part as we see it or the political representation of that anatomical part. When the the things as we see them and the things we choose together become so intertangled that some people believe it’s entirely politics and other people believe it’s entirely fact, the nature of facts get gets called into question. To wit, we begin to ask if there is such a thing as a fact.

Even as we ask this, we use our anatomical parts in ways that are not subject to debate. i.e. peeing is peeing. Quite directly, every time you take a whizz, the very nonpolitical nature of your anatomy is apparent. Some people have cogently argued that the problem is inherent to language. That because all language is representation, and because it is our shared tool for representing reality, language itself forces us to deal with ???? rather than the fact of our anatomies. Other people respond to this by saying that language itself has no agency, that the medium does not change the nature of the message. One thing the language argument has going for it is that because we don’t have a word for ????, we don’t have a way to incorporate it into our debates.

Hannah Arendt made spatial arguments; she would say that in one space — on the floor of Congress, let’s say — we talk about anatomy one way, politically. In another space — at the doctor, let’s say — we talk about anatomy a different way, medically. In yet a third space — the bedroom, let’s say — we might talk about anatomy a third way, sexually. Each space has its own rules and jurisdictions.

Some of you might rightly point out that these spaces are not as distinct from each other as we’d like, for example — laws about abortion might happen in congress, but also change what happens in the doctor’s office. In fact, it would seem, the relationship that is the thing as we see it < — > the thing as it is represented politically is not separable in our consideration, even when it is separable outside of our consideration (for example, when we are peeing).

I propose the following:

function = thing as we see it < — > thing as it is represented politically.

There is the fact of anatomy as we see it. There is anatomy, the social construct. Then there is the function of anatomy, which is the relationship between the fact of anatomy as we see it and the social construct of anatomy. The key to functioning is to understand that both exist in this relationship and indeed, without one, the other will ultimately fail. To see something but not be able to represent it socially, or likewise to attempt to construct it socially with no bearing on fact will mean the function cannot be made, and thus it ceases to be. The function in this case is deeper than say, the function of a computer. It refers to the function the thing as we see it (and the thing as we agree on it together) play in constituting reality. If it cannot participate in that, it cannot be real to us.
When I say the key to functioning, I mean the key to accessing reality, to understanding ourselves as inside of it, rather than apart from it. Right now, we are dysfunctional because we as a country have lost our ability to recognize a fact as we see it, we have convinced ourselves that it is merely a thing we have agreed on together, and that simply disagreeing with it is then enough to deconstruct it. But this is a delusion, which may be brought upon by language, or spatial jurisdictions, or by malicious agenda (let’s not rule it out) — for our purpose here, it hardly matters.

What matters is to recognize that simply calling a tree a flower is not enough to erase the existence of a tree, and to believe so is not an opinion or a position; it’s a delusion and a very dangerous one. There are consequences to insisting — even together as a society — that a tree is a flower, consequences that come directly from the choice to divorce reality from facts as we see them, and position it entirely within the domain of social construction. That is a child’s game of pretend, it is a game of pretend exactly identical to imagining we all had superpowers, or that we were horses, to name a couple of my childhood favorites. You would hardly let your child grow up believing they were a horse, it is quite easy to see why that would be harmful. Simply allow yourself the same charity of not letting someone tell you that you’re a horse.
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Notes:
1) I used gender here as an example without straying into a political assertion about what gender is or is not, and it might have been wiser of me to use something less buzzy. However, it remains true that my point is not political. Regardless of what you think gender is, you should not lose sight of the fact that without some relation to *both* fact and social representation, it does not exist.
2) The title of this post, Crossing the Macon County Line, is a line from the Mountain Goats Song “Going to Georgia” about a crazy guy who shows up at a woman’s door with a gun, and I have internally used the phrase “crossing the macon county line” to refer to the execution of delusion, the moment(s) when real world actions are produced from mental unwellness. The Mountain Goats are fantastic: also highly recommend their songs, “No Children,” “Up the Wolves,” “This Year,” “Love Love Love,” and “You Were Cool.”