Chapter Five

The Anthropological Construction of Human Systems

Human reality is socially, symbolically, psychologically, linguistically, culturally and behaviorally constructed. All these processes of anthropological construction occur simultaneously, and though analytically separable, in terms of human systems they occur in a synthetically integrated pattern that cannot be separated without doing damage to the human system.

Different processes and forms of human construction can be analytically separated for the purpose of intensive understanding. The basic factors of the psychological construction of human reality are different from, but overlap with, the factors of linguistic construction or cultural construction.

Together, these various processes of the human construction of reality, upon which human systems are formed, constitute what can be called the central anthropological complex, the set of distinctive, uniquely human traits and patterns that serve to define human systems as unique and as something different from and emergent from the biological or physical systems upon which they are founded.

Human beings have a wide range of choices to construct their world as they may, in a largely arbitrary manner, if one can get past conventional constraints. But human beings have little choice but to construct their worlds symbolically. Without human constructive capacities, humans have little else by which to shape their behavior. Without instinctive controls, what is not constructive quickly becomes destructive, and this by and large is what we bear witness to in human history, upon almost all levels of the articulation of human reality.

The unavoidability of human constructive process can be called the cultural imperative. In other words, humans are dependent upon their symbolically constructed cultural realities for their adaptive response, for their capacity to make sense of the world and respond to the world in an appropriate and adaptive manner. 

This is a scientific paradigm for the understanding of human behavior, social patterning and human psychological processes in an integrated manner. To claim that human reality is socially constructed is not to diminish the seriousness of the games that we play, that we must play, in order to survive and succeed upon the human stage of the world. Lives are made and broken in this game, and the consequences of success and failure are as real and unconstructed as it gets, regardless of the manner that the game is played. Being constructed merely implies a certain fundamental arbitrariness about our behavior and sense of reality that suggests that, no matter how bad things may become, we have some measure of choice and therefore certain degrees of freedom, if not in the final and often unintended consequences, then at least in terms of our response patterning to events that occur in our lives. The constructed nature of reality provides us at least with the possibility, no matter how remote the likelihood, of a counterfactual or the realization of a hypothetical reality.

The basis for the paradigm of the social construction of reality stems from the observation that human behavior is almost entirely mediated by our relatively large and sophisticated brains that are capable, indeed that have little other choice, than to articulate in reality in a symbolic manner. This symbolic capacity has arisen as a complex of our unique evolutionary development and our natural historical situation. Among other things the symbolic structure of human reality underlies the structure of all our knowledge, our perception, our cognition and our behavioral response patterning in reality. Very little has been left over for the role of human instinct and human reflex. Thus the constructed dimensionality of human reality, both in a shared and in a private, psychological sense, is a result and reflection of the structure of our symbolic modus operandi. We depend upon symbolic operations of our intelligence to mediate our worlds in an adaptive and successful manner, and indeed we cannot really escape the constraining influence of these symbolic operations in our daily lives.

It entails, among other things, that we are by our nature social animals, and a part of this social nature is that we are not only the bearers of human culture, but the producers and reproducers of our cultural adaptations that extend out into the world and influence our environments in a metabiotic and historical sense. The perspective of human systems comes into play when we begin to realize in some objectified sense that the patterning of all human behavior, at any level that it is discernible, is structured in certain meaningful and expectable if not quite predictable ways. The systematic structure of human patterning, symbolic in nature, allows us a scientific handle or rather yet, a mirror, for seeing, reflecting upon and objectifying aspects about our own reality, of ourselves in reality as if we are something or someone else, that would otherwise remain invisible and out of our own awareness. It also allows us the framework for developing conceptual systems, models and experiments that represent and reflect our own human nature in a manner that is true to our form and character.

If we did not treat human reality as a construction, no matter how tragic or comical its consequences, then we would be ultimately unable to separate ourselves from our own illusions that are the product of our constructions. We could not objectify our experiences in a disembodied manner, and we would therefore be unable to obtain a scientific comprehension of the patterning and structure underlying our common nature and our behavior.

The Linguistic Construction of Reality

The linguistic construction of reality largely rests upon the anthropological fallacy of reification, or misplaced concretization, or confusion of the name for the thing named. Language, in a sense, creates its own reality, or its own sense of reality, relatively independent of the referent reality upon which it is supposed to be based. Ideological realities, reinforced through linguistic codification, derive their power from this symbolic capacity to let the sign stand in place of the thing signified.

This constructive capacity of human language relates to the childlike tendency of the overextension and overgeneralization of terms of reference, which stems from the symbolic variability and openness of symbolisms to stand for more than one thing at a time.

Human Systems

by Hugh M. Lewis