An
Objective Report:
What's
really happening in Iraq... and everywhere else.
Three primates
died today while traveling in a motorized vehicle in an arid region
between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers. Although we can state
nothing with absolute certainty, the three “humans”
– basically hairless, cognitively advanced monkeys with
a striking genetic similarity to the common chimpanzee –
were most likely killed by some sort of explosive device as it
incinerated the vehicle beneath them. Over six thousand miles
away, another primate of the same species claimed that those killed
were members of a group he called “The United States Army.”
Upon further investigation, membership in this “army”
is marked chiefly by clothing, as well as by certain behavioral
traits. The exact purpose of the army’s presence in the
region, called “Iraq” by some, is under fierce debate.
In contemporary
sociopolitical discourse, much is made of taking an “objective”
view. To allege that a media report is “not objective”
is to strike at the very heart of the journalistic integrity of
its authors. If by objective, however, we mean independent
of peoples’ opinions, beliefs, attitudes, and feelings then
in an ideal world of “objective” reporting, all news
reports would look a lot like the one above.
This is not an introduction
to an argument about the inescapable subjectivity of claims like
“The U.S. is winning [or losing] the war in Iraq.”
The view suggested here cuts deeper than that, down to a level
that questions exactly what makes the U.S. the U.S., or Iraq Iraq,
or a war a war. Objectively, we cannot say much about the happenings
in Iraq other than that humans are riding around in jeeps, searching
houses, firing weapons, and making and deploying bombs, but also
washing clothes, cooking dinners, trading special bits of paper
for food, and carrying out innumerable other commonplace things.
To include or exclude any of these activities from under the umbrella
of a larger activity called “war” is a matter of opinion,
perspective, and consensus.
AN AGREED UPON FICTION
Like war, many
things would not exist without the beliefs, opinions, and attitudes
directed toward them by humans. Consider the concept of a dollar,
which exists only in the minds of a certain group of people. That
a particular piece of paper is worth one dollar is true only because
the members of the group agree that it does. The piece
of paper itself, on the other hand, exists independent of human
attitudes; it simply is. This distinction was popularized
by philosopher John Searle in his 1995 book The Construction
of Social Reality. Searle calls things like money, governments,
and baseball teams “social facts” or “institutional
facts,” whereas things like rocks, trees, and the snow on
top of Mt. Everest are “brute facts” of reality.
Nowhere are social facts
more fundamental and less obvious than in schemes of categorization
and identity. This may be due in part to the physical correlates
of social distinction – such as a uniforms, badges, or melanin
counts – which can trump nearly anything; as when different
colored uniforms allow brothers to fight on opposite sides of
civil wars. Still, these markers require social mechanisms –
and, most importantly, agreement – to be recognized. I can
wear pinstripes and a hat with a New York Yankees logo on it,
chew tobacco, and earn way too much money, but for me to be a
member of the Yankees, society must agree that: 1) a certain set
of activities, rules, and behaviors comprises a game called “baseball,”
2) a complex set of associations forms an organization called
“Major League Baseball,” 3) there exists a region
with arbitrary boundaries on the Eastern seaboard called “New
York City,” 4) that city has a Major League baseball team
called the Yankees, and 5) I am a member of that baseball team.
If any of these conditions are not met, I cannot be a member of
the Yankees.
INVISIBLE WORLDS
Observing a behavior
without an understanding of the social facts underlying it can
make the behavior look absurd. Consider, for example, someone
without an understanding of traffic laws watching the driver of
a car sit patiently at a quiet intersection while waiting for
a light to change, or someone unfamiliar with token economies
seeing a shopper exchange an intrinsically useless stack of green
paper for a basket full of food (even more perplexing, think about
how much people can freely take just by swiping a plastic card
through a plastic machine). It is easy to see how incomplete cultural
knowledge could be to blame for any number of unfortunate happenings
throughout recent history, such as the West’s frequent mislabeling
of other cultures as backward, primitive, or inferior.
These misunderstandings
happen because social facts are very difficult for the average
person to distinguish from brute facts. To explore how well individuals
naturally recognize this distinction, I conducted a small study
where I asked subjects to sort concepts into two equal groups
using whatever criteria they chose. The concepts were selected
such that their social construction vs. brute nature should have
been the most obvious distinction, but subjects repeatedly went
out of their way to fit them into more familiar, less logical
groupings. Even after I explained the social vs. brute distinction
to the subjects, 90 percent performed very poorly when asked to
divide a new set of concepts into two groups on that basis.
Subjects in the study
are not alone in their ineptitude. Each day, media outlets peddle
“unbiased” reports rife with culturally variable opinions,
while religions treat social beliefs about adultery, theft, and
marriage as natural law. Most American citizens obey the law against
murder as closely as they do the law of gravity.
The latter are wise to
do so, though, since nowhere can one claim that social facts do
not affect reality. On the contrary, social facts have enormous
real world impact. The border between Afghanistan and Pakistan
may have been scribbled by a British mapmakers’ pen, but
very real consequences can result from crossing it. Murder may
be considered wrong only because we believe it is wrong, but those
found guilty of it find themselves in very real prison cells,
or worse. Such consequences depend upon the society’s agreement
to uphold or affirm the social fact. The moment that the consensus
changes, the social fact ceases to have force, and the consequences
for defying it vanish. The same happens if the institution that
grants the fact its force collapses. As movies are fond of showing,
after a society falls, a suitcase full of its currency can’t
buy a thing.
OUR GIANT HOUSE OF CARDS
Social organizations,
particularly military and religious groups, go to great lengths
to make their abstract rules concrete. Oaths, devotions, codes,
and chants are specifically designed to reinforce artificial boundaries
and hide the fragility of the ties that bind the group. Such efforts
could not succeed, however, without the average person’s
aforementioned inability in distinguishing the socially constructed
from the “really real.” History has offered clear,
unmistakable examples of the fragility of entities bound by social
facts – most notably the ever popular “regime change”
– but those examples are forgotten, permitting an unwavering
confidence in the brittle buttresses of social institutions.
Along these lines, we
somehow forget stories about Muslims, Christians, and Jews living
side by side in a Baghdad neighborhood, or national armies composed
of all creeds and ethnicities, when we unquestioningly accept
the implication that because the tensions in the Middle East are
ancient they are basically unresolvable. In reality, little but
ideas separates Palestinian from Jew, or, for that matter, American
from Iraqi. Yet the entire global economy rests on these delicate
little notions of identity, borders, meaning, and value, oblivious
to the fact— to the brute fact of reality—that a few
changed minds could make it all come tumbling down.
By
Les Beldo
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