Social Constructs and Symbol Systems: Why are they valued?

After reading these excerpts and thinking about similar inequalities that exist because of systems and the individuals within systems, I find myself returning to questions of accountability: who are we holding accountable and for what are we holding them accountable? How can accountability be measured and how should unaccountable behavior be dealt with (or should it)? It is difficult to end oppression against women because there are not large national/international groups which convene to discuss how women will be oppressed in the coming year. Discrimination against women is not a rehearsed and orchestrated process. There are some individuals which may be encountered in daily experiences (conversations, media) and can be identified as causing some degree of oppression, but many others fall beneath the radar with subtle and implicit sexism or their sexism cannot be addressed directly. I can attempt to hold myself accountable and address displays of sexism I encounter, but how can I hold others or “the system” accountable?

This next section of my post gets quite radical. In some ways, I am doing exactly what Johnson writes is ineffective, which is blaming the system. In other ways, I am blaming the individuals who perpetuate the system (myself included). Just giving everyone a warning.

Johnson writes that “the main use of any culture is to provide symbols and ideas out of which to construct a sense of what is real” and later suggests that our society would be unrecognizable if these symbol constructions did not exist. The first place I encountered the idea of symbol construction was in Ernest Becker’s The Birth and Death of Meaning (1971), in which he explains that self-esteem originates from symbol systems, through which we (human beings) realize the expected social rules for behavior. We work our entire lives to protect and maintain our self-esteem by presenting ourselves as people of value to society. We are constantly forced to establish who we are because we no longer belong to ourselves (we have become social characters). However, because we are constantly “acting” to fulfill a role expectation, it is difficult to determine what others want or what bothers them. One of Becker’s main points in the text is that “the culture must make continued self-esteem possible; each individual must feel as though he [or she; the language of this text is male-dominated] is an object of primary value in a world of meaningful action”(79).

This text by Becker and a lecture I attended on Friday concerning “What Makes Us Distinctively Human: Our Genes, Our Minds, Our Politics” brought up conversation regarding why there seems to be a stigma associated with our animalistic tendencies and why we seek to distance ourselves from these tendencies. Why is what is socially constructed superior to what is innate? My point is, if Johnson argues that one way to combat sexism is to change what is acceptable so that the path of least resistance does not lead to sexism (go against the norms of sexism), why don’t we go against the norms of socially constructing our lives? Why don’t we make the path of least resistance include living our lives as distinct from the constructs which define our gender, behavior, and actions? Constructions of what it means to be an ideal woman and what it means to be an ideal man change constantly, and it seems nearly impossible to remain within these constructs in an attempt to be accepted. These constructs are perpetuated by individuals and the greater society, and women and men receive ridicule if their lives don’t line up with the construct or even if their lives do line up. What is the point of striving for these unachievable standards when that is all they are: standards? A similar concept in education is “teaching to the test” when the knowledge on the test has no practical use value in life and high scores on a test do not necessarily guarantee “success” (as interpreted by society) in life. Why don’t we reject that individuals who are biologically female should be expected to act in a specific way, feminine or otherwise? The Johnson quote in the opening of the above paragraph articulates that we, as members of society, use symbols to “construct a sense of what is real.” But symbols seem to be a barrier to realizing what is real, as we are surrounded by constructions and acting. Maybe we should try to reach what is actually real rather than a sense of what is real. Then we may come to the realization that our constructions fall remarkably short.