If society is a god (which is very odd concept), then there are some other contenders for godhood like heredity/natural selection, environmental factors apart from society, and so on. We don't have to accept social constructionism to acknowledge that society--other people--influence us in myriad ways.

Culture, which has to be continuously maintained, is so central to human life that it is difficult to imagine what we would be like without it. Take culture away, and we are taken back a million years to a presumed time when we were scavenging for food and grunting at each other. But culture has biological roots (it's how we meet both basic and complex needs as large-brained organisms).

It is usually a mistake to think that whatever the current wrinkle is, it's the hottest thing that ever happened.

Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.

Yes.

No society>>>No culture. We're socioculturally situated and there's no getting away from that. The human is biologically constructed, the person is socially constructed. That doesn't make society an absolute limit on thought though. Is that the idea?

What do you mean by "person" when you say it's socially constructed? If you mean that society is ontologically prior to persons, I don't see how that could be. What is society made of? I don't doubt that society substantially influences who we are, but that influence is limited. See twins separated at birth.

The concept of individuality is dependent on some kind of group which acts as a background to the individual. This is not a case of construction, though. It's a logical issue.

See twins separated at birth. — frank

Don't get "environment" confused with "society" as it's used philosophically. Think social forces inclusive of cultural forces, i.e. the sociocultural as used also in social science, because you can't really separate out the two. Society is the bricks, culture is the mortar.

I'll say more later. But it's futile to talk about "society" unless we're referring to the same thing. It's not just a bunch of "individuals" who happen to live in proximity, that's for sure.

The similarity between the lives of twins separated at birth is just one sign that much of what defines a person is innate.

My greater peeve about thinking of society as some sort of Creator, especially in the case of persons, is that our understanding of consciousness is limited (possibly permanently since the investigator of personhood is always a person).

Thanks for taking time out to reply. :D

There's a nice book by Ian Hacking titled The Social Construction of What?. I think it's great reading for anyone interested in the notion of social construction.

Cool. Thank you.

Don't get "environment" confused with "society" as it's used philosophically. Think social forces inclusive of cultural forces, i.e. the sociocultural as used also in social science, because you can't really separate out the two. Society is the bricks, culture is the mortar. — Baden

I'm not sure you can even separate "society" and "culture" like bricks and mortar or warp and weft. Society is a culture. Culture shapes society -- the two are too intermingled to separate them out.

So biology<--->culture<--->society. Biology comes first and lays down the basic floor plan of individual persons and furnishes the appliances. culture<--->society brings in the carpets, the couches, the tables, the chairs, and the drapes, but can't do too much about the floorpan or the appliances. Biology makes the culture in society it's own. Once it's committed to it, change becomes difficult--but not impossible.

My greater peeve about thinking of society as some sort of Creator, especially in the case of persons, is that our understanding of consciousness is limited (possibly permanently since the investigator of personhood is always a person). — frank

The social constructionist position would be more sophisticated than how you paint it. It is a co-construction story. Society shapes us as "persons". And we, as those persons, build society.

So for society to persist, in the form of some cultural set of habits, it must be able to produce the right kinds of people. And those people would need to generally re-build or re-produce the social culture that formed them, while also adding sufficient variety or spice to keep the evolutionary game going. The next generation can potentially start shaping some new cultural habits.

The collective whole thus has an organismic unity. We can speak of human society as something that actually exists in an evolutionary sense - a new kind of super-organism that adapts and responds to the world it makes.

This kind of feedback loop is already familiar in biology. We do talk about environments or ecosystems as having living or organismic reality. Earth has a uniquely oxygen rich atmosphere because bacterial life found that oxidative reactions offer the best energetic bang for buck. Life made the Earth that way for its own good reason.

And now humans, as socially constructed creatures, have just about remade the Earth again, transforming it into a planet dominated by farming and cities. The bulk of planetary biomass is entrained to the new human ecosystem. We have brought about the anthropocene age. Life is being redefined now in our image.

Of course, that may be a fleeting affair. But it has the same organic logic - the logic that actually needs to be applied to analyse the human condition through a social constructionist lens.

So perhaps the real problem with social constructionism is the extent to which it might encourage the idea that the outcomes of what it is to be "human" are either arbitrary or near completion.

It seems pretty clear that we are in a runaway period of explosive growth - the immature or "weed" phase of the ecological lifecycle. Come back in a thousand years and we will have a better idea of whether our particular social/linguistic adventure was a successful kind of "Creator".

Genes, as the creator of ecosystems, have got a pretty great track record. Words, as the creator of sociocultural systems and thus individuated personhood, are still to prove their value at the planetary scale of organic organisation.

I think it's just that at a particularly materialistic point in time, it seemed like a good idea to turn society into God. — frank

I don't know if you're familiar with the writings of Emile Durkheim, but he was sociologist and theorist whose writings on religion, culture and society are still very influential. He very much understood religion in primarily sociological terms, as a means to achieve social cohesion, an idea which has subsequently been developed by popular evolutionary theorists. (There's a useful summary of his views on religion on Wikipedia.)

Sociology of religion, generally, is rather a fascinating study, as a matter of fact. Max Weber's famous essay, The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is definitely worth being acquainted with. More recently, Peter Berger is a very insightful writer on sociology of religion - his The Social Construction of Reality (co-authored) was and remains a hugely influential book. (Berger died not that long ago, obit here.)

So it's a rich vein, that area.

Yeah I do think materialism is waning - you can see increasing scepticism about materialism on both the Left and Right.

I'm not sure how to parse "turning society into God", but certainly for a long time we've thought of Man as the default, de facto God. Humanism, Communism, Liberalism, Fascism, they all make Man out to be the measure of things.

I remember the puzzlement among intellectuals back in the mid 90s at the resurgence of religion as a world force with the advent of Islamism - it seemed all that had been done with and dusted when the "End of History" had happened at the end of the 80s.

But no, apparently people do seem to want to have some kind of belief in the transcendent in their lives.

There's probably going to be a bit of a resurgence of interest in Christianity in the West too, I'll wager (I myself enjoyed our local church's Christmas Mass this year) - as well as in atheism (the resolution of the apparent paradox being that more people are concerned overall to nail their colours to the mast publicly, whereas before they thought of religion as more of a private matter).

I know myself, my attitude towards religion has softened over the years, and I'm less cocksure about my atheism - in fact I do think of myself more as a classical Agnostic in the Huxleyian/Spencerian sense these days. I also find the Aristotelian/Thomist classical arguments for God more interesting and challenging than I used to, now that I understand their classical philosophical jargon better.

And I don't think I'll change, I think this is my settled position after 30 year or so thinking: IOW, no, I don't find sufficient reason to believe in God, and even the most valid arguments are still not demonstrable as sound.

But I wouldn't scorn anyone who feels like going with a religion, not like I used to when I was young. The classical arguments aren't airtight, but they're quite strong for anyone who's inclined to already have a sense of the transcendent at the emotional or mystical level.

To some extent it's a leap of faith - there is the known, and the unknown, and with the unknown, you pays your money and you takes your chance.

I think @apokrisis is right about social construction.

I would go on to say that individual intention is derivative of collective intention but collective intention is not reducible to the sum of individual intentions. Intentions are normative they can be shared, like joy or grief.

I saw something about society/god, and perhaps god might be considered the shared
intention of a community of believers with their faith, their collective intention, their god evolving as the community evolves.

it seemed like a good idea to turn society into God — frank

If anything I would say that we let society become the puppet master, but not the god.
Society cannot be seem as a god because the common definition of god usually includes "super natural" and there is no way that you can classify society as super natural.

Do you mean "intention" in a Husserl sort of way?

Interesting that you bring up faith. Faith isn't a universal feature of religion, is it? It's important to People of the Book. Those are jealous religions. That jealousy is a kind of cultural survival mechanism. Cultures that exist in isolation don't need survival mechanisms. It's only cultures that are in competition with others and vulnerable to extinction either through military force or possibly more lethal: adulteration by a more vibrant cultures that need energetic reinforcement of norms.

Oddly, societies that live in isolation also develop intensely complicated languages. There's no force on the scene to simplify language. Is an isolated culture similar to an isolated person in some ways?

:up:

The thing about God is that God is always invoked as an unexplained explainer: God doesn't explain anything at all, he's nothing but a stand-in - a synonym even - for ignorance. Explanations in terms of societies don't, or rarely do, function like this: to say that such and such can be explained in societal terms is (usually) to say that such and such is a response to some kind of societal problem. 'Society' rarely names an 'answer' so much as a problem to itself be explained: what are the conditions which made society respond in this way? And those answers will generally be local, historical, and concrete (even as they can play a part in broader anthropologies).

Or, err, A COMPLETELY REASONABLE AND STRAIGHTFORWARD APPROACH TO THINGS I MEAN HONESTLY ITS NOT SO BAD.

What counts as a societal problem? For an existentialist, social practices are embraced mindlessly, but important aspects of intelligibility emerge from these embodied principles.

For me, an awakening to just how much our social practices create comes into view when I look at a picture of the earth from outer space. What I object to is nodding in the direction of society to explain things that are really out of the range of our understanding (like personhood).

Well if it's out of your understanding then you can't object to it because you'd have no grounds to do so, by your own lights. I suspect you want to argue something like: these things are constitutively out of our range of understanding. But that would be voodoo - ignorance elevated to the rank of principle.

We don't know how people learn to speak. There's reason to believe that latent abilities are activated by social interaction. Let's not just pull a scenario about how it works out of our asses and then march onward.

Will we at some point fully understand the nature of consciousness? I actually doubt it. I'd be happy to be proven wrong.

Ignorance as principle it is then.

Try capitalizing that.

'Society' rarely names an 'answer' so much as a problem to itself be explained: what are the conditions which made society respond in this way? And those answers will generally be local, historical, and concrete (even as they can play a part in broader anthropologies). — StreetlightX

Yeah. Social and anthropological science may seek out the deep natural structures that are the organising forces beyond the mere passing contingencies of history. But what do they know, hey? Bloody Platonists!