With apologies to our many friends and posters outside the United States... it's time for another one of these! Culture war thread rules apply, and you are permitted to openly advocate for or against an issue or candidate on the ballot (if you clearly identify which ballot, and can do so without knocking down any strawmen along the way). "Small-scale" questions and answers are also permitted if you refrain from shitposting or being otherwise insulting to others here. Please keep the spirit of the law--this is a discussion forum!--carefully in mind.
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Notes -
The problem I have with social constructions is that virtually everything in society is at some level a social construct. It’s meaningless as a claim. Religion is a social construct and likewise contains legions of subgroups and deviations that make generalizations difficult. And that also isn’t a good reason to say religion is unimportant. Just because Southern Baptists, Anglicans, and Greek Orthodox Christians are all Christians, that doesn’t mean they’re identical or interchangeable in obvious ways.
Further, most of the ideas of what to do (generally deconstruct it) are silly. Just because it’s no longer seen as anything other than a social construct doesn’t mean it doesn’t have something of a force of reality. People are affected by social constructs, gender roles, social norms, and other social conventions because that’s how society actually works. Even if we recognize that we drive on the right side of the road in the USA as “just a social construct” that doesn’t mean that change is desired.
The people who use the "social construction" deepity are ironically the people who take the thesis the least seriously.
Imagine if every human disappeared and alien scientists had to puzzle out the purpose of these giant buildings and steel veins that dot the landscape. Why some buildings on a certain coast are built to different specifications, why standards vary across climes.
These things are clearly artificial but no archaeologist or historian worth his salt would start and stop at "people made this, so they just made it up because".
It really is just a blank slateist motte-and-bailey.
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I once heard this problem neatly solved with the saying "a house is a social construct, but I do rather prefer to live in one"
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