The title of this post might strike you as strange because if you are at all given to pondering the nature of reality, you are likely to understandably take reality as given; as having an independent existence apart from us human beings. The reality (pun intended) however, as documented by sociological research that has been carried out since the 1960s show that a great deal of reality is socially constructed through human interaction, language, and institutionalization, with institutionalization being a process repeated behaviors become structured and widely accepted.
What the previous paragraph implies is that our understanding of the world—what we accept as “real” or “true”—is constructed through ongoing interactions with others and embedded in cultural institutions. After a while, these institutions begin to appear to have an independent existence of their own and they in turn shape us, even though we humans originally shaped them (Typically, for durable institutions, the original shapers died a long time ago).
This role reversal tends to get progressively stronger with each succeeding generation, if no societal rupture causes us question the nature of some institution or the other. We should note what we commonly refer to as “common sense”, while also appearing to us as “natural” or given is also culturally determined or socially derived. In other words, what might be common sense to one group of people might not be obvious at all to another group given the differing customs the second group has evolved different from the first.
The process by which socially created norms and institutions begin to have an independent reality and control us is called reification. After reification, socially derived norms and institutions begin to take the mantle of “objective fact”. We begin to see them as “The way things are” because after reification, humans begin to go through a process where these norms are internalized. This process typically has two parts; the first typically taking place within the safe confines of the family and the second being the schooling process that prepares us to perform useful roles in society.
Language plays a key role in the creation and transmission of social reality. It enables shared meanings, the communication of abstract concepts, the construction and maintenance of the symbolic universe that holds society together.
Despite the appearance of durability, institutions and the social order they represent are inherently fragile. Long-standing institutions can be challenged and have been successfully challenged from time to time. This is because institutions, no matter how they take on the appearance of naturalness are human devised rules. What one set of humans devised, another set can change or do away with. It should be pointed out though that institutions partly evolve to bring stability and reduce uncertainty, hence they have a natural bias towards changing only very slowly.
This stability is helped along by a process of legitimation. The legitimation process has progressively passed through 4 increasingly sophisticated stages. These are legitimation through myths, religion, philosophy and science. Deviancy is punished through a variety of methods ranging from ridicule, to ostracism, even imprisonment.
Despite the need for the punishment of deviancy, a society’s institutions would need to be challenged from time to time (just not very often) for that society to remain healthy. This is because our socially derived rules, norms and institutions are typically responses to society’s challenges, and these challenges aren’t fixed once and for all time.
They are inherently dynamic, therefore necessitating society’s evolution and the nature of its responses (i.e., the evolved norms, rules and institutions) to these challenges. Societies that don’t question the nature of their inherited social reality eventually stagnate. A taken-for-granted attitude towards institutions will eventually lead to their ossification.
We in Nigeria need to be asking questions about what seems like pervasive institutional decay all around us. The examples are legion but the following table provides a decent summary:
| Sector | Institutional decay |
| Politics | Electoral fraud, weak parties |
| Judiciary | Corruption, slow justice delivery |
| Security | Police brutality, military inefficiency |
| Anti-Corruption | Selective prosecutions, limited results |
| Infrastructure | Persistent power failure, poor public service delivery |
| Regulation | Inability to control fake goods, policy inconsistency |
| Governance | Weak local governments, poor ethnic conflict management |
The institutional decay in Nigeria plays a key part in the erosion of public trust, stunted development, widespread corruption and fragile national cohesion that are being experienced in the country. My goal of writing an article on the social origins of reality is to alert us to the fact that, no matter how it seems otherwise, our reality is being created by all of us. Our repeated acts of commission and omission harden into institutions that though informal are every bit as powerful as formal institutions, perhaps even more powerful. Perhaps if we are reminded about the human origins of our social reality, we might realize that there is no escaping the fact that it us up to us to change it.
Bibliography
- Berger Peter L. et al. 1967 The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge London: Penguin Books
