On a long hike, a couple of friends and I once decided to take a shortcut by climbing up a hill from one path to another. Having downed an espresso and believing this would save us about 15 minutes of extra walking time, up we went.
As we got about halfway up the hill, the angle of the slope suddenly became much steeper than our eyes had seen. The upper section of the hillside also had tiny, loose rocks all over it that began to make the ground feel unstable.
Crawling up the hill and with only a few feet to go, I grasped in triumph for the ledge of the higher path but, slipping on those small rocks, my left foot rolled up behind me and I went tumbling down to the bottom of the hill (yes, like this). With bruises on each thigh, cuts and scrapes across my torso, and soil in my hair, I let out a few choice words.
Discovering and Making Realities
I think back to that experience when reflecting on all the challenges the physical world presents for human beings. Tumbling down a hillside “Jack and Jill” style looks minor when we take a wider perspective on the challenges people face. We’ve already got volcanos, floods, tornados, and other disasters to deal with. There are infectious diseases that mutate and wreak havoc on our species. And that’s before we get to all the lions and tigers and bears, oh my.
Thanks to the work of scientists, medical experts, and even animal control, we continue to make some headway in surviving many of life’s challenges. After taking stock of these threats, you’d think that human beings wouldn’t want to add any more problems to this mix.
Yet that’s just what we do. While we live in physical worlds that can be discovered via the rocks on the ground, the air that we breathe, and bodies with hearts pumping and joints that age, we also live in social and relational worlds that are made through communication. In fact, most challenges on this planet are people problems that are created through communication.
Source: Created with Canva AI, “The Two Realities”
A Quick Experiment
Take a piece of paper and split it into two columns. On the left side list all the current challenges in your life that are not-at-all people related. In the column on the right, list the challenges that have been created in some way by people.
For the column on the left, now add some nuance to tease apart the human from the physical challenges. You might have in the left column that you got strep throat, had a storm pass through the area leaving you without electricity for a week, or perhaps got bitten by a bunch of mosquitoes and are still dealing with the itching and pain.
Each of these stem from the realm of physical reality. But prod a bit further and you’ll find all types of social and relational challenges that connect to these problems. For example, what if the strep throat has you out of work for two weeks, putting pressure on your partner to take over all parenting duties, like dropping off and picking up the kids from school?
Or maybe you’re now wondering if that inconsiderate guy who was coughing and sneezing on the plane ride last week gave you this illness? Or perhaps your neighbors put a bird bath in their backyard that’s got hordes of mosquitoes headed from the tropics to this new source of standing water.
How we react to and interpret physical challenges often become social and relational issues. So, see if there’s additional people problems that need to be added to column on the right. Now, take a good look across each column. If you’re like most people, what’s in the column to the right will greatly outweigh what’s on the left.
How “War” and “Race” Get Made
Without ongoing, deep reflection on the difference between the two realities, our very survival and ability to thrive on this planet are at risk. To put it squarely: some of the worst actions human beings have ever taken resulted from a failure to distinguish between the two realities.
Take war. As Roderick Hart and others relate, there’s no such thing as “war” without a great number of words and talk about war in the first place. War doesn’t exist in nature like rocks or water. But many people talk about war as though it’s natural—a part of the physical world that is discovered, like the ocean currents—rather than created. “Militarism stakes its claim on realism,” according to Robert Ivie, sharing observations “that war is a cultural invention—something learned, not an instinct, a necessity, or an inevitability—but a thing hard to discard once it is habituated.”
Adolf Hitler created World War II through his rhetoric, just as Winston Churchill and other figures undid these creations through theirs. Massive changes to physical realities happened because of these figures’ words. But they originated as words, nonetheless. War is made through communication and, holding off on the question of whether any war is justified or not, the takeaway here is that nothing in communication is inevitable, permanent, or incapable of change.
You might think that people with extraordinary amounts of power don’t need to communicate with others. Yet every government relies on the consent of the governed. Even the most repressive, brutal dictatorship must convince some portion of its population (e.g. a key voting bloc, the military that cracks down on dissent, etc.) that what it’s doing has legitimacy and is worthy of continued support. That power is created and sustained through communication via official outreach, media channels, and circles of influence. When support declines and countering movements gain momentum, regimes fall. (What causes support to decline? Among many factors, it’s often when the stories told no longer fit the stories people are living; or put differently, when communication no longer aligns with the reality of people’s everyday lives). As such, social realities are ultimately the realm of communicated choices and decisions.
This is good news. When despondent about the state of the world and its many hardships and constraints, it should come as some solace that many people, in different times and places, have worked to re-imagine and re-make their realities, despite how difficult that can be.
Let’s go further by focusing on skin color and race. As extensively documented by historians and others, over 600 years ago the color of one’s skin was made to matter by people seeking to rank human beings in plots of hierarchy, profiteering, and enslavement. Both different shades of skin color (degrees of lighter to darker pigmentation) and designations for race (the groupings often used in censuses and other categorizations, such as Asian, Black or African American, Hispanic or Latino, etc.) have been made to have material and status consequences.
According to Ryan Smith and Rubia Valente, for instance, some dark-skinned people in Latin America consider themselves to be white because of the status conferred on “whiteness.” The significance attributed to skin color and race and the societal patterns of discrimination that have followed from these selections have been entirely created through human communication.
You can see traces of this difference in the terms “black” and “white.” Actual skin pigmentation for many people approximates brown and pink/peach (perceived physical reality), respectively, but the polarized color terms “black/white” imply that there’s a stark difference between people, supporting policies such as segregation, for example (perceived social reality). The binary terms attempt to hide the sheer variety of skin tones and colors people actually have and effaces how skin color generally isn’t even uniform across a single individual’s body. In what’s called a “social construct,” the categorization of race even varies between countries and among individuals.
Isabel Wilkerson highlights that any physical feature could have been selected six centuries ago: height, type of hair, eye color, etc. But by making differences in skin color and racial designations matter and made to seem a part of the “natural order” of a certain type of created social reality, the rhetorical trick that’s had horrendous, ongoing impacts in and across societies has been to erase, avoid, or imagine that communication has had no role in making these inequities and injustices.
Why This Matters
If we fail to examine or reflect on what communication makes or try to distinguish what separates ethical from unethical communication, “we’re in trouble.” All forms of fundamentalism, from the most cultish religions to the totalizing, insular worlds of gangs and the mafia, present themselves to their participants as the only, “normal” ways of being human, rather than as thoroughly made and capable of being remade in other ways. (And it’s easy to cast aspersions in these matters, but the truth is we all have some cult-like behaviors in our lives).
Neil Postman once said, “Fanaticism begins with our falling in love . . . with certain sentences.” The fancy word for this is “reification,” or treating words as if they’re real, concrete parts of physical reality. It’s deifying stories and language, overstating the reverence due to the “symbols” created by people.
What’s meant by that? “Signs” have a direct link to what they represent, such as smoke being an indicator of fire. But “symbols” like words have no relationship at all with their referents. That the word “apple” in English can be “naranja” in Spanish or “apfel” in German helps us discover and represent elements of our physical realities, but it’s easy to forget that symbols are also completely arbitrary. Going further, here’s Kenneth Burke’s question and take on all this:
“Can we bring ourselves to realize . . . just how overwhelmingly much of what we mean by ‘reality’ has been built up for us through nothing but our symbol-systems? Take away our books, and what little do we know about history, biography, even something so ‘down to earth’ as the relative position of seas and continents? What is our ‘reality’ for today (beyond the paper-thin line of our own particular lives) but all this clutter of symbols about the past combined with whatever things we know mainly through maps, magazines, newspapers, and the like about the present? . . . And however important to us is the tiny sliver of reality each of us has experienced first-hand, the whole over-all ‘picture’ is but a construct of our symbol-systems. . . . [every human] clings to a kind of naïve verbal realism that refuses to realize the full extent of the role played by symbolicity in [their] notions of reality.”
Where physical realities can be experienced prior to language, our social and relational worlds start to intersect with the physical world when words or symbols are used to name aspects of what we’re experiencing.
This is where the conflation of the two realities begins to take root. We all know at some level that the “map is not the territory” or “the menu is the not the meal,” but a “naïve verbal realism” easily creeps into our messages with one another in everyday life and practice. In other words, when we begin acting like there’s a permanence to our impermanent, choice-laden terms and statements.
For example, a young person told they are a “C” student might start believing that they are destined to never do well in their studies, internalizing a label that can become a pattern or self-fulfilling prophecy. Instead of seeing the label as in the realm of changeable social reality, the consequences can be dire if treated as part of an unchangeable physical reality. These are the very subtle communicative maneuvers that a focus on growth vs. fixed mindsets tries to remake.
Tammy Lenski notes that this is why naïve realism is “one of the most insidious problems lurking behind conflict in our ongoing personal and business relationships.” She shares how often people label another person with a term such as “conflict avoidant” and treat it as a fact (i.e. a physical rather than social reality). She’ll respond with,
“‘That’s possible. And what additional reasons might he have avoided raising these problems with you, other than being avoidant?’ This doesn’t seem, from the outside, like a hard question. You and I can conjure multiple reasons someone might avoid confronting someone about a problem, many of them reasonable. But from inside, this is a very difficult mental exercise. Sometimes, the person I’m talking with can’t come up with a single plausible alternative reason. They are not alone; you and I struggle similarly. This is the trap created by naive realism. From outside someone else’s conflict, alternative interpretations are easy to see. From inside our own conflict, the story we’ve constructed feels like the only realistic one, one we built from the evidence, objectively. None of this means we’re always wrong about people, of course. Occasionally the map is accurate. The trouble is that from the inside the conflict, an accurate map and a distorted one feel exactly the same. Certainty doesn’t tell us which one we’re holding. This is why naive realism is so insidious. We file away the interactions that confirm the story we’re building about them. We may not even notice the disconfirming data. The longer we know them and interact with them, the more set in concrete our story may become. Naive realism is more than just a ‘factor’ in conflict. It’s an engine — maybe the engine — of the friction that can build over time when we work or live together. . . . Naive realism seems to be so baked into the human condition that we can’t just switch it off.”
In this sense, a game human beings keep playing is to imagine that communication simply transmits what’s discovered in the world and plays little to no part in creating new realities. We certainly discover realities through communication, such as the structure of DNA, but we forget that whatever is out there is always filtered 1) through our nervous systems (e.g. no one sees X-rays or radio waves because our bodies simply can’t) and 2) language (e.g. words in different languages or different terms that can be used to describe the same event) in highly selective ways. The “C” student designation doesn’t exist out in nature, it’s created through communication and subject to revision. This is why the more complex your understanding of communication, the more you’ll be able to catch how communication involves way more than simply transferring information—it generates our senses of self, relationships, cultures, and more.
Three Qualifications
I highlight the two realities as a practical and ethical distinction for individual well-being and improving our conditions for living together on this planet. There’s a lot more to unpack about these, but at least three qualifications are in order.
First, it’s not the case that the physical realities of bodies, lakes, and clay are “material” while the social realities of words, music, or images are “immaterial.” For instance, words go directly from mouths into ears, bounce around in neural networks, and have material impacts on the human body. As I cover in another post, communication is “bioactive.” We all know how an appreciative comment can lift our spirits, while one unkind word can linger in our thoughts for weeks and months. While our social and physical realities should be distinguished from one another, there’s no less material impact in one realm than the other. As the two lists you drew up likely highlighted, the effects are even greater in our social realities.
Second, while nothing in social realities must remain permanent, there’s also a lot in our physical realities that’s changeable. Mountains and glaciers erode. Droughts can turn lush into arid land. Heraclitus’s ancient recognition that, “One cannot step in the same river twice,” accords with a lot of our tangible experiences of life on earth. Even the most permanent-looking features of our world, such as massive boulders, are really atoms and molecules that are in constant motion. Parts of our bodies refresh themselves on different timelines, just as personalities can change. Both our natural and social realities are a “pluriverse” of changes and emerging possibilities.
In quantum theory, the “observer effect,” where “observing a particle changes its behavior,” alone shows how “our relationship with the world may be more interconnected than we realize.” In other words, life is far more process than product. At the intersection of physical and social realities, Stephen Nachmanovich’s advice is thus to “stamp out nouns.” Describing a physical world in terms of nouns (e.g. grass, fingers, apple, etc.) misses all the ways that the matter around us is in motion as a verb.
When used to name parts of our social realities, nouns get even more thorny when, as described above, they’re used to describe qualities of our relationships with one another (e.g. “she’s a C student,” “Tom is lazy,” and transferred to the most dehumanizing and horrific level, “they’re animals”) instead of nouns that were made through verbs and can be unmade through more verbing. It’s the difference between playing a finite and an infinite game. In all cases, communicating can verb-alize different ways of thinking, being, and acting.
Third, this isn’t a call to relativism or moral equivalences. Quite the opposite. When you realize how much weight communication carries to both discover and impact the physical realities in which we live and to make/re-make our social realities, the stakes for supported conclusions, accountable and moral choices, a good dose of humility, respect for our shared humanity, and aspirations for creativity are only heightened. So long as we’re opening rather than closing space for further communication, we can make ethical choices and practice our roles as citizens in society well.
In this light, it’s not the case that any opinion is good as another. We need ongoing, broad and deep examinations of the world and conversations with one another to come to judgments. So long as a sobering lens is put on how our social realities get us to “truths,” there’s important places for firm beliefs, arguing for one’s interests, and even spiritual commitments in all this.
For example, I think slavery is wrong, in a permanent and unchanging way. That humans can construct this evil into existence takes strategic rhetoric to deconstruct it. Zooming out to take as wide a view historically and culturally on this issue as possible, and subjecting it to dialogue and deliberation among a random sample of the planet’s diverse inhabitants, I think the moral judgment that slavery is wrong would be found indisputable. But that slavery has been (and unfortunately in some quarters continues to be) disputable shows even our most devoted convictions need ongoing communicative attention. Evil or dangerous behavior can even become banal without such attention, and important histories and memories can easily get erased.
Robyn Penman writes that, rather than assuming communication can be explained by factors outside the process (our culture, our cognitive processing, our biology, etc.), communicating itself is consequential to human affairs. It is largely in communicating (with the noun stamped out, as a verb) that the world as we understand is brought into being, whether discovered or made.
Stop Conflating and Start Identifying the Two Realities
If there’s any message in all of this, it’s stop conflating and start identifying the two realities. Realize that communication is the most precious resource human beings have. None of us lives in physical realities unaffected by the social realities all around us. And no social realities remain unaffected by the physical realities in which we also live.
A major implication in all of this is that communication gets us into most of our problems, but it also gets us out of them. While the physical and social realities relate to one another, most human progress begins with the power of speech to start making better worlds together.
That’s a choice I encourage you to start making today: wherever you’re at and whatever problems you’re facing, look especially to what’s been made, how it’s been made, and what you and others could do to re-make even better versions than what’s on offer.