Beyond Deconstruction: Building in a World Obsessed with Breaking Things Down
If you are like me, you enjoy being critical. I don’t necessarily mean you like criticizing people or pointing out personal mistakes, though criticism can certainly manifest that way. Instead, I am referring to the practice of critical thinking and social deconstruction; and if your educational experience has been similar to mine this ability has probably always served you well and been extolled as a great virtue. After all, numerous educational institutions pride themselves upon their production of good “critical thinkers”, particularly when it comes to analyzing the social structures of the world. As a young student, learning to deconstruct social realities such as the socio-political, economic, religious, and moral structures is incredibly alluring. Attaining the ability to break these social edifices into their component parts feels like the acquisition of a vantage point to see these constructions for what they truly are, how they were made, and their application. Deconstructing the world around us is undeniably valuable. When done properly it allows us to see the world a bit clearer, identify the problematic areas, and begin collaborating to heal broken structures and relationships. Unfortunately, while many of us develop strong critical analysis skills we often don’t integrate them with creative collaboration, and this oversight creates problems.
This integration of creative collaboration often fails to occur due to a common misconception about what facilitates innovative and cooperative behavior. Creativity and collaboration are generally believed to happen best amongst people that think similarly and share closely related goals. Even for those of us that champion multicultural and diverse environments, when it comes time to collaborate or create we tend to seek out people with beliefs and visions that are exceptionally similar to our own. Yet, according to organizational psychologists like Adam Grant, highly agreeable groups are not the most innovative or creative ones. Grant asserts that the most creative groups are those that contain real differences and disagreements of opinion, values, and strategies because through dialogue and even conflict they are quicker to identify problems and discover more novel solutions. In psychological studies of the difference between randomly assigned groups that were either directed “not to criticize” one another or were encouraged to “debate, and even criticize”, researchers found that groups that debated and engaged in criticism generated 16% more ideas than those that did not. [1] Research further indicates that dissenting views are valuable even when they are wrong because the dialogue over flawed ideas often facilitates better solutions. [2] Yet, despite the value that emerges in collaborating with those we disagree with most of us, if we are being honest, avoid it.
Due to the difficulties and discomfort involved in creating and collaborating with others, deconstructing the world often appears comparatively easy. As a result, creatively collaborating to redeem flawed social structures is often passed over in favor of a wholesale rejection of imperfect institutions, traditions, concepts, or value systems. Completely rejecting flawed systems and structures feels justified because they are corrupt after all. Disposal is more expedient than slogging through the mire to assess what’s worth saving, and it’s a route that often saves us the discomfort of engaging with people with whom we’d rather not collaborate.
Amusingly, some of the most severe adherents of this mentality are young millennials and “zoomers.” While we ridicule “boomers” for their closed-mindedness and characterize them with a perceived lack of nuance, we ourselves inhabit a rigidly binary framework where things are either wholly good or bad. Our approach to classifying the world is fundamentally the same as the generations before us. The only apparent difference is a disagreement with older generations about what institutions, values, and customs ought to be labeled good and bad.
Zealously, what is problematic in implementation is identified and sought to be discarded completely in the waste bin of history. In the past, this was proverbially known as “throwing out the baby with the bathwater”, an idiom used to describe foolhardiness or inattention that resulted in throwing away the precious and the valuable with what was polluted and no longer useful. Yet, this troubling contemporary trend that considers anything that has been corrupted as inherently worthless, oppressive, or violent is pervasive. We often talk about these warped institutions or values systems as if they are inherently racist, sexist, malicious, or evil; and therefore beyond saving. It’s just not obvious, however, that this is the case as often as many of us seem to think.
Someone with a unique approach to flawed social structures and values systems is Augustine of Hippo, a theologian and philosopher, that lived from 354–430 AD. Augustine’s theory of evil provides a helpful alternative framework for identifying and engaging with structures, customs, or any other elements of the social reality that are debased. Augustine, as a Christian theologian, started from the position that everything existing had been created Imago Dei (in the image of God) and thus was originally created good. Evil then was the corruption of that goodness. Similarly, Augustine extends his analysis to human desire and social realities. He expressed it this way in The Enchiridion:
Where there is evil, there is a corresponding diminution of the good. As long, then, as a thing is being corrupted, there is good in it of which it is being deprived […] even if the corruption is not arrested, it still does not cease having some good of which it cannot be further deprived.
Augustine is saying that for every evil in the world if you trace it back far enough there is a good that has been corrupted. This begs the question what about practices like slavery or genocide? Where is the good there? It must be denoted that corruption is a spectrum. Some social realities are far more devolved and perverse than others. It is also critical to recognize that evils like slavery and genocide are typically the perversion of multiple interacting social phenomena like ethnic/national/religious/cultural identities, narratives, values, etc. Phenomena which in and of themselves are not intrinsically bad things and are actually good and healthy ways for structuring and orienting the human experience. Augustine often spoke of the corruptive nature of evil with a term he called “privation of the good.” Essentially, this privation idea is that individuals or groups often corrupt themselves and the world around them by seeking their own good at the expense of others or appropriating a good thing in an improper way. The utility of Augustine’s approach is that it allows adherents to identify deformed and malicious social realities and participate in deconstructing them while not applying a one-size-fits-all approach. In many of our social realities, we don’t need to apply a scorched earth policy. We need to prune the dead branches and remove the rot. Augustine’s paradigm allows us the nuance for this nurturing act. Permitting us to separate implementation from the structure or system, it grants us eyeglasses to search for the good amidst the corruption, where we otherwise might overlook it.
Augustine’s model is a particularly powerful perspective on critical analysis because it changes the questions that individuals ask. Instead of asking only “what is problematic here?”, it ponders the question “what has been corrupted here?” What is the good that was misaligned and how might we restore that good while healing the degeneracy? If we were to take this position, we might more clearly see the reductionism in completely scrapping any social, ethical, or cultural structure identified as oppressive.
The danger of a society that extols deconstructing social realities and creating critical thinkers is that we can fall victim to tunnel vision. We vivisect our institutions, customs, and narratives to find the ills that ail them, and when we find them we too often are satisfied to say “Look! Look, how feeble and corrupt they were!” In our ire, we are content to throw them in the fire. But if that is the extent of our response and perhaps more importantly if that is always our response, then what are we left with?
Perhaps it is not enough to analyze all the ways that these social constructions are problematic, to write essays and books, and post on social media about how problematic they are. Perhaps deconstruction is worthless without creation and a commitment to collaboration. Perhaps critical analysis must always be paired with a concerted effort to trace back the unraveled and corroded strands of every social construction under scrutiny in an attempt to identify what was the good that began to be undone? Where did good desire begin to harm others?
This involves deconstruction, yes, but it also involves charity. It involves searching for the commendable amidst the controversy and corruption. It involves the ability to differentiate between the existence of a thing and its implementation or utilization. A knife may be used to harm someone or it may be used to chop carrots for dinner. Its utilization as an instrument of harm is not a reason for the knife not to exist. Rather it is a reason to seek out how we encourage and facilitate it being used towards proper ends.
Denigrating the utility of critical analysis is not the point here. A constant refrain in my conversations with friends is that “It is essential that we are aware of the waters we are swimming in.” To the degree that anyone can stand outside their culture and communities and evaluate them, it is crucial to our character that we attempt this feat. We should think critically about the traditions that we engage in, the language that we use, the narratives that we have created, the social structures we participate in and reproduce. We should think about the ways that power functions in them. We should think about how knowledge is produced and the validity of it. We should think about how these social realities frame our perceptions, judgments, and virtues. There is value in reflecting on these relationships and social objects, providing that they allow us to go beyond analyzing or rejecting and towards creation and community.
We can give social edifices a vicious edge by building up our own infrastructure around them or adding our opinions, prejudices, or cultural understandings to them. However, we can also impoverish our society by euthanizing values, systems, traditions, or institutions without first contending with what may be worth saving. It is not purely through evil intent that social systems become malformed. The malignancy of a system may manifest despite the best of intentions. Critical analysis is powerful because it allows us to hold systems and those who participate in them accountable for wrongs perpetuated regardless of good intentions. Deconstruction is more powerful when it’s tempered with the ability to recognize the goodness of particular intentions and goals without rejecting them due to poor or corrupted implementation. Ultimately, critical analysis reaches the apex of effectiveness when combined with a commitment to collaboratively envision and construct a new social reality that works to reclaim what was previously misdirected or domineering.
In a world riddled with virtue-signaling and assertions of dominance, attempts to find and reorient the redeemable remnants amidst flawed and corrupted institutions and social objects are often disparaged as weak-willed half measures. Across the political spectrum, the idea persists that you reshape the world by completely razing every social structure, social network, or value system marred by corruption or immorality (as you define it). I wonder if, perhaps, too often we are prepared to amputate the infected appendages of our cultures when a round of antibiotics is all we need. If deconstruction and critical analysis are the diagnostic tools of our society, then their integration with a commitment to creative and collaborative culture-making is the treatment plan. You can’t have a healthy body without both.
It’s harder to build than critique. Sometimes it’s harder to heal infection than to just carve it out or leave it alone. Yet, maybe, it remains worth it. Maybe amidst all the darkness there are still lights that glimmer through. The trick is to search for them, stoke them, and in time they burn brighter and the world becomes more illuminated.
[1] Nemeth et al. “The Liberating Role of Conflict in Group Creativity: A Study in Two Countries” European Journal of Social Psychology
[2] If interested in seeing supporting evidence for this claim: check out Charlan Nemeth’s “Differential Contributions of Majority and Minority Influence” Psychological Review
