What is Reality?
In their much-heralded book "
The Social Construction of Reality", Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann maintain that human reality is an artifact of the culture in which individuals find themselves. In stating their case, they describe the ways in which language, institutions, and socialization practices function to construct, or "legitimize," the structure and content of reality. While Berger and Luckmann draw a distinction between objective and subjective reality, they claim that both these realities are constructed at the level of culture. They are quite unequivocal in asserting that "society exists as both objective and subjective reality." Similarly, David Heise discusses reality within a social constructionist framework, while stating that truth cannot be used as a criterion by which to define reality. He argues this position on the basis that "truth" varies across different social groups, and that what is "true" in one society may be "false" in another.
Certainly, one cannot deny that there is some substance to such a view. The reality of a Tibetan monk is certainly different from that of an Oklahoma used car dealer, which is again different from the reality of a Kung bushperson living in Botswana's Kalahari desert. Culture is almost certain to be an influential agency in the shaping of subjective reality; indeed, it even seems reasonable to speak of objective reality in terms of culture. Throughout human history cultures have served as conveyors of "knowledge" or "facts" that became the building blocks of people's impressions of objective reality. Growing up in my own culture and subculture, I acquired among many other things the "knowledge" that poison ivy is noxious, that the earth is round, and that Lutherans can never go to heaven. Another person, in another culture or at a different point in history, might have assimilated the cultural "knowledge" that ringed snakes are deadly, that the earth is flat, and that the gods can only be appeased by sacrificing virgins.
Since some cultural "knowledge" is true and some false, it is highly misleading to speak of objective reality in terms of the information that derives from cultural sources. It is true that culture tends to homogenize people's conceptions of reality. But objective reality implies a reality that has a consistency beyond the purely relativistic one espoused by some cultural relativists. In their view, objective and subjective reality are basically the same thing, since no account is taken of reality as it exists in a truly objective way. Their entire formulation is thus limited to the human perception of reality.
David Heise acknowledges that social constructionist formulations of reality are sometimes unremittingly relativistic to the point of being nihilistic. He also admits that, even within the nihilistically inclined field of sociology, many people find such a stance to be extreme. And there is good reason for dissension, since one must do more than depict reality as an ever elusive figment of cultural imagination. The earth, for example, has a certain shape at any one point in time. That shape remains what it is, despite the culturally transmitted shape entertained by individuals. I suppose that some cultural relativists would disagree, saying that the earth is flat if that is a feature of an individual's socially constructed reality. Likewise, they would say that the earth is also round if that is an element of the reality of another person from a different cultural setting. But unless one abandons oneself completely to nihilism, simple logic should tell one that the earth cannot be both round and flat.
In his book "
The New Skepticism", Paul Kurtz refers to a reality that remains constant despite the endless number of ways that we interact with the world via our activities, and the different ways that reality can be interpreted:
...There is a real world out there, but we interact, modify, or interpret it in different ways in terms of our contexts or fields of behavior. But the world does not evaporate into, nor is it totally assimilated by, a person's action. Reality is not equivalent to activity; activity presupposes a real world independent of oneself. It is that which exists and causally interacts with other things, separate and distinct from an intersubjective community of observers. And it is that which endures and functions in some sense independent of my activities... The real is that which exists or would exist if I were not around, but I could say little about it if I did not observe, study, probe, manipulate, or use it.
In my opinion, it is inappropriate to use the term “objective" reality as Berger and Luckmann used it earlier. According to truly objective reality, the earth is round in shape. The objective reality of which Berger and Luckmann spoke should be again understood as the culturally influenced perception or interpretation of objective reality. It is hardly more stable that the subjective reality to which they also made reference. As Kurtz also realizes, there is an important difference between knowledge and impressions, and between knowledge and belief. It is not sufficient to equate belief with knowledge. Instead, in Kurtz's view, there are objective "anchors" in the real world that exist independently of beliefs, imaginations, dreams, fantasizes, and so forth. It is even possible to judge the veracity of these mental constructions in terms of their alignment or misalignment with the objective "anchors" to which Kurtz refers.
In contrast with some prevailing schools of thought in sociology and anthropology, the fields of psychology and psychiatry have long histories of recognizing a stable reality that can be used as a touchstone by which to assess the personal reality of individuals. There would be no hesitation in saying that someone deviated from “real” reality if, for instance, that person claimed that he/she was Napoleon. Conversely, I know of no sane mental health professional who would take the position that such a person was Napoleon because this particular belief was an aspect of the personal reality of that person.
The phrases “real reality” and “unreal reality” are redundant and conceptually perplexing. The situation is little better for the words “objective” and “subjective” as they relate to reality, since they have attracted so many contradictory meanings. For my purposes, I would like to select, not the usual two, but rather three different terms in order to describe human reality. Although the addition of an extra category adds a certain amount of complexity, it does serve to clarify the confusion that has arisen regarding socially constructed reality, while permitting us to speak more confidently about individual constructions of reality. Brief mention will now be given to each of the three ways in which the concept of reality must be understood.
Primary Reality
Primary reality is reality as it would present itself if only that information or data available to the person were used as the building blocks of reality. This does not, however, mean that primary reality would necessarily be the result of rational modes of mental activity, such as critical and analytical thinking, reasoning, and so forth. Nor does it refer to "ultimate" reality in the sense that everything is known about an event or object. Instead,
primary reality is uncorrupted and unbiased because the creature does not modify, translate, or otherwise distort incoming information. This category of reality is reserved for nonhuman animals, due to the human being's natural tendency to rely on nonrational, as well as rational, modes of cognition in the formation of its unique blended reality.
Virtually all nonhuman animals operate within primary reality. Consider the squirrel. With no added bias from higher-order distortive mechanisms, the reality of a squirrel is a comparatively stable primary one wherein things are as they are. An acorn always remains something to eat or to stick into the hole of a tree. In the absence of the cerebral apparatus to misinterpret an acorn, squirrels never have acorn gods, nor do they ever develop acorn phobias. When another squirrel dies, decomposes, and disappears, the remaining squirrels have no ability to alter the empirical data about the squirrel's death. When the dead squirrel is gone, it is gone. The primary reality of a squirrel does not permit a squirrel heaven or a happy acorn ground in an afterlife. Quite simply, there are no data to indicate, either to a squirrel or to ourselves, that there exists an afterlife. Because of its brain design, the squirrel is prevented from reinterpreting empirical data, which gives it exclusive access to primary reality.
On the other hand, human beings have only one cerebral foot on the ground. They possess a talent that automatically banishes them from primary reality, at the same time offering endless other possibilities over the squirrel and all other nonhuman creatures. Berger and Luckmann gave the "dog-world" and the "horse-world" as examples of comparatively stable realities that differ from our own, proposing that the difference can be understood by degree of instinctual determination. That is, nonhuman animals "live in closed worlds whose structures are predetermined by the biological equipment of the several animal species."6 This, according to Berger and Luckmann, contrasts with the "man-world," which has "no species-specific environment, no environment firmly structured by [its] own instinctual organization."7
But a point of clarification is essential here. While I agree that nonhuman animals have a generally stable reality by comparison with human reality, Berger and Luckmann ignore an important fact in arriving at their conclusion. It is that a large proportion of non¬human animal behavior is acquired through social learning, in much the same way that it is done for human beings. Even the humble squirrel must learn that it is to eat acorns, and that a certain squeal from its mother means to scamper up the tree to safety. Furthermore, the Berger and Luckmann model discounts the ways in which some dimensions of human behavior are locked into biologically determined patterns. These may not be as obvious as those appearing in other species, but they do exist.
We might even go to the heart of the matter about reality and ask why it is that human beings, in all cultures, construct for themselves a reality that is not strictly empirical in nature. Why, all throughout our history, have we harbored irrational and often wildly false notions about the empirical world and our place in it? It is said that Socrates frequently began his speeches by imploring his listeners not to be angry with him if he tells them the truth. One gets the sense that Socrates definitely knew that falsehoods and errors held a central place in the human mind.
From the perspective of human beliefs, Paul Kurtz writes about our astonishing capacity to tolerate beliefs that mock our own awesome intellectual capabilities:
The surprising fact about human beings is that a belief does not have to be true in order to be believed by them. Indeed, most of the belief systems that generations of humans have heralded, lived by, and died for are in fact patently false. Yet they were held with deep conviction and fervor. . . . The fads and fallacies, delusions and fantasies that people have believed in are so numerous in human history that they constitute, as it were, the very fabric of our cultural existence. The list of erroneous belief systems is endless. . . . Human culture is comprised of the castles in the sand that we have constructed. . . . These are the products of our fertile imaginations and especially our yearnings for other worlds. The web of human civilization contains both the ingenious ways that humans have developed for understanding and dealing with the world with clarity and precision and the extraordinary palliatives and smoke screens that they have laid down for themselves.8
The universality of the distortion of primary reality requires us to consider that this phenomenon is not simply the result of society acting upon an otherwise structureless human being. Instead, as Kurtz argues, "there are powerful drives in the human species that often lead human beings to subvert their senses and reason and to accept popular delusions. These tendencies are rather general, and they may be invariant in all cultures."9
Yet human beings are also capable of arriving at what Kurtz terms reliable knowledge. It is well within our abilities to process incoming information in order that our mental constructions correspond to primary reality. The fact that we so often miss the mark in this regard is owing to our tandem ability to
regulate reality to suit our ends. This contradiction will sort itself out as we explore the peculiar workings of dissociation and divided methods of consciousness and unconsciousness. We will come to see that, as a consequence of our unique brain design, there is a highly fluid quality to human reality. This requires that any social constructionist theory of human behavior must take into account the physiological processes that are responsible for the consistent patterns that exist alongside the differences in behavior.
Personal Reality
Personal reality refers to the reality of the individual organism. For the nonhuman realm of the animal world, the reality of the individual animal overlaps exactly with primary reality. They are one and the same. Again this is because nonhuman animals do not have the sophisticated brain faculties required to translate and then retranslate incoming empirical information in such a way that reality can become virtually anything at the level of the individual.
To the human being, acorns can be little bombs planted by aliens from outer space (an aspect of the reality of a paranoid person). Or they can be the source of powerful magic, capable of ensuring the immortality of a dead person if the corpse is dusted with burnt acorn powder prior to burial (an aspect of the reality of certain former religious beliefs). Or an acorn can be merely an acorn. Many options are open to members of our species, and we naturally try to avail ourselves of them for purposes of social, psychological, and physical survival.
Culture usually specifies the alternatives to a strictly empirically based reality. But, in our species, the reality of the person never overlaps completely with reality as it would be constructed with empirical or factual data only. This is true in "normal" as well as "abnormal" individuals. Also not exempt are the existential pathfinders who consider themselves to be at the front lines of the truth. Their personal reality is also skewed and biased, albeit with superficial differences in the appearance of that bias. Human reality is destined to contain large amounts of error. In saying this, I am using primary reality as the criterion by which to gauge the world as it really is.
It must be conceded, however, that primary reality could also be false as it reveals itself to us. Take the acorn once more. It may be that acorns are little bombs, or that their burnt dust is the bestower of everlasting life. But in using empirical data to define real reality, one is proceeding on the basis of available data and probabilities and/or improbabilities. Therefore, it is highly improbable, in light of empirical data, that an acorn is an alien's bomb or that burnt acorn dust defeats the problem of mortality.
Religion cannot be given special consideration if we are to understand the principles of reality regulation. So, similarly, it must be said that, in all likelihood, religious beliefs are examples of adaptive cognitive errors. They are probably false because they are constructed in defiance and ignorance (in the sense of "ignore") of available empirical data. Thus they are deviations from primary reality.
We know that this is largely the case, since the thousands of religions in the world contain beliefs that directly contradict one another, thereby canceling out their credibility. For example, it cannot both be true that a bird-god gave birth to this planet four million years ago in the form of an egg, and also that the planet was born six thousand years ago when, over the course of six days, a different god created the earth one step at a time. Even so, there is no way of knowing that all religious beliefs are inaccurate, since their premises are not circumscribed by empirical evidence. Yet, with the aid of simple logic, we can safely say that most religious beliefs are probably false. They are certainly useful, however, as will be seen.
It is interesting to speculate about the birth of personal reality. That is, when did human beings develop the cerebral skills required in order to construct a reality that was deviant from primary reality? In my earlier book
Wings of Illusion, I proposed that this occurred when the human brain reached a critical developmental threshold wherein we became conscious to a potentially debilitating degree.10 It was then that a tandem brain capacity was needed to absorb, so to speak, the collision between amplified consciousness and many emotionally terrifying and confusing facets of this-world existence. New irreconcilable conflicts needed resolution, and new unanswerable questions demanded pacifying answers. The future viability of nature's experiment with the big brain depended on an evolutionary move that would preserve the many advantages of elevated consciousness, while simultaneously reducing the emotional impact of that same adaptation.
This evolutionary strategy came in the form of the capacity of the brain to dissociate itself from its own data. More specifically, the human brain gained the ability to (a) selectively perceive its environment, (b) selectively process information, (c) selectively store memories, (d) selectively disengage from already stored memories, and (e) selectively replace dissociated data with more "user-friendly" data.
Ultimately, this empowered human beings, like no animal before us, to regulate their own reality. One might compare this capacity to an automatic thermostat that regulates the temperature of a room, except that our ability to regulate is infinitely more sophisticated. The following chapter will attempt to isolate the actual brain-level processes involved in this astonishing evolutionary feat, in order to show that it is the cognitive basis for religion, hypnosis, and most forms of mental disturbance.
In short, personal reality defines itself by its deviation from primary reality, even though personal reality partially overlaps with primary reality. For most people, then, personal reality amounts to empirical reality plus or minus whatever empirically unjustified modifications or biases are made to empirical reality.
One can only speculate about the degree of bias that features in personal reality. Ernest Rossi, an Ericksonian hypnotherapist, estimated that
at least 80 percent of the information contained in the human mind is false.11 What makes this estimate more remarkable is that Rossi was referring to the vast quantity of error that is entertained, not as a result of formal hypnosis, but during the normal waking state. And here we are not talking about an animal with insufficient brain power to get things right. Instead, we are dealing with the creature with the most highly developed cerebral cortex. Yet, despite our cerebral talents, it seems that the mental world of the human being is often at odds with the true nature of things. Not only that, we will fight to preserve what is false. We do this while also, paradoxically, apprehending the world with astonishing precision. As a result, any useful theory about human behavior must explain the fundamental contradiction which is our capacity simultaneously to construe and misconstrue the world about us.
Whatever the actual extent of our cognitive error, it should be remembered that the generation of this error is the consequence of intricate cerebral processes that safeguard the integrity of the entire nervous system. Also, attempts to estimate the proportion of error in personal reality ignore the fact of individual differences. We should expect a substantial amount of variation regarding the distortive component of personal reality. These are reflective of situational, constitutional, and sociocultural factors that weigh differentially upon people. The actual content and emotional valence of the error contained in personal reality determines whether we describe that error as religion, psychopathology, or something else.
Cultural Reality
The inclusion of a category with the label "cultural reality" reinforces what was said previously about the "social construction" of reality.
The reality of the individual is to some extent the result of constructions that are fabricated and propagated by culture. We are all tattooed from birth with indelible beliefs and understandings as they are served up to us by the culture into which we are born. However, this does not necessarily imply that all people rally around a single culture which manufactures a single set of messages, or suggestions. Granted, in many instances, the vast majority of those born within a specific culture will endorse the dominant core of that culture. For example, most adult people in contemporary Western culture would not feel threatened at the prospect of allowing their children to receive an education. Indeed, the majority would probably see it as a positive and worthwhile undertaking. But certain individuals are also subject to the influence of any number of subcultures which, together, make up the composite culture. Even with regard to the matter of the desirability of education, one could point to significant Western subcultures wherein education is viewed with fear and suspicion (e.g., the Amish and Mennonites). Therefore, our approach to the concept of culture must be flexible enough to include the shaping forces of subcultures, as well as those of the mainstream culture. As a result, we need to define cultural reality broadly as the constellation of externally delivered suggestions that are normalized on the basis of group endorsement. The term "normalized" as it is used here means normal both in the sense that a suggestion has achieved normative status, and that it is experienced as normal by the person.
The above definition allows for the possibility that a suggestion can be normalized by a subculture, sometimes even if it lacks majority endorsement in that society as a whole. One question that immediately arises is this: How large and/or cohesive must a group be for it to be capable of normalizing a suggestion? There is no simple answer that will apply to all individuals across all cultural contexts. While not trying to beg the question, it can only be said that a cultural suggestion becomes an element of the reality of a person when the group is, in fact, sufficiently large and/or cohesive for the person to perceive that suggestion as normal, or normative.
We see, therefore, that cultural reality refers to reality that is shared, or agreed upon, at the group level, even if that group is only one portion of the total population. Of course, conflicts can arise between the reality of the dominant culture and that of a subculture. For instance, some Amish children are quite literally presented with two opposing cultural realities on the issue of education, progress, technology, and so forth. As a result, conflict situations can arise later when educational and lifestyle decisions become necessary.
We saw that personal reality overlaps only partially with empirical reality, and that the capacity to err is an inevitable feature of personal reality. The same is true of cultural reality. In fact, one central function of any workable culture is to offer mental constructions of reality that are erroneous in relation to empirical reality. In a sense, culture is the central bank of cognitive distortions that provide individual members the means by which to translate empirical reality into a more acceptable form. The mass biasing of empirical reality often carries the label "religion," even though this process spills over into other terminological categories.
There may be some truth to the adage that the job of the old is to lie to the young. Likewise, Ernest Becker may have been justified in describing culture as a "macro-lie."12 In addition to normalizing errors, culture also transmits a great deal of vital data that is in dose accord with primary or empirical reality. This has the obvious advantage of delivering information that is essential for survival. But cognitive error is also a requisite for survival; therefore, cultural reality must be viewed as an intentional and necessary blend of information and misinformation.
Since both cultural reality and personal reality overlap partially with empirical reality, we must next consider the overlap between personal and cultural reality. In the same way that the individual can self-control empirical reality, the individual can take self-initiative in modifying cultural reality. Under hypothetically ideal social and situational conditions, individuals would have little need to deviate much from culturally constructed reality. In most instances, alterations to cultural reality are made only when situational and/or intrapsychic factors deem this to be necessary. However, the general breakdown of traditional systems of religion, such as we have seen over the past three centuries, can also lead to widespread individual modifications to cultural reality....
I have been using the term "regulation" as it relates to reality since the word connotes four qualities that are unique to the human experience of reality. The first of these is that reality is not a fixed thing for human beings. The contours of one person's particular reality may differ quite dramatically at various points in time. Second, the word "regulation" implies that personal reality is potentially inaccurate in the sense of being out of alignment with an "anchored" primary reality that is not subject to these shifts. Third, "regulation" implies an ongoing adjustment process that is purposeful. Fourth, the word suggests that some intelligence is at work, providing the information which, in turn, determines the degree and direction of the adjustments. Since we are accustomed to equating normality with degree of contact with a reality that we imagine to be stable, the prospect of a reality regulation process casts doubt over our usual methods for defining what is normal and abnormal.
