Noah and I are lunching together. His brow is furrowed and his eyes are narrowed. I know this expression well. It is a lover troubled by a thought.
A one-liner floats into my mind. It is the one about the boy who went to sleep with a problem on hand and woke up with a solution on his chest.
I put it behind me, so to speak. I don’t mind that it is vulgar, nor do I care that it is juvenile. What troubles me is that it is inapposite.
Noah undeniably has a problem, but it is manifestly lacking a solution. Intellectual ferment is in da house.
“What ails you, dear heart?” I ask. The way to grab a lawyer’s attention is to speak in archaisms. It sets their conceptual juices flowing, and they become alert, bright-eyed, and silver-tongued.
Suffused with joy, they cast around for a learned friend with whom to exchange barbs, jibes and witticisms. Too bad that I am the only person present: tough titty, as vulgarians say.
“Did the professor really say all groups are socially constructed? I doubt it, and I suspect your readers are equally unconvinced.
“In their comments on last week’s article, I saw posts suggesting that animals at least combine intuitively, not by arrangement. Isn’t this factually true? I mean, we accept as much when we speak of the herding instinct, don’t we?”
When confronted by ontological issues such as this, I feel way out of my depth. But I have learnt, over the years, to doggy-paddle my way to safety. A bit of aggressive yapping helps.
“You lawyers are so contractarian,” I charge. “A construct can arise out of a common understanding born of habit that over time becomes so ingrained as to be instinctual.” As I utter these words, I marvel at my profundity. Were I blessed with a better line in insults, I too could have been a lawyer.
“You stretch the meaning of construct beyond its limits. A construct is something fabricated. That, my dear, is what construct means.” Mm, I’m wrong. To be a good lawyer, you need arrogance and condescension too.
I refuse to be bullied.
“No, it is you, Mr Noah-all, who misconceives the notion. Within the context, a social construct entails no more than a practice in which members of a group engage with common intent or design.”
“Wow! Where do you get that from? Examples, please.”
“There are plenty. Impala males are driven out of the group until they can oust the dominant buck. Lions and buffalo are expelled once they become a burden rather than a boon. Foals who misbehave are kicked out of the circle until, by hanging their heads, they repent. I have more examples, but I think these suffice.” Nice word, “suffice”, to end a splendid sally on my part.
The puzzled expression I first detected has been overtaken by a look of irritation. Noah is not used to being bested by his Bestie. “Okay, okay, but we are talking about human beings, not animals. Humans have the capacity for independent thought and action.”
“I see what you did there,” I cry. “Before you thought that instinct could create no social construct. Now, forced to concede, you turn the argument on its head, and suggest that sentience cannot. But this is nonsense, and you know it. We have been talking about groups – sporting codes and so on – all deliberately constructed to satisfy the needs of their members.”
“True enough,” Noah is gracious enough to concede. “But where does all this take us?”
“If I understood the professor aright, it creates the basis for saying that, if all groups are constructed, we are obliged as individuals to subscribe, to submit, to none. No doubt the social pressures to conform are huge, but we have the inalienable right to reject them. No one can force us to be, for example, a Blue Bulls supporter, a card-carrying commie, a proud South African or a God-fearing Christian.”
“Isn’t that obvious? Every teenager of my generation was brought up on The Turtles:
“Let me be, let me be, that’s all that I want,
I am what I am, and that’s all I ever shall be.”
Noah suddenly perks up. “Actually, that’s a great reference. I give you the lines that, for our purposes, are spot-on:
“Oh, society’s goal is to be part of the whole
That may sound good to you, not to me.”
“But,” he continues, “citing a pop song in support of your thesis only shows how banal it is. Everyone understands that society comprises individuals and groups. Everyone knows that groups canvass for members and then impose standards and establish tenets designed to keep the insiders faithful. What point are you really making?”
“I suppose it is simply this. Our world is, perhaps worse than ever, plagued with identitarianism (apologies if there is no such word, but you know what I mean). Everyone is determined to place a person in a group and then clothe the person with the supposed qualities of the group.
“Absurdly, they go so far as to make the colour of your skin the marker for who you are and how you will act. If you are white, then you believe your skin-fellows are the only ones who are honest, conscientious, capable and clever. If you are black, you believe your skin-fellows are kindly, humorous, thoughtful and willing. If you are coloured, perhaps you really do believe you are, as Sarah Gertrude Millin said, God’s stepchildren and know only that you are boozy, happy, lovely.”
“What you are saying is that people today are concerned with who you belong to, not who you are and how you think.”
Noah has seen a new side of me, and I think he is a bit dumbfounded.
“Exactly. Why else, inconvenience aside, would people make such efforts to identify with the opposite sex, flaunt their perverse sexuality, or shun people because they are Trump supporters? Of course, my dear, I name just a few instances.”
“There’s something in that, I guess. The other day, somebody took issue with me by asking how ‘a person like you’ could be so wrongheaded. I think he meant that no person in the educated class could hold the views I did.”
“I find the whole business tedious,” I say.
“So do I. So let’s just be a couple, married but only in the sight of God, and rejoice that we are ‘Happy Together’.”
“Ha flipping ha. I see you are turning Turtle yet again. Well, good luck, my love, my feather-brained turtle dove.”
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