BHA: Santa, God, kneeling

[Hans Ehrbar <ehrbar@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Colin argues that only the practices which create Santa are
real, not Santa himself.  I am arguing that Santa is a real
entity emergent from these practices.  I'd like to put this
into the context of some of my other views, and your comments
and criticisms are welcome:


Real emergent entities are much more numerous than is
commonly assumed.  If these real entities are social, it is
especially difficult to see them because nothing happens in
a society if not some individual member of society carries
it out.  Therefore it is easy to think one is only dealing
with actions of individuals (or groups) and to overlook the
social entity emergent from these actions.  I.e., regarding
social relations it is especially easy not to see the forest
for the trees.

A simple illustration of the kinds of real entities I mean
here is: if someone writes a book, it may happen that the
book takes on its own life: that what the book says may not
exactly be that what the author meant to say or what she has
stood for at any time in her life.  I would argue here that
in such a situation the book is an emergent real entity with
its own meaning irreducible to the conscious intentions of
its author, while Colin would probably say that what I call
the meaning of the book is just the various interpretations,
misunderstandings, etc., by its readers.  I do not deny the
possibility that people misunderstand a book, and I do not
say that every book has a meaning, but certain books have
meanings which are real entities not necessarily reducible
to the views of their own authors.  I agree with Tobin that
meanings are real, I think this is an important and
promising research program.

The evidence of inferiority of women Colin alludes to is
in my view evidence of the oppression of women and of the
effects of the oppression of women, which are both real
and socially created.  The important insight here is that
the generative mechanisms for the empirical phenomena
Colin alludes to lie in society and not in biology.

The issue is clearer with the concept of race because race
has no basis in biology whereas gender does.  There was a
discussion on this list earlier whether races are real.  I
hold the view that they are.  With this i do not mean that
people which society attributes to different races, on the
basis of the color of their skin, their ancentry, their
surname, their accent, etc., are systematically different
from each other.  It has been shown that genetically they
are indistinguishable.  "Race" is here a socially
constituted reality, and the goal of our struggles is to
make it unreal, i.e., causally inefficacious, i.e., create a
society in which it does not matter what colour your skin
is.  Racial discrimination has especially vicious effects
because the target of this discrimination often cannot
distinguish whether a given feedback he or she receives from
others in society is due to his or her personal qualities
and performances or whether it is a prejudicial reaction to
the race this person is perceived to be in.

The failure to recognize the reality of these emergent
entities is the error of reductionism.  The difficult
question is not whether these entities are real, the
question is what layer of reality these entities are
emergent from (race is social, not biological, and Santa
Claus is a social creation, not a person, nevertheless he is
real and his coat is red because of some Coca Cola ads in
the past), and how far these emergent entities have taken
off from the level of reality from which they emerge, how
they reproduce themselves, etc.

Hans Ehrbar.


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