A theory of natural law might be compelling and rigorous, but the theorist might have gotten a grant from a conservative foundation or worked on a legal case that readily licenses disrespect.....

Sneering Social Constructionists

by  Mark Bauerlein

Sneering at persons who are not social constructionists has become commonplace. Until defenders of inherent virtues, natural laws, divine beings, and other things that transcend social reality learn to overcome this initial set-up, they will be forever on the defensive.

It is often galling to hear social constructionists of various kinds address people who believe in things that transcend social and historical conditions. I don't mean thinkers who mount reasoned arguments against the soul, beauty, the good, value-free facts, and other entities beyond particular human circumstance. I mean constructionists who slide into ad hominem dismissals and downright cheap slurs.

Historicist figures from Hegel to Foucault have argued that one and another meta-historical belief was a time-bound and interest-based notion, but they didn't think to toss contempt on the believers. Some present-day constructionists, though, seem to assume that deploring the character of those who espouse anything supernatural or natural or more-than-human serves to dispel the beliefs.

Among intellectuals and scholars, the maneuver may have begun with Marx, who in The German Ideology (written 1845-1846) drew a direct line between fellow intellectuals and class interests. In any society, he said, a ruling class needs not only to control goods, manufacturing, and other material elements, but also ideas, values, and other ideal elements. Hence, the rulers hire thinkers and wordsmiths to do the ideological labor they haven’t time or talent to complete themselves: "inside this class one part appears as the thinkers of the class (its active, conceptive ideologists, who make the perfecting of the illusion of the class about itself their chief source of livelihood)." Intellectuals please their sponsors by detaching those illusions from the ruling class itself so that they appear to possess a transcendent or natural character, thus falsifying their actual status as rationalizations for one group's privilege.

Since then, belief in natural or transcendent entities has the status of a tactic, suspect from the start. 

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