This view of the world diverges sharply from the liberal humanist belief that words are tools of analysis rather than tools of deceit, and that by using words to analyse ‘reality’ we can arrive at the ‘truth’ of the situation and make moral choices according to that ‘truth’, and according to universal principles of ‘fairness’ and ‘justice’.

There is no doubt that a liberal humanist belief about the world is often falsely optimistic. It is easy to show historically that certain unconscious ideological beliefs or assumptions prevented the questioning of obvious and glaring examples of injustice. During the epoch of the Roman Empire, slavery was seldom questioned, and viewed as being a natural and unavoid­able fact of the human condition. In another arena of injustice, it took a lot of intellectual work on the pan of feminist writers to get females and males to accept that there was a lack of justice in relations between the sexes. However once that intellectual work has been done, the knowledge of that injustice is available to the conscious minds of all, and moral and conscious choices are unavoidable. In a sense, the moral choices beloved of liberal humanism do become possible in a broader range of human behaviour as a result of the intellectual work of post-structuralism. There is no way now, for instance, that any male can pretend he is being fair if he tries to justify special male privileges on the grounds that this is the natural way of the world.

In this sense the intellectual work arising out of post­structuralist thought is valuable. A more just world is made possible. I think that the irritation that many feel with ‘theory’ springs not from deep conservatism, but from the fact that ‘theory’ itself can be seen as a grab after power and prestige within the academy and the wider community, by those who espouse it. In pan this claim to authority and prestige is legitimate, as outlined above. In pan it is based on a major overstatement of the domain of legitimacy of ‘theory’. The claim that there is no ‘reality’ other than the reality created by words is at the heart of that overstatement. It is very fashionable to be ‘counter intuitive’ but most of us in our bones know that there is a ‘reality’ out there that has not been ‘constructed’ by rhetorical sleight of hand and are annoyed when that possibility is denied. The reason why social constructionists attempt to extend their domain of authority seems obvious. If words do create all, then the sorcerers who know the rules of rhetorical deceit can decipher all puzzles in the known world and become the all powerful shamans of our time. The anger with which I have been attacked for my rather mild satire on such Shamanism is consistent with the fury traditionally vented on the poor fool who remarks that the Empress has no clothes, or in this case has fewer clothes than she claims.

The ‘truth’, as I see it, is that there is a very definite reality out there that is not created by words. And it’s not just rocks and trees. The reality of the world is surely created by the age­old behaviours of human beings being goaded by age-old psychological and emotional desires and needs. Anyone who cares to read Aristophanes’ satires, written two and a half thousand years ago, or the Icelandic Sagas, written in the thirteenth century, will quickly recognise that they are stories about the same human species that we remain pan of. They are peopled by individuals driven by the same needs for power, status and respect, diverted by the same passions of lust, love, revenge, hatred, and com passion as we are. We laugh when their self-delusions and pomposities are punctured, we feel sadness when they lose a loved one, and we see our own weaknesses displayed when they fall prey to envy and spite. These are not humans whom we can’t empathise with because they have been ‘constructed’ by different sets of words from the ones used to ‘construct’ us. They are us. Sometimes they are sexist and racist in a way we hope (thanks to ‘Feminism’ and ‘Theory’) we have put behind us, but essentially they are us.

Every so often a theorist will go to great lengths to try and show that human emotion is culture specific and therefore just another product of words and nothing to do with our biology and our evolutionary history. Someone will triumphantly claim that Samoans don’t feel grief. In fact Samoans, like the rest of us, feel grief; they just happen to call it being ‘Sick’. Rom Harre and Claire Armon Jones are two theorists who have expended great energy on this endeavour, but the philosopher of science, Paul E. Griffiths, in his recent book What the Emotions Really Are (Chicago University Press), shows how self-contradictory the arguments are. He concludes that ‘There is no compelling reason to think that social constructionism is the sole or main illuminating perspective on emotion.’ He concludes that a satisfactory theory of the emotions must give due weight to biological factors.

I recently read a long and tortured book review by Terry Eagleton, which wrestled interminably with the worrying fact (to Eagleton) that words did not seem to ‘construct’ the whole of human reality. He kept returning to a concept of the ‘Real’, a brooding monster within us that seems to direct and dictate our behaviour. A ‘Real’ that was not a product of words but just ‘was’. It seemed to be immensely troubling to him. I must confess I read the article with some incredulity and felt like e-mailing him and asking him to get ‘real’. The ‘real’ he is referring to is called the limbic system. It sits in the mid portion of our brain and generates our emotional drives and needs. It is densely connected to our frontal lobes which try and chart socially acceptable forms of behaviour to satisfy these age-old needs. When I read many tortuous theoretical arguments like Eagleton’s, I am struck by the fact that many of the conun­drums they are wrestling with would be less mystifying if they took the trouble to read a little biology, neurophysiology, and psychology, or indeed the basic works of Charles Darwin. Our capacity for learning is immense, but it would not have surprised Darwin to find that there is a ‘real’ inside us and that ‘real’ biases us towards an egocentricity that tries to bias our learning and interpretation of the world in our own favour. All the words in the world can’t ‘deconstruct’ that basic egocentricity, as Karl Marx would now have to ruefully admit. Fortunately, all the words in the world can’t ‘deconstruct’ a basic human capacity for sympathy and a need for fairness either.

If it is accepted that human emotional and psychological needs, which remain fairly constant over time and culture, create reality, then what is it that words ‘construct’? Surely, it’s the rationalisations and justifications of the injustices arising out of real human behaviour. The reality of British Imperialism was that Britain used a technological and organisational advan­tage to conquer less technologically advanced nations and plunder their resources, and in doing so gained the same emotional and psychological rewards of status, prestige, power, and self-esteem that have motivated a pattern of conquest that has been repeated a thousand times over in human history. What was ‘constructed’ was an ideology that rationalised and justified that reality. The imperial ideology stated that Britain was in fact doing a service to the countries it conquered. It was bringing them fairness and British justice. What was con­structed was thus not ‘reality’, but a lie. A lie that may have been believed by many Britons and the more gullible of those they conquered, but it was not ‘reality’.

In a similar fashion, the reality is that human males, like many of the animals they are descended from, have always instinctively tried to control the sexuality of their female partners. Any biologist can tell you the reason. Those males in our evolutionary past who did not attempt to do so ran the risk of raising the offspring of other males, and thus leaving less of their own. What was ‘constructed’ to justify and rationalise this behaviour was patriarchal ideology. Women who strayed being deemed ‘sluts’ and men who strayed being lauded as ‘Don Juans’. Women being depicted as intellectually inferior and emotionally labile, and thus restricted from access to the real world, where they may just meet other men they were attracted to. Again the fact that many men and women may have believed the ideology and acted on it doesn’t make it ‘reality’. It’s just another lie.

I am sure that there would be far less hostility to ‘theory’ if it only claimed to do what it actually does. That is, investigate the modes of rhetorical deceit underlying the human egocentric tendency to invent ideological rationalisations and justifications for unfair behaviour, instead of claiming, spuriously, to be an intellectual ‘Theory of Everything’. Human beings acting on their age-old and enduring psychological and emotional needs create ‘reality’, and anyone who doubts it should try reading the works of, say, the great Greek dramatists or indeed William Shakespeare, and then try and claim that they can’t recognise the universality of those needs.