SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONISM AND BUDDHISM

​I have for a long time been interested in meanings, which are basically ideas that exist in people's heads, ideas that people use to understand the world around them (and within them) and to interact with it. One scholarly framework that I find helpful for understanding how meanings work is symbolic interactionism.

According to this framework, people interact with the world symbolically: they see things always as symbols (and by "things" I mean anything that we need to deal with in our daily lives--including objects, living beings, other people, events, natural phenomena, and our own inner worlds). Seeing things as symbols means seeing them with some kind of meanings (ideas, associations, memories, values) attached to them. Some meanings are shared, others are individual (i.e., based on one's unique experiences). People are inherently social beings, and so--not surprisingly--meanings are often formed through social interactions (hence, the name of "symbolic interactionism"). One really important thing to understand about meanings is that they mostly appear natural ("that's just how this is") and absolute ("that's the only way to see this"). But they are not natural or absolute. In fact, seeing them as natural and absolute causes people much trouble. (Symbolic interactionist scholars do not focus on this last idea, as far as I know, but it is essential to consider. More on that below.) 

Now, if you have never thought about any of that, you might even wonder whether it is relevant to your everyday experiences. On this page I am going to argue that it is, indeed, relevant. To begin my explanation, let me quote a passage from my book Media Is Us (pp. 36-37):

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In November 2010, when Barbara Holmes and Tom Williams moved into a new house in Sacramento, California, many people were shocked. They stopped by and questioned the couple: “Why would you do it? I would never.” The house was in bad condition, it’s true. It needed some major renovations. But it looked nice, and for a building this size, it was really cheap. So what was the problem? Why was the so-called “1426 F street” affordable yet still available after more than a decade of being empty?

The reason was simple: it used to be a dwelling of a serial killer, and the site of at least nine murders. In this location, an inconspicuous Dorothea Puente ran a boarding house where she preyed on elderly and mentally disabled boarders in order to cash their Social Security checks. In 1988, seven bodies were unearthed in the yard and Dorothea Puente went to jail.

Barbara Holmes and Tom Williams did not find this story a good enough reason not to seal the deal. For them, it was just a nice historic home in need of some reparations. (The fact that it was listed as “historic” was why it was not demolished after the gruesome crimes had been uncovered.) They liked the challenge and were not too bothered by the neighbors’ disbelief. In fact, Tom exercised his quirky sense of humor by adorning the house and its fence with plates that said, among other things, “Keep out from under the grass!” and “It was that awful, awful woman that did it! Don’t blame me!” signed “The House.” Not that Tom and Barbara thought that what had happened in the “1426 F street” was a laughing matter or that Puente’s victims should be forgotten. The new owners had another idea in mind: to show the Sacramento
community that the house was innocent. [note 5: This account is based on a short documentary The House Is Innocent directed by Nicholas Coles.]

This was a valuable lesson, indeed. It revealed something very important. People think of themselves a meaning-seekers, working hard to understand the world. But the meanings they “find” are actually produced by their brains, and this is where they reside. With a certain mental effort, even the most “obvious” and “natural” of these associations can be undermined. But until their human-made nature is brought to the surface, they may have a surprising
power over us.
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Symbolic interactionism scholars stress people's active participation in meaning-making. We are not passive recipients of meanings. Instead, we constantly negotiate them. Although active participation is essential to consider, I believe that it is only part of the story. Barbara Holmes and Tom Williams from the quote above were actively negotiating meanings of “1426 F street”. But their behavior seems more like an exception, under the circumstances. How many of us would like to live in a house where a gruesome crime was committed one day, whether last year or one hundred years ago? I suspect that not many people would like this place to be their home. Why? Because we often find it hard to challenge meanings that we encounter through social interactions. We often do not even try challenging them (as they seem so natural). Meanings do have power over us. And this power is important to recognize and explore. (As you might already know, I am really interested in exploring power.) 

Here I stop relying solely on symbolic interactionism and borrow ideas from a seemingly very different area: Buddhism. (Full disclaimer: I am neither a symbolic interactionist, nor Buddhist, nor any other -ist. I am just a scholar combining ideas that seem to fit together in interesting ways.) I am going to use Why Buddhism Is True by Robert Wright. In this book, Wright talks about Buddhism not as a religious practice, but as a source of wisdom formulated thousands of years ago, wisdom that has now been confirmed by discoveries in neuroscience and psychology. According to Wright, this wisdom can help us "learn to see the world, including ourselves, more clearly and so gain a deep and morally valid happiness" (quote from the description of the book here). Buddhist ideas are relevant for one's personal growth and also for dealing with such problems as social and political polarization (which Wright talks about in Chapter 16, although he does not use the word "polarization" in the book). 

He also does not talk about meanings of things as much as I do; instead, he talks about essences (in the context of the Buddhist doctrine of emptiness/formlessness). But as I kept reading his book, I realized that the idea of essences has important intersections with the idea of meanings. It turns out that Buddhism has a lot to say about meanings in the sense that symbolic interactionists talk about them; Buddhism also has a lot to say about power (people's power over meanings and meanings' power over people). Keeping in mind that I am not a Buddhist (or a specialist in Buddhism), I am going to offer below some ideas that I found in Wright's book, and explain how they are relevant for each one of us.

Two foundational ideas discussed in Why Buddhism Is True are no-self and emptiness. Both are really interesting and important (and, as it turns out, supported by discoveries of modern science). Here I am going to focus on emptiness, which (I argue) can be connected to the concept of meanings. (All quotes below are from Wright's book.)

According to Buddhism, "human beings often fail to see the world clearly, and this can lead them to suffer and make others suffer" (Appendix). According to modern science, people were "designed" by natural selection; and the main goal of natural selection is enhancing chances of survival of a species (in this case, Homo Sapiens). The goal of natural selection is not to help people see things clearly, or to eliminate individual suffering. 

In particular, not seeing clearly takes the form of seeing things through particular meanings (or essences), which are always associated with affective reactions (even if most of these reactions are very subtle and hard to articulate). Our affective reactions can be traced back to two basic reactions of all living organisms (including the simplest ones): approach or avoid. These reactions are essential for survival, as living organisms need to know (or feel) what is good for them and what is bad for them. In human beings, approach/avoid, like/dislike, love/have reactions take really complex forms that are further complicated by sophisticated ideas that human brains can generate. And although, from the natural selection's point of view, approach/avoid reactions are obviously important, according to modern science and to Buddhism these reactions can and do become a problem when left unexamined--when we let our lives be guided by them uncritically. In particular, according to Buddhism, these reactions translate into craving and aversion, which are two root causes of human suffering. 

According to Buddhism, we experience craving or aversion toward things (broadly defined) because we see these things as having essences. And vice versa, seeing things as having essences often means craving or avoiding them. Seeing things as having essences means having certain feelings about certain things; it means making judgments about them. And the ability/tendency to feel these feelings and make judgments is embedded in us by natural selection. As Wright puts it, "feelings, viewed in the context of their evolutionary purpose, are implicit judgments about things in the environment, about whether they are good for the organism or bad for the organism, and about what behaviors (approach, avoid, scream, flatter) will be useful for the organism, given these judgments... [But a]re those judgments accurate or inaccurate?” (Chapter 15). Indeed, they can be accurate and important, but often they are not accurate and actually harmful for individuals (as anybody who has experienced persistent craving for fatty or sugary foods could attest; and that's just one example). 

Essences/meanings that we see in things often come from social interaction, although not always. For example, it's not uncommon for men to be attracted to women, which means that for these men, women possess attractive essences, or meanings that encourage men to approach women. These essences/meanings can be easily traced back to evolutionary roots, as for men to be attracted to women and vice versa is essential for the survival of the human species. However, gender ideals vary across time and space. Women are attracted to certain men and men are attracted to certain women based on meanings of gender (i.e., "real men" and "real women"), love, romance, and beauty that are maintained (or challenged) through social interaction. Historically, we know that socially-constructed meanings could also lead men to be consistently attracted to other men (as it was common in Ancient Greece, for example).

The point here is not that all meanings and essences should be rejected and avoided, even if they are socially constructed or totally subjective. Seeing the world through meanings/essences is part of human nature; it is not inherently wrong and it can be beneficial. As Wrights puts it, “Even though, strictly speaking, it’s a self-serving feeling that makes your home seem to possess essence-of-home, I don’t see any reason to fight that feeling. It is fine to be drawn into your home, and it will lead to fewer uncomfortable encounters than being drawn into randomly selected homes. And once you’re in your home, by all means feel essence of dog or cat or son or daughter or spouse or partner (unless, perhaps, domestic tensions have transformed one of those essences from warm and fuzzy to cold and harsh). Up to a point, seeing the world from your particular perspective has its virtues from a standpoint of social efficiency and even social harmony and, yes, simple pleasure..." (Chapter 15).

But there are also plenty of examples when meanings/essences we see in things create suffering that Buddhism talks so much about. And the way to minimize this suffering lies through acknowledging our affective (however subtly) reactions to things; acknowledging the existence of meanings/essences we attach to aspects of the world we live in; acknowledging that these meanings/essences are not natural and absolute. For example, you might be craving something: a certain tasty treat, a certain new car, a certain stylish home, a certain conventionally attractive (according to your culture's standards) partner. Trying to achieve what you crave might cause you a lot of discomfort, and once you achieve it you might actually find yourself still unsatisfied, craving new things (as Wright points out, Buddhist notion of "suffering" could be also translated as unsatisfactoriness; see Chapter 1, Chapter 4, Appendix). It's in relation to this never-ending craving (and aversion) that we should ask ourselves: Are meanings/essences of things real? Or are they just a product of our minds, of our human nature, of our interactions with each other? 

Going back to the example of the innocent house from the story I used in my own book. Wright would say that for most people, this house has essence-of-place-where-gruesome-murders-were-committed. Let's imagine a theoretical situation. You have a home (house or apartment) and you like it. For you, it has mostly positive associations: essence-of-your-home. Then one day you discover that this place has a story similar to one of  “1426 F street”. Most people will immediately notice the presence of essence-of-place-where-gruesome-murders-were-committed in their mind, and the battle between the old and the new essence will begin. Some of us might go into denial ("maybe it is not true", "maybe it was not so bad") while others might even choose to move. Few people will be entirely unaffected by this discovery. But this will still be the same house! 

This process works the same in people's perceptions of each other. Say, you have a partner and you have very positive associations with this person: essence-of-loved-partner. Then one day you discover that this partner has cheated on you. It's still the same person, only now you might not even be able to be with them in one room, to say nothing about being in a relationship with them. All because now in your mind they don't have essence-of-loved-partner anymore; instead they have essence-of-dirty-cheater or essence-of-somebody-I-cannot-trust. Or, let's say, you have a colleague at work who you are not super close with, but she seems very nice. You chat with her a bit every day, sometimes you help each other out with work-related stuff. You trust her. She has essence-of-nice-colleague for you. Then one day you find out that she voted for a presidential candidate that you really hate. What happens next? Unfortunately, in the situation of political polarization, it might mean that essence-of-nice-colleague will be immediately and irrevocably changed in your mind to essence-of-idiot-who-voted-for-the-candidate-I-hate. End of nice workplace interactions. Yet again, the colleague in question will remain the same person; the only thing to change will be your perceptions. 

And which essence is "truer"? The one of “1426 F street” as just-a-house-anyone-can-live-in or place-where-gruesome-murders-were-committed? The one of your partner as loved-one or dirty-cheater? The essence of that person at work as nice-colleague or idiot-who-voted-for-the-candidate-I-hate? According to Buddhism, any particular essence is actually an illusion. And this is where the Buddhist doctrine of emptiness (or formlessness) comes in: the path toward enlightenment and liberation from suffering lies through understanding that things do not have essences. Or, to put it differently, they only truly have essences in our minds. This idea has clear intersections with the symbolic interactionist idea that meanings of things are not natural or absolute because they arise through social interactions. Symbolic interactionism does not talk about evolutionary underpinning of meanings we impose on the world around us (symbolic interactionism focuses on social interactions happening in the present moment). In contrast, Wright talks a lot about the evolutionary roots of our illusions. He shows that discoveries of neuroscience and evolutionary psychology make the Buddhist doctrine of emptiness appear much less outlandish than it might to someone who has never heard about it before: "What? Everything around me is empty and formless?" No, it is not literally empty and formless, but it is empty of meanings/essences that appear so natural and absolute. 

The world is not literally empty because it is indeed filled with things that have certain qualities. So, when you hear a sound, it's because there are actual sound waves hitting your ear. Question is, what does your brain do when your body interacts with the world? The answer: it takes these qualities and uses them to construct meanings (based on a lot of different factors--including the evolutionary history of human beings and your personal history, your cultural background, etc.). You perceive a sound as pleasant-sound or annoying-sound (or as neutral-sound that you ignore), but in reality is it just-a-sound.

To explain this idea, Wright tells a story about hearing a buzz saw while trying to meditate: "The point is just that a sound by itself is a passive, not an active, thing, neither pleasant nor unpleasant. So to make it unpleasant, you have to go out and, in a sense, do something to it ... Samadhiraja Sutra ... says that all things are 'without essence, but with qualities that can be seen.' This sutra isn’t denying the reality of the buzz-saw sound waves that were hitting my ear, the 'qualities' I was observing, but it seems to be saying that the 'essence' I normally see beneath the qualities—essence of buzz saw—is a matter of interpretation; it’s something I’m choosing to construct, or not, from the qualities. Essences don’t exist independent of human perception. This is the version of the emptiness doctrine that makes sense to me, and it’s the version most widely accepted by Buddhist scholars: not the absence of everything, but the absence of essence. To perceive emptiness is to perceive raw sensory data without doing what we’re naturally inclined to do: build a theory about what is at the heart of the data and then encapsulate that theory in a sense of essence" (Chapter 10). 

Wright then continues: "Yes, the buzz saw exists. It consists of things like a power cord, a blade, and a trigger. These, you might say, are among the buzz saw’s 'qualities.' But when I talk about the 'essence' of the buzz saw, I’m talking about something we perceive in a buzz saw that is more than the sum of such qualities, something that carries distinctive connotations and emotional resonance. And if I manage to divorce myself from some of those connotations and that resonance—enough that I can actually enjoy the sounds of a buzz saw—then that essence has started to erode. To put it another way, before this particular meditation retreat I might have said, 'It is part of the essence of buzz saws that they make unpleasant sounds.' But it turns out that making unpleasant sounds isn’t actually inherent in buzz saws. And if it isn’t inherent in them, how can it be part of their essence?" (Chapter 10).

Considering the emptiness of things is not supposed to make you feel depressed: "thinking of the perceived world as in some sense empty doesn’t have to strip your life of meaning. In fact, it can allow you to build a new framework of meaning that’s more valid—maybe even more conducive to happiness—than your old framework" (Chapter 10). And in case you have started to wonder whether perhaps this Buddhist denial of inherent meanings can be harmful (due to potential moral relativism, for example), Wright has a response for you: "I hasten to add that this doesn’t mean we live in a meaningless universe. Deeply embedded in Buddhist thought is the intrinsic moral value of sentient life—not just the value of human beings but the value of all organisms that have subjective experience and so are capable of pain and pleasure, of suffering and not suffering. And this value in turn imparts value to other things, such as helping people, being kind to dogs, and so on. Moral meaning is, in that sense, inherent in life. But ... as we go about our day-to-day lives, we impart a kind of narrative meaning to things. Ultimately these narratives assume large form. We decide that something we’ve done was a huge mistake, and if we had done something else instead, everything would be wonderful. Or we decide that we must have some particular possession or achievement, and if we don’t get it, everything will be horrible. Underlying these narratives, at their foundation, are elementary narrative judgments about the goodness or badness of things in themselves ... And this kind of meaning, which seems so firmly embedded in the texture of things, isn’t, in fact, an inherent feature of reality; it is something we impose on reality, a story we tell about reality. We build stories on stories on stories, and the problem with the stories begins at their foundation" (Chapter 10).

This is another link between Buddhism and symbolic interactionism. Story-telling is an inherently social process. We tell stories to each other, and we often tell stories to ourselves. There is a story behind our perception of a faithful partner vs. partner who cheated on us. There is a story (in fact, not even one story, but a great many of them) behind our perception of a nice college and a colleague who seemed nice but voted for a presidential candidate we hate. And there is most certainly a story behind the house that used to belong to the inconspicuous but deadly Dorothea Puente. In other words, we are constructing our world through stories we tell about it.

If you think of it, all of this actually makes a lot of sense considering our everyday experiences: "There is a pretty uncontroversial sense in which, when we apprehend the world out there, we’re not really apprehending the world out there but rather are 'constructing' it. After all, we don’t have much direct contact with the world; the things we see and smell and hear are some distance from our bodies, so all the brain can do is make inferences about them based on indirect evidence: molecules that waft across the street from a bakery, sound waves emanating from a jet plane, particles of light that bounce off trees" (Chapter 10). So, “the stories we tell about things, and thus the beliefs we have about their history and their nature, shape our experience of them, and thus our sense of their essence" (Chapter 11). And this is the great illusion that Buddhism works on dispelling: "that the 'essences' we sense in things really exist, that they inhabit the things we perceive, when in fact they are constructions of our minds, with no necessary correspondence to reality. Things come with stories, and the stories, whether true or false, shape how we feel about the things and thus shape the things themselves, giving them the full form we perceive” (Chapter 11).

In the grand scheme of things, it might not be that important whether I have negative or positive associations with a certain house. I might just choose to buy another one, and that will be the end of this problem. But, Wright points out, it is crucial to consider essences in our interactions with each other. Because our perceptions of essences might determine actions that will cause real suffering to fellow human beings. Indeed, our perceptions of each other's essences are riddled with illusions. For example, psychologists talk about fundamental attribution error, which is "the tendency to overestimate the role of disposition and underestimate the role of situation" (Chapter 12). We see people (like everything else in the world) through the like/dislike lens. When people we dislike do something we dislike, we attribute this to their nature ("he was late because he does not care"). In contrast, if someone we like does something we dislike, we tend to attribute this to the situation ("he was late because he is dealing with a lot of serious problems right now"). Or, "(1) if an enemy or rival does something good, we’re inclined to attribute it to circumstance—he’s just giving money to the beggar to impress a woman who happens to be standing there; (2) if a close friend or ally does something bad, then here too circumstance tends to loom large—she’s yelling at a beggar who asks for money because she’s been stressed out over her job" (Chapter 12). When we divide everybody into bad people and good people with unchangeable essences, this can really impair our ability to see situations in complex ways, to go beyond the us-vs.-them tribalism, and to efficiently solve problems that society is so ripe with. 

As someone really interested in paradoxes of the human condition, I want to stress this: meanings have power over us, but we also have power over meanings. Symbolic interactionists focus on how people actively negotiate meanings through everyday interactions. Similarly, Wright points out that "[p]erception is an active, not a passive, process, a process of constantly building models of the world. That’s one reason different people see different things in the abstract ink blots used in Rorschach tests: our minds try to turn even the most ambiguous patterns into something that makes sense. We like to have a story about what things are and what they mean" (Chapter 10). At the same time, Buddhism does talk about people being stuck in the cycle of suffering. And Wright points out that we do not control natural selection processes shaping us. Most individuals do not even fully understand how the natural selection "design" creates problems for them and others. There is no simple story about power here: people are neither absolutely powerful nor entirely powerless as related to meanings/essences. Our power lies in working to understand how  meanings/essences work, to notice when they negatively impact our lives, and to minimize this negative impact as much as possible. But all of that is often very hard to do. (To read more on paradoxes of power, see my project POWER of meanings // MEANINGS of power.)

So, keep this in mind: "Our entire notion of good and bad, our whole landscape of feelings—fear, lust, love, and the many other feelings, salient and subtle, that inform our everyday thoughts and perceptions—are products of the particular evolutionary history of our species” (Chapter 15). They are also products of everyday symbolic interactions between human beings, considering that these interactions are themselves products of the particular evolutionary history of our species. To come to this realization and to learn how to use it, you do not have to give up your possessions and live as a monk in the woods, meditating day and night. You also do not need to persuade yourself that you live in an entirely formless and meaningless world. But you might need to start making at least a small effort every day to see the world differently. And, considering the stakes, I agree with Wright: it is something really worth doing. ​

SOURCES:
About the Book "Why Buddhism Is True." (n.d.) Simon & Schuster. https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Why-Buddhism-is-True/Robert-Wright/9781439195468

Coles, N. (2015). The House Is Innocent. Blackburn Pictures. [watch the film here]

Friesem, E. (2021). Media Is Us: Understanding Communication and Moving beyond Blame. Roman & Littlefield.

Friesem, E. (n.d.). POWER of meanings // MEANINGS of power. www.meaningsofpower.com

Symbolic Interaction Theory. (n.d.) Structural Learning. ​www.structural-learning.com/post/symbolic-interaction-theory

Wright, R. (2017). Why Buddhism Is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment. Simon & Schuster.