SumBlog #10: Society as Human Product by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann

In reading the passage titled Society as Human Product by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, I read that "man's self-production is always, and of necessity, a social enterprise". Meaning that it is men together, create a human environment including all of its facets involving social and psychological factors. Even human productivity can be viewed as being sociallyb constructed releams not natural found in man alone. "Just as it is impossible for for man to develop in isolation, so it is impossible for for a man insolation to produce hman environment". (Berger).  Berger viewed people that lived their lives in solidarity as being on the same level of animals. People lacked the biologic ability to means to provide stability for human conduct or human order , meaning that they needed a guide to determine from where their human order derived, in other words how does social order itself arise? Amidst the reading I learned that simply put, social order is a product created by humans that continues to go through changes as life for humans change. Berger mentions that social order is produced by people as their life goes on and pulled from the events that he externalizes through their individual experiences. One aspect that is crucial to each human being is that he is able to find a place or create an environment where he is able to carry out his lfe in. The author clearly states that social order has nothing to do with the natural law of things in nature, but rather once again it is something that is socially created not something that is simply just known to man, however social order does correlate with a person's naturally given "equiptment". Humans are creatures of habit, for people , habits are formed by reapeatly performing certain "routines". This is true whether people are placed in the social sphere or the private sphere, habits can be formed in very personal ways that need not even be known to others. I think of driving in this aspect. A person may appear to be driving a vehicle with no or little effort or thought but because of the number of times that they performed the actions of driving, it becomes or appears to become "second nature". Due to the enormous amount of experiences in our lives, humans are able to skip the need for step by step directions that are generally required when executing a new taks. Habitualization is credited for the short cut because it actually takes precedence over any institutionalization that occurs. Sometimes people can perform a certain task without even necessarily appearing to be aware of it. However institutionalization, "occurs when there is a reciprocal typification of habitualized actions by types of actors". I undertstood this to mean that when like minded people convene together in commonality. The reading says that "institutions further imply that historicity and control", I translated that to mean that institutions such as schools for example were formed out of necessity, so there was an obvious need to gather likeminded individuals together in effort to further their commonality. Fun Fact... even human sexuality is socially controlled! Lastly discussed by Berger was the topic of socialization and how it arises.  Children are not able to distinguish between the natural world and the world that has been socially constructed around them because they have had no former relationship with how things are in nature versus what they have been exposed to for their entire lives, they have yet to become enlightened. In short, I learned that there are three factors that include: habitutualization, institutionalization and socialization when considering the key elements of society.  I chose the image below because I felt that it was an interesting example of how man creates society, not the other way around.