Racist theories have always been part of not only the European tradition, but generally the greatest works of art, literature, religion and philosophy. Only in the last hundred years, after the world globalization and cultures being exposed to one another, there seems to be a consensus between people around the world that any qualitative characteristics concerning race should be redundant, on the national, ethnic and personal level. However even if we consider this modern liberal democracy influenced consensus, racist acts prevail everywhere. This begs the question if people on the structural social level are inherently racist?

For answering this unconventional question, we must perhaps reach for unconventional way of thought. The German sociologist Niklas Luhmann might help us to achieve this goal, because he certainly did have unconventional methods. His system theory is regarded as strictly antihumanistic and lacked the individualistic way of thought which was present in the western society practically since the enlightenment. Luhmann himself basically stated that he wishes to pull sociology from the dark ages and accuses all other sociologists of suffering from epistemological obstacles, which causes them to lack scientific basis for their theories. Luhmann then in his own view brings his own scientific-sociologist enlightenment (Lee, 2000). According to Luhmann, individual people are not a part of social systems, but instead he puts them somewhere inside the system environment – in other words, all that is communicated remains outside the society. The main conceptualization of system theory Luhmann provides lies in communication itself, where the individual actors are virtually meaningless and are not part of the system in any way until they start communicating. Luhmann also addresses the humanistic way of thought, attributing it merely to wishful thinking (Lee, 2000). From Luhmanns perspective, humanistic thinkers are terrified of losing moral ground by shifting from anthropocentrism, because they do not want to lose the feeling of significance within the system.

“Regardless of how much people believe they have in common, Luhmann emphasizes the “improbability” of successful communication. If individuals do manage successfully to communicate, if they do build society together, it is not due to their regional, national, or cultural backgrounds. Rather, it is by employing established systems of communication, building new understanding upon what was successfully communicated in the past” (Lee, 2000). This notion of all national ties being redundant in our new globalized world, is perhaps one of the most interesting thought processes Luhmann provides in his extensive work. One cannot help but wonder if this thought of insignificance of interpersonal act in society could be interpreted as a gateway to solving why people attribute themselves the identity of nation, ethnicity and race. Considering the fact that most people have tried to solve these issues mainly from the socio-political perspective perhaps because that was the standpoint of various social activists iconically fighting for black rights around the world, the strictly sociological and scientific way of looking at this particular issue could be valid. Another way how society tackled this issue was through evolutionary psychology, where the notion of xenophobic reaction was merely attributed to human emotional nature, where the fear of the unknown was an efficient biological defense mechanism used by the body on a very primitive level in order to survive. However, if we eliminate the individualistic standpoint as Luhmann suggests, there is not much we can do from the psychological-biological standpoint, because according to Luhmann there can never be something like a collective consciousness (Lee, 2000). Perhaps what could be implemented into Luhmanns theory is the theory of roles proposed by Linton. Even if we consider that we as individuals cannot in fact be a part of society, the theory of roles makes sense in Luhmanns conceptualization of systems, because Luhmann himself says that people can only communicate only about one thing at a time. Spies, thieves and revolutionaries can order a pizza or participate in church practice, or any kind of ordinary mundane thing, although it is not considered as typical within their specific roles. The concept of roles could then be aligned with Luhmanns theory, because when we assume specific roles, the communication aspect we do are not interpersonal, but we are basically communicating through the social construct we created for ourselves as identities, and more importantly, the roles we create speak for us, not the other way around.

Another standpoint of Luhmanns theory is the binary mathematical approach towards the system function. A person is differentiated from his or her environment by the positive or negative output of something being me and something not being me. According to Luhmanns theory this is can be also applied to any functional sub-system in the society – meaning that the system of law is either just or unjust, the system of healthcare differentiates between the physical cases as healthy and unhealthy (Lee, 2000). This binary differentiation is almost literally aligned with the systematic work of a computer, where the ones and the zeroes create a dynamic algorithm based on communication. They create a sequence structure based upon electrical impulses within the cells of the computer. In order to apply this metaphor to Luhmanns system theory concerning society, we first have to define the factors of how a computer actually works. If we look into a primitive circuit that is the most basic functioning component of a computer, which then creates a complicated structure of larger circuits and chips, it is based on nothing other than statement logic. The Boolean operation, which is a mathematical operation which controls the true and false values within individual bits of information, makes it possible for us to manipulate inputs with the circuit architecture of AND, OR and XOR (Brookshear&Brylow, 2020). If there are two bits of inputs leading on the circuit into the AND operation, both of them have to be 1 (or positive) in order for the output to be positive. If only one of these operations is positive, the output will not be positive. The positive outcome of the OR operation needs only one of the inputs to be positive. In the XOR operation, it becomes problematic to explain it in the English language, because there is no real way of giving an example as there is no existing conjunction to describe it. However, on the logical basis, the XOR operation basically has the output of 1 only if one of the outputs is 1. There exists a fourth operation called NOT, and it has only one input, and it always negates the input provided. Using these phenomena used in computer science will prove to explain Luhmanns theory better, because his theory practically compares the society to an actual computer with specific components doing specific things. The main reason why Luhmann explains the society on this basis is that in essence the basic working of society are very simple just like the most primitive flip-flops within a computer. A CPU could be in fact attributed to something like the justice system.

This begs the question, if we consider that we as individuals are practically disposable within the system that operates on its own, are we truly responsible for bigotry and racism? And are we inherently racist? Luhmann says that the only defining factor outside of the sociological interpretation of the system is history (Lee, 2000). And more importantly, the logic of a system (and by logic I mean the logical conceptualization of the system works within itself) is defined by that systems own operation and history. So we can certainly say why the systems have in fact changed over time, for example why slavery is no longer an accepted fact within various systems that concern themselves with the questions of slavery, is because the systems have adapted to the point that the inputs and outputs of the systems themselves made it redundant. On the systematic level, if we consider the societal stigma of racism, we can say that ethnic minorities are identified by the systems as well. The concept of race is perhaps one of the oldest concepts that have been subject to system evaluation. In politics for example, the US government makes it possible for political parties to be defined on the binary level if they get support from the black or Hispanic communities. Political opinion itself is then perhaps one of the ways we can further apply the statement logic we already provided, because political opinion could work merely on the binary basis, but the OR and AND commands would be needed as well, considering the fact that we practically cannot say that any community is 100 percent homogenous within its opinion on politics, although statistically it shows that it is in favor of a specific political party for example. Systems are then the reason for racism, not individual people. Even though we cannot surely say that racism has a system within a society on its own, perhaps it is rather a bi-product and a system error. However, according to Luhmanns theory, systems can radically change as well. One of these radical changes came with the enlightenment, where the human way of thought and the philosophical and ethics changed suddenly only in the span of a couple of decades. Then it is possible for the systems to cease being racist.

Even though Luhmann himself basically structured the society as only binary, perhaps the additional commands like AND, OR and XOR are needed. Luhmann himself said that the system keeps making itself more complex, and because certain sub-systems have merged together or gained complexity because they are now intertwined with sub-systems all around the world, there is no place for the only simplistic yes or no answer to everything. Furthermore, considering the fact that Luhmann disregarded any nationalist ties being relevant in his system theory, the question of racism is then perhaps only sort of a glitch in the system itself. The only real way of how the world according to Luhmann would deal with systematic racism is through time. After all, ethnicity and nation according to Luhmann does not stand in the way of global communication, and technically should not really matter. Sociological enlightenment itself came only with Luhmann in the 1960s (according to Luhmann) and so racism should resolve itself by historical reflection, because it is simply not logical to have racism anymore. What humanism has been trying to do for several centuries, could be then maybe accomplished by pure uncut logic.

References:

Brookshear, J. G., & Brylow, D. (2020). Computer science: An overview. Harlow: Pearson.

Lee, D. (2000). The Society of Society: The Grand Finale of Niklas Luhmann. Sociological Theory, 18(2), 320–330.