William S. Lind

Several years ago, a Dartmouth College professorette and high priestess of Political Correctness said, "I can deconstruct the name Isaac Newton." In fact, that’s easy. Isaac = "I" plus "sac:" a reference to the male body. "I, the male" lay a "New ton," i.e., a new burden, on women, blacks, homosexuals, etc., by inventing Newtonian physics.

That’s absurd, you think. And you’re correct. But that is also deconstruction.

Every ideology needs a method of "analysis" that guarantees an ideologically correct result. For the Nazis, it was race: if something was good, it had to have been done by Aryans, hence "Aryan physics." For the old classical, economic Marxists of the Soviet Union, it all came down to ownership of the means of production. Since the "workers" owned everything in the country (via their "vanguard," the Communist Party), the Soviet economy was the most rational and efficient in human history. Never mind that the top cause of house fires in the Soviet Union was exploding televison sets and people had to wait in endless lines to buy luxuries like soap and meat.

The cultural Marxism we call Political Correctness has its method of analysis, too. It’s called "deconstruction," and like most things dirty, it came from France.

There, a fellow named Jacques Derrida came forth with the idea that words have no meaning. Because the image you see when I write the word "ship" may differ from the image I see, nobody knows what the word really means. At best, we have mere traces of meaning—not enough to communicate. In fact, in Derrida’s own writings, he carefully avoided using any form of the verb "to be," because not only do words have no meaning, but existence itself may not exist. This made Derrida’s works incomprehensible, which quickly got him a faculty position at Yale.

There, and in other American universities, the feminists, homosexual advocates, "Black Power" preachers, and the like quickly saw the potential of deconstruction. They could use it to remove all meaning from every "text," then put the meaning they wanted back. Presto! They had the method of analysis their ideology had been lacking. Now, they could take the Bible, Shakespeare, Little Women, you name it, and show it was really about white males repressing them throughout history.

Now you know why, when you sign up for a course in English literature on the Age of Johnson, you instead get endless rants about "racism, sexism, and homophobia." If texts have no meaning, the professor can talk about whatever he wants.

In the end, it is deconstruction itself that is meaningless. It is refuted as Dr. Johnson refuted Bishop Berkeley’s theories that we could not prove the existence of anything: he kicked a large stone, and said "I refute him thus." Or, you can have some fun and deconstruct the deconstructionists. Next time one of them starts on about "racism" in this historic work or "sexism" in that one, ask them to explain how "racism" or "sexism" can have any meaning, since they are also words. They really hate that.

More important, ignore the deconstructionists altogether. Spend your time reading the great works of our culture, Western culture. Get to know Dr. Johnson, not only England’s greatest talker but perhaps her greatest moralist as well. Relax in Jane Austen’s marvelous miniatures. Confound Shaw with Chesterton and explore the nature of good and evil with Tolkien and Charles Williams. That way, you’ll get what you are paying your college tuition for, but not getting from your "deconstructed" faculty: a genuine education.