“We live in a world possessed.” With these words the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga opened one of his books on the state of the western world of his days. That was in 1935, a time of severe economic depression and growing fascist and communist strength; a time also when mankind was already living in the shadows of the coming world war.

Almost sixty years later, the economic and political situations have greatly improved, and the West's chances of survival seem better than they have been since the beginning of this century. Whether its mental health has improved is another question. It is true that some of the most fearful demons that possessed Huizinga's world have been exorcized, but only some. Others stayed, and invited a host of colleagues to the half-swept and half-empty house. These legions establish headquarters in the institutions that traditionally functioned as guardians and bulwarks of our civilization in the 1930s, that is, in the universities.

I am referring to the p.c. or political correctness movement, and especially to its underlying principles, which will have our attention. I will have to begin by saying that it is a rather complex topic, but I do ask you to try to stay with me. The story is about the world view of our society, about the spirit of the age. And that, figuratively speaking, is what makes the world go “round.” It's an issue that affects us all, in more ways than we may realize.

Hermeneutics Old and New⤒🔗

The best way to introduce the topic is by describing a new type of literary theory, one that was invented in continental Europe, but that has become popular at several North American universities as well. It influences especially the study of literature, history, and law. In fact, it is not one theory, but several, each with its own name. They are all related, however, and for the purposes of this article we can often treat them as one. Where possible I will refer to them collectively as the new criticism or the new hermeneutics (that is, the new theory of interpretation). At times I will have to use more specific names.

The traditional critical theory, the old hermeneutics, is well known and is really a matter of common sense. Those who employ it look for “authorial or textual intent.” That means that they want to know what the author intended to say in the text they are studying. To determine that, they don't just read the books or poem or essay and leave it at that, nor are they necessarily satisfied with the author's own statement regarding meaning and message, although they certainly take that into account. They delve deeper, and look at such things as the historical and social contexts, the author's philosophy, the language and imagery he used, the exact meaning of words and images, and so on. To help their understanding further they may compare the text in question to other works by the same author or by his contemporaries, and make deductions from that. In that sense, they “read between the lines,” but – and that is the important point here – they do so in order to illuminate what the author wants to say, and so to bring his message closer to the reader. Author and text are at the centre. Our readers will notice that this hermeneutics is quite similar to that used in orthodox biblical exegesis.

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A Struggle for Power←⤒🔗

Those who practice the old hermeneutics, then, take the text seriously. It has a specific, an inherent meaning, given to it by the author, which the reader must try to determine in what is essentially an objective manner. The new hermeneutics turn this theory on its head. For them it is not the author, but the critics or readers who give the text its meaning, and in doing so they will consciously, as a matter of principle, ignore both the author's intent and his plain words. The author and text are no longer at the centre; the critic and reader are. And because the criteria they use are subjective, different critics and readers may well come up with opposing interpretations. Subjectivism and relativism rule. More ominously, as we will see: ideology rules, an ideology that is anti-Christian and socially destructive.

How do the new critics justify this kind of theory? And why do they use it? To start with the second question: it is to a large extent a matter of politics. The new criticism is a weapon in a struggle for power. It is used on behalf of the pressure groups. All these groups -feminists, racial and ethnic minorities, homosexuals – believe, as we saw, that they have been victimized by their society. That society, they say, is and always has been controlled by the white, western, heterosexual male, who uses every means at his disposal to maintain and extend his domination. These means include the written works of our civilization – philosophical, religious, and historical ones, as well as those of the literary canon proper. The enemy, then, is not just the western male; it is also western civilization, since that is the male's creation, bastion, and tool of oppression.

Western civilization, therefore, has to be destroyed, and if not destroyed, then at least radically changed. And one way of doing that is by emasculating those who formed it: its poets and writers, its law-makers and religious leaders, its philosophers and historians. Far too long the products of these people's minds have advertised themselves as ultimate truth, and far too long these same writings have been used to keep the victims under control. Every one of these works is nothing but a medium of oppression. (It is therefore no wonder, incidentally, that the new critics count conservatives like Allan Bloom and E.D. Hirsch, Jr. – people who want to restore the “great books” and spread the knowledge of western civilization – among their sworn enemies). The victims have to escape the influence and might of these works. They can do that by suppressing and ignoring them, but also by “deconstructing” them, that is, by showing that they mean and prove something very different from what their authors said they meant and proved – and so by laying bare their true nature. And that business of deconstructing is, of course, the task of the new critics. Just how they do it will presently have our attention. First we must return to the question about the principles by which they justify this kind of critical theory.

Freud, Marx and their Kin←⤒🔗

Depending on the axe they want to grind, the adherents of the new hermeneutics use different philosophies or combinations of philosophies. Some of these are old, some new. I will try to describe two of the more traditional ones. Both are still very influential and in a sense they are foundational, which means that they help explain most of the other theories as well.

Several of the new critics take their cue from the psychoanalyst Freud, who died in 1939. Freud, a follower of Darwin and Nietzsche, taught that man had only recently evolved from his animal ancestry, and that therefore the human mind also was quite a recent development. As a result man's reason was much less-developed and much weaker than the older, animal aspects of his personality, such as his instincts and drives, especially his sex drive. Because society could not allow him to live according to his animal nature, unacceptable sexual desires and experiences often had to be suppressed. If so, Freud said, they continued to dominate the subject's mind, although the mind did not know that. It all happened at the subconscious level. Such a person's neuroses, his dreams, his belief systems – it could all be explained with reference to these subterranean sexual drives. But once again, the subject himself did not know this: it was the psychoanalyst who dug it up from his client's subconscious by analysing his dreams and words and actions. The point is that for Freud and his followers the message a person tries to make cannot be taken at face-value. There are deeper motives present, and as often as not these motives are instinctual and self-serving.

Karl Marx said essentially the same thing, only for him the deepest motivations for a person’s actions were not sexual but materialistic (they had to do with economics, class, and so on). Freudians would say, for example, that someone might think he joined the Lutheran reformation for religious reasons, whereas in fact he did so because he hated the pope, and he hated the pope not because the latter had religious pretensions but because he was a father-figure, and he hated father-figures because he was subconsciously in competition with his own father for the love of his mother (the Oedipus complex, named after the legendary Greek king Oedipus, who unknowingly killed his father and married his mother).

Marxists, in turn, would say that this same man joined for economic and class reasons. After all, Luther preached the equality of all men before God, he brought down the mighty (such as popes and bishops and their colleagues) from their seats, and he delivered his followers from the obligation to pay tithes and other taxes to Rome. But like Freud, Marx also said that often people were unaware of these underlying reasons for their actions. They thought that they were inspired by the highest of motives when in fact it was greed and desire for material gain that moved them.

Religion, then, according to Freudians and Marxists, can be explained by its adherents' neuroses, wishful thinking, desire for power, greed, or all of the above – take your pick. And what goes for religion goes for every manifestation of our culture: for ethical, legal, political, and economic systems, philosophies, historiography, art, literature, and so on. The reader will realize how helpful this type of theory can be for anyone intent upon destroying the works of western culture.

Deconstructionism←⤒🔗

Many of the new critics limit themselves to Freudian and/or Marxist analysis. Others have followed the road of relativism and irrationality to its ultimate conclusion, which is nihilism. Nothing remains. Critics who adhere to this school are called deconstructionists. According to the obscure (and often self-contradictory) theory of deconstructionism, the text no longer gives an inkling even of the author's subconscious motives: it has nothing to say, it is without meaning. The reason is that man himself has lost all meaning. Deconstructionism believes that man as man, that is, as a subject with a will and mind of his own, no longer exists. He is merely a “consciousness,” conditioned by, and indeed a product of, history, society, language, race, and gender. An arbitrary product of arbitrary forces, he has no standards and lacks the ability to distinguish between truth and error, good and evil, beauty and ugliness. Everything is equal, and everything is equally nonsensical. This theory of absolute equality, as we will see later, stands for p.c. movement in good stead.

Deconstructionism, although it got many of its ideas from Marx and Freud, was strongly influenced by Nietzsche and his followers, such as the sociologist Max Weber, and especially the existentialist philosopher Martin Heidegger. Most of the grandparents of the new hermeneutics, you will notice, are 19th and early 20th-century Germans. The circle of present-day deconstructionists is more cosmopolitan. Among the best-known are the Frenchman Jacques Derrida, one of the movement's founders, and the Belgian Paul de Man, who teaches at America's prestigious Yale University. America has its home-grown deconstructionists as well, as do other western countries.

One might think that deconstructionism is too nihilistic to make literary analysis more than a neutral and innocent game. That is not necessarily the case, however. Its very arbitrariness is an attack on a civilization founded on the belief that meaning, truth, and standards exist. That same arbitrariness also allows deconstructionists to give to a text whatever meaning suits them at the moment. Orthodox Freudians and Marxists are still tied to certain rules; anyone who follows these rules can evaluate and judge their analysis. In that sense they are, if not objective, at least somewhat predictable.

Deconstructionists, on the other hand, have no rules and can do with a text whatever they want. They can employ Marxist, Freudian, linguistic, and any other branch of the new criticism in their analysis, or they can declare the text to be utterly incoherent. They can even turn around and upset their previous analysis, for the theory states that in a meaningless world meaning (for what it is worth) can only be bestowed temporarily. But whatever approach they follow, the aim of deconstructionists, too, is to wrest control of the text from the author and arrogate it to themselves. And for them also literary theory is a power tool: the makers of our culture, and thereby our culture itself must be discredited and made powerless. These people are as political and ideology-ridden as all the rest of the new critics are.

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Selectivity←⤒🔗

The new criticism, is used by feminists, blacks, and other pressure groups as a weapon. Deconstruction therefore is applied in a selective manner: only the work of enemies is subjected to it, not that of friends. The conservative author Dinesh D'Souza, one of the most trenchant of the movement's recent critics, provides a list of people who are never deconstructed. (See his book Illiberal Education – The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus, 1991/92, which has become a national bestseller). Among those who are exempt are the deconstructionists themselves, as well as feminists, blacks, and members of other groups that carry the badge of victimhood. Also exempt are the grandfathers of the new criticism such as Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud.

With an inconsistency typical of the movement, these various people (some of them white heterosexual European males!) are considered dispensers of absolute truth, whose work must be taken at face-value. That such a conclusion goes against the grain of their own teachings is blithely ignored. Necessarily so. Not even deconstructionists can afford to admit that they are sawing off the branch on which they are sitting.

Political Activism←⤒🔗

As D'Souza and other authors have shown, the new critics' war is waged in a quite open fashion. One deconstructionist, we read in D'Souza's book, stated that his work aimed at “demolishing beyond hope of repair the machine of Western metaphysics.” Another said that he intended to produce “a conspicuous increase of guilt-feelings about culture as such,” and a third revealed that he engaged in Marxist deconstructionism in order “to make Marxism an unavoidable presence in American social, cultural and intellectual life, in short to form a Marxist intelligentsia for the struggles of the future.”

Many feminists will agree with the Marxist goals, although they aim first of all at establishing woman's equality with man. In the process, feminists have produced scholarly work of real quality. So have authors who looked at history, literature and life from a black, a Marxist, or a Freudian perspective. These various tools of analysis, if properly employed, can indeed enrich our understanding of the works of our culture. Conventional critics and historians also have used them to advantage. The problem arises when no other perspectives are considered and the tools are used as weapons in ideological warfare. Then scholarship becomes the handmaiden of politics, with sad results. In the past we have seen examples of this in countries ruled by totalitarian regimes; today we see them in the universities of the free West.

Black Studies←⤒🔗

It is especially black studies that suffer the evil consequences of such politicized scholarship. I already provided an example with the story of allegedly black Egyptians whose contributions to scholarship and culture were said to have been stolen by Greece and the West. Nor is that the only case. Some black students believe that Cleopatra, Hannibal, St. Augustine, and possibly even Adam and Eve were black; that blacks built the pyramids, invented the Hippocratic oath, were the source of much of Solomon's wisdom, and inspired the Ten Commandments; and that the Washington monument is based on an African concept. (Similarly, claims have been made for Native American influence on American culture, such as its democratic system.)

I should add here that this type of myth-making is certainly not condoned by all blacks. Many of them regret and fight it. Many also remind their fellow-blacks that they are American rather than African, and that they would do well to accept western culture as their birthright, and work with it. This is what Martin Luther King did, and countless other black Americans.

Feminist Hermeneutics←⤒🔗

Although the work of feminists is often scholarly, this group too has members who use the academy primarily for ideological and political purposes. Under their leadership students are frequently asked to interpret a text from an exclusively feminist and/or Freudian perspective – or from a classist or racist one, for feminists are in close alliance with the other pressure groups. Such radical feminists will think nothing of suppressing whatever inherent meaning the text may have.

Ways can usually be found to show that the text proclaims the ruthlessness of the male and the unrelenting hostility between the sexes. One of the reasons why Lesbianism and other sexual alternatives are encouraged, and at times even recommended, is that they allow women to escape the sexual dominance of men. As to the matter of procreation, they say, there are always the possibilities of artificial insemination and test-tube babies, and ultimately science may make it possible for men to share the burden of childbearing. D'Souza quotes Allison Jaggard, chair of Women's Studies at the University of Cincinnati and head of the Committee on the Status of Women of the American Philosophical Association, who said that she “eagerly anticipated scientific advances to eliminate such biological functions as insemination, lactation and gestation. ’One woman,' she suggested, 'could inseminate another …, men and non-parturitive women could lactate …, fertilized ova could be transferred into women's or even men's bodies'.” The nuclear family, which Jaggard has called “a cornerstone of oppression,” could so be allowed to disappear, and women would at last reach biological equality with men.

The Literary Canon←⤒🔗

What types of texts are taught by these radical reformers? This question brings us to the matter of the literary canon, a term which refers to the list of what have long been considered the most important literary texts – the ones that were traditionally taught in literature departments of secondary schools and universities.

This canon, as we have seen, is under attack. Feminists and minorities are convinced that it gives disproportionate attention to the work and values of the western male, and serves as his power tool. To redress the balance, they insist upon a course of affirmative action: schools and universities must choose texts not simply on the basis of the traditional criteria of literary excellence, but also (and often exclusively) on that of gender and race. Just as businesses have to hire a certain percentage of women, members of minority races, and so on, so the literary canon has to allow for the representation of these groups.

There is something to be said for such a balancing act, for it is true that the work of minorities has often been ignored. There is also room for a reconsideration of the criteria traditionally used for the establishment of the canon. As was pointed out in this magazine some years ago (by William Helder, in “English studies and the canon,” Reformed Perspective, March, 1989), it was indeed a small and exclusive club, consisting mainly of liberal humanist professors, that long monopolized the business of establishing the canon, and whose members “daily propagated the often unexamined values of their particular ideology.” Dr. Helder rightly stated that in the cultural revolution of our days Christians cannot simply take the side of the liberal humanists. Education and scholarship are never neutral. The spirits of the right must be tested no less than those of the left.

To return to our feminists and their allies, one can sympathize, then, with their grievances in the matter of the canon. This does not mean, however, that one has to admire the way in which they go about the business of refashioning it. Partly because not every minority has produced a sufficiently large body of work of literary quality, the new critics appeal to the deconstructionist creed which states that judgments about truth and error, good and evil, beauty and ugliness, are totally subjective, that norms and standards do not exist, and that everything is equal. These people can therefore without any compunction replace Shakespeare, Milton and their peers with the work of any half-literate but “ideologically-engaged” minority author or feminist.

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Shakespeare Deconstructed←⤒🔗

Traditional authors are not discarded, however. Universities still make room for them, but, being mainly dead white European males, these authors certainly come under attack (always with the exception of politically correct ones). Shakespeare, for example, is being accused of male chauvinism, racism, and an anti-third-world attitude because of such plays as The Taming of the Shrew, Othello, The Merchant of Venice, The Tempest, and so on. English departments admit that they include him and other traditional writers primarily in order to set horrid examples of male dominance and white-male-instituted oppression. They are taught in order to be deconstructed. Even so, not every undergraduate can be bothered reading these authors. D'Souza quotes the by now celebrated remark of an English major who said that he wouldn't dream of touching a poet like Milton, because,

I know what the guy was up to – he was a sexist through and through.

Tribalism and Double Discrimination←⤒🔗

More examples could be given of the movement's strategies, but it is time to move on to its consequences. One of these – the disastrous effect the new criticism and the policy of affirmative action can have on scholarship – has already had our attention. Another is that once again group-forming is encouraged, and even sanctified. To justify appointing members of minorities, even when their qualifications are lower than those of white applicants, it is argued that minority perspectives are needed in dealing with minority works, because a white man cannot get “inside the skin” of non-whites, and vice versa. There are black perspectives, white perspectives, feminist perspectives, and so on. Intelligence is determined by race and gender, and we cannot understand each other across the walls dividing these groups.

There is something quite contradictory in such a stand. As the American historian C. Vann Woodward once pointed out, people don't seem to realize that to disqualify a member of one race from writing the history of another is “to subscribe to an extreme brand of racism.” Nor do they seem to realize the determinism implied in the entire approach, which leaves people with the idea that they are no more than the products of race, gender, and class, and that they can never escape the inherent restrictions. The world, the works, the insights of the rest of humanity are forever closed to them. And the transmission of knowledge and of culture through the works of literature and history comes to an end. These kinds of tribalism and determinism, moreover, do not provide real help to America's victimized groups. Neither does the policy of trying to make up for past discrimination by finding all sorts of alibis for these groups, and of expecting from them less rigorous standards than from their peers. In fact, all this leads to further discrimination. In a column in Christianity Today, Charles Colson speaks of a “double discrimination,” and illustrates the point by quoting from a speech which the black Judge Clarence Thomas once gave to a group of black students.

Not only [he told his audience] do you have to contend with the ever-present bigotry, you must do so with a recent tradition that almost requires you to wallow in excuses. You now have a popular national rhetoric which says you can't learn because of racism, you can't raise the babies you make because of racism; you can't get up in the mornings because of racism. You commit crimes because of racism. Unlike me, you must not only overcome the repressiveness of racism, you must also overcome the lure of excuses. You have twice the job I had.

Ethical Relativism←⤒🔗

One other characteristic to have our attention is the movement's ethical relativism. From among many examples, I choose that of Professor Stanley Fish of Duke University. A well-known new-hermeneuticist, Fish relates (we read in D'Souza's book) that members of the political left are drawn to the theory he espouses because it gives them a tool to throw overboard all traditional norms and standards.

Once you realize, Fish quotes them as saying, that standards emerge historically then you can see through and discard all the norms to which we have been falsely enslaved.

These people fail to realize that the sword they wield is two-edged. Ideologues of the right can use the theory as well as their colleagues of the left. Some years ago it was confirmed that Martin Heidegger, one of the movement's ancestors, had been an admirer of Hitler and an anti-Semite. This news was followed shortly later by the revelation that Paul de Man, the Belgian scholar who taught at Yale and until his death in 1983 was the leading American deconstructionist, had in his younger days similarly been associated with Nazism. He had also been involved in business fraud, abandoned his family in order to get to the United States, and subsequently remarried. De Man's disciples were upset by these revelations and with the help of the new theory tried to obscure them. They cannot deny, however, that the theory is not only powerless in the face of moral aberrations, but that it makes every possible room for them.

Minds that are Darkened←⤒🔗

We should not be too optimistic about the chance that this type of revelation will bring about the destruction of deconstructionism, or prevent the rise of similar theories in the future. Such theories and movements are the logical outcome of a development that began centuries ago, when our civilization first discarded God's Word and so introduced what is now called the post-Christian era. Thinking themselves emancipated and very wise, our intellectual leaders in fact became foolish, futile in their thinking and darkened in their minds.

How foolish they have become is now obvious to all who still have eyes to see. In a sense, that outcome is a comfort for Christians, who know that it has been foretold. May it at the same time arouse them to put on the whole armour of God and so contend against the forces of evil, also in the intellectual realm. We, Christians, owe it to our students, who at school, college, and university must face the enemy head-on. We also owe it to our society for have we not been appointed the salt of the earth and the light of the world?