Is nothing real anymore? Nothing has been sacred for quite a long time, as the old adage fears. But today, the societal quest to undermine things that are traditionally sacred and hallowed is on the backburner in deference to a far more devastating mission-the questioning and denial of reality.
As I neared my high school graduation, I was warned of a prevailing trend toward subjectivity that I would encounter in college. My teachers used the word deconstructionism, a weighty idea that they told me would loom over anything I studied, wrote or read. Deconstructionism is a relatively new theory that focuses on finding discrepancies which render text-or even ideas-contradictory and meaningless. In high school, no one prepared me to deconstruct, or to accept deconstructed ideas or writings that denied beliefs that I have held true and real for as long as I can remember.
A few years ago, poet and author David Lehman told The Chicago Tribune about a confrontation he had with a student and a professor while on a visit to Wittenberg University. Lehman had been asked to speak regarding a scandal involving deconstruction, but his talk resulted in a debate in which the two argued that the founders of the country were racist. The instigators based their position on a deconstruction of Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. If someone had walked into my American history class during my junior year of high school and claimed that they had "deconstructed" the Gettysburg Address and thought the Founding Fathers were racists, I would have laughed at the wasted time. In The Tribune, Lehman added, "We can either read the Gettysburg Address or we can deconstruct it; there isn't time to do both."
What Lehman is primarily concerned with is not the existence of deconstructionism, but the ignorance that inevitably results from spending one's time deconstructing. Lehman wrote that the honest and righteous students taken so deeply with deconstructionist doctrine "couldn't tell the Gettysburg Address from a Pennsylvania zip code."
Admittedly, I have only a workingman's knowledge of deconstructionist philosophy. So I propose that I be offered an enormous scholarship. This scholarship will allow me, over many, many years, to take every class at Duke not once, but twice. The first time through, I will learn everything traditionally, but the second time I plan to deconstruct everything I read.
I would be quite old after all of this is over-and I would be the world's most confused human being. The second half of my studies would render the first half utterly meaningless.
But realistically, this is my second-to-last year at Duke. When I move off-campus next fall, I will sorely miss many of the perks of on-campus life, but I will miss the Duke Movie Channel most of all. This month it is impossible to tune in to channel 31 without seeing The Matrix.
Despite Keanu Reeves' poor acting, The Matrix does a phenomenal job of instilling the idea that questioning reality is not wrong-the only way for humanity to escape the matrix is by knowing nothing is real. Everything that humans perceive is an illusion, a mask pulled over humanity's face to hide us from the truth. The truth, in this case, is hell-that humans will create autonomous artificial intelligence that will cause the destruction of life as we know it.
In his play No Exit, existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre asserts his notion that hell is other people. The play is set in Sartre's hell, which is under the guise of a stuffy hotel salon. Sartre's hell is not defined by physical suffering. Instead, the three characters that occupy the salon are doomed to the hell of each other's observations and judgements. Eyes are frozen open to eternally look upon one another, and to deny the occupants any inkling of the self-observation they misused on Earth; there are no mirrors in hell. Nothing is real anymore for the damned except others' interpretations.
Sartre's hell is a warning to humanity that hell on Earth is not merely a theological idea, but is possible through other people if precautionary measures are not taken. A world in which more time is spent studying inconsistencies than is spent examining truth is certainly close to hell.
In The Matrix, the hell imposed upon humanity is a deconstructionist's dream. Absolutely nothing in the world is real; everything that occurs in The Matrix is not only changeable but also open to any and every interpretation.
Ironically, deconstructionists seem to ignore the notion of intended interpretation. In high school, I learned and still believe that great men like Washington and Jefferson founded the country with the presumption that mankind would continue to gain deeper enlightenment, and that their somewhat vague groundwork would solidify through different interpretations by great men to come. Hell is less a place, and more a time when the interpretations of "other people" become more important than the original work, that which is real.
A deconstructionist quote of unknown origin reads, "The author must die so the reader lives." If the real is subverted for interpretations and deconstructions, then thinkers and writers are dead before they even touch pen to paper.
Colin Garry is a Trinity junior.
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