“What is truth?” Pilate says to Jesus. We can almost see the curl of his lip as he spits this reply at what to his mind is an ignorant religious zealot from some no-count little province in this backwater where Caesar in his infinite wisdom has dumped him. “What is truth?” Pilate says to this yahoo from up north, by way of saying, “There is no ‘truth,’ you fool. ‘Truth’ is whatever the people with the money and the political clout say it is — people like me! People like your very own religious leaders, who have brought you here, like a lamb for the slaughter, because they find you inconvenient! ‘Truth?!’ You rube! Don’t talk to me about ‘truth’!”

Deconstruction

            Let’s jump ahead a couple of centuries. “Deconstruction” is a hot topic in what gets called the “academic world”; at least it was a number of years back. “Deconstruction” is a theory of what language is, what language does, and what language can and can’t do. Basically deconstruction confronts and challenges the assumption that words — words like “truth,” for instance — refer to absolutes beyond themselves. What we all assume about the word tree, for instance, is that it points to some kind of perfect “tree” in some kind of implied or literal platonic world of forms.

            Well, according to deconstructionist theory, the word, “tree” is nothing but a word, period. It refers to absolutely nothing beyond itself. It refers to no perfect idea of tree; all it is is a word — a “sign” as deconstruction calls it — the meaning of which all of us who share the language more or less agree upon. I say “more or less,” for we use the word tree in all kinds of ways that have nothing to do, strictly speaking, with trees. We speak of “shoe trees” and “coat trees” and the “tree of life” and our “family tree,” and so on. It is perfectly conceivable that two or more of us could be gathered together talking about “tree,” and each of us be talking about entirely differe

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