Is the author asserting this is true? To paraphrase Artistole, as soon as a skeptic against truth opens their mouth, they contradict themselves and lose any right to be taken seriously. Deconstruction was a 1960s philosophical fad that was always full of holes and has been demolished by critics in subsequent decades. Unfortunately many aging leftists learned this type of tripe in their freshman philosophy classes and it's wormed its way into our academic and legal systems. This type of thinking is incompatible with the premises the Constitution is based on and needs to be met with a vigorous counter-offensive in our schools if our republic and culture are to survive.
“Miss Parks led a busy life because so many of us wanted to consult her. She was an important factor in preparing us to accept a materialist philosophy by mercilessly deriding what she called “dry rot” in existing society. I am sure she did help some students, but she did little for those who were already so emptied of convictions that they believed in nothing. These could only turn their steps toward the great delusion of our time, toward the socialist-communist philosophy of Karl Marx.”
(... snip ...)
“As I look back on the febrile group, so eager to help the world, looking about for something to spend themselves on, our earnestness appears pathetic. We had, all of us, a strong will to real goodness. We saw a bleak present and wanted to turn it into a beautiful future for the poor and the troubled. But we had no foundation for solid thinking or effective action. We had no real goals because we had no sound view of man’s nature and destiny. We had feelings and emotions, but no standards by which to chart the future.”
The above is taken from School of Darkness by Bella Dodd as she, having turned to Christ, looks back on how she was led to become an agent for the communists. She seemingly cannot see that her precious Miss Parks may well have been just the sort of person she had been and that her “help” may have been precisely to bring about the emptiness of materialistic views so her girls would become as she was: a socialist.
Yet it is all too obvious that she herself recounts (in previous pages to the above quotes) how Parks dealt rather mercilessly with her, not by calling her interests in the Middles Ages dry rot but by implicating that they the lives of those people were not normal for her, were basically alien to her, and therefore not something for her to admire.
Had she had a proper grounding in the Faith she might have quoted that there is a time for every purpose under Heaven. Had she had the benefit of a copy of Lewis’ The Abolition of Man somehow fallen through time to her hand she may have seen that Parks was debunking her interests, robbing her of them in so far as she could.
Bella Dodd is describing, even if she didn’t know it, a precursor of herself, as well as others like her ... so many who do their part to produce the leftist nitwits, snowflakes, and goons that now plague us.
Even though apparently repentant when this was written, Dodd doesn’t seem to come to grips with just who these girls she knew were, and who she had been one of, Miss Park’s sphere of influence. I would assert that they were in fact incapable of having “a strong will to real goodness” for they had already been led onto the shoals where goodness in them was bring wrecked and all that was to be left, had Miss Park’s had her way, were the very empty platitudes of social justice and socialistic pabulum.
And this was in the 1920s when people in education still had the habit of occasionally thinking and not just feeling only all the time!
How great must be the wreckage that is the leftist today, her counterparts that plague us now. Where she would become an agent of corruption in the “real goodness” she once thought she was capable of this current lot will smack you upside the head with a bike lock just for being unreceptive to their “goodness”. There can be no sentimentality about these people, for that lets our own Miss Parks unchallenged to do their harm, to Abolish Man in some kid if they are able.
Critical theory is pretty much the norm in the humanities these days as I understand it. You hear its jargon every time a snowflake opens zir mouth to complain about free speech or privilege or whatever.
I operate thusly:
There is an objective reality.
Everything is knowable.
Anything that can’t be measured doesn’t matter.
If you make an assertion that is other than the general consensus and/or my observation, incontrovertible proof must be provided.
The person making the argument must provide the proof, the other party is under zero obligation to accept any argument without proof.
The NYT is just as guilty as religious folks in asserting that people who disagree are under some sort of obligation to prove anything; be it religion, conspiracy theories, economics saying ‘nope, you haven’t proved it to my satisfaction’ is an absolutely ironclad response to any argument as far as I am concerned unless there is physical proof to the contrary.