I didn’t think stone could scream until I saw an image of Laocoön and His Sons, a sculpture depicting a scene from Virgil’s Aeneid. Troy’s priest of Neptune had implored his countrymen to refuse the Greek gift of a wooden horse, believing it was full of armed men. The Trojans dismissed Laocoön’s warning and hauled the horse within their walls.

As Laocoön attempted to sacrifice a bull to Neptune for the city’s protection, twin serpents, eyes suffused with blood and fire, emerged from Neptune’s chaotic sea and coiled around the throats of him and his sons. From Laocoön’s lungs came a “bellowing like some wounded bull struggling to shrug loose from his neck an axe that’s struck awry.” His own throat uttering the very cry of the animal he sought to slaughter, Laocoön becomes the sacrifice for a god less concerned with truth than with power, for a kingdom less concerned with prudence than with greed.

On the postmodern campus, words are often Trojan horses that drain discourse of its lifeblood. Today, students at most colleges seem to learn to obfuscate, equivocate, and manipulate language more than to communicate. Language, once considered the most inspired means of pursuing mutual improvement between human beings, becomes a means of deception and compulsion. Educational conversation once bound students together toward the pursuit of truth. Now, with the dissolution of belief in absolute truth, verbal expression by the deconstructionists on our campuses has increasingly aimed at conquest, at seizing and maintaining ideological control. Here questions warp into “questionings,” interactions into interrogations, articulations into accusations, and sentences into sentencings.

We are virtually willed into compliance under the grand narrative that no grand narratives are true, and the absolute truth that there is no absolute truth. No longer believing our breath is carried on the wind of divine consciousness, we feel only the Nietzschean breath of empty space. With the entire horizon wiped away, we drown in our own air. Our tongues reduced to mere muscle, we learn not the art of argument but the homogeneous, droning, artless regurgitation of accusations that brand us with a perpetually redefined sense of “virtue.” Together, yet utterly alone, we recite these empty prayers to the reigning cultural authorities, sacrificing intellectual dissidents on the altars of our own egos. Logos -- the reasoning word -- is dying, and we are killing it.

Our destruction of objective definition grows from the underlying belief that no one can adequately convey a reality to another through speech, that no one can truly reach another’s mind or heart. This amounts to a disbelief in the very definition of education, and if education is lost, what knowledge are we to acquire? That we are all “lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation,” as David Foster Wallace says in his address to a graduating class of Kenyon College on the value of a liberal arts education. A bit of Hebrew wisdom once warned that from such a pursuit of knowledge, rooted in pride and power, stems every ripe horror of the human experience. Do we not taste some of that horror? Do we not feel exiled from each other? Are we not out of breath?

The attempted elevation of our souls to infinite capacities for new definition and creation has proved to be dehumanizing, not deifying. The endless deconstruction of language generates disbelief in the ability of conversation and debate to sharpen a fellow human being. We have lost too much of our faith in mutual improvement and refinement, in good will and therefore friendship, in our capacity to gain strength through challenge. The extreme erosion of language illustrates a dying love for the human spirit. Losing this reverence strips us of our very humanity by blinding us to the humanity of others.

In our attempts to attain and advertise the heights of our own perceived virtue, we increasingly reduce our interactions to mere force. When persuasion is erased, only compulsion remains. Denying the existence of common ground, we stand in utter isolation. Our elimination of absolutes has wrenched away from us any true aspiration, while shrinking our sense of moral obligation to each other. Without a standard of meaning outside our own teetering mental constructions, we rob our pasts of redemption, our presents of hope, and our futures of achievement. With such a dismal interpretation of the nature of man, conversation regresses into a barbaric cacophony baying for sacrificial blood.

I fear that when at last we realize that our tyrannous butchery of dictionaries has caused our own kingdoms to crumble, we will look at the bleeding ink on our hands and wonder who will wipe it off us. We will not have the language to construct an answer. We will babble on. Only the rocks will be left to cry out.

“Antigone” was recently a student at Hamilton College.