The Oldest New Idea

In 1545, the world’s Catholic bishops gathered at the Council of Trent in order to address the growing problem of the Protestant Reformation. Reformers had many objections against Catholicism, but there was one central point of contention that was at the heart of all others. Sola scriptura (Scripture alone) was the Protestant position on authority. Neither the whims of a local priest nor the consensus of the world’s bishops could supersede what was plainly written in the books of the Bible. Nor should any type of proclamation from the church ever be given the same standing as Scripture: that of being infallible and binding on all people.

The principle of sola scriptura also implies that anyone can and should read the Bible for guidance directly. But this leads to a problem of interpretation. If Martin Luther and John Calvin both take guidance directly from the clear meaning of Scripture, they should both arrive at the same beliefs and practices. But they do not. As Vincent of Lérins had observed 1,100 years earlier, Scripture is "capable of as many interpretations as there are interpreters." The text does not wear its meaning on its sleeve to be neutrally observed without any presuppositions. This is the argument accepted by the bishops at Trent against sola scriptura: Scripture cannot be the sole authority because of the nature of texts themselves: Texts do not interpret themselves. The words on the page do not come with built-in instructions for how to resolve their own ambiguities. Without a living tradition to adjudicate among competing readings, there is no plain meaning. So according to the Catholic argument, the sole authority of Scripture actually leads to no authority at all. By the time the Council of Trent convened, Catholic theologians had long since digested the idea that reading a text is an inherently interpretive act, and there is no plain meaning outside of interpretation.

At this point, one probably recognizes what the oldest new idea is. It has been wielded ad nauseam by American leftist political activists since around 2012. Defending the 1619 Project against historians who disputed specific factual claims, Hannah-Jones wrote: "while history is what happened, it is also, just as important, how we think about what happened and what we unearth and choose to remember about what happened." Instead of arguing that certain events did or did not objectively happen, she attacked the notion that the archives of history could ever offer up objective facts. Reading the archive is an act of interpretation, and Hannah-Jones was issuing her church’s interpretation, one whose legitimacy is based in the authority of the church, not some objective reality of what happened. “We” (The New York Times, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Columbia University, New York University) “choose to remember” this interpretation. One's individual reading of history is as invalid to this cathedral as one's individual reading of the Bible is to the Vatican. Because the current cathedral of journalism and academia is committed to denouncing its predecessors, it does not realize that its favorite idea is merely one half of an old theological dispute. As far as it knows, the idea came from turtleneck and cigarette enthusiasts in 1960s Paris. It is one of the most important ideas in the history of Western thought. But almost nobody recognizes its recurrence for what it is.

"Christianity has at least an interpretive framework that does not refute its own doctrines."

In what is usually called postmodern philosophy, the central insight running from Martin Heidegger through Hans-Georg Gadamer to Jacques Derrida is that texts do not carry stable, self-evident meanings. Interpretation always involves presuppositions. The “plain reading” of any text is never really plain; it is shaped by assumptions the reader brings to it, assumptions that are usually invisible to the reader himself. There is no view from nowhere. Understanding is always situated and always embedded in a tradition, whether or not we acknowledge it.

Gadamer used the German word Vorurteil, or prejudgment, to describe the inescapable prior commitments that make reading possible at all. He meant something close to what a Catholic theologian would call “tradition”: the inherited framework of understanding without which a text is just marks on a page. Derrida pushed the point further, arguing that the instability of textual meaning was a structural feature of language itself. There is nothing outside the text to anchor it. Meaning defers endlessly.

This cluster of ideas has been treated, since the mid-twentieth century, as a breakthrough in continental philosophy. Philosophers such as Gadamer and Derrida developed the implications in a direction that previous thinkers had not. However, the core insight is clearly recognizable. It is the argument that Vincent of Lérins made in the fifth century and the Council of Trent formalized in the sixteenth. It is the Catholic argument against sola scriptura, now enthralling the recent generations of activist-academicians.

Deeper Than Words

To be fair, the postmodern problem of interpretation gives one a lot to think about. Since the argument is often centered on literary text and cultivated within recreational fields of study, it is easy to dismiss erroneously the idea as an overwrought failure mode of word games. Who cares if some neurotic bookworms cannot understand their books anymore? But the problem of interpretation is deeper than that. It runs all the way down to the intelligibility of existence itself.

Since 2004, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology neuroscientist Pawan Sinha has been running Project Prakash, a program that restores sight to children in India born with treatable blindness, usually from congenital cataracts. The children are old enough to describe what they experience, which makes them an extraordinary natural experiment in the relationship between data and meaning.

When the bandages come off, the children do not see. They have visual data (light, color, contrast) flooding their newly functional eyes, but they cannot parse it. They cannot distinguish an object from its background. They cannot identify overlapping shapes. They cannot piece together different parts of a scene into coherent wholes. The raw data are there, but there is no interpretive framework. It takes months of guided experience before they begin to see in any meaningful sense, before the stream of photons becomes recognizable as a world of objects.

This is the anti-sola scriptura argument in flesh. The data do not speak for themselves. Even at the most basic level of sensory experience, far below language and far below culture, at the level of photons hitting a retina, raw data are meaningless without a framework of interpretation. The framework is what makes reality intelligible in the first place, logically prior to any purportedly objective observations of fact. The children of Project Prakash have perfect access to the data. What they lack is the tradition of seeing.

The Schism of the Materialists

In sixteenth-century Europe, Christianity was the dominant intellectual system. Virtually everyone agreed on its authority; the fights were about how that authority operated. In twentieth- and twenty-first-century academia, scientistic materialism plays an analogous role. Scientistic materialism refers to the broad metaphysical conviction that the material world is all there is, and that legitimate knowledge is, thus, scientific knowledge. This has been the default operating system of the Western university for about a hundred and fifty years.

And, like Christianity before it, this system has suffered a great schism, with hermeneutics at the center of the dispute. On one side stand the positivists. These are the heirs of the Vienna Circle, the New Atheists, the defenders of science as a direct pipeline to objective truth. For them, facts are out there in the rocks and stars, and the right method will extract them without the contaminating interference of interpretation. Science is the only source of knowledge, as the physicist Lawrence Krauss claims. This sect believes in sola materia: One does not need a tradition to read truth from the material universe. Nature interprets itself, if one looks at it hard enough. The popular face of this tendency is a certain kind of “public intellectual,” the sort who appears on podcasts to explain that philosophy is dead because physics has answered all its questions.

On the other side stands the cathedral, the descendants of Marx and Engels’ materialist analysis of history. Having thrown away the notion of plain objective interpretation, philosophers such as Derrida and Michel Foucault adopted the practice of “suspicion” from Marx and Engels: ascribing unflattering motives to one’s ideological opponents in order to deflate their interpretations of the world. This practice has since proliferated into the mess of critical theories: critical race theory, critical legal theory, gender theory, and the rest. This sect of materialists claims that there are no uninterpreted facts. Every dataset, every measurement, every claim to objectivity is shaped by power, by social position, by the interests of the observer. Even mathematics, in the most aggressive versions of this view, is a cultural artifact of particular communities, with no legitimate claim to neutrality. As Foucault put it, "Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power."

These two factions of materialists despise each other, and their mutual contempt has been one of the defining features of intellectual life for the past two decades. But notice their positions. The sola materia camp holds that the book of nature is self-interpreting: Look at the evidence and the truth is plain. The critical theory cathedral holds that no text, including the text of empirical data, interprets itself, that all reading is shaped by an interpretive framework, as well as that the claim of objectivity is a power move.

The Catholic bishops at Trent would have recognized this argument immediately. It is their argument. The critical theorists are, in structural terms, playing the Catholic role: insisting that one cannot have sola scriptura (or sola materia) because texts and data require an interpretive authority. The positivists are playing the Protestant role: insisting that the evidence speaks for itself and that the interpretive layer is an illegitimate usurpation.

The Rebuttal

The Protestant counter-argument against the Catholic position was always available, and it is available to the positivists too. If no Scripture has an inherently discernible meaning, then neither does any pronouncement from the Magisterium. The Church leaders have not solved the problem of interpretation by adding another layer of interpretation. In the Bible, the book of Hebrews is an interpretation of the book of Leviticus, but Hebrews still needs to be interpreted. But then the interpretation of Hebrews will need to be interpreted, and so on. If Vincent of Lérins was correct that a text is capable of as many interpretations as there are interpreters, then layers of ecclesiastical interpretation only multiply the subjects to be interpreted, expanding the space of potential interpretations rather than narrowing it.

Likewise, if the social and material conditions of the world are capable of as many interpretations as there are interpreters, then layers of critical interpretation only multiply the things to be interpreted and cannot carry any inherent meaning or concrete implications about what any of us should think or do. 

But this rebuttal, though powerful, does not conclusively resolve the issue. It exposes a contradiction in the anti-sola scriptura position, but it does not repair the flaw in the sola scriptura position. It points out that the Catholic (or critical-theory) solution has the same problem it diagnoses, but it does not demonstrate that the data really can stand alone after all. One is left with a predicament: Interpretation requires a framework, but frameworks also require interpretation.

The Theological Resolution

Within Christianity, the interpretive regress was ultimately halted on both sides of the Reformation by an appeal that lay outside of the text-and-interpretation cycle entirely. Both Catholics and Protestants grounded meaning, at bottom, in guidance from God himself rather than in a text or an institution. God, in Christian theology, is more than the author of Scripture or the founder of the Church. He is the Logos—the Word, the principle of intelligibility itself. Instead of something humans construct or institutions confer, it flows from the nature of a God who is the one “in [whom] we live, and move, and have our being.”

Catholics halted their regress by claiming that the Holy Spirit guides the Magisterium into truth, that the interpretive authority of the Church is underwritten by a divine guarantee. Protestants halted theirs by claiming that the same Spirit illuminates the individual reader, that God makes his meaning known through the text to the faithful heart. These are different claims about how divine meaning reaches human beings, but they share a common foundation: Meaning is grounded in a transcendent source that is prior to all texts, all institutions, all human acts of interpretation.

One does not have to accept this theological claim to see that it performs an important structural function. It provides something that materialist epistemology cannot: a fixed point outside the circle of interpretation that is not itself just another interpretation. This gives both forms of Christianity internal consistency. Many materialists argue that Christianity is not externally consistent with scientific findings, but that is a further question. Christianity has at least an interpretive framework that does not refute its own doctrines.

The Materialist Dilemma

This is where the contemporary replay of the old schism diverges. Scientistic materialism, by definition, has no transcendent ground. There is no Logos. There is no divine intellect guaranteeing the intelligibility of the universe. There is no Holy Spirit guiding either the institution of science or the individual researcher toward truth. The metaphysical commitment of the whole system is that there is nothing outside the material order, no point beyond the circle of observation and interpretation.

This means that neither side of the materialist schism has access to the move that stabilized both sides of the Christian schism. The positivists cannot appeal to a divine guarantee that nature will yield up its meaning to honest inquiry. The critical theorists cannot claim a divinely guided interpretive authority. Both factions are trapped in the regress, and their metaphysical commitments prohibit them from reaching the exit that the Christians used.

The positivists continue to act as though the facts speak for themselves, as though the scientific method is a self-validating procedure that needs no philosophical foundation, conspicuously incurious about basic questions like “Why should we trust empirical observation?” or “Why should anyone do anything at all, since the material world is silent on morality?” Without answering these questions, the sola materia believers cannot say why the critical theory cathedral should leave them alone to measure their rocks.

The critical theorists have, in a shallow sense, accepted the absence of meaning. They insist that truth claims are socially constructed, that objectivity is a myth, that there is no stable meaning to be found. Catholic epistemology stripped of Catholic metaphysics leaves literally everything unresolved. In practice, of course, the critical theorists do not actually live without assuming they understand the true meanings of texts and material conditions. They hold their own political convictions with certainty, miraculously justified from the critique they apply to everyone else. One's objectivity is an illusion. The critical theorists know this to be absolutely true.

Consequences

I have laid out an analogy between the old Christian problem of interpretation and the new materialist problem of interpretation, and I have noted where the analogy diverges. I find this interesting on its own, but it also has power to make further sense of the current ideological landscape. Without any internally consistent way to assert objective meaning, materialists with political agendas are in a tricky spot. If the world itself has no inherently correct interpretation, then how does one convince oneself and others that the world is one way, that it should be another way, and that we should act in a certain way to change it? It becomes obviously ridiculous when one lays it out and thinks about it for a minute. So the key to success is to avoid thinking about it.

People can live with inconsistency in this way. They may continue to hold to their self-contradictory positions indefinitely. That is probably the normal thing for humans to do. But people also have at least some discomfort with dissonance. Internal inconsistency can nag at us until we change something. Often, belief changes to fall in line with behavior. But it remains to be seen what new belief materialists even could reach for in order to pull themselves out of the self-defeating hermeneutic. The most common cope has been, and will continue to be avoidance: Do not think about the ways in which one's beliefs refute themselves.

The best way to avoid thinking about the incoherence of one’s worldview is to remain in perpetual dramatic conflict with one’s ideological enemies. Group conflict feels like it has its own inherent justification: We need to defeat them before they defeat us. That feels like enough to ground an interpretation of the world for today. If we do not believe in the rightness of our interpretation, then we shall lose. We can explain away our enemies’ interpretations by pointing out their false objectivity. But applying that suspicion to our interpretation of the world is a luxury we cannot afford right now because of the conflict. After all, we already determined that compared to them, we are certainly on the right side. As such, there is little point in quibbling about esoteric details. Or so the semi-conscious chain of logic goes for many materialists.

But what happens when an ideological group with this logic wins, when it gets what it always wanted? Since cognitive dissonance was kept at bay while in ideological battle, the winning group will need more conflict to keep the dissonance from flooding in. The group will need to make new enemies or poke their tired old enemies hard enough to instigate a new fight. For example, after the American Left won its campaign for gay marriage, it immediately started a push for something that was sure to drum up some enemies.

The average progressive leftist did not know in 2010 that she wanted to perform irreversible sex-trait surgeries on children. However, by 2024, it was an explicit policy commitment openly championed by the Harris-Walz presidential campaign. When conservatives see drastic developments like this in the agenda on the Left, they mistakenly conclude that it was a secret agenda all along. But elites on the Left are not, in fact, that smart and strategic. They mostly blurt out whatever they believe at the moment. Many on the Left would love to take the credit that conservatives give them: “gender-affirming care for minors” was always right (even though it was made up yesterday), and so they always supported it. However, in reality, even the vast majority of left-wing activists in academia and media had no such belief in 2010. They were not intentionally concealing a secret plan from the beginning to arrive at trans children. When religious conservatives made slippery slope arguments against gay marriage, liberals at the time consciously believed that the conservative worries were drastically overblown—that the only agenda was really just for responsible adults in long-term gay relationships to have legal recognition like straight couples. Only when victory became imminent did the materialist magisterium formulate a new interpretation, drastically moving the finish line to a hill that would require heavy conflict to take.

The beliefs of the materialist clergy and masses changed readily because the finish line was never the point; the conflict was the point. It is conflict with ideological enemies that enables avoidance of the cognitive dissonance that could otherwise destroy an internally inconsistent ideology. The normal assumption would be that stronger internal logic would make a person more convinced of a worldview, and the more convinced a person is, the more he will fight for his worldview. But this says the opposite: When a person’s most foundational beliefs lack coherence, he will fight more tirelessly against rival views because that is what enables avoidance of facing his own dissonance. This entails perpetual escalation: The issues of the day always need to be inherently upsetting, insulting, or ridiculous enough to rouse a counteroffensive. This basically offers an explanation of so-called “wokeness,” which is above all else ridiculous. The ridiculousness is an essential feature of it that performs a specific function.

Christian beliefs do not comparably escalate because they do not hide the supernatural basis of their claims to intelligibility. Christians are supposed to meditate on the Logos. Provocative ridiculousness is a psychological consequence of submitting to the dogma of scientific materialism and rejecting any transcendent meaning; of godlessness. Or as the book of Romans puts it: “Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools.” This passage actually deals specifically with the psychological effects of misguided intellectualism that denies the “invisible attributes” of God and instead asserts the preeminence of material things. Notably, the list of effects is centered on foolish and evil distortions of sexuality and gender. These are distortions not just done in the dark but rather celebrated and promoted at the highest levels of society. If the Western literati have quickly gone from “God is [sadly] dead” to championing puberty blockers for children and allowing the removal of teenagers' breasts, then Paul the Apostle certainly got something right in this passage. And to the list of sins attributable to our intellectual class should be added devastating unoriginality.

Their supposedly progressive values have merely progressed to something that was predicted by Paul two thousand years ago. And they impress each other by grasping half of a hermeneutical debate that was resolved in Christianity five hundred years ago. It gives their project of “deconstruction” an intellectual sheen, but upon further inspection, it refutes its own rationale. It is true that Scripture alone, matter alone, or data alone are an insufficient foundation for intelligibility and knowledge. All signs require interpretation, and interpretation requires a grounding that the sign itself cannot provide. Vincent of Lérins knew this in 440 AD. The Council of Trent knew it in 1545. Postmodern philosophers realized it in the 1960s. And those born with congenital cataracts experience it when the bandages come off. The materialist cathedral loves this insight because it can be used to undermine many traditional systems of thought. But those same materialists have no protection against their own weapon, which creates a perpetually growing demand for enemies to fight instead. To fill unmet demand, the cathedral imagines enemies (as in hate crime hoaxes) or awakens real resistance by perpetually becoming more provocative. The future of Western thought is not bright if the cathedral cannot find a way to defeat its own favorite idea.

Stuart Doyle is a Ph.D. student in clinical psychology at the University of Kansas. He holds a B.A. in neuroscience and behavior from Columbia University and an M.S. in criminology from the University of Pennsylvania. He is a veteran of the United States Marine Corps.