Luke Ford

In 1976 the Massachusetts Institute of Technology gave a literary critic a chair. The chair had a long name, William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of American Cultural History, and it sat inside the temple of the machine. Leo Marx (1919-2022) had written a book about a locomotive that ruined a poet’s afternoon. Now he drew his salary from the men who built the locomotives. He walked into rooms full of students who cared about turbines and circuits and assumed Thoreau was a hippie, and he taught them Thoreau anyway. He added environmental studies to his teaching because the young engineers wanted to talk about the planet more than about Hawthorne. The garden-keeper had taken a post in the engine room, and he kept the post for the rest of a very long life. He died at home in Boston at the age of 102, having watched the century whose machines he studied carry every one of its shocks into the palm of every student’s hand.

A hero system, in the account Ernest Becker (1924-1974) gave near the end of his own life, is the answer a man builds to a fact he cannot face. The fact is that he dies. The answer is a structure of significance that tells him what counts, what earns him a place inside something larger and longer than his body. The hero system is not a map of the world. It is a defense against the knowledge that the world will go on without him. Becker’s wager is that almost everything men call value, almost everything they call sacred, grows from this root. Read a man’s hero system and you read what he has decided will redeem his time.

Leo Marx kept his sacred ground in the middle landscape. Not the wilderness, which terrifies, and not the iron city, which crushes, but the cultivated place between them, the garden where man and the not-man hold a truce. Jefferson (1743-1826) dreamed this ground at continental scale, a green republic of farmers spread to the horizon. Marx spent fifteen years tracing how American writers heard the dream break.

The image at the center of The Machine in the Garden is a man in a clearing. Hawthorne (1804-1864) sits in the woods at Sleepy Hollow with his notebook open. Thoreau (1817-1862) sits by the pond at Walden. A locomotive shrieks across the distance, and the green hour shatters into an awareness of iron and smoke and the power gathering in the cities. Marx calls this the interrupted idyll, and he splits the men who suffer it into two kinds. The sentimental man flees backward into nostalgia, a soft retreat that pretends the train never came. The complex man holds the ideal yoked to its opposite and refuses both the flight and the surrender. When Melville (1819-1891) blesses the survival of Ishmael, Marx sees a pastoralism that keeps the contradiction breathing rather than closing it with a comforting lie.

Run that through Becker and the stakes come clear. The garden is where death is held off. Harmony is the denial. The whistle is the reminder of death arriving at the feast. Sentimental pastoralism is the cheap immortality, the man who pretends the train never came and so pretends he will not die. Complex pastoralism is the harder heroism. Stand in the clearing, hear the whistle, name what it carries, and stay. The refusal to flee is Marx’s idea of a life worth the having. He spent a career honoring writers who managed it and quarreling with a country that mostly would not.

There is a second pillar, and he built it late. In an essay he first delivered in 1996 and revised for print in 2010, “Technology: The Emergence of a Hazardous Concept,” Marx argues that a single word had turned dangerous. Men took something they make and do, and they turned it into an agent with a life of its own. They began to say that technology drives history, that technology decides, that technology arrives like weather. Marx names the move reification. You endow a human activity with the character of a thing, and then the thing seems to command you. For Becker this reified Progress is a god. It absolves men of choice and answers their fear of nothing-ness with a promise of transcendence by machine. Marx refuses the god. He insists that men choose, and that men answer for the choosing. To deny your agency is to deny that you will be judged, and to deny judgment is one more flight from the burden of being a mortal who must act in time.

So Marx leaves us a question and a quarrel, and both gather around a single word. The word is progress. He asks it plainly in a 1987 essay, “Does Improved Technology Mean Progress?” His answer holds two values apart. An improvement counts as progress only when it serves justice and the good life. A faster engine is not an ascent of the soul. Now set his meaning beside the meanings other men carry, and watch the same whistle reach different ears.

A founder stands at a window south of Market Street in San Francisco, the city’s fog burning off below him, his slide deck still glowing on the wall behind. Progress for him is the curve, the doubling, the compute that compounds until intelligence slips the leash of biology altogether. He hears the whistle and hears the future arriving on schedule. “We are going to escape the body,” he tells the room, and he means it as good news. His hero system promises that the species outruns death by building its successor. The machine in his garden is the only god he trusts to grant the thing Becker says all men want, which is to not end.

Two thousand miles east a man works a hillside with horses because the slope is too steep for a tractor and because he has decided the horses keep him honest. Progress is the word the company used while it took the topsoil and the young people and left the county older every year. He hears the whistle and hears the auction. His significance lives in staying put, in the membership of a place that holds his grandfather’s grave and might hold his grandson’s crib. He reads Marx and finds half a brother and half a stranger. Marx mourns the rupture from a chair in Cambridge. This man lives inside it, and pays the mortgage on it, and buries his neighbors who lost the fight.

In a ward in Lagos a physician reads a chart where the line for infant mortality bends down across ten years, and the line is her life’s work. Progress is that line. The whistle is the ambulance on the new road, the cold chain that keeps the vaccine alive to the last village, the generator that holds the lights when the grid fails. The romance of the unspoiled garden strikes her as a comfort for men whose children already survive. Her hero system counts saved bodies, and it counts them one at a time. She might tell Marx that the machine in her garden is the thing that kept her daughter breathing through the night.

In a stone choir a Benedictine sings the office he has sung for forty years. Progress is the slow ascent of the soul toward God, and the pronoun he uses for God is Him, and nothing in the newspaper alters the climb. The world’s progress is the rearrangement of dust. He hears the whistle and hears noise. He and Marx share a suspicion of the cult of the new, and they part on the question of where the eternal lives. For the monk it lives outside of time, and the garden and the machine pass together into the same forgetting.

In the Gulf a planner unrolls a drawing of a city laid in a straight line across empty desert, a mirrored wall a hundred miles long, and he believes he is summoning a future out of sand. Progress is the will to build the monument that says a people existed and reached. He hears the whistle and hears the cranes. His hero system is the pharaoh’s, the oldest one we have, which answers death with stone that outlasts the builder. Marx, watching the machine sold as paradise and the city marketed as a garden, hears the old American confusion spoken in a new accent.

One whistle. Six men. Six meanings, and each one stands as plain fact inside the house that holds it and reads as folly from the house next door. This is Becker’s hard teaching carried into a single word. Progress is never a neutral measure of how far we have come. It names what a hero system has chosen to count as the redemption of the time, and what one system counts another cannot see. The founder’s salvation is the farmer’s theft. The physician’s mercy is the monk’s vanity. The planner’s monument is Marx’s confusion. They do not disagree about the facts on the ground so much as they pray to different answers to the same fear.

Marx’s place in this is particular and worth holding still to see. He did not pick a side and call it the future. He heard, in one shriek of one locomotive crossing one American afternoon, that the country had no settled answer, that the garden and the machine both claimed it, and that an honest man holds the quarrel open rather than shutting it with a lie that lets him sleep. That posture costs something. The sentimentalist gets the warm retreat. The accelerationist gets the rush of the curve. The complex man gets the contradiction and the long watch and no rest. Marx took the long watch, and he took it for eighty years, and he took it from a chair the engineers had built him inside the temple of the very power he refused to worship.

He spent that career trying to put the human hand back into the sentence, to make men say that they choose the machine rather than that the machine chooses them. He lost the argument in the only court that decides such things, which is common speech. By the time he died the word technology had become a god that almost no one argues with, and the students who once thought Thoreau a hippie now carried the whole noise of the world in their pockets and called the arrangement progress without a tremor. The whistle no longer interrupts the idyll. The whistle is the idyll now. And somewhere in the record there remains a man in a clearing who heard it coming, named what it carried, and stayed.

The Great Delusion

In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:

My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”
[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization…

If John J. Mearsheimer is right, his anthropology undermines the foundations of Leo Marx.
Marx argued that the defining American myth is the desire to escape the complex social pressures of civilization and retreat into a pristine, rural landscape—the garden. This pastoral ideal is disrupted by the sudden intrusion of industrial technology—the machine. Marx analyzed this tension as a psychic split in American culture, tracking how writers like Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain, and F. Scott Fitzgerald tried to reconcile individual freedom with industrial power.
Mearsheimer’s realism upends Marx’s cultural history in many ways.
Marx treats the American pastoral myth as an urge to escape organized society and discover a baseline of individual liberty, self-reliance, and direct communion with nature. If Mearsheimer is right, this pastoral ideal is an anthropological fiction. Human beings do not long to stand alone outside a group, nor can they survive that way. The “state of nature” or the solitary forest retreat is a luxury concept born of a stable, secure civilization. What Marx reads as a deep, universal human impulse to escape social containment is merely a parochial fantasy peculiar to safe, wealthy societies that can temporarily afford to downplay human tribalism.
Marx treats the relentless drive toward industrialization, urbanization, and technological expansion as a tragic historical movement that crushed the tranquil American garden. Mearsheimer’s worldview reveals that this industrial expansion is the logical product of group competition under conditions of structural anarchy. A nation-state does not build railways, steel mills, and factories out of a simple cultural choice or a mechanical obsession; it builds them to maximize its material power relative to other states. In an anarchic world, a society that remains in the garden is eventually conquered by a neighbor that builds the machine. Marx analyzes industrialization as a cultural tragedy, whereas Mearsheimer shows it is an existential survival strategy.
Marx’s critical framework focuses heavily on how elite writers use literary forms to navigate and resolve the contradiction between the machine and the garden. He looks to literature as a sensitive register of human consciousness trying to find balance. Mearsheimer’s ranking of human faculties places reason and literary reflection last. The cultural myths Marx tracks do not determine the path of a society. A nation’s direction is driven by its structural situation and its primal need for security. The poetic wrestling between pastoralism and industrialism is a surface variation. When a group faces real scarcity or a threat from a rival, it discards the pastoral ideal instantly and embraces the machine to ensure its survival.
Marx treats the pastoral ideal as a deep, shared psychological wound within the American psyche—a genuine, painful ambivalence about the cost of progress.
Mearsheimer’s anthropology, paired with alliance theory, implies that the pastoral ideal is not a psychological struggle, but an ideological weapon used by specific elite coalitions. The romantic defense of the “garden” against the “machine” was historically mounted by agrarian elites, and later by literary intellectuals, to defend their own social status, prestige, and power against the rising industrial and financial coalitions. When Thoreau or Melville criticized the locomotive, they were not registering a universal human grief; they were signaling loyalty to an intellectual tribe that defined its virtue by its opposition to commercial mechanics. The myth of the garden serves to shame rivals and secure the moral high ground for the holder’s coalition.
Marx argues that the tension between the machine and the garden forms a dominant cultural framework that fundamentally shapes how all Americans perceive their world and make choices. He treats this literary pattern as a primary engine of American historical consciousness.
Mearsheimer’s realism flips this hierarchy of causation. Cultural myths do not shape the material structure of a society; the material requirements of group survival shape its culture. The intense childhood socialization Mearsheimer describes infuses individuals with values that keep them loyal to their state and survival group. The pastoral myth was never a deep structural force; it was a luxury narrative that flourished precisely because the American nation-state was insulated by two oceans and faced no immediate existential threat. The moment a real crisis of survival or global competition arrives, this entire cultural framework evaporates, proving it was a surface decoration rather than a foundational driver of human behavior.
A core assumption in The Machine in the Garden is that industrial technology is inherently alienating, tearing men away from their natural, organic state and fragmenting their social bonds.
Mearsheimer’s view of the social animal implies that technology does not alter the fundamental nature of the creature. Men are tribal from start to finish. The introduction of the machine does not atomize the human being; the human being simply embeds the machine into his tribal survival strategy. A factory, a railway system, or a modern communications network becomes a new way for the group to organize, cooperate, and project power against rivals. What Marx diagnoses as technological alienation is the standard friction that occurs when a tribe scales up its organization to outcompete other groups in an anarchic world. The creature remains intensely social, and his primary allegiance is still to the group that wields the machine for his defense.
If Mearsheimer is right, Marx’s analysis of the machine and the garden captures a literary elite’s romantic anxiety while missing the structural operations of the species. Men are social animals whose primary environment is not the untamed wilderness of the garden, but the protective vehicle of the tribe, and they will build whatever machinery is necessary to defend it.

‘A Big Misunderstanding’

If David Pinsof is right, Marx’s entire framework is an elegant cover story. The tension between the machine and the garden is not a profound philosophical dilemma. It is a description of how the intellectual class negotiates its own comfort, status, and power.

Marx argued that Americans have a deep, sentimental attachment to the pastoral ideal—a desire for peace, simplicity, and a harmonious relationship with nature.

From Pinsof’s perspective, the “garden” is not a genuine spiritual yearning; it is a high-status luxury belief. Historically, the people who have the time and resources to romanticize the wilderness or the quiet countryside are those who have already extracted immense wealth from the urban, industrial economy. Spouting love for the garden is an effective way to signal that you are above the vulgar, everyday scramble for survival. The intellectual champions the garden because it allows him to claim a higher moral plane than the industrialist who builds the machines or the laborer who operates them.

In Marx’s telling, the “machine” represents the brutal reality of industrial capitalism, which constantly threatens to destroy the pastoral peace. Marx framed the intellectual’s hostility toward the machine as a noble defense of human values against cold, mechanical greed.

Pinsof’s logic reveals a zero-sum competition for authority. The intellectual does not hate the machine because it is ugly or loud; he hates it because the machine represents a rival hierarchy. The engineers, capitalists, and industrial tycoons who build the machines do not care about literary theory or academic credentials; they gain power through market dominance and material production.

By framing the machine as a destructive force that ruins the human soul, the intellectual class attempts to delegitimize their rivals. It is a dirty fight wrapped in aesthetic criticism. The intellectual positions himself as the defender of the garden, which conveniently makes him the person who should be in charge of regulating, curbing, and guiding the men who build the machines.

Marx concluded that the conflict between pastoralism and industrialism is an “unresolved contradiction” in American culture—a tragic problem with no easy solution. He spent his career analyzing this hole, teaching generations of students at MIT and Amherst how to navigate its complexities.

If Pinsof is right, keeping the problem unresolved is highly functional for the academic. If the contradiction were solved, the critic would lose his job. By framing the tension as a deep, permanent feature of the human condition that requires constant interpretation, Leo Marx ensured the ongoing necessity of his own profession. The intellectual thrives on the myth that society is broken by these deep misunderstandings and cultural neuroses. He does not actually want to fix the world; he wants to study the hole, decorate it with brilliant prose, and maintain his position as its most sophisticated chronicler.

A photograph from 2014 shows Daniel Aaron (1912-2016) in his Harvard office, pointing at a picture of himself as a boy. He is a hundred and two. The hand that points has signed petitions, edited seventeen million words of another man’s diary, and helped decide which American books stay in print forever. The boy in the frame knows none of this is coming. The boy has two living parents, a father with a Hollywood law practice, and an address on a Wilshire Boulevard that still runs partly to dirt. Within a few years both parents die and the boy goes back to Chicago to relatives. The old man pointing at him has outlived the parents by ninety years. He has outlived the relatives, the fraternity brothers, the department chairmen, and nearly every writer he ever interviewed, studied, or canonized.

Ernest Becker (1924-1974) held that a man builds his life as a denial of death. The culture hands him a script for significance, a hero system, and inside that script he earns the feeling that he counts, that some part of him will outlast the body. Becker called the deepest form of the wish the causa sui project: the desire to be one’s own father, one’s own cause, the author of a self that no parent and no accident gave you. Most men get the script free, by birth. They inherit a faith, a people, a flag, and they spend their lives playing the part. Aaron’s case runs cleaner than most because the inherited script got taken from him at ten. The orphan keeps no tribe by default. He has to choose one, or build one, and then he has to earn his standing in it from a cold start.

What Aaron built was a country. Not by birthright, since the country already counted him a citizen, but by stewardship. He made himself the man who understood America better than the people who simply were American, and through that understanding he claimed a membership no one could revoke and no pogrom could chase him out of.

Watch the choosing happen. At the University of Michigan he lives in an all-Jewish fraternity, drifts off the premedical track, and reads Nietzsche and Baudelaire instead of chemistry. He takes a degree in English at the bottom of the Depression, a degree good for nothing, and carries it to Harvard. There a department chairman gives him the kind of advice that arranges a life. Jewish students in English, the chairman says, sometimes do better in German or chemistry or sociology, fields where a name and a face and an accent draw less notice. Aaron takes the hint and turns it sideways. He enrolls in the new program in the history of American civilization, founded the same year Harvard turns three hundred. In 1943 he becomes the first man to take a Harvard doctorate in it.

He had a word for what came next. Dehyphenation. The Jewish-American hyphen wears away, and he lets it. He converts to nothing. He joins no congregation and trades his grandfathers’ Russia for no new orthodoxy. Instead he attaches himself, his own verb, to parts of the American tradition he can use, and he goes looking for more parts to attach. An orphan with no father makes a father out of a nation and then spends seventy years proving himself the nation’s most attentive son.

The stance he chose for the work was the witness. He liked to call himself an observer, a reporter, a social historian who happened by. The self-description carried a half-step of distance built into it, and the distance was the point. During the war he works the asparagus fields of western Massachusetts beside Polish-American farmers. He pitches for a local softball nine called the Purseglove Pups. He interviews former Communists in their Mexican and London exiles. In each scene a reader feels two things at once, the closeness of the encounter and the gap the encounter never closes. Aaron sits with men who bet their lives on something. He takes notes. A critic of his memoir saw it plainly: the man who risks little sits across the table from the men who risked everything.

Those men gave him his best subject. In Writers on the Left he tells the story of the American writers who handed their whole hero system to the revolution. Mike Gold (1894-1967), who had written the world of Jewish poverty into Jews Without Money. Joseph Freeman (1897-1965). Max Eastman (1883-1969). They wagered their bid for permanence on History with a capital letter, on the future tribunal of the working class, on a verdict that would arrive and vindicate them. The verdict never came. History fired them. The thirties faith curdled into the forties and fifties disenchantment, and Aaron, who had bet nothing, studied the wreckage from his chair, outlived the wreckers by half a century, and put some of them back into authoritative editions on terms he set. The man who took no risk became the keeper of the men who took every risk. His scholarship even reached back and warmed them. It moved Freeman to write him long confessional letters. It sent Gold back to the world he had captured young.

He was no coward about it, and the record shows where he stood. At Smith he backed Newton Arvin (1900-1963) when the college pushed Arvin out over his homosexuality. He circulated a petition for Granville Hicks (1901-1982), a Communist whose teaching contract Harvard declined to renew. The petition earned Aaron a line in an FBI file, a file that reads, now that the Freedom of Information requests have pried it loose, as the dullest spy story in Cambridge. A faculty member suggested a petition. That is the whole crime. Even his brush with danger comes to us as a signature, a curatorial act, a name added to a document about a man the state found more interesting than him.

Then he built the apparatus. In 1979 he helped found the Library of America and served as its first president. Set the orphan’s biography beside the institution and the shape of the life stands clear. A man who lost his own lineage at ten spends his ninth and tenth decades conferring lineage on the nation’s dead. He runs the room where American writers stop being mortal and start being permanent, bound in uniform black, printed on paper that does not yellow, kept in print by charter. He could not keep his own parents. He kept Melville and Twain and Edmund Wilson (1895-1972). The boy who came first only because the roll call ran alphabetically grew into the man who decided whose names made the permanent roll.

So the sacred value at the center of Daniel Aaron is America, and to see what the word held for him you have to see what it could not have held. For Aaron, America names a tradition a stranger can study his way into, a democratic bastion worth understanding because it might be worth preserving, a family that takes you in if you learn its language better than its native speakers. The country is a text. You earn your place by reading it well. The whole hero system rests on a faith that close, fair, ungrudging attention buys belonging, and that belonging bought this way can never be taken back the way a hyphen or a homeland can.

That faith is legible only from inside the assimilated orphan’s project. Move to another hero system and the same five letters mean something a thousand miles off.

To a man on Pine Ridge whose grandmother walked to a boarding school that forbade her language, America names the thing that broke the world, and no amount of fair reading redeems it, because the text itself is the inventory of what was taken. To a Pentecostal mother homeschooling six children in exurban Texas, America names a covenant, a nation God set apart and might yet abandon, and her standing in it comes not from understanding it but from obeying its founding promises to its Founder. Aaron’s careful neutrality would strike her as the very faithlessness eating the country alive. To a Salvadoran roofer who crossed in 2004 and frames houses in the Dallas heat, America names the place that pays, indifferent, transactional, neither family nor text, a job site with better wages and worse winters, and the scholar’s loving custody of its literature belongs to a world he will never be invited into and does not want. To a Boston matron whose forebears sailed before the Revolution, America names a bloodline, a genealogy of pews and portraits, and Aaron is the clever newcomer who learned the catechism by rote, admirable, useful, and not quite one of us. To a Black organizer who came up through 1968, America names a promise written in a hand that never meant to honor it, and the canon Aaron guards is the document of his exclusion, the official memory that left his people, in Aaron’s own word for the Civil War’s writers, unfaced.

Five men and women, one word, five hero systems that share almost nothing. Each treats America as the stage on which a soul earns its weight, and each weighs it on a different scale. The dispossessed weigh it as theft. The covenant believer weighs it as a trust from Heaven. The laborer weighs it in dollars and distance. The descendant weighs it in blood. The organizer weighs it as a debt unpaid. Aaron weighs it as a library to be kept accurate and kept open. None of them is reading the same country, because none of them is denying death the same way.

His way had a tell, and the tell was the open door. For thirty-three years after he retired, Aaron held court in his English Department office at the Barker Center, the longest-running open seminar anyone could name. Friends a third his age came. Colleagues from a dozen countries came. He met them with curiosity and play and a self-deprecation that wanted no disciples and collected hundreds of devotees instead. He performed the membership daily, the host who could not be evicted from the house he had spent a life learning to keep. The boy in the photograph had no people. The old man pointing at him had a worldwide following and a wall of permanent books with his fingerprints on the spines.

He ended his memoir calling himself a citizen of two Americas, and the phrase concedes the whole game. A man secure in one country does not count them. The counting is the immortality project showing through. Aaron took the orphan’s wound, the lost tribe and the dead parents, and he answered it with a country he could read his way into and an archive he could make permanent, and he lived to a hundred and three inside that answer, longer than the radicals who bet on the revolution, longer than the believers who bet on the covenant, longer than the men whose contracts the state declined to renew. The question his long life leaves open is the one Becker would press. Did the man who took no risks finally win the thing the risk-takers died wanting, a name that outlasts the body, by the simple method of guarding everyone else’s? Or did he buy permanence at the only price permanence ever asks, which is to watch from the doorway while other men go inside and burn?

The Great Delusion

In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:

My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”
[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization…

If John J. Mearsheimer is right, his anthropology challenges the intellectual historical framework of Daniel Aaron, a pioneer of American Studies and author of landmark works like Men of Good Hope and Writers on the Left.
Aaron approached American intellectual and literary history through a progressive lens, chronicling how individual writers and thinkers interacted with utopian dreams, radical politics, and democratic ideals. He viewed the shift of American intellectuals toward communism in the 1930s not as a simple case of subversion, but as an honest, critical engagement with human suffering and an attempt to expand the boundaries of the American democratic tradition.
Mearsheimer’s realism upends Aaron’s historical narrative in many ways.
In Writers on the Left, Aaron treats the attraction of American intellectuals—such as Max Eastman, John Reed, and Langston Hughes—to communism as a moral and philosophical struggle. He focuses on their literary and ideological navigation of a crisis.
If Mearsheimer is right, Aaron misinterprets this movement by focusing on the surface rhetoric of ideas. Human reason ranks last among the ways preferences are formed, falling far behind socialization and innate sentiments. The radicalization of the 1930s intelligentsia was not an act of individual critical reasoning breaking free from bourgeois culture. It was a classic process of tribal realignment. Faced with the crisis of the Great Depression, these writers did not independently think their way into Marxism; they sought the protection and solidarity of a new, cohesive intellectual coalition that provided clear moral boundaries and a shared weapon against status rivals.
In Men of Good Hope, Aaron sought to rehabilitate a native American progressive tradition, tracing a line of reformist thought from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Thorstein Veblen. Aaron believed this tradition was fueled by a distinct “faith in the possibilities of democracy”—a shared ethical framework that could guide social reform through reason and pragmatic gradualism.
Mearsheimer’s worldview implies that this progressive faith is built on an incorrect view of the creature. Liberalism and its progressive offshoots mistakenly treat society as an aggregate of individual choosers who can be united by abstract universal principles. The American progressive tradition Aaron champions is not a neutral discovery of discoverable utopias; it is a parochial ideology belonging to a specific, educated Western coalition. The belief that human societies can be permanently improved or unified around abstract democratic ideals ignores the hard reality of human tribalism and structural anarchy.
Aaron characterized the eventual disillusionment and departure of American writers from the Communist Party in the 1940s as a tragic, internal reckoning with a failed utopian dream.
Mearsheimer’s anthropology, paired with David Pinsof’s alliance theory, offers a simpler, structural explanation that strips away the literary romance. Ideas and universalist creeds serve to bind alliances and signal loyalty to a group. When the Soviet state under Stalin acted to ensure its own survival and hegemony through ruthless power politics (such as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact), the universalist language of literary communism could no longer protect the reputations of American writers within their local social groups. They abandoned the coalition not because their critical faculties suddenly matured, but because the cost of remaining in that specific tribe became dangerous to their survival and status in the American nation-state.
In The Unwritten War: American Writers and the Civil War (1973), Aaron examines how American writers dealt with the trauma of the Civil War. He notes with disappointment that the war failed to produce a singular literary masterpiece, and he attributes this dearth to the psychological and emotional resistance of writers who were “blinded by bias” and unable to comprehend the full moral and historical meaning of the conflict.
Mearsheimer’s realism shows that Aaron misinterprets what a national crisis does to the human mind. Under the pressure of existential conflict, men do not become detached, universal moral observers who process national tragedy through objective reason. Humans are tribal at their core; when an anarchic system fractures into war, early socialization and survival instincts tighten. Writers like Walt Whitman or Herman Melville did not fail a moral test of comprehension; they reacted precisely as Mearsheimer’s anthropology predicts, using their work to stabilize, defend, and process the survival of their respective social groups. Aaron’s expectation that a writer should rise above the tribal fray to produce a balanced, universal masterpiece asks human nature to violate its own design.
Aaron focuses on the “invisibility of Black Americans” in nineteenth-century Civil War literature, treating the blocking out of race by White writers as a profound failure of the American democratic imagination. Mearsheimer’s anthropology, supplemented by alliance theory, offers a structural explanation that strips away Aaron’s moralism. Socialization during a long, vulnerable childhood infuses individuals with the specific boundaries and prejudices of their immediate group to ensure survival.
White Northern and Southern writers ignored or distorted the reality of Black Americans not because their democratic machinery suffered a temporary malfunction, but because their primary evolutionary obligation was to the cohesion of their own coalition. A group’s narrative operates to protect its internal solidarity and defend its status against immediate rivals. The “blindness” Aaron documents is the standard operation of the tribal mind insulating itself from inputs that threaten the unity of the group.
As the founding president of the Library of America, Aaron dedicated decades to preserving a definitive, standardized canon of American literature. His goal was deeply progressive and liberal: to collect the diverse voices of the American past into a unified, accessible heritage that could inform and cultivate a shared civic consciousness.
Mearsheimer’s hierarchy of preferences reveals why this canonical project is a fragile superstructure. Reason and text-based reflection arrive too late to forge the primal bonds that hold human societies together. A collection of books cannot overwrite the deep, non-rational value infusions that individuals receive from their immediate communities. Aaron’s secular, literary patriotism assumes that a nation can find its coherence in shared ideas and democratic principles. Mearsheimer’s realism predicts that when real scarcity, anarchy, or conflict hits, a shared literary canon provides no protection. The sophisticated, universal text is quickly abandoned, and individuals fall back on the primal, unreflective identities that actually preserve life.
If Mearsheimer is right, Aaron’s lifelong effort to document the American literary mind captures the surface waves while missing the deep ocean currents. Writers do not navigate history as independent moral agents exploring ideas; they remain social animals whose writing serves to defend, justify, and advance the survival vehicles of their respective tribes.

‘A Big Misunderstanding’

Daniel Aaron pioneered the field of American Studies and helped found the Library of America. His most influential book, Writers on the Left, examined the American writers who responded to the Great Depression by aligning with Communism. Aaron framed this history as a story of good intentions, crushed hopes, and moral idealism. He argued that these intellectuals were motivated by a desire for social justice, but were disillusioned when they discovered the harsh realities of Soviet authoritarianism.
If David Pinsof is right, Aaron misread the entire phenomenon. The attraction to radical politics was not a noble experiment gone wrong. It was a strategic bid for dominance.
Aaron spent much of his career institutionalizing American literature, ensuring it was preserved and taught as a coherent civic tradition. As the founding president of the Library of America, he helped create a uniform, authoritative canon. To a traditional scholar, this looks like a public service that preserves a shared national heritage.
Pinsof’s logic shows that the project serves a more practical function. By determining which writers constitute the “authentic” American voice, the academic elite builds a cultural monopoly. The Library of America functions as an exclusive club where professors serve as the door-keepers. They decide who is remembered and who is forgotten, transforming raw creative work into academic capital that confirms their own high status.
In Writers on the Left, Aaron treated the intellectual embrace of Communism as a tragic misunderstanding. He wrote that these writers were romantic idealists who simply failed to see the totalizing nature of the ideology they endorsed. They had a “good hope” for humanity that blinded them to political reality.
From Pinsof’s perspective, this explanation covers up the true motive. The writers who flocked to Communism did not do so out of a naive misunderstanding. They did so because the ideology promised them ultimate authority over the coercive apparatus of the state. In a fully realized Marxist system, the intellectual class stops being a group of low-influence writers and becomes the vanguard that directs society. Stupidity is strategic here: the writers ignored the warning signs of tyranny because the system offered them a path to absolute power.
Aaron’s work often focused on bridging divides, examining how marginal or radical voices eventually fit into the broader American tapestry. He believed that studying our literary past creates a more empathetic, unified culture.
Pinsof would argue that this emphasis on unity and empathy is the typical story intellectuals use to signal their own benevolence. Literary history is not a tool for building empathy; it is a tool for forging elite alliances. By mastering the canon and defining its boundaries, figures like Aaron create a shared language that allows the educated class to identify its members, exclude its rivals, and justify its right to guide public consciousness. Aaron looked at the American literary tradition and saw a grand search for national meaning. Pinsof’s view suggests he was documenting the steady consolidation of authority by a professional class that hides its pursuit of status behind a screen of cultural preservation.

In 1943 a man sits in a basement laboratory at Harvard and listens to a human voice drowning in roar. The Psycho-Acoustics Laboratory has a war problem. A bomber crew cannot hear an order over the engines and the flak, so the order dies in the din and men die after it. Meyer Howard Abrams (1912-2015), known to everyone as Mike, has the assignment of making the voice get through. He builds military codes a pilot can pick out of the noise. He designs tests that find the few men who can hear a signal where other men hear only static. The work is small, technical, and forgotten. It also names the conviction that runs under everything he writes for the next seventy years. A voice survives interference. Meaning reaches its hearer. The channel holds.

Ernest Becker (1924-1974) gave us the word for what Abrams was building, though Abrams never used it. In The Denial of Death and Escape from Evil, Becker argues that every culture hands its members a hero system, a scheme of significance that lets a man feel he counts in a universe that will outlast his body. The hero system answers the one question the animal cannot bear: I die, so what was I for. A man earns his place in the scheme by performing its rites, and the scheme repays him with a share in something that does not die. Strip the content away and the form stays constant. A hero system tells a man how to be of use to the immortal thing, and what the immortal thing is.

Abrams found his immortal thing early and never left it. The line. The inheritance. The unbroken transmission of made meaning from the dead to the living, and from the living to those not yet born. His whole career defends one proposition against all comers: the line continues, and a man can join it.

I

Start with where he came from, because the hero system makes its deepest sense against the life it had to overcome.

He was the son of Eastern European Jewish immigrants in Long Branch, New Jersey. His father painted houses. No one in the family had gone to college. Abrams entered Harvard in 1930, at the bottom of the Depression, and went into English by a process of elimination. He liked to say there were no jobs in any profession, so a man might as well “enjoy starving.” The line is funny and it hides the size of the leap. A house painter’s son, child of a people with their own sacred books in their own sacred tongue, walks into the Yard and takes up Wordsworth (1770-1850) and Coleridge (1772-1834). He inherits a tradition that is not his by blood, not his by faith, not his by country. He inherits England.

This is the first thing to see about his hero system. The inheritance he served was adopted, and he chose to theorize inheritance as a thing a man can adopt. A blood line you receive. A canon you can walk into off the street, learn, master, and carry. The immigrant’s son made a doctrine out of his own escape. If meaning can be transmitted at all, then it can be transmitted to anyone who learns to read, and the orphan and the heir stand on equal footing before the text.

At Cambridge his tutor was I.A. Richards (1893-1979), the man who tried to turn reading into something close to a science, who put unsigned poems in front of students and watched them go wrong. Abrams took the lesson and reversed its mood. Where Richards catalogued the ways reading fails, Abrams spent his life on the conditions under which reading succeeds. He came back to Harvard, took the doctorate in 1940, went to the war lab, and then in 1945 went to Cornell and stayed. One university. Sixty years and more. A man who teaches the doctrine of continuity should embody it, and he did.

II

The Mirror and the Lamp arrives in 1953 and makes him. The argument is a history of how critics have pictured the poet. For centuries the poem was a mirror held up to the world, and the poet’s job was to reflect what is. Then the Romantics turned the mirror into a lamp. The poem now pours light outward from the poet’s inner life, and the world we see in the poem is the world lit by one man’s soul. Modern Library later put the book among the hundred best nonfiction works of the century. Every graduate student learned his four-part scheme: theories that look to the world, to the audience, to the artist, or to the work alone.

The scheme reads like neutral taxonomy. It is also a confession. Abrams sorts all of criticism into four relations, and every one of them assumes the others are there. World, audience, artist, work. A maker, a made thing, a thing it is about, and someone to receive it. You cannot run his fourfold scheme if any term drops out. The poet must mean something, the poem must carry it, and a reader must take it up. His map of criticism is a map of a successful transmission. He could not imagine a literature in which the line breaks.

Then comes the larger book, the one that shows the size of the faith. Natural Supernaturalism, 1971. Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature. The argument is that the great Romantic enterprise did not break with the Christian story. It carried the story forward in disguise. The fall, the long exile, the redemption, the new heaven and new earth. The Romantics took that arc out of the church and relocated it inside the human mind and inside human history. Wordsworth’s growth of a poet’s mind is the fall and the return, told without God. The kingdom comes, only now it comes as the marriage of the mind to the world it perceives.

Hear what Abrams does there. The whole modern world calls itself a rupture. The Enlightenment broke with religion, the moderns broke with the past, the secular age threw off the sacred. Abrams says no. There was no break. The sacred went underground and kept flowing. Continuity won. The son of immigrants who had himself crossed an ocean and changed worlds tells the West that it never really left home, that its deepest revolution was a translation, that nothing of value was lost in the crossing. A man builds the theory he needs.

III

The faith got tested in public, and the test made him famous a second time.

In the 1970s the French arrived in the American English department, and with them came the claim that undid Abrams at the root. Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) and his American hosts argued that a text never delivers a stable meaning to a reader. The author’s intention does not survive the writing. Every word leans on other words that lean on other words, and the meaning slides off down the chain and never arrives. Reading does not recover what a man meant. Reading catches the text in the act of meaning more and other than anyone intended, and coming apart as it does so.

In 1977 Abrams and J. Hillis Miller (1928-2021) had it out in the pages of Critical Inquiry. Abrams wrote “The Deconstructive Angel.” Miller answered with “The Critic as Host.” Abrams made the case a plain reader feels in his bones. We do understand each other. A writer sets down words to be understood, a reader takes the meaning up, and most of the time the thing works, or no one could follow a recipe or a treaty or a love letter. The deconstructive reading, he held, can run only after the ordinary reading has already succeeded, since you cannot subvert a meaning you have not first grasped. Miller answered that the ground Abrams stood on was the very illusion under analysis, that the obvious reading is obvious only because the culture has trained the eye, and that the abyss opens under the plainest sentence the moment you look.

Set the two men inside Becker and the fight stops being technical. These are two hero systems, and each needs the other to be wrong.

Abrams serves continuity. His heroism is the heroism of the steward. A man takes the made thing the dead handed him, keeps it intact, understands it as it was meant, and hands it on undamaged. His enemy is the broken line, the lost meaning, the message that does not arrive. The war lab again. Signal survives noise, or men die.

The deconstructor serves a different immortal thing, and it is not nothing. His heroism is the heroism of lucidity. He refuses the consolation the steward sells. He stares at the place where the ground gives out and does not flinch and does not lie about it. Paul de Man (1919-1983), the hardest of them, built a whole ethic on naming the blindness inside every insight. To that hero system, Abrams looks like a man who will not open his eyes, a sentimentalist who mistakes his own training for the nature of things. The deconstructor wins his immortality by being the one who would not be fooled.

So the word reading means two different sacred acts. For Abrams it means recovery, the safe arrival of a meaning across time. For Miller it means exposure, the demonstration that nothing arrives intact and that the honest man says so. Same word. Opposite rite. Each man’s heaven is the other man’s lie.

IV

This is the part the user asked me to open up, so let me push it past these two and show how far one word can travel.

Take the word at the center of Abrams’s whole life. Inheritance. The thing the line carries. To Abrams it means a made meaning, kept and passed on without loss, available to anyone who learns to read. Watch what it becomes in other hero systems, none of which would recognize his.

For the molecular geneticist, inheritance is the germ line, and the germ line carries no meaning at all. It carries sequence. What passes from parent to child is a string of bases copied with errors, and the errors are the point, since without copying error there is no variation and no life. Continuity here is real and blind. Nothing is understood, nothing is meant, nothing is kept intact on purpose. The line persists because the things that fail to persist are gone, and that is the only reason. To the geneticist, Abrams’s faith that a meaning crosses the generations whole is a category mistake. Meaning is not transmitted. Replicators are selected. His hero system is the survival of what copies, and his enemy is the sentimental belief that anything passes down because it deserves to.

For the Benedictine monk, inheritance is the liturgy, and the heroism runs the other way from Abrams. Abrams keeps the line so that the maker’s meaning survives. The monk keeps the line so that the maker may vanish. He says today the words said in the sixth century, the Rule of Benedict (c. 480-547) read aloud as it has been read for fifteen hundred years, and the rite asks him to add nothing of his own. His glory is to be a hollow vessel through which the unbroken worship passes. To this hero system, Abrams looks half secular and half proud, a man who keeps the inheritance so that human authors will be remembered, when the inheritance worth keeping is the one that points away from every author toward the One who does not change. Continuity for the monk means the perpetuation of a worship that precedes him and will not miss him.

For the founder in the engineer’s hero system of the new economy, inheritance is the enemy outright. He calls it legacy code and technical debt. The thing the dead left him is a tangle he did not write, full of choices he cannot question and bugs he cannot find, and the heroism is to tear it out and start clean. Move fast and break things. The line is not sacred. The line is friction. A man earns his place by rupture, by the rewrite, by the disruption that makes the old transmission worthless overnight. Hand this man The Norton Anthology of English Literature and he sees a monument to inertia, ten pounds of dead men telling the living what to read. Continuity for him is stagnation, and the maker he serves is the future, which owes the past nothing.

And then a hero system in which the word barely registers, which shows that Abrams’s sacred value is not a human universal but a particular faith. Daniel Everett (b. 1951) reported of the Pirahã of the Amazon a people who live close to the present tense, with little interest in distant ancestors, no creation story carried down from far back, and small patience for talk of what cannot be seen and was not seen by someone living. Set the steward of the Western canon before such a people and his life’s work has no place to land. He has spent a century keeping a line that runs back through the dead toward men he never met. To a hero system anchored in what the living have witnessed, the keeping of that line is not heroic and not evil. It is simply not a thing a serious man would spend his days on. Inheritance, for them, is not the immortal thing. The immortal thing, if there is one, lives in what is present and shared now.

Five hero systems, one word. The geneticist’s inheritance is blind copying. The monk’s is self-erasing worship. The founder’s is the debt to be razed. The Pirahã barely have the concept. And Abrams’s is the safe arrival of meaning across the dead. The word does not mean one thing and get applied in five places. It means five things, because the immortal thing behind it is different in each, and the rite that earns a man his share of it is different in each. Becker’s point holds. A value makes sense only inside the system that needs it, and the same syllable spends very different gods.

V

Return to the man, because his hero system also tells him how to live, and he lived it to the edge.

He married Ruth and stayed married seventy-one years. He took the general editorship of The Norton Anthology of English Literature and turned it into the book on ten thousand American desks, the fat volume with the onionskin pages that taught the survey course to a couple of generations. Think about what that editorship is in his own terms. The general editor decides what passes to the next cohort. He stands at the gate of the line and waves some makers through and leaves others in the dark. A priest of transmission could ask for no better altar. His students carried the line forward in their own directions, some of them away from everything he believed. Harold Bloom (1930-2019), Gayatri Spivak (b. 1942), E.D. Hirsch (b. 1928), the novelists William H. Gass (1924-2017) and Thomas Pynchon (b. 1937). The line he served does not promise that the heirs agree with the steward. It promises only that something gets handed on.

Ruth died in 2008, after the seventy-one years. The one rupture the doctrine could not translate into continuity. He went on. In 2012 Adam Kirsch (b. 1976) climbed the stairs to visit him for his hundredth birthday and found him still at work, the last of his kind, the humanist who had outlived the theory that buried his humanism and then outlived, in part, the burial. He turned a hundred reading and arguing. He died in Ithaca in 2015 at a hundred and two.

A man who spends a century insisting that the line does not break will, of course, break with it, once, at the end, in the only way no doctrine has yet translated. Becker would say the hero system exists for exactly that appointment. The denial of death is not a lie a man tells once. It is the work he does every day, the war lab running in the basement of the mind, the voice pulled out of the roar one more time. Abrams pulled the voice out for a hundred and two years. He pulled Wordsworth’s voice out of two centuries of noise and handed it to a freshman who could not yet hear it, and he believed, against the cleverest men of his age, that it arrived.

Whether the signal arrived intact, or arrived changed, or arrived as the listener’s own training dressed up as the speaker’s meaning, is the question his enemies put to him and he could not finally close. The steward cannot prove the line unbroken from inside the line. He can only keep it, and hand it on, and die. Which is the shape of every hero system once you strip the content off. A man finds the immortal thing, serves it with the one life he has, and trusts it to outlast him because he cannot bear the alternative and because the trust is the only door out of the basement and into the light the lamp throws.

Abrams chose the lamp. He spent his life on the proposition that one man’s inner light reaches another man across the dark, and he is gone now, and you are reading this, which is either his vindication or his finest illusion, and there is no third reader who can tell us which.

The Great Delusion

In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:

My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”
[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization…

If John J. Mearsheimer is right, his anthropology undermines the humanist legacy of M. H. Abrams (1912–2015), specifically his definitive work on Romanticism, The Mirror and the Lamp (1953), and his foundational role in shaping the literary canon through The Norton Anthology of English Literature.

Abrams is celebrated for charting the historical shift from classical mimetic theories of art—where literature is a “mirror” reflecting the external universe—to Romantic expressive theories, where writing is a “lamp” fueled by the poet’s inner soul illuminating the world. Abrams believed that art is a thoroughly human creation through which the individual mind, operating under the impulse of feeling, can generate original illumination and profound, self-directed insights. Mearsheimer’s thesis directly challenges Abrams’s framework across several key concepts.

Abrams viewed the Romantic shift as a genuine revolution in human consciousness, where individual poets like William Wordsworth or Percy Bysshe Shelley broke free from mechanical views of the world to project their unique, internal values outward. If Mearsheimer is right, this internal light is an illusion. The mind does not possess an unconditioned core capable of generating its own illumination. What the Romantic poet perceives as the unique light of his own soul spilling out is merely the delayed emission of the values infused into him during his long childhood socialization. The lamp is not self-powered; it is plugged into the grid of the specific tribe that raised the poet.

Abrams argued that key metaphors steer human thinking and help determine how we perceive reality. He treated the cultivation of these literary metaphors as part of a grand humanistic tradition that refines our shared capacity for sympathy and reason. Mearsheimer, particularly when supported by David Pinsof’s alliance theory, suggests a far colder function for literary metaphors. Human narrative and poetic expression did not evolve to expand cosmic awareness or deepen individual emotion. They evolved as tools to form coalitions, signal group loyalty, and coordinate behavior against rivals. The grand metaphorical systems of the Romantics are not independent triumphs of the human spirit; they are sophisticated ideological badges designed to bind an elite intellectual coalition.

As the general editor who spent decades shaping The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Abrams operated on the classic liberal assumption that a standardized canon of high literature could foster universal human values, transcend parochial boundaries, and cultivate the critical reason of generations of students. If Mearsheimer is right, an anthology cannot replace or restrain the raw binding power of basic human tribalism. Reason and literary reflection arrive too late to redraw a man’s moral map. The academic canon Abrams constructed is not a universal heritage for all mankind; it is the cultural armor of a specific, Western liberal elite. The moment group survival or sharp political competition threatens that elite, the sophisticated text-based humanism of the Norton Anthology is discarded in favor of the raw, unreflective group solidarity required to win.

In his second major work, Natural Supernaturalism (1971), Abrams argued that Romantic literature represented a profound historical evolution: the secularization of inherited religious myths into a humanist framework. He claimed that the Romantics successfully saved the moral and emotional core of Judeo-Christian theology, translating it into a secular faith in human potential, brotherhood, and creative imagination.

Mearsheimer’s view reveals that Abrams misread this historical transition. You do not get rid of the binding power of religion by translating it into poetry. Human beings are tribal and require an intense value infusion during their long childhood to survive. The Christian structures the Romantics inherited provided a cohesive, functional social identity. By strip-mining the theology and leaving only a secular, individualized “humanist faith,” the Romantics did not advance human consciousness—they created an unstable ideological luxury. Secular humanism lacks the primal, group-binding power of traditional religion. When a society built on this secular romanticism faces intense competition, the thin language of universal brotherhood fails, and men fall back on raw, non-literary tribal identities.

Abrams’s critical theory puts faith in the concept of the creative imagination as a sovereign, autonomous faculty. He argued that the mind is an active partner in perception, capable of standing outside of mechanical nature and social conditioning to reshape how we value the world.

Mearsheimer’s hierarchy of human preferences destroys this concept of autonomy. Because a man’s moral code and social attachments are fixed by early socialization and innate sentiments long before his critical faculties mature, the “imagination” cannot be sovereign. The imagination does not stand outside social conditioning; it operates entirely within the boundaries that conditioning has established. The poet cannot imagine a truly unconditioned world because his very cognitive apparatus has been manufactured by his group to serve its collective survival.

Abrams championed the Romantic “expressive theory” of art, which posits that literature is the overflow of an individual’s internal feelings and perceptions. He treated poetry as an honest, deep communication of a man’s inner life.

Mearsheimer’s anthropology, paired with alliance theory, suggests that human communication is rarely an unconditioned expression of internal truth. Language and narrative evolved to manage reputations, coordinate alliances, and defeat rivals. What Abrams analyzes as a pure, expressive outpouring of the soul is better understood as a sophisticated move in a social game. The Romantic poets were not just expressing their inner feelings; they were building an elite intellectual coalition designed to claim moral and cultural authority over their rivals.

Abrams did not just write about literature; he designed the way it was taught to millions of students, operating on the liberal belief that exposure to the humanities would cultivate a more reasonable, empathetic, and universal citizen.

Mearsheimer’s thesis shows why this pedagogical project has a built-in breaking point. Reason is the least important of the three sources of human preference. A classroom anthology cannot override the deep, non-rational value infusions that students receive from their actual social groups. Abrams’s belief that analyzing text and metaphor could create a shared, universal moral framework among diverse peoples ignores the hard reality of human tribalism. When groups clash over survival, resources, or status, the sophisticated literary training Abrams designed is instantly overridden by the primal, unreflective loyalty that men owe to the collective unit that protects them.

If Mearsheimer is right, Abrams’s belief that literature is a powerful, autonomous force “by, for, and about human beings” misses the narrow, structural design of the human animal. The mind does not stand alone to illuminate the world; it remains firmly embedded in the survival vehicle of the group.

‘A Big Misunderstanding’

If Pinsof is right, his critique transforms how we view M. H. Abrams (1912-2015) and his work on Romanticism, particularly The Mirror and the Lamp.

Abrams argued that the Romantic movement marked a fundamental shift in how intellectuals and artists viewed the mind. In the eighteenth century, the mind was seen as a mirror—a passive reflector of external reality. The Romantics redefined the mind as a lamp—an active, radiant projector that contributes to and constructs the reality it perceives. Abrams viewed this shift as a grand, poetic liberation of human consciousness.

If Pinsof is right, this transition from mirror to lamp was not a disinterested evolution of aesthetic theory. It was the birth of the modern intellectual’s ultimate tool for status.

By establishing the mind as a lamp that constructs reality, the Romantic thinkers—and the literary critics like Abrams who institutionalized them—laid the groundwork for the modern intellectual class to claim ownership over reality itself.

If the mind is merely a mirror, then the masses can see reality just as well as the elites; everyone looks at the same world. But if the mind is a lamp, then some lamps burn brighter, clearer, and with better “perception” than others. The intellectual positions himself as the master technician of the lamp.

From Pinsof’s perspective, the “lamp” model allows intellectuals to claim that when the public disagrees with them, the public is simply suffering from a broken lamp—malfunctioning perceptions, cognitive biases, or a lack of imagination. It turns disagreements over resources and power into disagreements over “enlightenment.”

In Natural Supernaturalism, Abrams argued that Romantic poetry secularized traditional Christian theology. The Romantics took religious concepts of redemption, apocalypse, and spiritual rebirth and translated them into the human experience and the creative imagination. Abrams saw this as a beautiful, humanistic rescue mission for meaning in a scientific age.

Pinsof’s logic reveals a more cynical structure behind this secularization. By taking the machinery of salvation out of the church and placing it into the secular imagination, the Romantic writers—and later, university professors—effectively transferred the cultural monopoly of grace to themselves.

The intellectual class became the new priesthood. Instead of saving souls from sin, they save minds from “misunderstanding.” The goal remains the same: elite status and moral authority over the masses. Abrams chronicled this shift as an artistic triumph, but if Pinsof is right, Abrams was actually documenting the hostile takeover of cultural power by the secular intelligentsia.

Abrams spent his career at Cornell University organizing, anthologizing, and explaining these grand literary frameworks to generations of students, most notably through the Norton Anthology of English Literature. He operated on the assumption that literature and high theory expand human empathy and correct our narrow view of the world.

If Pinsof is right, this entire structure is an engine of self-justification. The intellectual class reads Abrams, studies the Romantics, and learns to view themselves as part of a noble tradition of “raised consciousness.” They are not actually expanding empathy; they are learning the vocabulary needed to look down on the masses. The study of the “lamp” becomes a way to signal elite status, forge alliances with other elites, and justify their right to guide, nudge, and govern everyone else.

Abrams looked at the Romantic lineage and saw a beautiful celebration of human perception. Pinsof’s view suggests that Abrams was tracing the history of a successful class ideology, one that disguised a raw appetite for cultural dominance as a desire to make the world a more beautiful place.

The Harvard catalog for the fall lists a course, Proust, Joyce, and Mann. A young woman reads the line and decides her life. Marjorie Perloff (b. 1931) never takes the course and never studies with the man who teaches it. She reads the three names and the one name above them, and she knows where she belongs. A hero system recruits this way. It posts a list, and a stranger reads her own salvation in it.

The man who teaches the course is Harry Levin (1912–1994), and he teaches the modern as scripture. The lecture hall fills. He came up summa cum laude in 1933, took a seat in the new Society of Fellows, and never wrote a dissertation. The A.B. stayed an A.B. while ninety doctoral candidates passed under his hand. T.S. Eliot (1888–1965) printed an undergraduate essay of his in the Criterion and stayed his friend for life. Allen Tate (1899–1979) called him a young Turk. The sentences Levin writes run long and allude across four literatures, and the allusion serves as armor and credential at once.

The word under all of it is culture.

Culture comes from colere, to till, to tend, to inhabit. The Roman farmer cultivates a field. Cicero moves the word indoors and speaks of cultura animi, the tending of the mind. Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) hands it to the nineteenth century as the best that men have thought and said, a sweetness and light set against the machine and the mob. Irving Babbitt (1865–1933), whose chair Levin takes in 1960, guards the word against the romantic flood. By the time it reaches Warren House it carries a promise. Tend the right field of the mind and you join the permanent things.

Ernest Becker (1924–1974) gives the promise its harder name. In The Denial of Death he takes from Otto Rank (1884–1939) a claim about men. A man knows he dies and cannot bear the knowing, so he builds a project that outlasts his body and enrolls himself in it. Becker calls the project a hero system. Culture, in Becker, names the immortality system a society offers its members, the script by which a mortal earns a place that death cannot revoke. The farmer’s field and Arnold’s library turn out to be the same wager against the grave.

So the word splits. Watch it split.

In a basement under a museum a woman leans over a panel painting four centuries old. She tests a solvent on a coin of varnish the size of a fingernail and waits. Her field is culture, and culture for her means an object losing the war with time at a rate she slows by months. Save the panel and you hand it to a curator not yet born. Her heroism is delay. She measures immortality in the half-life of a resin.

On a slope in Burgundy a man walks rows his grandfather planted. He says culture and means viticulture, the cut and the graft and the reading of a sky. The vines outlive the men who tend them. He will die in a house his name has held for two hundred years, and the wine will carry the year of his death on a label, and men who never knew him will drink the slope. His immortality has a vintage.

Two floors under a hospital ward a technician pulls a plate from an incubator. The colony on the agar is a culture, a living thing she keeps alive past the body it came from. She speaks the same word Levin speaks and means propagation, the cell line that survives the patient. Her dead go on dividing in a dish, and the dish is a monument she reads under glass.

In a glass office off a freeway a man of thirty briefs a recruiter. We hire for culture, he says, and the word means the temperature of a room, the shared joke, the willingness to stay late for a mission slide. His immortality project files for an IPO. He wants the company to outlast him, to become a place men name in oral histories, and he calls that culture and believes it as Arnold believed his.

In a field camp a man writes by lamp. He has spent a year with a people whose songs no press has printed. For him culture has no high and no low. It means the inherited equipment of a way of life, and every way of life ranks even, and the monograph he writes will outlast the songs because the singers are old and the young ones leave. He saves a people by filing them. His tribe lives in his index.

Five rooms, one word, no shared meaning. Push the conservator and the founder into the same elevator and ask each what culture is, and each answers with his life and misses the other by a continent. Becker’s point sits here. A value reads as obvious only from inside the hero system that issues it. From outside it reads as a strange thing grown men give their days to. The vines look like dust to the technician. The agar looks like nothing to the vigneron. The panel painting and the mission slide cannot see each other at all.

Return to Warren House and the question sharpens. Why does this word and not another carry the life of the son of Isadore Levin of Minneapolis?

The record answers in the architecture of the place. A. Lawrence Lowell (1856–1943) presides over the Harvard of Levin’s youth and declares that Jews belong under a quota and Black students in a separate dormitory. The English departments of that era keep the men they call aliens from teaching the literature of England and America, on the theory that a Jew lacks the rootedness the work requires. A boy hears that the soil is not his.

The boy answers with the one field no quota can fence. Comparative literature crosses every border the nation polices. It belongs to no blood and no parish. A man from Minneapolis enters the mainstream of English letters the way Eliot did, by reading his way in, and once inside he stands as rooted as any man with a manor, because the republic of letters issues no passports and revokes none. Levin watches Eliot and names the wonder of it, a legend made real before his eyes, a Midwestern boy who reached the center. He describes Eliot. He draws his own map.

Culture for Levin is the immortality system the blood cannot bar. The pogrom kills the body and burns the town and cannot touch the line of Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593) or the structure of Ulysses. Enroll in that line, transmit it, add to it, and you take a place in a company that outlasts every regime that ever counted Jews at a gate. The ninety dissertations are his vines. The crowded course is his propagation. Memories of the Moderns is his salvage of a people, the modernists he knew and filed before the singers died. He keeps the recallable past recallable. That labor is the field he tills against his own death.

The terror under the work shows in the choice of weapon. A man who feared death less might have farmed a literal field or banked a literal fortune. Levin reads. He builds an immortality out of other men’s books because the books survive what kills men, and he knows what kills men, and he watches it take F.O. Matthiessen (1902–1950) by the man’s own hand and take Eliot by the slow conservatism Levin mourns even as he loves him. The mandarin sentences, the four literatures in a single clause, the refusal of the easy audience: these are the works of a man building a structure tall enough to stand on above the flood.

From inside, the structure is culture, the best that men have thought, the permanent things, salvation. From outside, to the founder and the vigneron and the technician, it is an old man’s love of old books. Both readings hold. The seven letters carry them both and reconcile neither. By Becker’s account every man in the building does the same thing in a different costume, tilling a field against the same end, and the fields cannot see one another, and that blindness is the price of the comfort each field buys.

Levin paid the price and bought the comfort and left the field larger than he found it. The vines are still in rows. Men who never knew him still drink the slope.

The Great Delusion

In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:

My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”
[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization…

If John J. Mearsheimer is right, his anthropology fundamentally challenges the critical framework of Harry Levin (1912–1994), an influential exponent of comparative literature and modernist criticism.
Levin approached literature as a window into the expanding horizons of human consciousness and creative autonomy. In works exploring modernism, James Joyce, and the concept of realism, he treated great literature as a testament to the mind’s ability to transcend parochial limitations, map complex realities, and synthesize diverse cultural traditions. For Levin, the ultimate power of a writer lies in his capacity to use language to construct a unique vision of the world that challenges static assumptions.
Mearsheimer’s thesis directly undermines Levin’s scholarly assumptions in several ways.
Levin was a champion of comparative literature, a discipline built on the belief that scholarship and art can bridge national, cultural, and linguistic divides. This cosmopolitan ideal assumes that the human mind can rise above local prejudices through intellectual exploration. If Mearsheimer is right, this perspective is an illusion. Because childhood socialization infuses a specific social unit’s values before a man can think critically, his foundational worldview is fixed. Comparative literature does not liberate the individual from his tribe; it merely dresses his tribal baseline in a more sophisticated, cross-cultural vocabulary.
Levin wrote extensively on modernism, viewing it as a profound breakthrough where individual artists broke free from traditional structures to forge new ways of perceiving reality. Mearsheimer’s ranking of preferences places individual reason last, far behind socialization and inborn sentiment. This upends Levin’s view of modernism. The radical innovations of modernist literature are not genuine escapes from human nature or social constraint. In a world dictated by group competition and survival, the highly individualistic and fragmented aesthetic of modernism is a fragile luxury, one that quickly collapses back into basic tribal solidarity whenever group survival is threatened.
As a critic of literary realism, Levin examined how writers attempt to report the social world accurately. Mearsheimer’s anthropology, paired with alliance theory, suggests that human communication and narrative are not designed to track objective truth or register external social facts neutrally. Instead, stories serve to bind coalitions, manage reputations, and signal group loyalty. The literary “realism” Levin analyzed is not an objective documentation of society, but a sophisticated instrument of cultural consolidation. A writer’s narrative serves his group’s self-image and moral standing in its competition with other groups.If Mearsheimer is right, Levin’s faith in the expansive, universal potential of literature misses the narrow design of the human mind. Literature cannot break the boundaries of early socialization, because the group remains the primary vehicle for survival, and reason arrives too late to redraw the map.
Levin treated the university and the literary institution as autonomous spaces where ideas could be weighed, refined, and debated outside the raw pressures of politics and power. Mearsheimer’s realism views institutions not as independent actors or neutral zones, but as instruments that reflect and serve the distribution of power. If human beings are tribal at their core, the academic fields Levin built—such as comparative literature—are not detached sanctuaries of high culture. They are elite coalitions that use the language of cosmopolitanism to manage their own status, reward allies, and police boundaries against rival groups.
Levin’s critical theory focused heavily on the interplay between literary convention and individual innovation. He argued that literature progresses when an original mind breaks through established conventions to capture reality in a new way. Mearsheimer’s thesis suggests that Levin overstates the importance of these stylistic shifts. Because a man’s moral code and social identity are sealed by intense childhood socialization long before his critical faculties mature, the individual writer can only innovate on the surface. He can alter the form or the style of a narrative, but he cannot rewrite the foundational tribal loyalties and inborn sentiments that govern how he and his audience view the world.
Levin was known for an approach to realism that insisted literature must be understood in its historical and social context. He believed that by examining the specific social arrangements of a period, a critic could understand how a text reflected its world. Mearsheimer’s anthropology implies that Levin looked at the wrong context. By focusing on the shifting social, economic, and artistic conventions of a particular era, Levin missed the permanent, unchanging context of human life: the struggle for group survival under conditions of anarchy. What Levin analyzed as historical shifts in consciousness are merely minor surface adjustments over a fixed tribal substrate.
Levin’s scholarship helped define a secular, Western literary canon, operating on the assumption that a shared body of high literature could provide a stable foundation for humanistic values. Mearsheimer’s argument reveals why this project is unstable. A collection of texts cannot replace the raw binding power of a living social group. Because human reason arrives late and lacks the power to override early socialization, a secular canon possesses no inherent authority to keep a society together or restrain its tribal impulses. When a group faces a crisis of survival or competition, it does not rally around the complex, ambiguous texts of Levin’s canon; it falls back on its most primal, unreflective group identities.

‘A Big Misunderstanding’

Harry Levin represents the ultimate institutionalization of the literary critic as a gatekeeper of cultural value. As a Harvard professor and a foundational figure in comparative literature, Levin did not merely read books; he codified the “contexts” in which they were to be understood.

If Pinsof is right, Levin’s career is not a story of disinterested scholarship, but a successful campaign to secure status by defining the “official” interpretation of reality.

Levin once described literature as “an institution” akin to the church or the law, complete with its own precedents and devices. To an admirer, this sounds like a serious, intellectual mapping of cultural influence. From Pinsof’s perspective, this is a calculated professional maneuver.

By defining literature as an institution that requires specialized training to navigate, Levin ensured that the “literary class” remained an exclusive club. If literature is just art that anyone can enjoy, the critic is redundant. But if literature is a complex institution with a “special body of precedents,” then the professor is an essential high priest. Levin did not just study literature; he built the apparatus that authorized him to tell the rest of society which books mattered and why.

Reviewers often praised Levin for his “breadth of vision,” “humanity,” and “lack of pedantry.” He was seen as a man of great taste who could synthesize complex European movements.

Under Pinsof’s frame, this “breadth” is simply the refined toolkit of a high-status competitor. By mastering the broad strokes of modernism and realism, Levin signaled that he stood above the “narrow” specialists or the “uninformed” masses. His work such as The Gates of Horn categorized writers like Balzac and Stendhal not just as storytellers, but as contributors to a grand, teleological project of “Realism.” This framing serves a clear purpose: it subordinates the authors to the critic’s master narrative. The critic becomes the architect of literary history, deciding which works pass through the “gate of horn” into the realm of truth and which remain in the realm of “ivory” fiction.

Levin’s commitment to comparative literature was often framed as an effort to foster international understanding and bridge cultural divides. He wanted to show how the “main currents” of life flowed through different national literatures.

Pinsof would argue that this is another form of the “misunderstanding” myth. The intellectual class frames their work as a grand project of bringing people together through empathy and shared culture. In reality, this “comparison” is a way to consolidate influence over the attention economy. By positioning himself as the one who understands the “international frame” of modernism, Levin maintained his standing at the top of the academic hierarchy. He wasn’t solving a misunderstanding between cultures; he was curating a high-status canon that confirmed his own role as the indispensable expert.

Levin’s long tenure at Harvard and his supervision of nearly 100 doctoral students cemented his influence. He created an engine that replicated his own logic across the university system. Every student he trained learned the same lesson: the world is a chaotic place, but it can be brought into focus through the “contexts” and “perspectives” of professional criticism.

If Pinsof is correct, Levin’s “contexts of criticism” were levers used to turn artistic expression into academic capital, organizing it in a way that gave his own work, and the work of his peers, the highest possible value. He was a master of the “hole” we are stuck in, decorating the walls with refined essays while ensuring his own seat at the top remained secure.

The English department at Columbia sits above Broadway, and in the late 1930s it has a problem named Lionel Trilling (1905-1975). The senior men confer. One of them tells the young instructor, with the courtesy of his class, that a Freudian, a Marxist, and a Jew might find himself more comfortable somewhere else. The sentence does its work. It draws a line. On one side stands the long Protestant patrimony of the American university, the men who carry it the way a man carries his own height, without thinking about it. On the other side stands a junior man whose people came from Białystok and London, who reads Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) the way other men read scripture.

Trilling does not clear his office. He goes from door to door. He argues his case to each man in turn. He tells them what the department loses if it lets him go. He stays. In 1939 the department promotes him, the first Jew it admits to its faculty.

Hold that scene. It holds his hero system.

Ernest Becker (1924-1974) gave a plain account of what men want under the noise. A man wants to feel he counts. He wants a mark the grave cannot rub out. Culture hands him the means. It issues a hero system, a set of sacred values, and it promises that a man who serves them earns a portion of significance death cannot cancel. The soldier earns it by courage. The father earns it through the line he continues. The saint earns it through holiness. Each system mints its own coin, and every coin buys the same thing, the sense that a man is more than meat.

Trilling cannot earn it the inherited ways. Tribe is the thing he is half leaving. Wealth is not the family business. Faith in the old sense has thinned in him to a wary respect. What remains is the examining mind. He makes criticism a vocation with the weight other men give the priesthood or the regiment. The moral life of literature becomes his road to significance, and the road has a toll. He must read everything, suspect everything, and grant himself no comfort he has not first cross-examined.

His sacred words follow from this. In the preface to The Liberal Imagination he sets the task of criticism as the recall of the liberal mind to variousness and possibility, to complexity and difficulty. These four are his holy quartet. The liberal imagination, which he loves and distrusts at once, tends to simplify, to organize, to choose the warm general idea over the cold particular case. Trilling spends his life as its loyal opposition. He prizes the adult over the innocent, the tragic over the consoling, the particular man over the abstract Man. He reveres Freud (1856-1939) because Freud refuses to flatter the self. Where the will is, he wants the examining mind to be.

In 1972 he publishes Sincerity and Authenticity, drawn from his Norton lectures at Harvard, and there he does to a single word what this essay does to him. He takes the word authenticity and turns it over in the light. He traces it from Rousseau (1712-1778) forward, through the Romantics, into the counterculture of his own students. He shows that the word has not meant one thing. It has meant a procession of incompatible things, each sacred to the men who held it.

This is the move worth keeping. A sacred word is not a fixed coin passed hand to hand with its value stamped on the face. The value lives in the hero system that issues it. Lift the same word out of one system and drop it into another, and it buys a different salvation. Trilling saw this about his age. The thing to see now is how far it runs.

Watch the word authenticity travel.

On a soundstage in the San Fernando Valley an actor sits in his trailer and will not come out. The coach waits. The first assistant director knocks. The actor has a scene in twenty minutes where the character buries a son, and the actor has decided he cannot do it on technique. He goes back to a real grave, a real morning, a coat he wore once and gave away. He dredges the thing up so the camera takes a true tear and not a glycerin one. To him the word authentic names a debt paid in private pain. The unfeigned is the only currency. A faked grief is a sin against the craft, and the craft is how he earns his place among the immortals on film.

Across the country, in a storefront church with folding chairs and a Hammond organ, a preacher in a white shirt soaked through tells the room that you cannot counterfeit the anointing. He means it as the first law of his world. The choir can sing on pitch and leave the room cold. Then the Spirit comes, the unplanned cry, the tongue that runs past sense, and the room knows the difference. For him authentic names possession by something not himself. The tear the actor manufactures from his own past, the preacher would call dead works. The true thing arrives from outside the man and uses him. His immortality runs through that visitation. The self he polishes is not the point. The self the Spirit overrides is the point.

In a glass room in Culver City a consultant runs a deck for a beverage client. Slide nine reads, in lower case, authenticity is our highest-converting asset. He means the surface that tests as unforced. The shaky phone video that beats the polished spot. The founder’s story, focus-grouped, A-B tested, shot to look unshot. He likes the word because it sells, and what sells is what is real in his system, the only ledger he trusts. To the actor and the preacher he is the enemy of the word. To himself he is its master. He has found the price of the sacred thing and made a market in it.

A drill instructor at a depot has a shorter creed. He sorts men into the ones who have been there and the ones who talk. The word real, in his mouth, names the test no rehearsal supplies. Fire decides it. A man who has stood in it owns the word, and a man who has not cannot borrow it. The actor’s private grief and the preacher’s anointing strike him as theater. The only authentic thing is conduct under conditions that do not care how you feel about yourself.

After hours in a half-empty club an old saxophone player listens to a gifted kid run changes, and at the break he leans over. You sound like everybody, he says. When you gonna sound like you. He means the kid has the licks and not the voice. In his world the sacred labor is the long subtraction by which a man clears away every borrowed phrase until what comes out the horn could come from no one else. Authentic names a sound earned over years, paid for in nights like this one. The consultant’s word, manufactured spontaneity, is to him the death of music.

In a field at night a Breslov Hasid pours out his heart to God in his mother tongue, alone, no prayer book, no minyan, no fixed words. The practice has a name and a long lineage, and its premise cuts against the synagogue’s order. The true cry comes when a man drops the inherited formula and speaks to Him as a son speaks to a father, raw, ungrammatical, his own. Here the word that the actor pays for in buried grief and the preacher waits for as a gift from above becomes the unmediated speech of a true self before its Maker. The forms of worship are the floor. The authentic thing is what a man says when no one but God can hear.

Six men, six worlds, one word. To the actor it is a tear that costs him something. To the preacher it is a power that uses him. To the consultant it is a surface that converts. To the Marine it is conduct under fire. To the saxophonist it is a voice no one else has. To the Hasid it is the cry of the heart before Him. Each holds the word as a final word, a place to rest, the coin that buys his portion of significance. None of them turns it over.

Trilling is the man who turns it over.

That is his vocation and his peculiar heroism. He will not let the coin rest. He asks where the word came from, what it cost the men who first minted it, what older word it replaced and why. He notices that authenticity displaced sincerity, and that the swap was not free. Sincerity asked a man to be true to himself so that he might be true to others, a social virtue with a public face. Authenticity raises the stakes and turns inward. It asks a man to be true to his own being whatever it costs the people around him, and it carries a charge that can run toward the heroic and toward the murderous in the same breath. Trilling follows the word to the edge of his own moment and finds, waiting there, the romance of madness, R. D. Laing (1927-1989) and the company who taught that the man most undone is the man most truly himself. Trilling will not bless that. He ends his book uneasy, an adult who has watched a sacred word ripen into something he cannot eat.

Now Becker turns the screw, because the refusal is itself a hero system.

The mind that sees through every consolation keeps one consolation back for itself, the dignity of seeing through. The adult who declines the candy still wants the credit for being the adult. The complexity Trilling holds sacred is his immortality bid, his way of counting for more than the meat, no less than the preacher’s anointing or the Marine’s fire. And the bid is lonely in a way the others are not. The preacher has the congregation that catches him when the Spirit drops him. The Marine has the unit that bled with him. The Hasid has Him, and the rebbe, and the long table on a Friday night. Trilling has the seminar table and the sovereign examining self, the self that looks at every warm thing and asks first what it hides. He taught Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) in that room, the student who would go and live the adversary culture his teacher could only study. The teacher stayed at the table. The table was his portion.

When the cancer comes in 1975, Becker’s question stands open over the bed, and this essay leaves it open, because the man earned the right to his own ending. The question is whether the tragic adult mind warms a man at the close the way tongues warm the Pentecostal, whether complexity holds a hand. And whether Trilling, who suspected every consolation that men reach for in the dark, suspected that one too, and lay there turning his own last coin over in the light, unwilling even then to call it gold.

The Great Delusion

In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:

My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”
[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization…

If John J. Mearsheimer is right, his anthropology dismantles the central project of Lionel Trilling.

Trilling operated on the premise that literature and criticism are vital because they cultivate a complex, flexible, and self-reflective individual. In works like The Liberal Imagination (1950) and Sincerity and Authenticity (1972), he argued that the mind can develop a private space of moral autonomy, separate from the rigid dogmas of political movements and social groups. For Trilling, the ultimate value of the human mind lies in its ability to modulate its own impulses, tolerate ambiguity, and critique its own culture from within.

Mearsheimer’s argument challenges Trilling’s vision of the mind and its relation to society on three fronts.

Trilling believed that a man could achieve a high degree of critical independence by engaging with literature and high culture. This engagement allows the individual to look askance at his society’s unexamined assumptions. If Mearsheimer is right, this independent space rarely exists. Because intense socialization occurs during a long, vulnerable childhood, the social unit stamps its values onto a man before his critical faculties even develop. By the time a man reads literature or attempts to cultivate his “liberal imagination,” his baseline moral code and tribal loyalties are largely fixed. The critical reflection Trilling prizes is not an escape from socialization; it is merely a refined product of it.

Trilling feared that modern political life was too rigid, and he offered the complex, modulating individual intelligence as an antidote to tribal fanaticism. Mearsheimer’s ranking of human faculties reveals why Trilling’s remedy is weak. Reason is the least important of the three ways men determine their preferences, falling far behind socialization and inborn sentiment. Trilling’s ideal man—who weighs ambiguities, questions his own side, and values complexity over certainty—is an evolutionary luxury. In a world driven by group competition and the struggle for survival, men do not look for modulation and ambiguity; they look for solidarity and clear moral boundaries to protect their coalition.

In Sincerity and Authenticity, Trilling traced how the modern Western ego sought to define itself, first through its honest relations with society (sincerity) and later by looking inward to find an unconditioned, true self (authenticity). Mearsheimer’s anthropology implies that this inward quest is a dead end. There is no unconditioned self beneath the layers of culture. A man is a profoundly social being from start to finish. The quest for individual authenticity is a parochial illusion of liberal societies that downplay human tribalism. A man’s true nature is found not by looking inward away from the group, but by looking at the group that ensures his survival.

Trilling argued that the novel was the premier agent of moral life in the West because it forces the reader to confront the internal complexity and mixed motives of other people. He believed that reading fiction trains the mind to resist simple, dogmatic moral judgments. If Mearsheimer is correct, this reads the human animal backward. Human beings do not use narratives to complicate their moral frameworks; they use them to simplify the world into allies and enemies. A novel cannot override the intense value infusion of early childhood socialization. When a reader encounters a complex text, his innate sentiments and tribal loyalties will filter that text to serve his coalition’s self-image, turning even the most ambiguous novel into a weapon for group competition.

In his later work, Trilling identified and critiqued what he called the “adversary culture”—the tendency of modern intellectuals and artists to define themselves by their automatic opposition to the values of the middle class. Trilling viewed this as a tragic psychological and cultural shift where the pursuit of extreme individualism and subversion subverted social stability. Mearsheimer’s thesis implies that Trilling misdiagnosed the behavior. The adversary culture is not a departure from tribalism into radical individual alienation; it is simply the formation of a new tribe. The intellectuals Trilling worried about did not cast off social ties; they formed a distinct elite coalition with its own intense socialization, its own strict moral codes, and its own survival logic designed to strip status from bourgeois rivals.

Trilling’s criticism often tracked the tension between the raw, unreflective “will” of political movements and the refining power of the “idea.” He hoped that ideas, carefully weighed by a self-reflective elite, could restrain the crude, coercive will of the masses. Mearsheimer’s ranking of human faculties reveals that Trilling’s hope is an evolutionary impossibility. Because reason ranks last behind socialization and inborn sentiment, ideas possess no independent lever to alter human action on a broad scale. Ideas do not restrain the political will; they are the instruments the political will employs to justify its pre-existing tribal drives.

Trilling looked to high culture and the critical intellect to provide a stabilizing foundation for a liberal society, acting as a buffer against the raw, irrational forces of mass politics. Mearsheimer’s realism removes the possibility of such a buffer. In an anarchic world where no authority stands above groups to keep the peace, the primary source of security is the cohesive social unit, not its cultural sophistication. When a society faces an existential crisis or intense competition from a rival group, the refined, modulating intelligence Trilling championed becomes a liability. The group will inevitably discard Trilling’s cultural complexity in favor of the primal solidarity required to survive.

If Mearsheimer is right, Trilling’s liberal imagination is a fragile superstructure built on an incorrect view of the mind. Literature and criticism rarely liberate an individual from his tribal baseline, because the value infusion of childhood has already won the battle for his loyalty.

‘A Big Misunderstanding’

Lionel Trilling spent his life examining the same blind spot that Pinsof describes. In his collection of essays, The Liberal Imagination, Trilling argues that the educated class tends to simplify human nature. He writes that the liberal mind prefers organization, blueprints, and administrative solutions. It treats human difficulties as errors that a better system or clearer thinking can solve. Trilling saw that intellectuals deny the tragic, complex, and competitive parts of the human soul to keep their worldview neat.

If Pinsof is right, Trilling diagnosed the symptom correctly but misread the motive. Trilling thought that intellectuals lacked imagination and literary depth. He believed they fell into a dry, programmatic way of thinking because they loved order. Pinsof implies a more cynical reality. The intellectual does not simplify human nature by accident. He simplifies it because that simplification creates his job security.

By framing human conflict as a series of misunderstandings, the intellectual positions himself as the indispensable arbiter. If war, bigotry, and poverty come from cognitive errors, then the man who charts those errors holds the key to progress. Pinsof reveals that this intellectual habit is a tool for status. The preference for neat solutions is an engine of self-interest.

Trilling wanted intellectuals to read more high literature to develop a tragic sense of life. He hoped that a deeper acquaintance with complexity would make the educated class less arrogant. If Pinsof is right, that hope is hollow. Arrogance is not an intellectual error that reading can cure. Arrogance is the point. The intellectual class uses the language of enlightenment to mask a basic competition for power and state control.

Pinsof changes the meaning of Trilling’s critique from a warning about a lack of imagination to an exposure of an ideology. The liberal imagination is not a failed attempt to understand the world. It is a successful strategy to dominate it.