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 Mearsheimer’s thesis is correct, it directly undermines the entire foundation of Benjamin Schreier’s The Impossible Jew Identity and the Reconstruction of Jewish American Literary History. Mearsheimer’s assertion that humans are fundamentally tribal, socially embedded, and shaped by an early “value infusion” completely opposes Schreier’s desire to dismantle stable ethnic categories.
Schreier advocates for a “postidentitarian” and “subjectless” approach to Jewish studies, drawing on critics who try to decouple ethnic fields from a concrete, identifiable human population. He argues that a text’s Jewishness should be viewed as a spectral product of interpretive desire rather than a reflection of real Jews. If Mearsheimer is right, Schreier’s theory is a textbook example of hyper-individualistic liberal delusion. In Mearsheimer’s view, humans do not operate as lone wolves or choose their identities from a menu of textual desires; they are born into social groups that shape their identities long before they can think for themselves. Schreier’s attempt to vaporize the biological and sociological reality of “the population” ignores the evolutionary and social fact that group survival depends on cooperation and shared, inherited tribal realities.
Schreier fiercely critiques the historicist mainstream of Jewish studies for its “anthropological expectation” that a body of literature represents an actual, legible population. He calls this a complacent, nationalistic dead end. If Mearsheimer is right, this historicist “ghetto” is actually the only scientifically and sociologically valid way to read literature. Literature should be evaluated through the lens of population, socialization, and shared tribal experience because authors are products of intense early childhood socialization within their specific group. You cannot separate a text from the collective survival engine of the society that produced the writer.
In Chapter 3, Schreier attacks right-wing critics like Ruth Wisse who argue that the Jewish New York Intellectuals had a biological or cultural responsibility to a Jewish polity. Schreier prefers Lionel Trilling’s model of “self-conscious detachment from any position” and the preservation of individual imaginative freedom over collective affiliation. Mearsheimer’s framework suggests that Trilling’s detached, universalist individualism is a psychological impossibility. If humans are tribal at their core and reason is subordinate to socialization, then the New York Intellectuals could never truly strip away their early “value infusion.” Wisse’s argument that their identity naturally bound them to the fate of their group comports with Mearsheimer’s belief that individuals develop powerful, involuntary attachments to their group and are wired to cooperate for collective survival.
If Mearsheimer is right, Schreier’s book is an artifact of the post-Cold War liberal universalism it purports to critique. By trying to turn a concrete, historical group identity into an abstract aesthetic playground of “negation” and “unknowability,” Schreier is downplaying the social nature of human beings to the point of ignoring it. Mearsheimer would argue that no matter how much a literary critic twists textuality to make identity “impossible,” the tribal reality of human socialization will always dictate the boundaries of the group.
