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.
Grant Mearsheimer his three claims. Men are tribal before they are anything else. Reason ranks below socialization and inborn sentiment in setting what a man wants. Colorblind meritocracy is a local creed, not a law of nature. Run the Cofnas affair through that frame and the familiar story comes apart. The free-speech reading and the inclusion reading both assume a contest over evidence and rights. The realist reading sees a tribe defending the engine that reproduces its young.
Start with what Cofnas wants, because his own program carries the flaw he finds in his enemies. He argues that wokeness follows from the equality thesis, the premise that every group holds the same spread of cognitive traits. Accept that premise and any gap left over reads as proof of hidden racism. He wants the elite to trade the equality thesis for hereditarianism, genes playing a non-trivial part in average group differences, and he expects a colorblind meritocracy of individuals to settle out the far side. The fight then narrows to which premise the elite carries.
Mearsheimer’s man wrecks the payoff. A meritocracy of sorted individuals asks men to hold still while status flows to whoever scores highest, and to take their rank without forming a faction. No people does this. Tell a group it sits low on a prized trait and it does not scatter into lone strivers. It organizes. It mobilizes along the line Mearsheimer says runs deepest. Under his premises, hereditarian facts, once public and believed, arm tribal competition rather than dissolve it. Cofnas imagines the truth about genes yields peace and merit. The realist predicts it yields sharper coalitions and a harder scramble for power and resources. So Cofnas underrates tribe in his cure as the liberals underrate it in theirs. Two rationalist projects, one blind spot.
Look at the pair side by side and they rhyme. The woke elite holds that reason and reformed schooling erase the difference and widen sympathy toward all mankind. Cofnas holds that reason and accepted data sort men by talent and leave a creed of individual merit. Both trust the right facts to govern the man. Mearsheimer ranks reason last of the three and puts the value infusion above it. Both projects misread the creature in the same direction.
The crusade reading falls on Cofnas next. His hereditarian revolution is a missionary campaign. Convert the elite at the top universities, reform the society from above, carry the unwelcome truth into the fortress for the good of all. That is the universalist structure Mearsheimer attacks in liberalism, the urge to remake men by fixing the doctrine. Cofnas stands inside the pattern, not outside it. He is another missionary with a rival gospel, and the gospel travels by argument because he believes argument moves the men who run things.
That belief is the heart of the misread. He pins his hope on a vanguard of intelligent, rational leaders who change their preferences when shown the chart. Mearsheimer’s account of childhood value infusion says the elite mind is the most socialized mind in the country, formed inside the institution that selected it, trained it, and handed it its moral coordinates. Reason there is a lawyer for inherited preference, not a scientist chasing the taboo fact. Asking that elite to adopt race realism by philosophical argument asks the immune system to welcome the thing it formed to destroy.
The institution behaves the way the frame predicts. The university reproduces a value infusion and passes it to the next ruling class. The marketplace of ideas is a story the engine tells about itself. Its work is transmission, generation to generation, of a moral code, and the equality thesis sits at the center of that code as the sacred premise. Cofnas attacks the premise at the root. Function drives what follows. They did not disprove him. They removed him, the way a body clears what threatens its cohesion, and the removal needed no finding of fact.
Cofnas held no tenure. He was a Leverhulme early-career fellow in the Faculty of Philosophy and a College Research Associate at Emmanuel, a peripheral and unprotected affiliate. The college cut the affiliation. The faculty held the line. Realism expects the tribe to cull the exposed member first, at the lowest cost, and to send its signal through the cheapest available actor. A marginal post-doc is the easy target. The pattern then repeated at Ghent, where his own department moved against the appointment. One campus might be an accident. Two is a fault line.
So the protestors read the institution right and read themselves wrong. They see that the fortress lives by enforcing its code, that an affiliated insider who breaks the code threatens the cohesion of the whole, and that the safe move is expulsion. They are correct about all of it. Then they tell themselves the expulsion serves a borderless human liberation. Under Mearsheimer it serves their tribe and no one beyond it. Realists in the deed, universalists in the self-description: that is his portrait of the liberal, drawn from life.
The affair resolves into a hard diagnosis. No neutral seminar room. No resting point in colorblind merit, because the merit creed is one tribe’s myth and the egalitarian creed is another’s, and neither describes the man as he is. The university is an arena of great power competition, and the prize is the engine that infuses the next elite. Academic freedom and the Equality Act 2010 set the rules of the contest. They do not name the prize. The only live question is which tribe runs the engine, and on what terms it shapes the moral coordinates of the men who will govern.
Cofnas bets the truth about genes will free the West, and he addresses his guide to the most heavily socialized people in the country, on the faith that argument reaches them. The genre fights the thesis, the way the genre fights Mearsheimer’s own four hundred reasoned pages. If reason ranks last, the hereditarian revolution is a sermon preached to men whose tribe has already told them what to believe. The only readers it converts are the few in whom criticism outruns the infusion. That band is real, and it is too thin to turn an elite. It is also the one niche where Cofnas, and Mearsheimer, and the argument itself still do their work.
