Luke Ford

Cynthia Ozick (b. 1928) grows up behind the counter of her father’s pharmacy in the northeast Bronx, and the first thing she learns about herself she learns from the other children. They have a word for her, and the word comes with a stone behind it. She is the one whose people killed their God. She walks home past the row houses where the December windows fill with small lit tableaux, the plaster infant in the straw, the ox, the kneeling kings. The neighbors love these figures. The figures glow in the cold. The girl carries home the knowledge that she belongs to the people who refuse to bow to the made thing, who keep a fence around this exact glow.

That refusal becomes her life. Read the essays and the stories and you find one commandment under all of them, the second one, the one against the graven image. Ozick writes against idolatry the way other writers write for love or money. It is her subject, her fear, and her accusation, and she turns it most often against herself.

To see why the prohibition rules her, borrow the frame of Ernest Becker (1924-1974). In The Denial of Death Becker argues that a culture is a scheme for outliving death. Man knows he will die and cannot bear the knowledge, so he builds a system of heroism, a set of cosmic stakes, and earns a place in something that will not die. The warrior dies for the flag. The scientist adds his name to the permanent record. The mother lives on in the child. Each culture hands its members a different ladder out of the grave, and the climbing feels like the most serious thing a man can do, because it is. Becker calls the ladder the immortality project. He adds a darker claim in Escape from Evil. Men kill to feed the project. The other tribe carries death, so the other tribe must die, and the killing buys a little more life for the killer’s god and the killer’s name.

Now set Ozick’s commandment beside Becker’s argument, and something turns over. Becker says every culture makes an idol. The hero system is a graven image of meaning, a thing built by human hands and then worshipped as though it came down from the sky. The flag, the record, the nation, the masterpiece, the self crowned as its own author. Ozick’s tradition names this and forbids it. Hers is the hero system built to diagnose the hero system. The Jew, in her telling, is the man who knows that the made thing kills, that the idol is death wearing the mask of life, and who lives under a Law that forbids him to crown himself or his works. She reads Becker before Becker, and from the inside.

The trouble is that she wants to be an artist, and the artist makes idols for a living.

She knows this from her own youth. As a young woman she does not worship God so much as she worships Henry James (1843-1916). She writes her master’s thesis on him. She reads him the way the devout read scripture, and she gives him years, and she becomes, by her own later account, an old man’s sensibility before she has lived a young woman’s life. In the essay she later calls “The Lesson of the Master” she sets down the cost. She had made a priest of herself in the temple of art, and the god she served was a man who had made his own renunciations, and she copied the renunciations without the life that earned them. She had committed the sin. She had bowed to the made thing, and the made thing was a novel, and the novelist was a man.

Her clearest confession comes dressed as a story. In “The Pagan Rabbi” a brilliant scholar of the Law, Isaac Kornfeld, hangs himself from a tree by the water, and he hangs himself with his own prayer shawl. He has fallen in love with the spirit of the tree, a creature of the green world, Pan’s world, the world of nature worshipped for its own sake. He has left the Word for the Image. He has chosen the living tree over the dry Law, the creature over the Creator, and the choice kills him. Ozick writes the story as a warning, and the warning points at the writer who wrote it. To make a character breathe is to take up the work of the one who breathes life into clay. The novelist works the same trade as the idol maker. He shapes a figure from nothing and asks the world to love it. Ozick spends a career inside this trade while believing the trade is forbidden, and the belief gives her work its heat. She is the pagan rabbi. She knows the tree is beautiful. She knows the shawl is for prayer and not for hanging.

Here the frame opens onto its largest claim. A sacred word does not carry one charge. It carries the charge its hero system needs it to carry, and the same word can save one man and damn another. Watch the word idol travel.

In a stadium in Seoul a girl of nineteen lifts a lightstick with forty thousand others, and the lights move together as one, and when the dancer she loves walks to the front of the stage she cannot get her breath. She has saved for the ticket for a year. She runs an account that tracks his schedule and defends his name. Her word for him is idol, and the word holds no shame in it. It holds devotion, belonging, a reason to wake early, a place in a crowd that loves the same face. The idol gives her the thing Becker says a hero system must give. He lifts her out of the small life and into a large one. Tell her the word names a sin and she will not follow the sentence.

In a temple in Tamil Nadu a priest bathes the stone in milk and honey before dawn. He has performed the rite that calls the divine into the image, and for him the image holds the god the way a hearth holds fire. The deity wakes, eats, dresses, sleeps. When a visitor from a missionary tradition calls the practice idolatry the priest hears an insult laid across the holiest hour of his day. The word that organizes Ozick’s reverence organizes his shame, and he rejects the word. The stone, for him, never stood between the worshipper and God. The stone is where God consents to be met.

In a study lined with bound volumes a cleric of a purifying school speaks of shirk, the setting of any partner beside the One. He shares Ozick’s horror of the image and carries it past where she dares. Where she fears the idol in a novel he fears the idol in a shrine, a tomb, a saint’s grave loud with petitioners, and men of his persuasion have leveled such tombs to the ground. The same fence around the same God, and on his side of it the bulldozer. Ozick guards the commandment with an essay. He guards it with rubble. The shared word measures the distance between two heroisms more than it joins them.

In a white room in Chelsea a curator stands before a large canvas and speaks to a collector in a low voice. “He’s the real thing,” he says. “A monster. An idol.” In his mouth the word climbs to the highest praise the trade can offer. The idol is the artist who will outlast the season, whose name the museum will keep, whose work the market will not let die. This hero system runs on the worship Ozick forbids. It crowns the maker. It hangs the made thing on a white wall under a soft light and asks the room to fall silent before it. The curator and the rabbi use one word and kneel in opposite directions.

In a seminar room a theorist of the old left writes commodity fetishism on the board. The idol he hunts is the price tag that hides the worker, the brand that men love as though it loved them back, the thing that drinks up the labor poured into it and shows the buyer a bright and shining face. He has no God to defend, and yet he keeps the prophet’s quarrel with the idol, the charge that men bow to the work of their own hands and forget their own hands made it. Strip the theology and the structure remains. The idol is the human power that escapes its makers and rules them.

Five rooms, one word, five charges. The girl with the lightstick and the priest with the milk give the idol their love. The cleric and the prophet of the left give it their hatred, and they hate it for opposite reasons, the one because it insults God and the other because it hides the worker. The curator gives it his money and calls the gift reverence. Ozick stands among them with the second commandment in her hand and watches the word she has built her life on mean its reverse three feet away. The frame holds. A sacred value lives inside the hero system that keeps it, and outside that system it turns to something else, sometimes to its opposite.

The stakes rise past argument when Ozick turns to the murdered. In The Shawl a mother watches a guard throw her infant against the electric fence, and the story runs a few pages, and Ozick has written of her unease at making such a story at all. To make the death beautiful is to make an idol of it. To shape the camps into a fine sad object for a reader to admire is to do the dead a second wrong. She wants memory and refuses monument. The covenant remembers the way she trusts. It keeps the name and forbids the statue. She writes the murder and then distrusts the writing, and the distrust is the Jewish part of her, the fence she will not climb even when her own gift carries her toward it.

Becker might not let her stand clear of the charge. Your covenant, he might say, is an immortality project like the rest. The Word is your bid for permanence. Torah outlasts the body, the name in the long chain of names outlasts the grave, and your books make a second bid on top of the first, since you, who fear the idol, will leave a shelf of idols behind you with your name down the spines. She might not deny it. She might answer that the difference sits in one place and one place only. Every other hero system lets the man become the god. It crowns the maker, the nation, the genius, the self that would be its own father, the self that bows to its own face in the work. Hers forbids the crowning. It hands the permanence to Him and leaves the man a servant who may build but may not worship what he builds. The idol is the self mistaken for the eternal. Ozick spends her life making things that tempt her to that mistake, and naming the mistake, and making the next thing anyway.

She is the pagan rabbi and she knows it. The tree is beautiful. The shawl is for prayer. She writes the warning, signs her name, and the signature is the idol and the confession at once.

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 provides a striking, unexpected validation of Cynthia Ozick, specifically her theological defense of Jewish particularism and her fierce critique of Western aestheticism. Yet, it simultaneously strips her work of its transcendent, divinely commanded authority, reducing her theological vision to a highly functional evolutionary survival device.
Ozick operates as a deeply theological essayist and fiction writer. In landmark collections like Art & Ardor (1983) and stories like The Pagan Rabbi, she draws a sharp, unyielding line between the Jewish tradition—rooted in history, memory, the commandment, and the collective covenant—and what she terms the “pagan” or “Hellenistic” impulse, which prioritizes individual aesthetic beauty, nature worship, and universalist literary imagination. For Ozick, being Jewish is an act of rigorous, conscious resistance against the seductive, atomizing allure of Western culture.
Mearsheimer’s thesis interacts with Ozick’s worldview on several fronts.
Ozick argues that a Jew cannot separate himself from the historical memory and moral commandments of his people without losing his identity. She views the Torah and Jewish law as a totalizing blueprint for a collective life. If Mearsheimer is right, Ozick’s description of this inescapable inheritance is anatomically correct. The long human childhood requires an intense value infusion from the surrounding society before an individual’s critical faculties ever mature. What Ozick frames as a sacred, historical covenant binding generations together is the exact sociological mechanism Mearsheimer describes: a highly effective, rigorous system of early socialization designed to seal group loyalty and preserve the collective unit.
While Mearsheimer’s anthropology explains the immense holding power of Ozick’s tradition, it undermines her belief in its transcendent origin. Ozick presents the rejection of paganism as a continuous, demanding exercise of human moral choice and intellectual fidelity to God’s law. Mearsheimer’s hierarchy of preferences places individual reason last, far behind socialization and innate sentiments. A man does not remain loyal to the covenant because he has rationally weighed the options and chosen holiness over pagan nature worship; he remains loyal because his initial group socialization fixed his moral framework in childhood. The “pagan rabbi” in Ozick’s famous story who falls in love with a nature spirit is not experiencing a philosophical lapse of reason; he is a social animal attempting to slip out of his tribe’s survival vehicle—a move that Mearsheimer’s model predicts will fail or result in social destruction.
Ozick is famously skeptical of the religion of art. She argues that literature becomes an idol when it is treated as a self-contained, sovereign universe capable of generating its own moral light, a direct critique of the Romantic “lamp” championed by critics like M. H. Abrams. Ozick demands that literature serve a moral and historical purpose. Mearsheimer, along with David Pinsof’s alliance theory, confirms Ozick’s suspicion but alters the diagnosis. Art and high aestheticism are indeed idols, or rather, they are ideological camouflage. The universalist, aesthetic realm that liberal intellectuals worship is not a neutral zone of creative freedom; it is a sophisticated cultural badge used by a competing elite coalition to claim status and moral superiority over traditional, cohesive groups. Ozick correctly identifies that Western aestheticism aims to dissolve the distinct boundaries of her group, but realism reveals that this is a standard maneuver in the game of tribal competition.
In her famous essay Who Owns Anne Frank?, Ozick voiced profound outrage over how Anne Frank’s diary was systematically sentimentalized and universalized by Western liberals to preach a bland, abstract message about the generalized goodness of the human spirit. Ozick insisted that this universalization was a erasure of the specific, targeted destruction of the Jewish people. Mearsheimer’s critique of liberal universalism explains this exact friction. Liberalism downplays the tribal nature of human beings, treating individuals as atomistic rights-bearers and projecting its own ideals onto foreign realities. The liberal attempt to transform Anne Frank into a bloodless symbol for all humanity is the precise mechanism Mearsheimer predicts: a powerful dominant culture using universal language to rewrite the hard, particularist realities of group conflict.
Ozick makes a sharp distinction in her criticism between “liturgical” literature—writing that serves the collective memory, history, and survival of a specific people—and “pagan” literature, which exists purely for individualistic, aesthetic pleasure. She argues that true Jewish writing must be liturgical, prioritizing the community’s historical narrative over private artistic experimentation.
Mearsheimer’s anthropology, paired with alliance theory, shows that Ozick has correctly identified the primary function of language. Human narrative did not evolve to allow lone individuals to express their unique inner light; it evolved as a tool to coordinate behavior, signal group loyalty, and enforce compliance within a coalition. What Ozick calls “liturgical” literature is simply narrative operating in its native, evolutionary state: binding the tribe together to ensure survival in a competitive world. The “pagan” literature she rejects is an evolutionary aberration—a luxury product of stable, secure societies that mistakenly believe they can survive without strict group boundaries.
Ozick places the Concept of the Commandment (the mitzvah) at the center of human morality. She argues that true righteousness is not an innate sentiment or a product of individual reason, but an act of disciplined obedience to a historic, external law. For Ozick, morality is a yoke that a man must consciously choose to carry.
Mearsheimer’s hierarchy of human preferences upends this theological voluntarism. Because reason and conscious individual choice arrive late and rank last, a man does not carry the yoke of the commandment because he continuously decides to do so. He carries it because the value infusion of his long childhood socialization has wired his brain to accept the group’s rules as absolute. Ozick’s vision of a highly conscious, intellectually driven moral fidelity masks a hard biological necessity: the long childhood ensures that the group can stamp its survival rules onto the individual before he ever gains the critical faculties to rebel.
Ozick has frequently condemned Jewish intellectuals who abandon their particularist heritage to embrace universalist political creeds, human rights campaigns, or cosmopolitan artistic movements. She views these figures as tragic moral failures who have been seduced by the false gods of Western secularism, trading their historical birthright for a hollow assimilation.
Mearsheimer’s realism offers a structural explanation for this behavior that strips away Ozick’s theological outrage. These cosmopolitan intellectuals are not suffering from a personal moral collapse; they are executing a standard tribal migration. In an anarchic, status-driven arena, individual survival and prestige often require an actor to join the most powerful dominant coalition available. The universalist Western intelligentsia is itself a formidable tribe that uses the language of global human rights to claim elite status and police its own boundaries. The intellectuals Ozick laments have simply calculated that their survival and status prospects are better served by joining the universalist coalition than by remaining within a smaller, particularist unit.
If Mearsheimer is right, Ozick emerges as a remarkably clear-eyed observer of human boundaries, one who recognized that universalist narratives are threats to group survival long before political realists codified the charge. Her tragedy, under a realist reading, is that the distinct, holy boundaries she spends her life defending are not commanded by Him from above, but are the permanent, protective walls built by an endangered tribe to survive in an anarchic world.

‘A Big Misunderstanding’

Cynthia Ozick presents a complex challenge for the misunderstanding myth. She is a fierce defender of high culture, the sacred nature of the text, and the central role of the Jewish literary tradition. She rejects the soft, therapeutic view of literature that claims art exists simply to make us nice or to foster vague human warmth. In her essay Moral Necessity, she argues that literature must possess a fierce, demanding moral gravity.
If David Pinsof is right, Ozick’s high-minded defense of the literary imagination is not a noble stand against cultural decay. It is the defensive strategy of a premium brand protecting its market monopoly.
Ozick frequently writes about the distinction between the “holy” and the “profane” in literature. She treats the act of writing and deep reading as a high, almost liturgical calling. For Ozick, a culture that abandons tough, complex narrative in favor of quick entertainment is losing its soul and its capacity for deep truth.
Pinsof might say that by framing literature as a sacred liturgy that requires deep reverence and immense intellectual labor, Ozick creates an elite caste system. If literature is easy, anyone can do it, and the cultural critic has no value. If literature is a demanding, sacred mystery, then you need a highly specialized priesthood to interpret it. Ozick’s insistence on the “holy” nature of the text is a tool to secure status. It allows the high-culture intellectual to look down on popular culture not merely as a different taste preference, but as a profane moral failure. The rigor she demands is a barrier to entry that keeps the masses out and keeps the value of her own cultural capital high.
Ozick has argued that the imagination is inherently moral because it allows us to conceive of the “other.” She writes that the capacity to imagine what it is like to be someone else is the very engine of human morality. This is a classic, sophisticated version of the misunderstanding myth: we do bad things because we fail to imagine each other properly, and literature fixes this gap.
Pinsof might say that the imagination is not a moral tool; it is a weapon. Humans do not lack the capacity to imagine their rivals; they use their imagination to invent sophisticated strategies to defeat them. When Ozick frames the imagination as an instrument of empathy, she is providing a cover story for her own class. Intellectuals survive by selling the idea that their specific skill—manipulating words and ideas—is the key to human goodness. Pinsof’s logic shows that we do not commit cruelty because we suffer from a failure of imagination. We commit cruelty because we want resources, status, and power over our rivals. Ozick’s “moral imagination” is an elegant story that hides these ugly motives behind a screen of literary beauty.
A major theme in Ozick’s work is the war against idolatry. She defines an idol as anything that is static, visible, and worshipped for its own sake, whereas the true Jewish literary tradition is driven by the invisible, demanding “Idea.” She warns that modern culture is constantly falling back into the pagan worship of physical icons, celebrity, and material success.
Pinsof might say this is a direct, zero-sum turf war over what constitutes status. The “idols” Ozick attacks—material wealth, political power, physical beauty, and mass popularity—are the main currencies of her rivals in the social hierarchy. The businessman, the politician, and the pop culture star win in those arenas. The intellectual cannot compete there.
By declaring that material and popular success are mere “idolatry” and that the invisible “Idea” is the only thing of true value, Ozick attempts to devalue her competitors’ currency while inflating her own. It is a highly savvy maneuver: if the invisible Idea is supreme, then the writer who handles those ideas sits at the top of the human hierarchy, looking down on the billionaires and celebrities as primitive idol-worshippers stuck in a deep misunderstanding.

The shop sits on a Brooklyn corner in the 1930s. Sawdust on the floor, the smell of blood and brine, a scale on the counter. Beny Chametzky came from Volhynia in 1913, learned the trade, and bought the place. Anna came from Lublin and ran a sewing machine in a sweater factory. They speak Yiddish at the table. The older son, Leslie, ships out with the infantry, lands in North Africa, falls into German hands, and comes home through Sicily. The younger son, Jules Chametzky (1928–2021), watches the meat go out the door and the language stay in the house. He learns young that a people can be cut down and a tongue can go silent, and that somebody has to keep the account.

Ernest Becker (1924–1974) argues that every culture hands its members a hero system, a scheme that lets a man feel he counts against death. The hero system tells him how to earn cosmic significance, how to leave a mark the grave cannot take back. Religions promise this through the soul. Nations promise it through the flag and the line of descent. Becker’s claim is that the terror of dying drives the whole enterprise, and that men will kill and die to keep their immortality project intact. Chametzky builds his on letters. He builds it on the canon.

To put a writer in an anthology is to confer a small immortality. The editor stands at the gate. He decides whose sentences students read in 2050 and whose go to the landfill. Chametzky spends his life at that gate, and he spends it widening the opening. His essay broadens the canon to take in the regional, the ethnic, the racial, the sexual. He writes the first book-length study of Abraham Cahan (1860–1951), the Yiddish editor and novelist of the immigrant Lower East Side, and titles it From the Ghetto. He co-edits Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology. He gathers his encounters with the great Jewish writers into Out of Brownsville. In his own account of the early years, the work means letting in Jewish, Black, and women writers, fresh currents against the dam of the New Criticism.

The shape of the work repeats the shape of the wound. A boy from a Yiddish house, his kin in the path of the German erasure, grows up to run the ledger of who survives in print. The anthology is a Yizkor book at scale, the memorial roster a congregation reads for its dead, widened to a national literature. His immortality project answers the death he fears most, the erasure of his own kind.

The word he loves carries other freight in other houses.

In a study hall not far from where Beny kept the shop, a young man in a black hat bends over a folio. For him the canon closed long ago. The text came down at Sinai and the sages built a fence around it. To broaden it is no project, it is a breach. His work is transmission, word for word, the same page his grandfather swayed over. Where Chametzky opens the gate, the yeshiva man guards it shut, and both believe they serve permanence.

Across the river a professor of the old school keeps a list of the hundred books a free man should read. To him Chametzky’s broadening reads as dilution, the slow drowning of Homer and Milton under the minor and the local. The same act Chametzky calls justice the traditionalist calls vandalism. One word, canon. The traditionalist mourns the books pushed off the raft. Chametzky mourns the writers never let aboard.

On the other side of the world a Maori carver works a beam for a meeting house. His ancestors live in the whakapapa, the genealogy chanted aloud, and in the figures cut into wood. He keeps no canon of printed books. To him the written page might be the thief that lets a people forget what it once held in the mouth. Chametzky’s whole apparatus, the press, the anthology, the footnote, looks to the carver like the instrument of forgetting.

In a glass office a founder hears the word canon and reaches for “legacy.” The old code runs slow. The canon is technical debt. Permanence comes through the next release, not the preserved text. He builds his immortality on disruption, on the thing that erases what came before. The founder and Chametzky both chase a name that outlasts the body. They disagree on whether the past is the treasure or the obstacle.

January 1954. A witness names Chametzky before the federal board that hunts subversives. The local papers run it. The president of the University of Minnesota convenes a committee. Chametzky sits across from them with his graduate work, his teachers Leo Marx (1919–2022) and Henry Nash Smith (1906–1986), his half-built life as a scholar, and a question on the table about his loyalties.

He had drawn his line already. He joined the American Labor Party, the NAACP, the youth groups. He did not join the Communist Party. Three things kept him out. He rejected its line on the Jewish and Zionist question. He rejected social realism as the measure of a book. And he rejected the Stalinist habit of settling an argument by destroying the man who lost it. Then came the hanging of Rudolf Slánský (1901–1952), the Czech Communist, a Jew, strung up by his own party. For Chametzky the rope around Slánský settled it. The Communist immortality project, the workers’ paradise that licensed any corpse, fed on Jews no less than on anyone else, and called it history.

The committee clears him later that year. He keeps his place. He has watched a rival hero system, the state’s loyalty apparatus, decide whether a man is surplus, and he has seen what another one does to its own when it judges them so.

Out of that refusal grows the second word he holds sacred. Solidarity. He is a union man before he is a professor, a member of the electrical workers in his Brooklyn years. At the University of Massachusetts he builds the faculty union and serves as its third president. He pulls the Amherst faculty and the smaller, angrier Boston faculty back into one body and writes the rules for their quarrels. He quotes Lenin (1870–1924) on what a union is, a defensive arm raised to take a blow. Then he adds his own clause. You need the arm so that you do not just barely survive, but live with dignity. Survival alone falls short. A man owes himself a life with a floor under it, and the floor gets built by men standing together.

The word travels badly.

In a monastery the monks keep silence and sing the hours. Their solidarity is the communion of saints, the living and the dead in one choir, each man dying to his own will so the body might pray as one. They stand together by sitting still and saying nothing of themselves. Chametzky’s solidarity speaks up, files the grievance, signs the contract. The monk’s empties the self. Both answer death. One by the contract, one by the Rule.

In the mountains a Pashtun elder reads solidarity as the blood tie and its debts, melmastia and badal, the hospitality a man owes his guest and the revenge he owes his line. The bond runs through kin and honor. A union of strangers who happen to share a payscale might strike him as no bond at all.

To the young officer at the academy solidarity is the man on his left and the man on his right. Unit cohesion. No one left on the field. He will die for the three men in his fire team and could not tell you their politics. Chametzky’s solidarity sets labor against capital. The officer’s sets flesh against fear under fire. Same word, different field, each built to hold a line.

In a hill town a Sicilian widow keeps the older meaning, the one that runs against his. Solidarity is silence. You owe the family your mouth shut. You never speak to the state. Chametzky’s solidarity is the open contract, the named member, the voice raised in the hall. Hers is the sealed lip, the refusal to sit on any record at all. The same word names the thing he does and the thing he most refuses.

His third word puzzles the others as much. Dignity, the floor under the man. The dueling aristocrat hears dignity and reaches for his sword, since for him it climbs, a height defended against insult, not a floor secured by contract. The Stoic hears it and looks inward, to the citadel no master can enter, and finds the floor beside the point, since the wise man keeps his dignity in chains. The Confucian elder hears it as face, the right order of ranks, each man dignified by filling his station. Chametzky alone hears, in dignity, a thing you bargain for and win in a room with a contract on the table.

He dies in Amherst in 2021, married more than fifty years to the writer Anne Halley (1928–2004), his name on the Massachusetts Review he started with a memo in 1958. The shop in Brownsville is gone. The Yiddish at his parents’ table is gone with the world that spoke it. What he built to answer that loss still stands on a shelf, the anthology with its widened roster, the names he would not let the landfill take. He spent his life at a gate deciding who survives in print, the same work, in the end, as the union man deciding who survives with dignity and the boy deciding whom to read into the next century. The hero system he chose let a butcher’s son confer immortality on others while he was still alive to sign the page. Whether the canon he widened holds, or narrows again, or breaks apart, the next century decides. He took his stand at the gate and held it.

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 intellectual and political legacy of Jules Chametzky, a pioneer of ethnic studies, a champion of multi-ethnic American literature, and a co-editor of Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology.
Chametzky spent his career arguing that the American literary mainstream is constantly revitalized, integrated, and transformed by the unique voices of marginalized ethnic, racial, and regional writers. Through books like Our Decentralized Literature and his work founding The Massachusetts Review, Chametzky operated on a progressive, pluralistic model: that cultural mediation and literary translation can bridge divisions, allowing minority groups to integrate into a wider democratic culture while retaining their distinct heritage.
Mearsheimer’s realism upends Chametzky’s pluralistic optimism in several ways.
Chametzky’s scholarship on Jewish-American and Black writers treats ethnic identity as a site of rich, ongoing cultural mediation—a process where an individual navigates his immigrant or minority heritage and negotiates his place within the broader American fabric. If Mearsheimer is right, this focus on literary mediation misses the primary force shaping human life. Individuals do not fluidly negotiate their identities through essays and novels; their moral frameworks and group allegiances are largely sealed by intense childhood socialization and innate sentiments long before they can think critically. The deep “value infusion” of the initial tribe anchors the individual. What Chametzky analyzes as a smooth, creative synthesis of cultures is a luxury narrative that can only exist when a dominant group or state provides total security.
By co-editing the Norton Anthology of Jewish American Literature and anthologizing Black writers, Chametzky sought to expand the canon to foster mutual understanding and democratic inclusion. Mearsheimer’s anthropology, paired with alliance theory, implies that these canonical projects do not work as tools for universal harmony. Narratives and cultural products evolve to bind coalitions, signal group loyalty, and manage reputations in a competitive arena. Chametzky’s push to decentralize literature was not a neutral aesthetic correction; it was a highly sophisticated move by an elite intellectual coalition designed to claim moral and institutional authority within the university system. The anthology functions as a badge of tribal alignment for the academic left, rather than a bridge to post-tribal coexistence.
Chametzky’s lifelong political and academic work—including his early activism with the NAACP and his labor union leadership—pre-supposed that disparate social groups could build stable, lasting coalitions based on shared progressive ideals, fair practices, and rational consensus. Mearsheimer’s worldview is tragic and static. Because humans are tribal at their core and driven by survival under conditions of scarcity and anarchy, the thin ties of shared literary appreciation or progressive political rhetoric are the first things to snap during a crisis. When real group interests, resources, or safety are threatened, individuals do not fall back on the multi-ethnic synthesis Chametzky curated in The Massachusetts Review. They abandon the cosmopolitan coalition and retreat to their primary, unreflective group identities for protection.
Chametzky wrote about early Jewish-American writers like Abraham Cahan, analyzing their work as a complex, self-conscious psychological negotiation between the old-world ghetto and new-world American modernity. He viewed assimilation as a fluid, literary, and intellectual journey through which individuals wrestled with competing cultural ideals.
Mearsheimer’s realism strips the romance from this process. Assimilation is not a series of individual literary choices; it is a structural capitulation to a more powerful survival vehicle. When an immigrant group arrives in an anarchic or highly competitive environment, individual survival depends on embedding oneself within the dominant, protective social structure. The shift in language, dress, and values that Chametzky tracks in literature is the standard operation of the human animal adapting to a new dominant tribe. The writer’s prose does not drive this process; it merely documents the surface adjustments after the structural reality of power has already forced the realignment.
A core tenet of Chametzky’s critical work is that ethnic and marginalized literature acts as a corrective, purifying force that holds American democracy accountable to its universalist promises. He believed that by introducing the stories of the marginalized into the mainstream, literature could expand the capacity for empathy and reason within the dominant culture.
Mearsheimer’s hierarchy of human preferences reveals why this humanist hope fails. Reason and text-based empathy rank last among the forces that govern human behavior, falling far behind the unreflective survival instincts of the group. A dominant coalition does not alter its structural behavior or yield material power because it reads a moving novel about a minority group. The universalist democratic promises Chametzky looks to are not active moral truths; they are the ideological standard of the ruling coalition. The dominant group will tolerate and even celebrate multi-ethnic literature during times of peace and abundance, but it will discard those empathetic insights instantly the moment its own collective dominance or security is threatened.
Through his decades of work with The Massachusetts Review, Chametzky sought to create an independent cultural space where writers, civil rights activists, and labor leaders could unite their voices to drive political reform. He operated on the liberal assumption that a shared commitment to artistic excellence and social justice could bind disparate groups into a durable political force.
Mearsheimer’s realism exposes the fragility of this setup. A literary magazine cannot manufacture a tribe. Real, binding social units are forged through intense childhood socialization, shared ancestry, or the immediate, mutual reliance required to survive in a hostile world. The coalition Chametzky assembled in print was an elite, intellectual arrangement held together by shared language and status goals. Because it lacked the deep, non-rational value infusions that generate true sacrifice and group loyalty, such a coalition possesses no structural staying power when real political or material conflicts emerge between the constituent groups.
If Mearsheimer is right, Chametzky’s decentralized literature captures the surface ripples of ethnic assimilation during a rare period of domestic stability. It mistakes a temporary cultural truce for a permanent transformation of the human animal, who remains stubbornly tribal from start to finish.

‘A Big Misunderstanding’

If David Pinsof is right, this multi-ethnic literary project rests on a false premise. Chametzky treats cultural friction as a big misunderstanding that can be cured by reading immigrant stories.

Pinsof reveals that ethnic groups do not clash because they lack empathy or do not understand each other. They clash because they compete for zero-sum status, resources, and control over the state. A group understands its rivals well. It demonizes them to win. The intellectual tells a nicer story. He claims that the public needs his curated anthologies to overcome bigotry. This claim turns the literary critic into an indispensable social healer.

By expanding the canon to include Black, Jewish, and immigrant writers, Chametzky did not just discover hidden artistic value. He built a new alliance engine for the secular intelligentsia.

An intellectual gains elite status by deciding who belongs in the canon. Books like From the Ghetto: The Fiction of Abraham Cahan allow the professor to serve as a high priest for the marginalized. He translates the immigrant experience into academic capital. He uses this capital to justify his authority over the culture. The study of decentralized literature becomes a way to signal progressive moral superiority over the provincial middle class.

Chametzky also worked as a union leader, heading the faculty union at the University of Massachusetts. In the union hall, he engaged in a direct, zero-sum fight over salaries, contracts, and workplace power. Pinsof would argue that this union work reflects how humans operate. It is a rational struggle for resources.

The contradiction lies in the academic work. The intellectual acts like a savvy primate when fighting the administration for a contract, but he turns around and writes essays claiming that society’s deep wounds are just cognitive errors and narrative omissions.

If Pinsof is right, Chametzky’s career is a monument to the survival strategy of the academic class. The professor creates a market for his own intervention. He insists that reading ethnic literature fixes a broken world. In reality, the world functions exactly as natural selection designed it to function, with rival coalitions fighting for dominance. The professor merely designs a sophisticated lens to examine the hole, ensuring that he receives the credit—and the paycheck—for managing the view.

To fully strip away the misunderstanding myth from Jules Chametzky, you have to look at the specific machinery he used to construct his career. Chametzky did not just analyze text; he built institutions like The Massachusetts Review and traveled Europe as a Fulbright professor teaching American Studies.

If Pinsof is right, every one of these high-minded achievements was a tactical maneuver in a zero-sum game of status and power.

Chametzky co-founded The Massachusetts Review in 1959 to create a space where literature, art, and public affairs could converge. The stated mission was to break down institutional barriers, foster deep cultural dialogue, and heal a fragmented society by exposing readers to radical new perspectives.

Pinsof might say that a literary journal is not a bridge; it is a border checkpoint. It is a tool used by a small group of academic elites to decide who is allowed into the intellectual marketplace. Chametzky did not print minority and radical writers to cure public ignorance. He printed them to build a proprietary network of alliances. By acting as the gatekeeper who “discovered” and validated these voices, Chametzky accumulated immense cultural capital. The journal did not heal society’s fragments; it established Chametzky and his peers as the mandatory brokers who get to decide which fragments are considered respectable.

Chametzky spent significant time abroad as a Fulbright professor in countries like Germany, lecturing on American literature and ethnic diversity. The stated goal of the Fulbright program is classic misunderstanding-myth ideology: to promote mutual understanding between the people of the United States and other countries, reducing international friction through educational exchange.

Pinsof might say that Chametzky’s European lectures were not an exercise in international empathy; they were a highly successful export of class ideology. By teaching foreign elites how to interpret American society through the lens of literary multiculturalism, Chametzky was expanding the market share of his own profession. He was telling European academics: “The old, raw, capitalist America is crude, but we—the literary intellectuals—possess the sophisticated tools to understand and fix it.” It was an international alliance-building project designed to validate the moral superiority of the university class over the bourgeois business class, both at home and abroad.

When Chametzky worked to integrate Jewish-American, Black, and immigrant writers into the standard curriculum, it was framed as a noble correction of a historical error. The narrative claimed that the old WASP-dominated canon was a product of narrow-minded bias, and that a wider canon would create a more democratic, empathetic student body.

Pinsof might say that the old canon was not a mistake, and the new canon was not a cure. The old canon was a tool used by an older elite to maintain its status. Chametzky and his generation of progressive, multi-ethnic intellectuals did not dismantle the idea of a dominant hierarchy; they launched a hostile takeover of it. By inventing a new set of literary requirements based on identity and marginalization, they rendered the old guard’s expertise obsolete. You cannot teach the new canon without Chametzky’s anthologies and frameworks. The “inclusive canon” was a highly effective lever used to displace an entrenched academic rival and secure jobs, prestige, and institutional control for a new coalition of professors.

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.