{"id":195544,"date":"2026-06-25T10:31:05","date_gmt":"2026-06-25T18:31:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=195544"},"modified":"2026-06-25T10:49:02","modified_gmt":"2026-06-25T18:49:02","slug":"the-myth-of-cosmopolitan-transcendence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=195544","title":{"rendered":"The Myth of Cosmopolitan Transcendence"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

The man who teaches the course is Harry Levin<\/a> (1912\u20131994), and he teaches the modern as scripture. The lecture hall fills. He came up summa cum laude in 1933, took a seat in the new Society of Fellows, and never wrote a dissertation. The A.B. stayed an A.B. while ninety doctoral candidates passed under his hand. T.S. Eliot<\/a> (1888\u20131965) printed an undergraduate essay of his in the Criterion and stayed his friend for life. Allen Tate<\/a> (1899\u20131979) called him a young Turk. The sentences Levin writes run long and allude across four literatures, and the allusion serves as armor and credential at once.<\/p>\n

The word under all of it is culture.<\/p>\n

Culture comes from colere, to till, to tend, to inhabit. The Roman farmer cultivates a field. Cicero<\/a> moves the word indoors and speaks of cultura animi, the tending of the mind. Matthew Arnold<\/a> (1822\u20131888) hands it to the nineteenth century as the best that men have thought and said, a sweetness and light set against the machine and the mob. Irving Babbitt<\/a> (1865\u20131933), whose chair Levin takes in 1960, guards the word against the romantic flood. By the time it reaches Warren House it carries a promise. Tend the right field of the mind and you join the permanent things.<\/p>\n

Ernest Becker<\/a> (1924\u20131974) gives the promise its harder name. In The Denial of Death<\/a> he takes from Otto Rank<\/a> (1884\u20131939) a claim about men. A man knows he dies and cannot bear the knowing, so he builds a project that outlasts his body and enrolls himself in it. Becker calls the project a hero system. Culture, in Becker, names the immortality system a society offers its members, the script by which a mortal earns a place that death cannot revoke. The farmer’s field and Arnold’s library turn out to be the same wager against the grave.<\/p>\n

So the word splits. Watch it split.<\/p>\n

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

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

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

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

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

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

Return to Warren House and the question sharpens. Why does this word and not another carry the life of the son of Isadore Levin of Minneapolis?<\/p>\n

The record answers in the architecture of the place. A. Lawrence Lowell<\/a> (1856\u20131943) presides over the Harvard of Levin’s youth and declares that Jews belong under a quota and Black students in a separate dormitory. The English departments of that era keep the men they call aliens from teaching the literature of England and America, on the theory that a Jew lacks the rootedness the work requires. A boy hears that the soil is not his.<\/p>\n

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

Culture for Levin is the immortality system the blood cannot bar. The pogrom kills the body and burns the town and cannot touch the line of Christopher Marlowe<\/a> (1564\u20131593) or the structure of Ulysses. Enroll in that line, transmit it, add to it, and you take a place in a company that outlasts every regime that ever counted Jews at a gate. The ninety dissertations are his vines. The crowded course is his propagation. Memories of the Moderns is his salvage of a people, the modernists he knew and filed before the singers died. He keeps the recallable past recallable. That labor is the field he tills against his own death.<\/p>\n

The terror under the work shows in the choice of weapon. A man who feared death less might have farmed a literal field or banked a literal fortune. Levin reads. He builds an immortality out of other men’s books because the books survive what kills men, and he knows what kills men, and he watches it take F.O. Matthiessen<\/a> (1902\u20131950) by the man’s own hand and take Eliot by the slow conservatism Levin mourns even as he loves him. The mandarin sentences, the four literatures in a single clause, the refusal of the easy audience: these are the works of a man building a structure tall enough to stand on above the flood.<\/p>\n

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

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

The Great Delusion<\/em><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities<\/em><\/a>, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:<\/p>\n

\nMy 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\u2014everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights\u2014and 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. \u201cHuman rights,\u201d Samuel Moyn notes, \u201chave come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities\u2014state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.\u201d
\n[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…\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If John J. Mearsheimer is right, his anthropology fundamentally challenges the critical framework of Harry Levin (1912\u20131994), an influential exponent of comparative literature and modernist criticism.
\nLevin approached literature as a window into the expanding horizons of human consciousness and creative autonomy. In works exploring modernism, James Joyce, and the concept of realism, he treated great literature as a testament to the mind’s ability to transcend parochial limitations, map complex realities, and synthesize diverse cultural traditions. For Levin, the ultimate power of a writer lies in his capacity to use language to construct a unique vision of the world that challenges static assumptions.
\nMearsheimer’s thesis directly undermines Levin’s scholarly assumptions in several ways.
\nLevin was a champion of comparative literature, a discipline built on the belief that scholarship and art can bridge national, cultural, and linguistic divides. This cosmopolitan ideal assumes that the human mind can rise above local prejudices through intellectual exploration. If Mearsheimer is right, this perspective is an illusion. Because childhood socialization infuses a specific social unit’s values before a man can think critically, his foundational worldview is fixed. Comparative literature does not liberate the individual from his tribe; it merely dresses his tribal baseline in a more sophisticated, cross-cultural vocabulary.
\nLevin wrote extensively on modernism, viewing it as a profound breakthrough where individual artists broke free from traditional structures to forge new ways of perceiving reality. Mearsheimer’s ranking of preferences places individual reason last, far behind socialization and inborn sentiment. This upends Levin’s view of modernism. The radical innovations of modernist literature are not genuine escapes from human nature or social constraint. In a world dictated by group competition and survival, the highly individualistic and fragmented aesthetic of modernism is a fragile luxury, one that quickly collapses back into basic tribal solidarity whenever group survival is threatened.
\nAs a critic of literary realism, Levin examined how writers attempt to report the social world accurately. Mearsheimer’s anthropology, paired with alliance theory, suggests that human communication and narrative are not designed to track objective truth or register external social facts neutrally. Instead, stories serve to bind coalitions, manage reputations, and signal group loyalty. The literary “realism” Levin analyzed is not an objective documentation of society, but a sophisticated instrument of cultural consolidation. A writer’s narrative serves his group’s self-image and moral standing in its competition with other groups.If Mearsheimer is right, Levin’s faith in the expansive, universal potential of literature misses the narrow design of the human mind. Literature cannot break the boundaries of early socialization, because the group remains the primary vehicle for survival, and reason arrives too late to redraw the map.
\nLevin treated the university and the literary institution as autonomous spaces where ideas could be weighed, refined, and debated outside the raw pressures of politics and power. Mearsheimer’s realism views institutions not as independent actors or neutral zones, but as instruments that reflect and serve the distribution of power. If human beings are tribal at their core, the academic fields Levin built\u2014such as comparative literature\u2014are not detached sanctuaries of high culture. They are elite coalitions that use the language of cosmopolitanism to manage their own status, reward allies, and police boundaries against rival groups.
\nLevin’s critical theory focused heavily on the interplay between literary convention and individual innovation. He argued that literature progresses when an original mind breaks through established conventions to capture reality in a new way. Mearsheimer’s thesis suggests that Levin overstates the importance of these stylistic shifts. Because a man’s moral code and social identity are sealed by intense childhood socialization long before his critical faculties mature, the individual writer can only innovate on the surface. He can alter the form or the style of a narrative, but he cannot rewrite the foundational tribal loyalties and inborn sentiments that govern how he and his audience view the world.
\nLevin was known for an approach to realism that insisted literature must be understood in its historical and social context. He believed that by examining the specific social arrangements of a period, a critic could understand how a text reflected its world. Mearsheimer’s anthropology implies that Levin looked at the wrong context. By focusing on the shifting social, economic, and artistic conventions of a particular era, Levin missed the permanent, unchanging context of human life: the struggle for group survival under conditions of anarchy. What Levin analyzed as historical shifts in consciousness are merely minor surface adjustments over a fixed tribal substrate.
\nLevin’s scholarship helped define a secular, Western literary canon, operating on the assumption that a shared body of high literature could provide a stable foundation for humanistic values. Mearsheimer’s argument reveals why this project is unstable. A collection of texts cannot replace the raw binding power of a living social group. Because human reason arrives late and lacks the power to override early socialization, a secular canon possesses no inherent authority to keep a society together or restrain its tribal impulses. When a group faces a crisis of survival or competition, it does not rally around the complex, ambiguous texts of Levin’s canon; it falls back on its most primal, unreflective group identities.<\/p>\n

‘A Big Misunderstanding’<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

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

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

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

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

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

Under Pinsof\u2019s frame, this “breadth” is simply the refined toolkit of a high-status competitor. By mastering the broad strokes of modernism and realism, Levin signaled that he stood above the “narrow” specialists or the “uninformed” masses. His work such as The Gates of Horn categorized writers like Balzac and Stendhal not just as storytellers, but as contributors to a grand, teleological project of “Realism.” This framing serves a clear purpose: it subordinates the authors to the critic’s master narrative. The critic becomes the architect of literary history, deciding which works pass through the “gate of horn” into the realm of truth and which remain in the realm of “ivory” fiction.<\/p>\n

Levin\u2019s commitment to comparative literature was often framed as an effort to foster international understanding and bridge cultural divides. He wanted to show how the “main currents” of life flowed through different national literatures.<\/p>\n

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

Levin\u2019s long tenure at Harvard and his supervision of nearly 100 doctoral students cemented his influence. He created an engine that replicated his own logic across the university system. Every student he trained learned the same lesson: the world is a chaotic place, but it can be brought into focus through the “contexts” and “perspectives” of professional criticism.<\/p>\n

If Pinsof is correct, Levin\u2019s “contexts of criticism” were levers used to turn artistic expression into academic capital, organizing it in a way that gave his own work, and the work of his peers, the highest possible value. He was a master of the “hole” we are stuck in, decorating the walls with refined essays while ensuring his own seat at the top remained secure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Harvard catalog for the fall lists a course, Proust, Joyce, and Mann. A young woman reads the line and decides her life. Marjorie Perloff (b. 1931) never takes the course and never studies with the man who teaches it. … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14100],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-195544","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t