{"id":197082,"date":"2026-07-03T08:10:29","date_gmt":"2026-07-03T16:10:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=197082"},"modified":"2026-07-03T09:36:39","modified_gmt":"2026-07-03T17:36:39","slug":"the-great-delusion-about-the-great-books-curriculum","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=197082","title":{"rendered":"The Great Delusion About The Great Books Curriculum"},"content":{"rendered":"

In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities<\/em><\/a>, John J. Mearsheimer wrote<\/a>:<\/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 Mearsheimer<\/a> (b. 1947) is correct that humans are tribal, profoundly social beings whose moral codes are largely fixed by early childhood socialization rather than reason, the modern justification for the Great Books curriculum requires a complete overhaul.<\/p>\n

Today, elite American universities usually defend the Great Books through a standard liberal framework. They claim these texts teach individual critical thinking, expose students to universal human truths, and allow autonomous actors to construct their own moral worldview through reason.<\/p>\n

If Mearsheimer is right, that entire defense is an illusion. Here are the implications for the curriculum and how it must be taught to yield maximum social value.<\/p>\n

A Great Books education cannot be a tool for self-creation or the discovery of universal human rights. Under Mearsheimer’s logic, a student does not read Plato<\/a> or Machiavelli<\/a> as an atomistic individual operating in a vacuum of pure reason. He reads them through the lens of the social group that nurtured him.<\/p>\n

Reason does not drive the student’s preferences; his tribal socialization drives how he employs his reason. Therefore, expecting a Great Books curriculum to transform students into universal cosmo-liberals who view all of humanity as an undifferentiated group of rights-bearing individuals is a structural error. The texts will simply be weaponized to defend the existing prejudices of the student’s tribe.<\/p>\n

If Mearsheimer is right, the curriculum must abandon its post-World War II framing of universalism. Instructors should stop teaching these texts as a steady march toward the realization of global human rights or a borderless liberal peace.<\/p>\n

Instead, maximum social value is achieved by teaching the Great Books as the specific, tribal inheritance of Western civilization. The curriculum should be taught as a historical record of how one particular culture established its internal cohesion, managed its internal conflicts, and survived. Teaching the texts this way aligns with human nature by reinforcing a shared social fabric rather than pretending students can discard their group identity for a phantom global citizenship.<\/p>\n

If people are tribal and reason serves socialization, then the Great Books are best used to understand the competitive nature of human groups. The curriculum should emphasize writers who analyze power, group survival, and the limits of reason.<\/p>\n

Thucydides<\/a> and Machiavelli must form the core of the curriculum. They show that the international system is anarchic and that groups must compete for survival.<\/p>\n

Hobbes<\/a> and Rousseau<\/a> should be taught to demonstrate how fragile social order is, and how deeply men depend on a sovereign or a community to escape isolation.<\/p>\n

Locke<\/a> and Mill<\/a> should still be read, but explicitly as the tribal ideology of the West\u2014an ideology that can create internal stability at home but causes disaster when crusading elites attempt to export it globally through ambitious foreign policies.<\/p>\n

To provide the highest social value, instructors must shift the classroom environment from an exercise in abstract moralizing to an analysis of group logic.<\/p>\n

Classes should focus on how values are infused into societies and how those values create cohesion or conflict. Instead of asking students, “What is the abstractly just choice in this text?” the instructor should ask, “How does this text help a society survive, and what happens to a group when these core ideas fracture?”<\/p>\n

By treating the Great Books as a study of group survival and the limits of human reason, the curriculum prepares citizens for the world as it is\u2014an arena of competing groups\u2014rather than the world as liberal hyper-individualism imagines it to be. This approach curbs the dangerous universalist impulses of the ruling class and grounds students in the reality of their own social architecture.<\/p>\n

Does anyone do anything close to this?<\/p>\n

No major institution implements this approach, because it directly contradicts the dominant post-World War II consensus. Most existing Great Books programs, whether at secular institutions like St. John’s College<\/a> and the University of Chicago<\/a>, or traditional religious schools like Thomas Aquinas College<\/a>, teach the canon to cultivate universal reason, individual moral self-determination, or human flourishing. They are designed to expand the mind beyond the tribe, not to ground the student within the logic of tribal survival.<\/p>\n

However, three distinct traditions approach this realist, group-centric philosophy from different angles.<\/p>\n

One. The closest operational version of this curriculum exists inside military war colleges and specific international relations graduate programs, rather than undergraduate humanities departments. Institutions like the U.S. Naval War College<\/a> or the Stratis Strategy Center treat classic texts exactly as tools for civilizational and political survival.<\/p>\n

When these programs teach Thucydides, Hobbes, Machiavelli, and Clausewitz<\/a>, they discard the liberal lens entirely. They do not read Thucydides to mourn the loss of Athenian democracy; they read him to analyze how shifting power balances make war inevitable. The text serves as an instrument to train strategic elites to ensure state survival in an anarchic world.<\/p>\n

Two. The intellectual lineage following Leo Strauss<\/a> (1899\u20131973) reads the Great Books with a deep skepticism toward universal progress, modern liberalism, and the standard Enlightenment narrative. Straussians argue that classical political philosophy contains esoteric truths about the permanent friction between political order and philosophical inquiry.<\/p>\n

Thinkers in this tradition, such as Allan Bloom<\/a> (1930\u20131992) in The Closing of the American Mind<\/a>, argued that the Great Books should be used to protect the specific cultural and political health of Western civilization against the solvent of modern moral relativism. While Straussians still place a high value on reason, they reject the post-WWII cosmopolitan human rights consensus, viewing it as a dangerous delusion that blinds a society to the enduring realities of regime survival and political conflict.<\/p>\n

Three. During the early to mid-20th century, the “Western Civilization” courses introduced at Columbia University<\/a> and later adopted across America resembled this model. They were established partly to provide a diverse, immigrant-heavy nation with a unified civic identity and a shared cultural vocabulary. The goal was explicit socialization: to ground American citizens in a specific civilizational inheritance so they could understand and defend the institutional structure of their society. As the century progressed, this model was either abandoned or rewritten to fit the universalist, globalist paradigm, shifting the focus from preserving a specific inheritance to critiquing it through a global lens.<\/p>\n

If Mearsheimer’s anthropology is correct, the most important Great Books are those that dismantle the illusion of universal liberal progress and expose the raw mechanisms of group survival, socialization, and power.<\/p>\n

To achieve maximum social value for Americans today, the curriculum must prioritize texts that explain how tribes form, how they maintain internal cohesion, and how they collide in an anarchic world.<\/p>\n

Here are the essential books that must form the core of that education.<\/p>\n

1. Thucydides<\/a>, History of the Peloponnesian War<\/i><\/a><\/p>\n

Thucydides<\/a> is the foundational text for this entire framework. He provides the ultimate demonstration of how groups behave under the pressure of survival, stripping away the rhetoric of justice and human rights.<\/p>\n

The central takeaway is the Melian Dialogue, where the Athenian empire tells the weak Melians that “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” Thucydides<\/a> teaches that when the chips are down, group interest and security override moral declarations. For Americans socialized to believe that global institutions and universal norms dictate world politics, Thucydides<\/a> is the ultimate antidote.<\/p>\n

2. Thomas Hobbes<\/a>, Leviathan<\/i><\/a> (Part I and II)<\/p>\n

Hobbes<\/a> (1588-1679) provides the psychological and structural blueprint for why humans are profoundly social and tribal.<\/p>\n

Hobbes<\/a> demonstrates that the “state of nature,” a world of atomistic individuals operating as lone wolves, is a nightmare of constant fear and violent death. Humans flee this isolation by surrendering their autonomy to a sovereign power in exchange for protection. Hobbes<\/a> illustrates Mearsheimer’s point perfectly: our social nature is driven by the stark reality that survival requires being embedded in a tight, rule-bound society. It forces students to realize that the state is not a luxury or a vehicle for global charity, but a fragile fortress that keeps chaos at bay.<\/p>\n

3. Niccol\u00f2 Machiavelli<\/a>, The Prince<\/i><\/a> and Discourses on Livy<\/i><\/a><\/p>\n

Machiavelli<\/a> (1469-1527) is essential because he separates political reality from Christian or liberal morality. He analyzes the world as it is, not as it should be.<\/p>\n

Machiavelli<\/a> teaches that a leader’s primary moral duty is the survival and glory of his state, which often requires actions that are immoral on an individual level. In Discourses on Livy<\/i><\/a>, he focuses on how civic virtue and intense socialization are required to keep a republic from decaying from within. This teaches Americans that internal cohesion is not automatic. It requires deliberate, tribal cultivation and a shared identity.<\/p>\n

4. Jean-Jacques Rousseau<\/a>, The Social Contract<\/i><\/a> and Discourse on the Origin of Inequality<\/i><\/a><\/p>\n

While Rousseau<\/a> (1712-1778) is often claimed by the left, his political architecture is deeply collectivist and particular.<\/p>\n

Rousseau<\/a> explains how a society creates a “General Will” that is greater than the sum of its individual parts. He argues that true citizens are shaped completely by their laws and customs from childhood. He famously notes that a citizen of Sparta was so thoroughly socialized that he did not view himself as an individual, but purely as a part of the Spartan collective. Rousseau<\/a> exposes the fiction of the modern cosmopolitan traveler, showing that a man without a specific country and a specific tribe is politically homeless and weak.<\/p>\n

5. Edmund Burke<\/a>, Reflections on the Revolution in France<\/i><\/a><\/p>\n

Burke<\/a> (1729-1797) provides the conservative, sociological defense of Mearsheimer’s observation that family and society infuse values into a child long before he can think for himself.<\/p>\n

Burke<\/a> attacks the French revolutionaries for trying to rebuild society from scratch based on abstract, universal “rights of man.” He argues that society is a contract between the dead, the living, and those yet to be born. Our loyalties start with our immediate group, what he calls the “little platoon,” and expand outward to the nation. Burke<\/a> teaches Americans that prejudice, tradition, and inherited habits are not irrational biases to be erased by liberal education, but vital social glue that protects a civilization from fracturing.<\/p>\n

6. Carl Schmitt<\/a>, The Concept of the Political<\/i><\/a><\/p>\n

Schmitt (1888\u20131885) is the most controversial addition, but if Mearsheimer’s tribal view is correct, his inclusion is non-negotiable.<\/p>\n

Schmitt argues that the core of politics is the distinction between friend and enemy. A group only exists politically if it can decide who is part of the group and who poses an existential threat to it. He mocks liberalism for trying to turn politics into an endless economic debate or a legalistic conversation about universal human rights. Schmitt teaches Americans that the world cannot be neutralized into a single human family; as long as different human groups exist, the friend-enemy distinction will remain.<\/p>\n

If taught together, these six authors teach Americans that their survival depends on the strength and internal cohesion of their specific political community. They show that liberalism’s universalist crusades abroad are dangerous delusions born from a misunderstanding of human nature, and that the first duty of any society is to protect its own borders, its own people, and its own shared cultural heritage.<\/p>\n

The anthropology of John J. Mearsheimer and that of the National Socialists share a fundamental starting point: both reject the liberal view of human beings as atomistic individuals possessing universal human rights. Both argue that humans are inherently social, group-oriented, and bound to their specific community for survival.<\/p>\n

However, beneath this surface structural similarity lies a vast, unbridgeable chasm regarding the nature of that group identity and the rules that govern the world.<\/p>\n

Both perspectives operate on an explicitly anti-universalist logic. They agree that the concept of universal human rights is a fiction, often used by dominant powers as an ideological smokescreen to achieve hegemony.<\/p>\n

Both views hold that the individual is secondary to the collective. A person is born into an existing society that shapes his identity, language, and moral outlook long before his individual reasoning skills develop.<\/p>\n

Both systems view international politics as a zero-sum arena of competing groups where survival is the ultimate goal and law or morality cannot save a weak state from a strong one.<\/p>\n

The crucial difference is what defines the group and how that group must behave.<\/p>\n

Nazi anthropology is rooted in biological determinism and racial mysticism. They believed that race is a hard, genetic reality that dictates a man’s spiritual, intellectual, and moral worth. In their view, the racial group must expand biologically, conquer other races, and either subjugate or eliminate them in a social-Darwinist struggle for global racial dominance.<\/p>\n

Mearsheimer’s anthropology is cultural and structural. He defines the primary group as the nation\u2014a socially constructed community bound by shared history, language, and culture, not genetics. More importantly, Mearsheimer is an offensive realist. His structural logic dictates that states seek security, not endless conquest. He argues that the international system penalizes states that attempt global or regional domination because other groups will naturally balance against them. Where Nazism commands aggressive, genocidal expansion, Mearsheimer’s framework warns that such expansion is a strategic blunder that leads to national ruin.<\/p>\n

The movements and societies that closest exemplify Mearsheimer’s view are those that champion particularist nationalism\u2014the idea that a specific people has a right to its own state, that its primary duty is to its own citizens, and that it has no interest in governing or transforming the rest of the world.<\/p>\n

1. 19th-Century Classical Zionism<\/p>\n

The political Zionism formulated by Theodor Herzl (1860\u20131904) aligns remarkably well with Mearsheimer’s anthropology. Herzl recognized that humans are fundamentally tribal and that anti-Semitism was a permanent feature of European group dynamics. He realized that Jews could never survive as atomistic individuals relying on the liberal promises of universal tolerance or assimilation. The only rational solution for survival was for the Jewish people to become a nation among nations, embedded within their own state with a hard border to protect their specific collective.<\/p>\n

2. The Mid-20th Century Anti-Colonial Independence Movements<\/p>\n

Movements like the Indian Independence Movement led by the Indian National Congress, or the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN), operated on a deeply particularist, national-cohesion logic.<\/p>\n

They rejected the British or French liberal claims of a “universal civilizing mission.”<\/p>\n

They recognized that their survival and dignity required intense internal socialization around a shared national identity to throw off foreign rule.<\/p>\n

Once independence was achieved, these movements generally focused on state-building and internal consolidation rather than exporting their ideology globally. They wanted their own state for their own tribe, period.<\/p>\n

3. Gaullism in post-WWII France<\/p>\n

The political philosophy of Charles de Gaulle (1890\u20131970) rejected both Anglo-American liberal universalism and Soviet internationalism. De Gaulle famously argued that the only permanent realities in world history are nations (les r\u00e9alit\u00e9s nationales), while ideologies like liberalism or communism are merely passing fashions used by empires to advance their own interests. Gaullism prioritized French internal cohesion, independent nuclear deterrence, and a cold, clear-eyed focus on national survival in an anarchic world, while explicitly rejecting the urge to join global ideological crusades.<\/p>\n

4. The Contemporary National-Conservative and Sovereigntist Movements<\/p>\n

The modern resurgence of populist nationalism across the West\u2014exemplified by movements emphasizing border control, economic protectionism, and cultural preservation\u2014is the closest contemporary match. These movements explicitly argue that globalist institutions pretending to represent a “global community” are a delusion. They share Mearsheimer’s view that a man’s primary moral obligation is to his own national family, and that the state should focus entirely on the security and well-being of its own people rather than spending blood and treasure on ambitious foreign policies to spread liberalism abroad.<\/p>\n

If Mearsheimer’s anthropology is correct, free speech and free inquiry cannot be justified as inalienable, universal human rights. They do not exist as natural properties of human beings. Instead, they are fragile, highly specific cultural tools created by a particular society to help it solve problems and survive.<\/p>\n

In this framework, free speech is a luxury asset that a cohesive tribe permits itself under specific conditions\u2014never an absolute principle that trumps the security of the group.<\/p>\n

Mearsheimer argues that reason is subordinate to socialization. However, a society still needs reason to calculate its interests, develop technology, and assess threats in an anarchic world. If a state completely suppresses free inquiry, its leadership class becomes blind, trapped in its own dogmatic echo chamber.<\/p>\n

Therefore, a realist framework allows for free inquiry not to validate the individual’s self-expression, but to prevent strategic blunder.<\/p>\n

Free speech functions as a diagnostic tool. It allows a society to stress-test its policies, weed out incompetent leaders, and adapt to changing external realities. A tribe that allows zero internal debate will eventually miscalculate its security environment and be destroyed by more adaptive competitors.<\/p>\n

Because the primary goal of any group is survival, free speech will always be sharply curtailed the moment it threatens internal cohesion or national security.<\/p>\n

If humans are tribal, then no society will ever tolerate speech that attacks its own founding myths or encourages alignment with an external enemy. When a nation faces an existential crisis or goes to war, the illusion of universal free speech vanishes instantly. The tribe moves to suppress dissent, enforce narrative conformity, and punish those who fracture the group’s willpower.<\/p>\n

Under this view, the recent rise of corporate and state censorship across the West is not an aberration; it is human nature reasserting itself as elite consensus fractures and global competition intensifies.<\/p>\n

For the university and the Great Books classroom, a Mearsheimer-style anthropology completely changes the rules of debate.<\/p>\n

The goal of education cannot be a completely open-ended, consequence-free interrogation of all values. Because children and young adults are highly susceptible to socialization and have unformed critical faculties, exposing them to endless, unchecked deconstruction before they are anchored in their own tradition does not liberate them. It atomizes them, rendering the society weak and fragmented.<\/p>\n

Free inquiry within a Great Books curriculum must therefore occur inside a secure perimeter. Students are taught the Western tradition first to anchor their identity and build social cohesion. Only after that value infusion is secure can free inquiry be deployed as a practical discipline\u2014a tool to analyze the world accurately, understand the motivations of competing tribes, and ensure the survival of their own.<\/p>\n

If Mearsheimer’s anthropology is correct, how should intellectuals go about their work (which tends to seek importance through deconstruction) with regard for both their own safety, standing and the health of society? Would Leo Strauss’s technique of hiding one’s heretical views be useful? <\/p>\n

If Mearsheimer’s anthropology is correct, intellectuals are playing with fire. The standard modern intellectual seeks status and tenure through deconstruction\u2014peeling back the layers of national myths, traditional morality, and social hierarchies to expose them as arbitrary.<\/p>\n

In a liberal framework, this is viewed as a noble, courageous pursuit of truth. In Mearsheimer’s framework, it is a form of civic suicide. By dissolving the shared values that bind the group, the deconstructive intellectual actively weakens the internal cohesion his society needs to survive in an anarchic world.<\/p>\n

Furthermore, because humans are tribal at their core, a society will eventually protect itself. When an intellectual’s deconstruction threatens the group’s core survival mechanisms, the tribe will inevitably turn on him to protect its structural integrity.<\/p>\n

To maintain his safety, protect his social standing, and preserve the health of his society, the intellectual must completely alter his methodology.<\/p>\n

The technique described by Leo Strauss of esoteric writing becomes an essential tool for survival under this anthropology. Strauss argued that before the modern era, the greatest political philosophers (like Plato, Al-Farabi, and Maimonides) wrote with two distinct audiences in mind. They packed their texts with an exoteric (surface-level) meaning for the general public, and an esoteric (hidden) meaning for a small circle of philosophic readers.<\/p>\n

If Mearsheimer’s view holds, this dual-layer technique is useful for three reasons:<\/p>\n

The general public requires intense socialization and a firm infusion of values to function cohesively. Raw, unvarnished truths about the amoral nature of power, the arbitrariness of legal orders, or the fragility of religious myths can cause mass cynicism and social decay if broadcast indiscriminately. Esoteric writing allows the intellectual to explore these dangerous realities with other elites without shattering the protective illusions of the broader populace.<\/p>\n

By burying heretical or realist conclusions beneath a surface layer of orthodox, patriotic, or conventional language, the intellectual avoids triggering the tribe’s defense mechanisms. He retains his elite standing and avoids cancellation or persecution because the standard gatekeepers only read the surface narrative.<\/p>\n

A society needs a small, clear-eyed group of thinkers who understand the world exactly as it is to prevent strategic blunders. Esotericism creates a secure, private room where the ruling elite can analyze raw power dynamics and structural realities without causing domestic panic or political fragmentation.<\/p>\n

If an intellectual chooses not to hide his views through Straussian esotericism, Mearsheimer’s anthropology demands that he shift his public work from deconstruction to construction.<\/p>\n

Instead of asking, “How do I dismantle this inherited tradition?” the responsible intellectual must ask, “How do I fortify the social structures that keep this community safe?”<\/p>\n

His public scholarship should focus on reinforcing civic virtue, strengthening the “little platoons” of family and local community, and explaining the realities of international competition to the public. He uses his reason not to tear down the foundational myths of his tribe, but to help the tribe adapt its traditions to meet modern existential threats. By aligning his work with the survival instincts of the group, the intellectual guarantees his own safety, elevates his social standing, and fulfills his primary duty to the civilization that nurtures him.<\/p>\n

Orthodox Jewish intellectuals working within the framework of the mesorah (the transmitted tradition) provide an exact, living example of this principle. They operate with a clear understanding that ideas have social consequences, and that indiscriminate distribution of certain truths can shatter the communal cohesion required for group survival.<\/p>\n

Within the mesorah, this careful gatekeeping of knowledge is not seen as malicious deception. It is an act of deep pastoral and communal responsibility.<\/p>\n

The classical architecture of Jewish thought has always maintained a strict boundary between public instruction and elite analysis.<\/p>\n

The public arena is governed by Halakha (the law). It is clear, action-oriented, and universal across the community. It provides the intense, daily socialization that Mearsheimer identifies as essential for group survival. It binds the atomized individual to the collective through shared rituals, diet, and calendar, creating an incredibly resilient social fabric.<\/p>\n

Conversely, esoteric truths\u2014whether the philosophical complexities of Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed or the mystical insights of Kabbalah\u2014were historically restricted. The Mishnah explicitly states that certain deep, potentially destabilizing topics should not be taught publicly, but only to a single student at a time, and only if that student is wise, mature, and capable of understanding on his own.<\/p>\n

The logic behind this restriction matches the Straussian and Mearsheimer critique of modern intellectual life. An intellectual who drops complex, deconstructive, or highly abstract ideas into the public square without regard for the recipient’s foundation causes deep harm.<\/p>\n

For the masses, whose faith and social stability are built on inherited habits and healthy socialization rather than abstract philosophical proofs, exposing them to raw, unshielded theological difficulties or historical-critical analysis does not liberate them. It induces doubt, anxiety, and eventual alienation from the community. It strips away the protective insulation of the mesorah, leaving the individual atomized and vulnerable.<\/p>\n

Orthodox intellectuals who respect the mesorah use their critical faculties to fortify the fortress, not to breach its walls. When they encounter challenging historical data, philosophical contradictions, or complex theological questions, they process these issues within elite, highly trained circles.<\/p>\n

Their public-facing work is constructive. They translate complex realities into actionable, stable guidance that preserves the community’s boundaries and strengthens its internal loyalty. They recognize a fundamental truth that modern secular academia has forgotten: an intellectual’s primary duty is to ensure that the chain of tradition remains unbroken, preserving the social architecture that allows his people to survive in a chaotic world.<\/p>\n

Changing the Immutable: How Orthodox Judaism Rewrites Its History<\/em><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

If Mearsheimer’s anthropology is correct, it changes how a reader should interpret Marc Shapiro’s Changing the Immutable<\/em><\/a>.
\nShapiro, writing as a modern academic historian, approaches his subject with a clear commitment to objective factual truth. He uncovers hundreds of instances where the Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) world has censored, airbrushed, or altered historical texts, photographs, and rabbinic rulings. The standard liberal response to Shapiro’s book is moral outrage at an “Orwellian” suppression of facts.
\nIf you read Shapiro through Mearsheimer’s lens, however, the book ceases to be an expose on religious dishonesty. Instead, it becomes a brilliant, empirical case study in how a highly successful tribe manages its internal socialization to ensure its own survival.
\nMearsheimer’s framework adds value to understanding Shapiro’s findings in three ways:
\nOne. Shapiro notes that Orthodox historiography often views truth as entirely instrumental\u2014what matters is not what happened, but what leads to piety and faith in the Sages. Mearsheimer’s anthropology explains exactly why this happens. If humans are tribal, and if intense childhood socialization is the primary tool for injecting the values needed to keep the tribe intact, then an accurate historical record is a secondary luxury. The primary function of history within the tribe is pedagogical. The text must serve the social architecture. If an ancestor held a view that would confuse a modern student, weaken his faith, or cause internal fracturing, altering the text protects the student’s unformed critical faculties and preserves communal unity.
\nTwo. Shapiro documents the censorship of radical or unconventional positions held by towering figures like Maimonides, Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, and Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook. Through a Mearsheimer-style lens, this textual tampering is a defensive operation. In an open, anarchic cultural marketplace, exposing the masses to complex internal contradictions, historical deviations, or lenient past standards creates cognitive dissonance. It introduces doubt, which leads to atomization\u2014the individual breaking away from the collective. By smoothing over the rough edges of history, the rabbinic elite maintain a unified front that shields ordinary members from the destabilizing effects of raw, unvarnished data.
\nThree. Shapiro shows that this practice is not a modern aberration; it has precedents dating back to talmudic times. Mearsheimer’s view implies that this plasticity is precisely why the Jewish people survived thousands of years of exile without a state. A rigid adherence to literal, unchanging history would have shattered the group under changing external pressures. The ability of the elite to quietly adapt the past to serve the religious needs of the present is a structural device. It allows the tribe to slide its cultural norms in response to external threats while maintaining the vital illusion of absolute, unbroken continuity.
\nShapiro provides the data; Mearsheimer provides the underlying logic. Changing the Immutable<\/em><\/a> demonstrates that when a community prioritizes the survival of its collective identity over the liberal value of absolute informational transparency, it chooses the path aligned with human anthropology.<\/p>\n

Open Orthodoxy<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

If Mearsheimer’s anthropology is correct, it provides a cold, structural explanation for why the Open Orthodoxy movement\u2014founded by Rabbi Avi Weiss in the late 1990s\u2014faced such severe institutional backlash and why its attempt to merge liberal universalism with Orthodox communal structures was bound to create intense friction.<\/p>\n

Open Orthodoxy explicitly sought to combine a strict commitment to Halakha (Jewish law) with an embrace of modern liberal values, including intellectual openness, inclusivity, and expanding leadership roles for women (such as ordaining female spiritual leaders).<\/p>\n

Evaluating Open Orthodoxy through Mearsheimer’s lens strips away the ideological rhetoric and reveals the underlying group dynamics at play.<\/p>\n

Mearsheimer argues that reason is subordinate to socialization. By the time a person reaches adulthood, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him.<\/p>\n

Open Orthodoxy attempted to inhabit two distinct, powerful systems of socialization simultaneously: the insular, particularist, authority-driven world of traditional Orthodoxy, and the open, egalitarian, universalist world of modern Western liberalism.<\/p>\n

From a realist perspective, these two systems operate on contradictory core logics. Orthodoxy socializes the individual to submit to cumulative legal precedent and communal boundaries to preserve the group’s distinct identity. Modern liberalism socializes the individual to prioritize autonomy, equality, and universal rights. Open Orthodoxy tried to use reason to harmonize these two worldviews, but Mearsheimer’s framework suggests that because raw socialization drives our deepest preferences, the two tribes were destined to clash. Mainstream Orthodoxy viewed the movement not as a minor halakhic variation, but as a dangerous infection of foreign liberal socialization threatening the tribe’s internal architecture.<\/p>\n

As seen in the analysis of Marc Shapiro’s work, traditional societies often guard their texts, histories, and practices to maintain an unblemished narrative that ensures absolute continuity and maximum internal cohesion.<\/p>\n

Open Orthodoxy championed absolute transparency, intellectual openness, and a willingness to confront difficult modern critique. In Mearsheimer’s view, while this approach satisfies the liberal desire for truth, it strips away the protective insulation that a tribe uses to guard its members’ unformed critical faculties. By bringing modern academic critique, secular ethics, and egalitarian demands directly into the halakhic framework, Open Orthodoxy inadvertently threatened the very mechanisms that keep the Orthodox collective tightly bound. Mainstream rabbinic authorities reacted defensively because they recognized, consciously or instinctively, that breaking the traditional narrative front would lead to individual atomization and the eventual dissolution of the community’s distinct borders.<\/p>\n

Mearsheimer’s anthropology dictates that when a group feels its core survival mechanism or identity is threatened, it moves to enforce narrative conformity and punish those who fracture its unity.<\/p>\n

The fierce institutional pushback against Open Orthodoxy\u2014including public condemnations from organizations like Agudath Israel, which declared the movement a radical departure from tradition, and the exclusion of its rabbis from mainstream circles\u2014is exactly how a tribe behaves when it senses an existential threat. Mainstream Orthodoxy acted to protect its borders. By drawing a hard line and casting Open Orthodoxy outside the camp, the dominant Orthodox leadership reasserted the friend-enemy distinction necessary to keep their own community’s identity clear, sharp, and resilient against outer cultural pressures.<\/p>\n

Through Mearsheimer, Open Orthodoxy is understood not merely as a theological debate over the limits of Jewish law, but as a structural experiment that tested whether a traditional, particularist tribe could absorb the hyper-individualistic values of its surrounding civilization without triggering its own survival alarms.<\/p>\n

The Jacobs Affair<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

The Louis Jacobs affair is a case study for John Mearsheimer’s anthropology. The controversy erupted in British Jewry during the early 1960s when Rabbi Louis Jacobs (1920\u20132006) published We Have Reason to Believe. In the book, he used modern historical-critical methods to argue that the Torah was not dictated verbatim by God to Moses on Mount Sinai, but was instead a product of historical development through a series of divine-human encounters.<\/p>\n

Jacobs thought he was offering a vital synthesis to save Anglo-Jewry, allowing Oxbridge-educated young Jews to remain committed to Orthodox law (Halakha) without intellectual dishonesty. Instead, the Orthodox establishment, led by Chief Rabbi Israel Brodie and fueled by a shifting demographic toward more traditional Eastern European families, blocked Jacobs from becoming principal of Jews’ College and effectively forced him out of the United Synagogue.<\/p>\n

Through a standard liberal lens, this is a tragedy of fundamentalist overreach crushing free inquiry and intellectual honesty. If Mearsheimer’s anthropology is correct, however, the affair looks completely different. It reveals structural realities of how human groups maintain themselves.<\/p>\n

Jacobs believed he could isolate Jewish practice from its foundational myth. He argued that one could reject literal verbal revelation while remaining fully committed to Jewish observances as divinely ordained via history.<\/p>\n

Mearsheimer\u2019s framework explains why the establishment found this position intolerable. A group’s daily socialization relies on an absolute value infusion during early childhood. Children are trained in the rigorous restrictions of the law long before they can reason. The psychological power that sustains this intense, lifelong socialization is the shared belief that the law is the unvarnished, direct command of God.<\/p>\n

By introducing the documentary hypothesis and historical-critical analysis into mainstream Orthodox training, Jacobs was threatening to dissolve that authority structure. The establishment recognized that if the masses began to view the Torah as an evolving historical document, the absolute authority of the law would weaken, leading to individual atomization and assimilation.<\/p>\n

Jacobs made the precise error that Leo Strauss warned against: he broadcast a destabilizing, elite academic critique directly to the public square.<\/p>\n

Jacobs originally formulated these ideas for weekly classes at the New West End Synagogue and then published them in a popular book for the general reader. He operated under the liberal assumption that absolute transparency and open information are always net benefits for a community.<\/p>\n

From a realist perspective, this was a massive strategic miscalculation. He forced a public confrontation on a topic that a highly cohesive tribe cannot afford to debate openly. By bringing the heresy out of the private library and into the public pews, he left the rabbinic leadership with no choice but to react.<\/p>\n

The subsequent blacklisting of Jacobs, the removal of his congregation’s management committee by the United Synagogue council, and the vitriolic communal split were not irrational acts of malice. They were the natural, defensive movements of a tribe protecting its borders.<\/p>\n

The Anglo-Jewish community at the time was facing severe assimilation pressures from secular British society. To survive, the group required absolute clarity regarding its identity, laws, and boundaries. When Jacobs introduced a theology that blurred the hard line of Orthodox dogma, the leadership invoked the friend-enemy distinction. They cast Jacobs out to preserve the internal cohesion and narrative alignment of the remaining collective.<\/p>\n

The Louis Jacobs affair demonstrates that when the survival mechanisms of a community collide with an intellectual’s demand for absolute historical accuracy, the tribe will always choose survival.<\/p>\n

The Ford Affair<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

The Desmond Ford controversy of 1980 is a Protestant parallel to the Louis Jacobs affair, and John Mearsheimer’s anthropology explains exactly why it occurred and why the institutional fallout was so severe.<\/p>\n

Desmond Ford<\/a> (1929\u20132019) was a controversial Australian theologian within the Seventh-day Adventist Church. In 1979, he gave a public lecture at Pacific Union College challenging the biblical basis for the church’s unique, core pillar: the “investigative judgment” and the heavenly sanctuary doctrine. This doctrine held that in October 1844, Christ entered the second phase of his heavenly ministry to review the lives of believers and see if their good works matched their claims of faith. Ford argued from the text of Hebrews and raw biblical scholarship that this doctrine lacked scriptural support and obscured the true Protestant gospel of justification by grace alone.<\/p>\n

The church responded by convening the Sanctuary Review Committee at Glacier View Ranch in 1980, where administrators and theologians stripped Ford of his ministerial credentials, sparking a massive schism that cost the denomination over a hundred ministers.<\/p>\n

Through the lens of modern liberal scholarship, this was an oppressive suppression of academic freedom and theological truth. Through Mearsheimer’s anthropology, it was a textbook operation of a tribe preserving its life-support systems.<\/p>\n

Mearsheimer notes that the primary reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society. For a religious society, the glue that binds the group together is its unique prophetic narrative.<\/p>\n

The 1844 heavenly sanctuary doctrine is not a minor theological footnote for Seventh-day Adventism; it is the structural reason for the church’s existence. The movement was born out of the “Great Disappointment” when William Miller’s prediction of Christ’s literal return on October 22, 1844, failed to occur. The heavenly sanctuary doctrine\u2014validated by the visions of co-founder Ellen G. White\u2014was the psychological mechanism that rescued the proto-Adventists from existential despair. It explained that the date was right, but the event was wrong.<\/p>\n

By attacking the biblical basis of 1844, Ford was not just correcting a verse in Daniel; he was pulling the thread that held the entire tribal history together. If 1844 was a historical mistake, the unique identity and divine commission of the Seventh-day Adventist Church dissolved. The leadership defrocked Ford because they recognized that the historical accuracy of a date is secondary to the preservation of the myth that keeps the tribe cohesive.<\/p>\n

Ford committed the classic intellectual blunder that Leo Strauss warned against: he made his deconstruction exoteric. He shared his radical critique of the investigative judgment in a public forum, and the tapes were quickly duplicated and circulated nationwide.<\/p>\n

In Mearsheimer’s framework, humans undergo intense early childhood socialization when their critical faculties are unformed. For generations of Adventists, their entire moral, dietary, and social rhythm was built on the absolute authority of the church’s prophets and its prophetic timeline. When Ford introduced sophisticated theological deconstruction directly to the pews, he threatened to fracture that unformed foundation. He was forcing ordinary believers to choose between intellectual transparency and communal loyalty. The leadership stepped in at Glacier View to cut off the source of the cognitive dissonance before it caused widespread individual atomization.<\/p>\n

The Glacier View meeting and the subsequent purging of ministers who sympathized with Ford were the natural defensive reactions of a group under threat. Mearsheimer’s anthropology dictates that when a group feels its core identity is endangered, it will move to enforce narrative conformity.<\/p>\n

Administrators demanded that Ford recant and publicly denounce external critics. When he refused, they used the ultimate tool of group defense: exclusion. By drawing a hard line and declaring Ford’s positions outside the boundaries of authentic Adventism, the hierarchy reestablished the clear borders of the tribe. They chose to lose a hundred intellectuals rather than let those intellectuals compromise the internal architecture that kept the millions in the collective secure.<\/p>\n