{"id":199165,"date":"2026-07-28T05:38:13","date_gmt":"2026-07-28T13:38:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=199165"},"modified":"2026-07-28T05:48:14","modified_gmt":"2026-07-28T13:48:14","slug":"if-mearsheimer-is-right-about-human-beings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=199165","title":{"rendered":"If Mearsheimer Is Right"},"content":{"rendered":"

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 Mearsheimer is right, then the entire edifice of liberal political theory, liberal journalism, liberal education, liberal foreign policy, and liberal institutional self-understanding rests on a fundamental mistake about what humans are.<\/p>\n

Men are social before they are anything else. Survival runs through the group. Reason ranks third behind innate sentiment and socialization, and it arrives late, after a long childhood during which the family and the surrounding society have already performed an enormous value infusion. A man has limited choice in formulating a moral code because most of his sense of right and wrong was installed before he could evaluate anything.<\/p>\n

Grant all of it. What happens to Torah?<\/p>\n

The first thing that happens is that most of the field’s prestige projects<\/a> lose their footing. The second thing is that the value of Torah study goes up. <\/p>\n

Analytic Jewish philosophy takes the hardest hit. The project of testing revelation, chosenness, and divine command as propositions under contemporary scrutiny assumes that a man can reason his way to or from a religious commitment. Mearsheimer’s anthropology says reason is the weakest of the three engines and the last to arrive. The Orthodox philosopher who follows the argument wherever it leads has, in the overwhelming majority of cases, already been formed to arrive where he arrives. The record supports this. The circle around the Association for the Philosophy of Judaism has produced sophisticated argument and almost no defections. Under Mearsheimer’s account that is what you expect from a group of men socialized into a tradition, working with the third-ranked instrument, on questions whose answers their formation settled decades earlier.<\/p>\n

The moral critique of Torah<\/a> loses its standing next. If moral knowledge comes from inborn sentiment and socialization, then the modern intuitions that indict Torah on slavery, Amalek, gender hierarchy, and the treatment of gentiles are products of a particular formation. Postwar Western liberal formation, to be exact, and Mearsheimer’s whole book is an argument that this formation mistook itself for a discovery about all human beings everywhere. Samuel Moyn (b. 1972), whom Mearsheimer quotes on how human rights came to define the highest aspirations of movements and states, has spent a career showing how recent that vocabulary is.<\/p>\n

So the question “can Torah be morally wrong” becomes a question about whose sentiments are doing the judging and what installed them.<\/p>\n

The traditionalist wins nothing here. His intuitions are also installed. Mearsheimer’s anthropology does not adjudicate between moral codes.<\/p>\n

The authority problem dissolves. The deepest question in the field, as we mapped it, is how a historically produced text acquires transcendent authority. That question assumes obedience requires a warrant. Mearsheimer says obedience never worked that way for anybody. Men obey because the people who raised them obeyed and because the group they need in order to live expects it. Benjamin Sommer’s model of revelation and Ethan Tucker’s account of obligation are elegant answers to a question that only becomes urgent for people already loose enough from their formation to ask it. The question is a symptom rather than a problem.<\/p>\n

That also explains the secular failure. The earlier map<\/a> said the secular world has no persuasive theory of command without a commander. On this frame, nobody ever had a theory of command. Secular batei midrash produce readers rather than obligated men because they supply text without supplying the childhood, the endogamy, the calendar, the sanctions, and the burial society. The missing thing is density of formation.<\/p>\n

One figure moves to the center under this frame.<\/p>\n

Moshe Koppel argues that halakhah works like a first language. A native speaker knows what sounds right before he can state the rule. Communities, practices, intuitions, and exemplars carry the tradition, and codes and ideologies come second. That is Mearsheimer’s value infusion during a long childhood, restated in halakhic terms by a man who arrived at it independently.<\/p>\n

Koppel becomes the most important living theorist of Torah if Mearsheimer is right. Not Lebens, who reasons. Not Sommer, who models. Koppel, who describes how transmission happens.<\/p>\n

Rav Shagar rises for a different reason. He built a religious language for men whose formation had cracked and who could not repair it by argument. That is the correct response to a partial socialization failure. You cannot reason a deracinated man back into a tradition. You can give him a way to stand inside practice without the certainty he lost. Yishai Mevorach’s theology of absence is the same instrument in a harsher key.<\/p>\n

And the Haredim rise, which is the finding nobody in the liberal or Modern Orthodox world wants. Near-total socialization density. Low individualism. High sacrifice for the group. Thin rational apologetics. Enormous demographic success. Modern Orthodoxy invested in synthesis and rational defense and does worse. Liberal Judaism maximized individual autonomy and does worst. Under Mearsheimer’s anthropology that ordering is precisely what the model predicts, and the model was not built to flatter anyone.<\/p>\n

Mearsheimer explains group survival through security, territory, and state power. Jews survived close to two millennia without any of the three. No army, no borders, no sovereign. On a strict realist account that should not happen.<\/p>\n

What did the work was Torah. A portable, textual, ritually saturated formation system that reproduced a people across dispersion, hostile hosts, and repeated destruction. It maintained endogamy, a calendar, a legal order, a language, and a lifelong labor that consumed the intelligence of the group’s ablest men. It is the only known technology for maintaining tribal cohesion without territory over that span.<\/p>\n

That reframes Shaul Magid’s exile argument. Strip the theology and it becomes a sociological claim: diaspora forced the development of a formation system so strong it did not need a state, and sovereignty introduced a substitute that might weaken the original. You need not accept his politics to see that the empirical question is real and open.<\/p>\n

If Mearsheimer is right, the value of studying Torah is that Torah is the most tested continuously operating socialization system on earth.<\/p>\n

The old list of live questions was theological<\/a>. This one is not.<\/p>\n

What is the minimum density required to transmit? Which components are essential and which are ornamental? Endogamy, a distinct language, a full calendar, real sanctions on exit, a text demanding lifetime labor, immersion coextensive with childhood. Hadar is running one version of this experiment. Chabad another. Bnei Brak a third. Nobody compares them with any rigor.<\/p>\n

Can a community that teaches its children the critical account of the text still produce adults who obey? This is the real version of the revelation question. Not whether revelation survives criticism as a proposition, but whether formation survives criticism as a practice. TheTorah.com is the natural test case and the results are not in. This question is more consequential than anything in the analytic literature and almost nobody is asking it, because asking it requires treating one’s own community as a subject of study.<\/p>\n

What does Torah know about relations between groups once universalism stops being the default? The tradition thought about Jews and gentiles for three thousand years without liberal assumptions. Noahide law, ger toshav, the resident alien, the laws of war, the obligations owed to those outside the covenant. Under liberal assumptions this material reads as an embarrassment to be minimized. Under Mearsheimer’s assumptions it becomes a developed body of thought about how a particular people manages real obligations to outsiders without pretending outsiders are insiders. The liberal frame makes the material look reactionary. The nationalist frame treats it as ammunition. Neither reads it. This is the largest unworked seam in the field.<\/p>\n

What restrains a people when restraint cannot come from universal rights? Mearsheimer removes the external check. His own answer to what limits a nationalist state is prudence and the balance of power. Torah limits are internal, ancient, and binding on men who do not care what The Hague thinks. Rav Shaul Yisraeli’s floor. Rambam on siege. Bal tashchit. The prohibition on wanton destruction. A serious account of internal restraint under conditions where nobody can enforce it from outside would be a contribution to political theory. No one has written it.<\/p>\n

Mearsheimer explains why men believe. He does not establish that what they believe is false. God either spoke at Sinai or He did not, and no amount of sociology settles it. Lebens and Segal’s enterprise survives as a small, honest undertaking for the handful of men whose temperament requires it. It stops being the center of the field and becomes one room in it.<\/p>\n

You were formed by something before you could evaluate anything. You will be run by that formation whether you inspect it or not. Studying Torah is the only available way to get any purchase on the operating system you are already running, because it is the system, laid out for examination, by men who spent their lives on it.<\/p>\n

It binds you to the living people who study it. The study is itself the transmission. What we described earlier as interaction ritual is Mearsheimer’s socialization watched at close range, and a man who studies with a chavruta twice a week is not gathering information. He is being made.<\/p>\n

It gives you a moral vocabulary with three thousand years of stress testing rather than seventy years of rights talk. Selection is not proof. A code that has survived that long has been selected for something, and fitness is evidence even where it is not truth.<\/p>\n

If socialization determines moral code and reason is weak, then a preference for uncomfortable truth is socialized. The man who prizes candor over consolation belongs to a small subculture that rewards candor, and he is doing coalition work for it while believing he has escaped coalition work.<\/p>\n

The reply is in Mearsheimer’s own conduct. He wrote a book of arguments against the primacy of argument. He must believe reason moves men at the margin, or the writing makes no sense. The margin is small and it is where every intellectual life happens. Torah study, done with your eyes open, is margin work performed inside an engine that runs on something else.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … 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,"footnotes":""},"categories":[590],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-199165","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-torah"],"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