Anger

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 252 of 447 · 20 per page

• From Going Clear (2013)

  In his view, Haggis’s emotional state on the Tone Scale at that moment was a 1.1, Covertly Hostile. By adopting a tone just above it—Anger—he hoped to blast Haggis out of the psychic place where he seemed to be lodged. Isham made what he calls an intellectual decision to be angry. “Paul, I’m pissed off,” he told Haggis. “There are better ways to do this. If you have a complaint, there’s a complaint line.” Anyone who genuinely wanted to change Scientology should stay within the organization, Isham argued, not quit. All of his friends believed that if he wanted to change Scientology, he should do it from within. They wanted him to recant and return to the fold or else withdraw his letter and walk away without making a fuss. Haggis listened patiently. A fundamental tenet of Scientology is that differing points of view must be fully heard and acknowledged. But when his friends finished, they were still red-faced and angry. Haggis suggested that as good Scientologists, they should at least examine the evidence. He referred them to the St. Petersburg Times articles that had so shaken him, and to certain websites written by former members. He explained that his quarrel was with the management and the culture of the church, not with Scientology itself. By copying them on his resignation letter, he had hoped that they would be as horrified as he by the practices that were going on in the name of Scientology. Instead, he realized, they were mainly appalled by his actions in calling the management of the church to account. Haggis’s friends came away from the meeting with mixed feelings— “no clearer than when we went in,” Archer felt. What wasn’t said in this meeting was that this would be the last time any of them would ever speak to Haggis. Isham did consider Haggis’s plea to look at the websites or the articles in the St. Petersburg Times, but he decided “it was like reading Mein Kampf if you wanted to know something about the Jewish religion.” After that first meeting with friends on his back porch, Haggis had several lengthy encounters with Tommy Davis and other representatives of the church. They showed up at his office in Santa Monica—a low- slung brick building on Broadway, covered in graffiti, like a gang headquarters. The officials brought thick files to discredit people they heard or assumed he had been talking to. This was August 2009; shooting for The Next Three Days in Pittsburgh was going to start within days, and the office desperately needed Haggis’s attention.

• From Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989)

  30 Even if we think that Holbach and Diderot are unjust to La Mettrie, the fact remains that they are on to a live issue, and one that fo r a variety of reasons was more salient in Franc e than in England. In the Anglo-Saxon countries generally, the force of the ethic of ordinary life and benevolence was such, not only among intellectuals but in the whole society, that it c arr ied over from theistic or deist i c to unbelieving forms almost without interruption. B ut Fr a n ce w en t throu g h a quite differ e nt evolu t ion. The seventeenth century saw a strong t e nsion between ethical outlooks which drew on anci ent philosophy, pr inci pa lly Stoicism and Epicureanism, on one hand , and a hyper-Augustinian Jansenism on the other. 31 In the latter part of his re ign, Louis XIV favoured the increasing domination of a clerical, triump ha list Catholicism and a stern moralism. After h is death, aristocratic society of th e Regency period swung to th e opposite extreme of frivolity and moral la xit y . In these condi t ions, Deism developed its own forms in France, evolving much more clandes t inely , passionately anti-clerical and anti-Catholic, a n d often i nspired by the work of Spinoza. One of the crucial developments which p r ovided the background for th e Encyclopaedists in France was the merging of t his French D eism with the English varieties. We might speak of the importation of English Deism int o France and the corresponding transformation of French thought. In a se n se, Radical Enlightenment · 3 3 5 t h e two intellectual culture s grew together in the eighteenth century , came d o se to fusion, and the result was what we know as the Enlightenment, a b i li ngual product of the two societies (or more a cc urately England, Scotland, F ra nce, and America ) . In France, Voltaire was the major architect of this fusion, principally t h r ough his Lettres philosophiques of 1734, though others also played a part: M ontesquieu, for instance, in his prai s e of English politics. With the fusion, th e themes of English Deism become c urrent in France as well. The Abbe de S aint-Pierre coins the term 'bienfa isance', 32 which is then taken up by Volt a ire and others and occupies a central place in the outlook of the p h ilosophes. But important differences of emphasis naturally remain. In France, the struggle against religion, in paticular Catholic Christianity, takes on over whelming importance, at times threatening to crowd out other crucial asp ir ations. It was essential to show its falseness, its misanthropy, its destructiveness.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  As we see in the epics of Homer, for a Greek aristocrat of the eighth century, public speaking was as important as military prowess.58 In the Mycenaean period, the king had been simply primus inter pares, and had to listen to the advice of the lords. Discussion of public policy continued in the polis, and because the farmers took part in government, they also had to develop debating skills. Everybody was forced, in however rudimentary a way, to think about abstract principles of justice and morality, as they argued about practical problems. The farmers were starting to become more like the nobility; an important characteristic of the polis was that the whole citizenry would gradually take over the old aristocratic ethos.59 Debate was an agon, a contest between the various speakers, in which the person who argued best was the victor. The Greeks retained the ancient Indo-European passion for competition that some of the Vedic Indians were beginning to discard. The agon was a law of life, and paradoxically, the nobility achieved a sense of solidarity by competing with one another.60 Now that the entire polis was becoming an aristocratic, warrior society, farmers were beginning to acquire this agonistic spirit too. Homer shows that the Greek warlords were driven to excel, even at the expense of others. There was no esprit de corps, because each lord strove to fulfill his own personal destiny. Everybody was expected to be remarkable, and that meant everybody was a rival in the battle for singularity that informed every activity. Instead of self-surrender, therefore, there was fierce egotism in the polis. There was also an inherent aggression. The creation of the poleis had often been violent. The establishment of a community that could resist its neighbors and rivals had not always been peaceful. Village communities had often been forced to join a polis against their will. Synoeicism (“unification”) had meant uprooting, resistance, and a good deal of misery—a birth agony reflected in many of the founding myths of the poleis.61 The city had drawn people together, but had all too often achieved this violently. Each polis also had to compete constantly with the other poleis for power and wealth.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  In the Iliad, the violence and death of the warrior is often presented as not only pointless, but utterly self-destructive. The third person to be killed in the poem was the Trojan Simoeisios, a beautiful young man who should have known the tenderness of family life, but instead was beaten down in battle by the Greek hero Ajax: He dropped then to the ground in the dust, like some black poplar Which in the land low-lying about a great marsh grows Smooth trimmed yet with branches growing at the uttermost tree-top: One whom a man, a maker of chariots, fells with the shining Iron, to bend it into a wheel for a fine-wrought chariot, And the tree lies hardening by the banks of a river. Such was Anthemion’s son Simoeisios, whom illustrious Ajax killed. 75 Homer dwelt on the pity of it all; the young man’s life had been brutally truncated, cruelly twisted from its natural bias, and transformed into an instrument of killing. There was a similar hardening and distortion in the character of Achilles, who was revered as the greatest of the Achaeans. 76 He is presented as a man of great love (philotes) and tenderness; we see it in his behavior to his mother, Patroclus, and his old tutor. But in the course of his quarrel with Agamemnon, this love was quenched by anger, a hard, self-righteous wrath that isolated him from the people he loved. “He has made savage the high- hearted spirit within his body,” his colleague Ajax explained. 77 He had become hard and pitiless. 78 Achilles was trapped in a violent, damaging ethos, which he questioned but could not abandon. After the death of Patroclus, for which he was largely responsible, his philotes was turned to inhuman hatred. In his duel with Hector, to avenge the death of his friend, he became demonic. When the dying Hector asked that his body be returned to his family for burial, Achilles replied that he would rather eat his own raw flesh, 79 and foully mutilated Hector’s corpse, tying him to his horses and dragging the body round and round Patroclus’s grave. The old, noble Achilles would never have behaved like this. In the course of his egotistic struggle, he had lost himself. As Apollo explained in the divine council, he had become an impersonal, destructive force, with neither pity nor justice, and had entirely relinquished the shame that holds humans back from the worst atrocities. And what had he achieved? “Nothing,” said Apollo, “is gained for his good or his honour.”

• From Between Us

  The Utku Inuit valued equanimity and generosity, and considered anger to be dangerous. “Satan . . . takes people who get angry easily and puts them in a fiery place . . . We do not get angry here,” her Inuit foster father informed Briggs. Getting angry was considered offensive, immoral even. It was hard for Briggs to suppress her everyday irritations. She writes: “I was acutely aware of the high level of control valued, and to a large extent achieved, by the Utku, and with secret discomfort I contrasted that control with my own tempery reactions to minor misfortunes. Though my reactions were well within the boundaries set by my own culture, in a Utku setting they did not seem harmless.” Briggs certainly tried to fit in, but to little avail: “The [Utku emotional] control was much greater than that to which I was accustomed to discipline myself. . . . Discouragingly often after hours, or even days, of calm, when I was congratulating myself on having finally achieved a semblance of proper equanimity, the suddenness or intensity of the feelings betrayed me.” The final blow to Briggs’s position came when a group of kaplunas (white men visiting the Inuit territory) broke one of the two boats that Utku owned and asked to borrow the remaining one. Briggs describes this episode in her book: “I exploded. Unsmilingly and in a cold voice I told the kapluna leader a variety of things I thought he should know: that if they borrowed the second canoe we would be without a fishing boat; that if this boat was also damaged we would be in a very difficult position. . . .” Her litany was longer, but she ended claiming that the owner of the boat did not wish to lend it. The Inuit owner of the boat looked dismayed all along, but when Briggs asked him to confirm, he responded in a voice that was “unusually loud”: “Let him have his will!” The incident had dire consequences, as Briggs was ostracized for three months during the second year of her field trip. Although nobody had entered her tent for a few days, Briggs did not realize that she was ostracized until she read a letter by one of her hosts to an Utku liaison at the mainland that read: Jean “is a liar. She lied to the kaplunas. She gets angry very easily. She ought not to be studying Eskimo’s. She is very annoying, because she scolds and one is tempted to scold her. Because she is so annoying, we wish more and more that she would leave.” At first Briggs had not noticed the changes in her hosts’ behavior, but her book carefully paints a portrait of her stay with the Utku that resonates with the idea that “To understand another emotional world is an often painful process of self-discovery as well.”

• From Going Clear (2013)

  When Sweeney refused to accede to the church’s restrictions (mainly that he agree not to use the word “cult” in his report) and began independently reporting on the accusations of defectors, he was shadowed by private investigators. A Scientology film crew showed up to document the making of the BBC documentary. Cameras were pointed at cameras. Davis appeared unannounced at Sweeney’s hotel and even traveled across the country to disrupt his interviews with Scientology dissidents. Sweeney had covered wars in Afghanistan, Bosnia, and Chechnya, but he had never had such emotional and psychological pressure placed upon him. During these confrontations, Rinder trailed behind Davis, staring blankly into space as Davis goaded the reporter, inches from his face. When Sweeney suggested that Scientology is a “sadistic cult,” Davis, wearing sunglasses, checked with his cameraman to see that the camcorder was running, then said, “Now listen to me for a second. You have no right to say what is and what isn’t a religion. The Constitution of the United States of America guarantees one’s right to practice and believe freely in this country. And the definition of religion is very clear. And it’s not defined by John Sweeney. For you to repeatedly refer to my faith in those terms is so derogatory and so offensive and so bigoted. And the reason you kept repeating it is ’cause you wanted a reaction like you’re getting right now. Well, buddy, you got it! Right here, right now, I’m angry! Real angry!” Davis turned and walked away, trailed by Sweeney, who protested, “It’s your turn to listen to me! I’m a British subject....” Another confrontation took place at the “Psychiatry: An Industry of Death” exhibit in Hollywood. Davis once again moved in, nose to nose with Sweeney. “You’re accusing members of my religion of brainwashing!” He was referring to an earlier interview Sweeney had conducted with another Scientologist. “No, Tommy,” Sweeney responded, his voice rising, “you were not there—” “Brainwashing is a crime,” Davis said. “Listen to me! You were not there! At the beginning! Of the interview!” Sweeney shouted in an oddly slow cadence. “You did not hear! Or record! The interview!” “Do you understand that brainwashing is a crime?” Davis said, unfazed by Sweeney’s enraged screams. Davis’s composure and his spirited defense of his church made quite a contrast with the sputtering and eventually deeply chagrined reporter, who apologized to BBC viewers on the air. In March 2007, John Travolta’s new movie, Wild Hogs, a comedy about two middle-aged men who decide to become bikers, was scheduled to open in Britain. Concerned that Sweeney would confront Travolta during the publicity for the film, Rinder and Davis planned to travel together to London, but on the day of departure, Davis failed to show up. Someone went to his room, but he was nowhere to be found.

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  “I’d like you to keep seeing her … after…” His voice dropped off, and I looked away. “All right.” But I didn’t mean it. He tapped the granite with his fingertip. “All right,” he repeated. “I’ll see you later, Senna.” I started unpacking the groceries. At first I felt nothing. Just boxes of pasta and bags of fruit being shelved … put away. Then I felt something. An itch. It nagged at me, tugging and pulling until I was so frustrated I threw a box of soup crackers across the room. They hit the wall and I stared at the spot where they’d landed, trying to find the sound of my emotion. Sound. I ran to the living room and hit play on Florence Welch. She’d been singing this song to me nonstop for days. Her real voice would be tired by now, but her recorded voice called out to me, unfailing. Strong. How had he known this song, these words, this tormented voice would speak to me? I hated him. I hated him. I hated him. [image file=image19.jpg] I didn’t see Isaac until a few days before the surgery. I saw plenty of Dr. Elgin. I saw her three times a week upon my surgeon’s demand. It was like trying to fit a lifetime’s worth of therapy into six sessions. She commanded me to speak with her eyes and her tinkling bracelets: tell me more, tell me more. Each time I sank into her couch, I sank a little lower in esteem. This was not me. I was spilling my guts, as some people called it; divulging. It was word vomit and Saphira Elgin had her fingers down my throat. I discovered that private things were mostly sour. They sat spoiling in the corners of your heart for so long that by the time you acknowledged them you were dealing with something rancid. And that’s what I did; I threw every rotting thing at her, and she absorbed each one. It seemed that the more Saphira Elgin absorbed of me, the less of me there was. Sometimes I tried to be funny, just so I could hear the dusty way she laughed. She laughed at the inappropriate, sometimes the crass. I liked her so much on some days, and on others I hated her. At the end of every session the dragon would purr the same thing: “Read Nick’s book. It will give you purrrrspective. Closurrrrre.” I would drive home determined, but then I would get to the title page and see For MV, and quickly close the cover. The dedication page was beginning to look worn and touched, rivets of fingerprints on the page.

• From Between Us

  Moms were also disapproving of their kids’ anger at a peer who did nothing wrong. The message here was a different one: “Don’t be spoiled.” The Baltimore moms considered the ideal child one who was not easily taken advantage of by others, yet knew their place. Where many Western caregivers may assume that anger is an unavoidable concomitant of the child’s maturation as a person with their own needs and goals, or a necessary response to injustice, caregivers in many other cultures consider anger childish; they believe that it is their role to help children outgrow and conquer their anger. Utku caregivers indulge the emotionality of little children who have “no ihuma : no mind, thought, reason, or understanding.” Anthropologist Jean Briggs describes how Saarak, who was the youngest of her host family and three years old around the time Briggs arrived at her field location, “screamed in anger and frustration.” Saarak’s family indulged her, trying to meet all her needs, and soothing her when they could not. It was common knowledge that small children are easily angered and frightened, and cry a lot. It was also shared wisdom that there is no point in teaching children ihuma before they show signs of possessing it, which was thought to happen around the age of five or six. Saarak’s older sister Raigili, who was six when Briggs arrived, was treated very differently: she was expected to have ihuma . Raigili acted as one who has ihuma most of the time: her behavior was pleasant and inconspicuous, and she tried not to give offense or inconvenience anyone. Maturity meant to contribute to the equanimity of the group, which meant to ban anger. Of course, older children’s control was still imperfect. Raigili did express anger or frustration sometimes, though her “hostility took the form not of attack but of sullenness: a passive, but total resistance to social overtures.” These feelings were never considered justified by the surrounding adults, and her parents ignored the behavior. Adults assumed that the child would end up finding reason, and seeing their errors, even if they did not at the moment. Adults’ disapproval of children’s actions, although clear to see, did not lead to sanctions. If a child chose to pay no attention to the disapproval, sometimes expressed in the form of fake threats, the subject was dropped, no penalties inflicted. Utku parents modeled the calm and rational response that they valued. They expected that over time their children would become calm as well.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  Muslims traditionally call the pre-Islamic period jahiliyyah, which is usually translated as “the time of ignorance.” But the primary meaning of the root JHL is “irascibility”—an acute sensitivity to honor and prestige, excessive arrogance, and, above all, a chronic tendency to violence and retaliation. 4 Muhammad had become intensely aware of both the oppression and injustice in Mecca and the martial danger of jahiliyyah. Mecca had to be a place where merchants from any tribe could gather freely to do business without fear of attack, so in the interests of commerce, the Quraysh had abjured warfare, maintaining a position of aloof neutrality. With consummate skill and diplomacy, they had established the “sanctuary” (haram), a twenty-mile zone around the Kabah where all violence was forbidden. 5 Yet it would take more than that to subdue the jahili spirit. Meccan grandees were still chauvinistic, touchy, and liable to explosions of ungovernable fury. When Muhammad, the pious merchant, began to preach to his fellow Meccans in 612, he was well aware of the precariousness of this volatile society. Gathering a small community of followers, many from the weaker, disadvantaged clans, his message was based on the Quran (“Recitation”), a new revelation for the people of Arabia. The ideas of the civilized peoples of the ancient world had traveled down the trade routes and had been avidly discussed among the Arabs. Their own local lore had it that they themselves were descended from Ishmael, Abraham’s eldest son, 6 and many believed that their high god Allah, whose name simply meant “God,” was identical with the god of the Jews and Christians. But the Arabs had no concept of an exclusive revelation or of their own special election. The Quran was to them simply the latest in the unfolding revelation of Allah to the descendants of Abraham, a “reminder” of what everybody knew already. 7 Indeed, in one remarkable passage of what would become the written Quran, Allah made it clear that he made no distinction between the revelations of any of the prophets. 8 The bedrock message of the Quran was not a new abstruse doctrine, such as had riven Byzantium, but simply a “reminder” of what constituted a just society that challenged the structural violence emerging in Mecca: that it was wrong to build a private fortune but good to share your wealth with the poor and vulnerable, who must be treated with equity and respect. The Muslims formed an ummah, a “community” that provided an alternative to the greed and systemic injustice of Meccan capitalism.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The anti-Hildebrandian party of the Roman nobles, headed by Count Girard of Galeria (an excommunicated robber), with the aid of the disaffected Lombard clergy, and the young emperor Henry IV., elected Cadalus (or Cadalous), bishop of Parma, anti-pope. He was consecrated Oct. 28, 1061, as Honorius II., and maintained a schism of ten years. He had been repeatedly charged with simony, and had the sympathy and support of the married or concubinary clergy and the simoniacal laity, who hoped that his success would lead to a modification of discipline and legalization of clerical marriage. The opposition thus became an organized party, and liable to the charge of heresy, which was considered worse than carnal sin. Damiani and Humbert defended the principle that a priest who is guilty of simony or concubinage, and believes himself innocent, is more criminal than he who knows himself to be guilty. Damiani hurled the fiercest denunciation of a Hebrew prophet against the anti-pope. Cadalus entered Rome with an armed force, and maintained himself in the castle of St. Angelo for two years; but at length he sought safety in flight without a single follower, and moved to Parma. He died in 1072. His party was broken up. Alexander held a council at Mantua, May 31, 1064, and was universally recognized as the legitimate pope; while Cadalus was anathematized and disappeared from history. During the pontificate of Alexander, the war against simony and Nicolaitism went on under the lead of Hildebrand and Damiani with varying success. The troubles in Lombardy were renewed. Archbishop Wido of Milan sided with Cadalus and was excommunicated; he apologized, did penance, and resumed office. After his death in 1071 the strife broke out again with disgraceful scenes of violence. The Patarine party, supported with gold by the pope, gained the ascendancy after the death of Cadalus. The Normans repelled the Mohammedan aggression and won Southern Italy and Sicily for the Church of Rome. This good service had some weight on the determination of Hildebrand to support the claim of William of Normandy to the crown of England, which was a master-stroke of his policy; for it brought that island into closer contact with Rome, and strengthened the papal pretension to dispose of temporal thrones. William fought under a banner blessed by the pope, and founded the Norman dynasty in England, 1066. The conquest was concluded at Winchester by a solemn coronation through three papal delegates, Easter, 1070. But in Germany there arose a powerful opposition, not indeed to the papacy, which was the common ground of all parties, but to the Hildebrandian policy. This led to the conflict between Gregory VII. and Henry IV. Alexander threatened Henry with excommunication in case he persisted in his purpose to divorce his queen Bertha. CHAPTER II.GREGORY VII, 1073–1085.See literature in § 3. § 10. Hildebrand elected Pope. His Views on the Situation.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  51 Yahweh had annihilated the other deities and become in effect the only God, his vitality in sharp contrast with the lifeless, inanimate effigies of the Babylonian deities. 52 “I am Yahweh, unrivalled,” he announced proudly. “There is no other god besides me.” 53 This is the first unequivocal biblical assertion of monotheism, the belief that only one God exists. The doctrine is often seen as the great triumph of the Jewish Axial Age, but in the way that it is phrased, it seems to retreat from some fundamental Axial principles. Instead of looking forward to a period of universal peace and compassion, Second Isaiah’s aggressive deity looks back to the pre-Axial divine warrior: Yahweh advances like a hero, His fury is stirred like a warrior’s. He gives the war shout, raises hue and cry, Marches valiantly against his foes. 54 Unlike the self-emptying servant, this God cannot stop asserting himself: “I, I am Yahweh!” Where the servant refused to “break the crushed reed,” 55 this aggressive deity could not wait to see the goyim marching behind the Israelites in chains. Instead of recoiling from the violence, like so many of the other Axial sages, Second Isaiah gave it sacred endorsement. The prophet’s focus on the earthly city of Jerusalem also seemed to turn the clock back to an older, less developed theological vision. In India and China, the cult was being steadily internalized, and in Israel too Ezekiel’s mandala of a holy city had represented an interior, spiritual ascent to the divine. But the pivot of Second Isaiah’s hopes was the earthly Zion. Yahweh would work a miracle there, transforming its desolate ruins into an earthly paradise. The “glory” of Yahweh, which Ezekiel had seen leaving the city, would return to Mount Zion, and—most important—“all mankind shall see it.” 56 Second Isaiah was expecting something dramatic. Before the exile, the “glory” had been evoked and reenacted in the temple rituals, but in the restored Jerusalem (whose walls and battlements would be studded with precious jewels), the divine presence would be more tangible. The returned exiles would experience the glory directly, and because Yahweh would be with his people in such a public, incontrovertible way, they would be safe forever. No nation would dare to attack them again: Remote from oppression, you will have nothing to fear; Remote from terror, it will not approach you. . . . Not a weapon forged against you will succeed. 57 Second Isaiah’s promises were disconcertingly close to those of the “false prophets” who had predicted that Jerusalem could never fall to the Babylonians.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  His teaching was shocking, because it overturned so many traditional certainties. Israel had always seen Yahweh as a divine warrior; from the earliest days, they had imagined their god marching from the southern mountains to come to their aid. Now Yahweh was back on the warpath. He would shatter the kingdoms of Damascus, Philistia, Tyre, Moab, and Ammon, but this time he would not be fighting on Israel’s side. He was leading a holy war against Israel and Judah, using Assyria as his favored instrument. 9 The spirituality of the Axial Age could often be iconoclastic. Religion was not about holding on to cherished practices and beliefs; it often demanded that people question their traditions and criticize their own behavior. Besides turning the ancient devotion to Yahweh, the divine warrior, upside down, Amos also poured scorn on Israel’s beloved rituals. “I hate your feasts,” Yahweh complained; “I take no pleasure in your solemn festivals.” He was sick of listening to his people’s noisy chanting and their devout strumming of harps. Instead, he wanted justice to “flow like water and integrity like an unfailing stream.” 10 Finally, Amos undermined the Israelites’ pride in their unique relationship with Yahweh. Other peoples had been liberated by Yahweh too; he had brought the Philistines from Caphtor and the Arameans from Kir and settled them in their promised lands. 11 Now he was preparing to wipe the kingdom of Israel off the map. Amos had delivered a swingeing blow to Israel’s self-esteem. He wanted to puncture the national ego. This was one of the earliest expressions in Israel of the spirituality of self-surrender, which was at the heart of the Axial ideal. Instead of using religion to shore up their sense of self-worth, the Israelites had to learn to transcend their self-interest and rule with justice and equity. The prophet was a walking example of what the Greeks would call kenosis, “emptying.” Amos felt that his subjectivity had been taken over by God. 12 He was not speaking his own words, but Yahweh’s; the prophet had left himself behind in passionate empathy with his God, who had experienced the injustice committed by Israel as a personal humiliation. 13 This was an important moment. Axial Age religion would be conditioned by a sympathy that enabled people to feel with others. Amos did not experience anger on his own part; he felt the anger of Yahweh himself. Hosea, who was active in the northern kingdom at about the same time as Amos, learned sympathy with Yahweh through a tragedy in his own life, when his wife, Gomer, became a sacred prostitute in the fertility cult of Baal.

• From Between Us

  In recent studies, Michael Boiger, Alexander Kirchner-Häusler, Anna Schouten, Yukiko Uchida, and I studied emotional interactions in Belgian and Japanese couples who came to the lab to discuss a disagreement. The Belgian and Japanese couples danced to very different types of music: the dance of “meeting each partner’s personal needs” and the dance of “relationship harmony,” respectively. The Belgian couples reported and showed mutual anger (as rated by independent judges) throughout discussion of conflict—more than any other emotion we measured, and much more so than the Japanese couples. The Japanese couples reported more mutual empathy and showed more validation than any other emotion during the discussions on conflict, and also more than their Belgian counterparts. In focus groups, Belgian men and women told us that anger and conflict were “right” for the relationship, as they helped the couple to figure out and negotiate each partner’s needs. Japanese men and women in this study, told us they avoided “bad feelings” in the relationship as much as possible by evading discussion about a disagreement, by adjusting to their partner’s wishes, and by empathizing (putting themselves in the shoes of their partners). Of course, it happened that Belgian couples felt empathy and validated each other, and of course, Japanese couples were judged as angry occasionally, but the episode—the dance in which the couple joined—was different. When unpacking the emotional episodes, it is important to try to understand the dance that is being performed: the interpersonal goals. Expectations for the dance in monocultural couples, and monocultural interaction partners in general, are shared to a certain extent. But what if you are the person to make a next step in an intercultural encounter? Many of us are these days. I do not think there is a shortcut to unpacking the emotional episode. Unpacking becomes easier when you know the many ways in which emotional episodes may develop across cultures, as these cultural differences reveal the junctures at which emotions are OURS. Some cultural competence does make it easier to imagine how emotions are tied to the sociocultural contexts in which they occur—to be aware of “opportunities.” Knowing about cultural differences in the ways emotional episodes typically unfold in other cultures also stretches your imagination beyond your habitual way of doing emotions. And yet, understanding the emotions of people from other cultures will never be like botanizing tropical plants. There is no finite number of well delineated entities to be known.

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  Most of us think of anger as a dangerous, destructive emotion—which, of course, it most certainly can be—but its primary function is self-protection. Fear alerts you to danger, but anger helps you mobilize the energy necessary to take action. As Carol Tavris says in her fine book Anger: The Misunderstood Emotion, “anger is ultimately an emphatic message: Pay attention to me. I don’t like what you are doing. Restore my pride. You’re in my way. Danger. Give me justice.”14 Anger is self-protective, and because risks and dangers abound in the erotic adventure, we shouldn’t be surprised that sex and anger are intricately linked, with results ranging from positive to destructive. Obviously, those who are chronically angry, who feel as if life itself has done them wrong, are rarely available for sensitive lovemaking, although some are very interested in hostile sex. More than a few angry people lose interest in sex altogether or are plagued by sexual dysfunctions. Angry couples can go either way. Some conflict-ridden partners rely on clashes between them to add drama to their sex lives, while others sink into sexless bickering or outright war. Luckily, most of us are neither ruled nor defined by our anger. Instead we occasionally become angry, with varying degrees of comfort or distress. In examining your own peak turn-ons, don’t be surprised if you come across one or more in which anger functioned as an aphrodisiac. The role of anger as an arousal intensifier is crystal-clear when a fight or argument is followed by a passionate reconciliation, as in this story told by Sheila, a graduate student in her mid-thirties: I remember a night in our second year of marriage when my husband Rick and I had a terrible fight. At least I felt it was terrible. Rick says it was no big deal. It started out as a normal argument until Rick was really getting pissed off. I felt so frustrated that he wouldn’t listen to me and became very agitated myself. He can be so stubborn! He talks like a damn attorney, pounding away at me like I’m on the witness stand. Before long I became totally emotional with tears streaming down my face. Rick tried to hold me but I pushed him away. After I calmed down a little we were able to talk things out.

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  I’d told her I was writing a new book. One about Nick. She’d become flustered at that. Not in the extreme outward way a normal person becomes flustered. I don’t even know if I can pinpoint how I knew it upset her. Maybe her bracelets tinkled a little extra that day as she jotted notes down on her yellow pad. Or maybe her ruby lips pulled a little tighter. But I knew. I’d confessed to her that I’d messed everything up, but I wasn’t sure how. When we ended our session she’d grabbed my hand. “Senna,” she’d said, “do you want another chance at the truth?” “The truth?” I’d repeated, not sure of what she was getting at. “The truth that can set you free...” Her eyes had been two hot coals. I’d been close enough to smell her perfume; it smelled exotic like myrrh and burning wood. “Nothing can set me free, Saphira,” I’d said in turn. “That’s why I write.” I’d turned to leave. I was halfway out the door when she’d called my name. “Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth.” I’d half smiled, and gone home and forgotten what she’d said. I’d written my book in the month after that meeting. I only needed thirty days to write a book. Thirty days in which I didn’t eat or sleep or do anything at all but clack away at my keyboard. And after the book was finished and catharsis was complete, I’d never made another appointment to see her. Her office called and left messages on my phone. She eventually called and left a message. But I was finished. “Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth.” I say it out loud, the memory aching in my brain. Is that where she had the idea? To put me in this place where for a time both the sun and the moon were hidden? Where like slow, seeping molasses I would discover the crickets of truth in my heart? My zookeeper thought it kind to be my savior. And now what? I would starve and freeze here alone? What was the point of that? I hate her so. I want to tell her that her sick game didn’t work, that I’m just the same as I’ve always been: broken, bitter and self-destructive. Something comes to me then, a quote by Martin Luther King, Jr. I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. “Fuck you, Saphira!” I call out. Then I reach out in defiance and grab the fence.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  It sprang from his outrage at the suffering of his people and his yearning for justice. He wanted the wicked to be punished for the pain they had inflicted on good, innocent people. But as time passed, he began to realize that he would not be alive to see the Last Days. Another would come after him, a superhuman being, “who is better than a good man.” 25 The Gathas call him the Saoshyant (“One Who Will Bring Benefit”). He, not Zoroaster, would lead Lord Mazda’s troops into the final battle. When—centuries later—the Axial Age began, philosophers, prophets, and mystics all tried to counter the cruelty and aggression of their time by promoting a spirituality based on nonviolence. But Zoroaster’s traumatized vision, with its imagery of burning, terror, and extermination, was vengeful. His career reminds us that political turbulence, atrocity, and suffering do not infallibly produce an Axial-style faith, but can inspire a militant piety that polarizes complex reality into oversimplified categories of good and evil. Zoroaster’s vision was deeply agonistic. We shall see that the agon (“contest”) was a common feature of ancient religion. In making a cosmic agon between good and evil central to his message, Zoroaster belonged to the old spiritual world. He had projected the violence of his time onto the divine and made it absolute. But in his passionately ethical vision, Zoroaster did look forward to the Axial Age. He tried to introduce some morality into the new warrior ethos. True heroes did not terrorize their fellow creatures but tried to counter aggression. The holy warrior was dedicated to peace; those who opted to fight for Lord Mazda were patient, disciplined, courageous, and swift to defend all good creatures from the assaults of the wicked. 26 Ashavans, the champions of order (asha), must imitate the Holy Immortals in their care for the environment. “Good Purpose,” for instance, who had appeared to Zoroaster on the riverbank, was the guardian of the cow, and ashavans must follow his example, not that of the raiders, who drove the cattle from their pastures, harnessed them to carts, killed, and ate them without the proper ritual. 27 “Good Dominion,” the personification of divine justice, was the protector of the stone Sky, so ashavans must use their stone weapons only to defend the poor and the weak. 28 When Zoroastrians protected vulnerable people, looked after their cattle tenderly, and purified their natural environment, they became one with the Immortals and joined their struggle against the Hostile Spirit.

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  **Voice — Sheila:** I remember a night in our second year of marriage when my husband Rick and I had a terrible fight. At least I felt it was terrible. Rick says it was no big deal. It started out as a normal argument until Rick was really getting pissed off. I felt so frustrated that he wouldn’t listen to me and became very agitated myself. He can be so stubborn! He talks like a damn attorney, pounding away at me like I’m on the witness stand. Before long I became totally emotional with tears streaming down my face. Rick tried to hold me but I pushed him away. After I calmed down a little we were able to talk things out. When we went to bed Rick wanted to have sex but I said “forget it” because I was still mad at him and didn’t feel sexy at all. But in the morning I felt different. I opened my eyes and there was Rick’s beautiful face, our noses almost touching. He gave me one of those big grins that made me fall in love with him and we embraced passionately. His penis felt wonderful as it pressed against my clit. What followed was surely one of our most amazing lovemaking sessions. I was totally excited. I couldn’t get enough of him. I remained in a steamy mood all day long and we had boisterous sex again that night. Maybe we should fight more often.

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  The old tech industry was run by engineers and MBAs; the new tech industry is populated by young, amoral hustlers, the kind of young guys (and they are almost all guys) who watched The Social Network and its depiction of Mark Zuckerberg as a lying, thieving, backstabbing prick—and left the theater wanting to be just like that guy. Many are fresh out of college, or haven’t even bothered to graduate. Their companies look and feel a lot like frat houses. Twitter, at one point, will literally hold a frat-themed party. In 2012 a new word has entered the Silicon Valley lexicon: brogrammer , which refers to a kind of macho dickhead who chugs from a beer bong and harasses women. Soon come the scandals and lawsuits and criminal cases, with tales of sleazy founders sexually harassing female employees or, in one extreme case, allegedly beating up a girlfriend. These are the people who now run tech companies, who have been entrusted with huge sums of other people’s money. It would be nice to think that when everything falls apart, the only ones who get hurt will be venture capitalists on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park. But a lot of the money being thrown at these kids originally came from pension funds. The pain, when it comes, will not be confined to Sand Hill Road. Walking around San Francisco, it strikes me that this cannot end well, that the combination of magical thinking, easy money, greedy investors, and amoral founders represents a recipe for disaster. My first response is to feel the same kind of righteous indignation that I felt back in the late 1990s. (Journalists are really good at righteous indignation. It comes naturally to us.) But this time I also feel something else—maybe because I’m older and more pragmatic, or maybe because I now have kids to support, or maybe because I’m still stung by the loss of my Newsweek job and fearful that there is no future in the media business. Maybe it’s because I hate my new boss at ReadWrite, and every day I slog into the office and bang out blog posts only to have her call me from New York and tell me the site isn’t getting enough traffic. I feel like a hamster in a wheel, running and running, getting nowhere. I’m never going to make any money doing this, and meanwhile all around me there are kids in skinny jeans making millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars—money for nothing, as Mark Knopfler sang in that old Dire Straits song. This time I start thinking that I should get in on that. I should go get a job at one of these start-ups. Tech companies and VC firms are all poaching journalists to pump out blogs and get them some attention. They’re flush with cash and hiring like crazy. Two of my journalist friends have already made the leap. One is working at Evernote, the other at Flipboard.

• From Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989)

  If the y are orthodox utilitarians, and if my argu m ents in Part I are valid, they will have an untenable meta-ethic to start with . In a dditio n, as I have just indicated, there is plenty of evidence that in their lives they are not i m perviou s to such g oods as e xpressive unity and inte grity. Romantic ism has shaped just about everyone's views about personal fulfil ment in our civilization. The apologists of instrumentalis m suppress their awareness of this when it comes to esp o using their explicit ideology. They sim p lify their moral world by deliberately narrowing their sympathy. Or so I would wish to argue. Mo re ov er, the instru mentalist re ading of th e publi c conseque nc es is bad ly off tar get. The re is an importa nt se t of c ondi tions of the cont inu ing hea lth of self-governing societie s, well explored by T ocqueville. These include a strong se nse of ident ificat ion of the citize ns with their pu blic ins ti tu tion s and politi c al w ay of life, and may also in v o lve so m e dec ent ralizat ion of power w he n the central ins titut ions ar e too distant and b ur eauc ra tized to sustain a con tinui n g sense of parti cipa tion b y the m selv e s. The se condi tions are unde r th r eat in our highly c oncen trate d an d mobi le soc ie ti e s, whi c h ar e so d omin at ed by i nstru men t alist con sidera tions in bo th economi c and defence pol ic ie s. What is wor se, the atomist o u tloo k which in stru m ent al ism foste rs ma kes pe ople unaw ar e of these condit ions , so th a t they ha pp ily support p oli cies whi c h und er mine the m -as in th e recent rash of neo- conse rvative me a sures in Britain an d the United St ates , wh ic h cut welfare pr ogra mm e s and regr essive ly red ist ribu t e in c ome , thus er oding the ba ses of co mmuni ty ide ntifica tion. Atomism has so befogged our awareness o f the conne ction between the act and consequence in society that the same people who by their mo bile and gr ow t h-o riented way of life have greatly increased the t asks o f the 506 • C O NCLUSION public se c tor are the loudest to protest paying their share of t he cost s o f fulfilling them.

• From Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989)

  Rather we think of that P e r s o n o r ev ent, we allow our feelings full reign, prec isely as the way we e x p er i e n ce th e p erson co nc erned . d ' To at te mp t t o dis e n g a ge fro m our f e eli ngs involves something quite •ff e r e n t . H e r e as above , we t ry to w ith dr aw from the intentional dimension. 164 • INWARD N ESS Perhaps you find Aunt Mabel's sense o f humour irritat i ng. It seems stra i n e d and push y , calculated t o take over an d grab atten tion. But you tell y ou r s el f t hat you're overreactin g. It's just some t hing abo ut you, which makes y o u react like this to a perf ectly normal w ay of being. You try to strangl e the reaction by treating it as just a reaction, not a valid perception of ann oy in g features. We do somethin g similar when we decide that we oughtn't to f e el g uilty for something we do or feel and treat t he spa sms like some irrat i o n a l holdover from our childhood training. Disengage ment and what we m i ght call engaged exploration are t wo quit e different things. They carry u s i n contrary direction s and are extremely difficult to combine. The p o int of this contrast is to see that the option for an epistem o l ogy which privileges disengagement and control isn't self-evident l y righ t. It require s certain assumptions. If the great a g e of rationalism and empir i ci sm launched itself on the "way of ideas", i t was because it took certain thing s fo r granted. Epistem i cally, a s has just been mentioned, it was based in par t on a belief in mechanism as against the universe of meaningful order, of the ontic logos. To see the world as the embodiment of Ideas is to see knowledge a s a ttained b y attuning the soul's gaze. We get to it by engaging more fully w ith t his order, turning the eye of the soul towards it in Plato's imag e; i n Aristotle's formulation, we come to knowledge when the eidos of our nous a nd that of the object are one.