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.

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• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  Therefore, when he imposes punishments on them, it is not out of hatred of the people, but he does so simply out of concern for them.” 10 He should be impartial and unselfish, punishing friends and family if necessary and rewarding his enemies. A poem attributed to Han Fei gave the ruler’s wu wei almost mystical significance: By doing without knowledge, he possesses clear-sightedness, By doing without worthiness, he gets results, By doing without courage, he achieves strength. 11 The law was not supposed to be a method of punishment and suppression. It was an education that would accustom king and subjects to behave in a different way. Once this reformation was complete, there would be no further need for punishments; everybody would act in accordance with the best interests of the state. Yet for all his good intentions, Han Fei also suffered a violent end; he was slandered and imprisoned, and in 233, rather than submit to execution, accepted the option of committing suicide. Before he had become a Legalist, Han Fei had studied under the most distinguished Confucian philosopher of his time and probably acquired much of his idealism from his teacher. Xunzi (c. 340–245), a passionate, poetic, yet rigorously rational thinker, managed to absorb insights of other philosophers into his own Confucian perspective and created a powerful synthesis. 12 He did not think that Mohists, Yangists, and Legalists were wrong; they simply stressed only one side of a complex argument, and it was possible to learn something from them all. Xunzi was also profoundly influenced by Daoist ideas. His book was more cogently argued and organized than any other text of Axial Age China, yet at times his prose modulated easily into poetry and his logic into mystical insight. Xunzi was appalled by the new pragmatism, which he believed had led to a decline in moral standards. Everywhere he went he saw “scheming and plotting,” and the selfish pursuit of wealth, power, and luxury. 13 Because princes refused to allow themselves to be restrained by the li, they pursued their own ambitions ruthlessly, and violence and warfare became endemic. Xunzi did not accept the realism of the Legalists; he still believed that a compassionate king was the only person who could restore peace and order, but he was prepared to consider any system that might bring relief, even if it departed from traditional Confucian principles. Xunzi was an activist; he longed for a government post, but was no more successful than Confucius and Mencius. He was three times appointed master of the Jixia Academy, but had to leave Qi when its tyrannical King Min expelled the scholars from his kingdom. In 255, he moved to Chu, where the prime minister made him a magistrate, but he lost his post in 238 when his patron was assassinated.

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

  Those Christians who remained loyal to the Church but could see how the intrinsic violence of Christendom violated the gospel teaching were inevitably conflicted. Unable to admit that the “heretics” had a point, yet furious with them for drawing attention to their dilemma, they projected these sentiments outward, in forms monstrous and inhuman. There were paranoid fantasies of a highly organized, clandestine Catharist Church determined to destroy the human race and restore Satan’s kingdom.102 We shall see that similar conspiracy fears would later erupt in other societies that were going through a traumatic modernization process and would also result in violence. The Council of Rheims (1157) described the Cathars “hiding among the poor and under the veil of religion … moving from place to place and undermining the faith of simple people.”103 Soon Jews would be said to belong to a similar international conspiracy.104 Even a fair-minded man like Peter the Venerable, abbot of Cluny, who claimed to be reaching out to the Muslim world with love rather than force, described Islam as a “heresy and diabolical sect” addicted to “bestial cruelty.”105 At the outset of the Second Crusade he wrote to King Louis VII of France that he hoped he would kill as many Muslims as Moses and Joshua had killed Amorites and Canaanites.106 During this period Satan, often pictured as a monstrous human being with horns and a tail, became a far more menacing figure in Western Christianity than in either Judaism or Islam. As they made their stressful transition from a political backwater to a major world power, Europeans were terrified of an unseen “common enemy,” representing what they could not accept in themselves and associated with absolute evil.107 [image file=image_rsrcDZA.jpg] Innocent III had achieved a virtual papal monarchy in Europe, but no other pope would match his power. Secular rulers, such as Louis VII of France (1137–80), Henry II of England (r. 1154–89), and Frederick II all challenged this papal supremacy. They had built powerful kingdoms with government institutions that could intrude more than ever before into the lives of ordinary people, so they were all zealous persecutors of “heretics” who threatened the social order.108 They were not “secularists” in our sense; they still regarded royal power as sacred and war as holy, but they had developed a Christian theology of war that was quite different from that of the official church. Again, we find it impossible to pinpoint a single, essentialist “Christian” attitude to war, fighting, and violence. The Christian template could be used to very different effect by different groups.

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  “Why would you do that?” I cry. That was so cruel. I grab the only thing I see—a dishtowel—and I hold it against the cut that we made together. He has blood running down his chest, I have it running down my arm. It’s morbid and confusing. When I look up for his answer he is looking at me intently. “What did you feel?” he asks. I shake my head. I don’t know what he’s asking me. Does he need stitches? There must be a needle somewhere around here … thread. “What did you feel when that happened?” He’s trying to catch my eyes, but I can’t take my eyes from his blood. I don’t want the life to bleed out of Isaac. “You need stitches,” I say. “At least two…” “Senna, what did you feel?” It takes me a minute to focus. He really wants me to answer that? I open and close my mouth. “Hurt. I don’t want you to hurt. Why would you do that?” I am so angry. Confused. “Because that’s what I feel when you hurt yourself.” I drop the dishtowel. Nothing dramatic—it’s just become too heavy to hold along with my understanding. I look down at where it lies between my feet. There is a bright red stain on one side of it. Isaac bends to pick it up. He also picks up the knife and places it back in my hand. Grabbing my wrist, he leads me back to the table and firmly plants me in front of it. “Write,” he says, gesturing to the wood. “What?” He grabs the hand that’s holding the knife. I try to pull away again, but his eyes still me. “Trust me.” I stop fighting. He presses the tip into the wood this time. Carves a straight line. “Write here,” he says. I know what he’s telling me, but it’s not the same. “I don’t write on my body. I cut it.” “You write your pain on your skin. With a knife. Straight lines, deep lines, jagged lines. It’s just a different kind of word.” I get it. All at once. I feel grief for everything that I am. Landscape is playing in the background, a strange soundtrack, a constant soundtrack.

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

  The reticence or condemnation of the establishment would thus ofte n d rive the c ommitted abo l itionist to rebellion. In fact, something of th e s ame dialec tic was at work within the churche s a s ha d originally help e d to generate the unbelieving Enlightenment. From one Calvinist pe rsp ective, too great an identification with the cause could lead to the Papist error of seeking salvation in works. From the perspective of a committed abolitionist, anything less than full commitment was backslidin g. The two views coul d bar el y coexist. But to the extent that the hyper Augustinian view comes to be accepted as the defi n ition of Christian fait h, that it comes to be generally accepted that wholesale dedication to secular r eform sits uneasil y with this faith, to that degree those committed to the cause may feel forced outsid e orthodox Christianity by the very force of th at commitment. The paradox is that a religio u s impulse an d vision ma y sometimes drive people out of religious b elief. Something of these pressures ca n be seen in the care e r o f t he America n aboliti onist minister Henry C l a rke Wright. " Christ is the Prince of mor al Our Victorian Contemporaries · 4oz r eformers . .. as well as the Prince of Peace, , , he affir m ed. But he was o utraged b y the establishment's complicity in slavery and i ts persecution of William Lloyd Gar ri so n , an d he bega n t o evolve towards more heterodox vi ews. He wrote a tract entitled: "The Bible, if Opposed to Self-Evident Truth, is Self-Evident Falsehood'\ A nd he declared, " In spirit and in practice, Voltaire was nearer the king do m of heaven than the slaveholding clergy of America". 12 We can see here a slide towards a mutually supportive opposition, in w nich hyper-Augustinia n Christianity stre ngth en s the moral credentials of u �1belief; and this in turn deepens the suspicions of hyper- A ugustinian believers about secular reform. Something like this polarization is evident in t he French Enlightenment. And the slide towards it has been visible among s ocially committed Christians since-witness, for example, the China mis sionaries in our own day who ended up Communists. Something very i mportant ha pp ened in the nineteenth century when these reformers and others stepped outside the boundaries of belief. But it would be a mistake to think of this as part of a smooth, continuing, unidirectional move towards 's ecularization'.13 The initial impulse underlying reform was a d eeply religious one, and something of this remains.

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  The police come next. All official looking. I tell them I want to speak to Saphira before I speak to them. They want my statement; they’re clicking the little buttons on the ends of their pens and pushing tape recorders at me, but I stare at them tight lipped until I can speak to Saphira. “You can speak to her when you’re well enough to come in to the station,” they tell me. A chill runs through my body. They have her. Here. “That’s when I’ll speak to you, then,” I tell them. A day before I am discharged I am visited by two doctors; one is an oncologist and the other an orthopedic surgeon. The ortho guy holds up the x-rays they took of my leg. “The bone didn’t heal straight, which is why you have pain when you put too much pressure on it. I’ve scheduled you for—” “No,” I tell him. He brings his eyes to my face. “No?” “I’m not interested in fixing it. I’ll leave it how it is.” I open the magazine on my lap to signal that the conversation is over. “Ms. Richards, with all due respect, the irregular fusion of your bone that was caused by the accident will be something that pains you for the rest of your life. You will want to have the surgeries needed to repair it.” I close my magazine. “I like pain. I like when it lingers. It reminds a person of what they’ve lived through.” “That’s a very unique perspective,” he says. “But not practical.” I fling the magazine across the room. It flies with surprising force and hits the door with a healthy thud. Then I pull down my hospital gown—all the way—until the scars on my chest are exposed. He looks like he might pass out. “I like my scars,” I say. “I earned them. Now, get out.” As soon as the door shuts behind him, I scream. The nurses come rushing in, but I throw my water jug at them. At the rate I’m going they’re going to put me in the psych ward. “Get out!” I scream at them. “Stop telling me how to live my life!” I am much nicer to the oncologist. She got my file from the hospital in Seattle and ran the yearly tests that I’d missed during my imprisonment. When she gives me the results she sits on the edge of my bed. It reminds me so much of Isaac that I feel overwhelmed. When she is finished she tells me that I am built to fight; emotionally and physically. I actually smile.

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

  We see this not o nly in those e nam oured o f reductiv e ex p l a nations but in another way in classical utilitaria nism. T he aim of this philosophy was precisely to reje ct all qualitative d ist inct ion s an d to co nstrue Inescapable Frameworks • 2.3 al l hum an g oals a s on the same footin g , susceptible theref or e of common q u a ntifi cation and calculation accordin g to some common 'curren cy', My th e sis here is that this idea is de eply m istaken. But as I said above, it is m o tiva t ed itself b y moral reasons, and these reasons form an es se ntial part of th e p ic ture of the framewo rk s people live by in our day. This has to do with what I called in section r.3 the 'affirm at i on of or din ar y life'. The notion th at the life of production and r e production, of wo rk a nd the family, is the main locus of the g ood life flies in the face of what w er e o ri g inall y the dominant distinctions of our civilization. For both the w a rr io r ethic and the Platonic, ordinary life in this sense is part of th e l o we r range, part of what contrasts with the incomparably higher. The affirmation of ordinary life therefore involves a polemical stance towards th es e traditional views and their implied elitism. This was true of the Reformation theolo g ies, w hich are the ma in source o f the drive to this affirmation in modern times. It is this polemical stance, carr ied over and transposed in secular g ui se, which p owers the reductive views l i ke utilitarianism which want to denounce all qualitative distinctions. They are all accused, ju st as the honour ethic or the monastic ethic of supererogation was earlier, of wrongly and perversely downgrading ordinary life, of failin g to see that our destiny lies here in production and reproduction and not in some a lle g ed higher sphere, of bein g blind to the dignity and worth of ordinary human desire and fulfilment. In this , naturalism and utilitarianism touch a strong nerve of modern sensibility, and this explains some of the ir persuasive force. My claim is here that they are nevertheless deeply c onfused.

• From Between Us

  The sister apologized afterwards, but Emiko was not sure what it was worth, because this was her sibling’s usual disregard. Yet, Emiko decided it was not worth complaining about too much: she knew that she and her sister had different perspectives. Even if I had told her: “I was waiting for you, and I was not able to plan my day without knowing what you were up to,” she would have no doubt replied: “Why didn’t you just go without waiting for me?” But the reason I stayed home was so that she could reach me, since neither of us have a cell phone and it’s difficult to contact each other, but . . . (laugh) . . . (silence). Emiko’s response was not to take distance and vilify her sister, as many American respondents reported, but rather to come up with a solution: I thought I want my sister to have a cell phone, she answered when asked what she had felt like doing. The majority of the Japanese respondents analyzed the anger target’s behavior, without vilifying them. They tried to understand the behavior of the person who had offended them, if not explain it away. Even Emiko’s reflections that it was in her sister’s nature to be lax can be understood as an attempt to explain or analyze the behavior. Our Japanese respondents sometimes went as far as to justify the behavior of their target of anger: Emiko pondered that it was hard for her sister to call, because she did not have a cell phone. This did not change her being offended by the behavior, but it did put it in perspective. Most Japanese respondents also reported “doing nothing at all,” because any behavior would have been useless or counterproductive: Emiko thought her sister would not have been responsive to her complaints. A pattern among the Japanese respondents emerged: they tried to adjust, and coped with the situation as best as they could. Emiko talked to her sister, but saw the solution in a cell phone. Hiroto, the Japanese man whom I introduced in chapter 2, similarly tried to understand the motives of the fellow committee member who criticized him. Hiroto felt “offended and annoyed” that this woman had started to annex his tasks, he thought she was wrong, he took some distance, but also sought to be cooperative in the committee. And Chiemi, the student whose grandparents criticized her for being late so often, even though she was usually home early, also focused on the relationship. She may have wanted to have more “fun until late at night,” but she smiled away their criticism and made an effort to come home early after this exchange with her grandparents.

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

  Because their moral sources are unavowable, t hey are m a inly invoked in p o lemic. Their p rincipal words of p ower are denunciatory. Much of what they live by has to be inferred from t he ra ge with which t heir enemies are attacked and refuted. Marxism i s an excellent case in point. This self-conc ealin g k in d of philo so phy i s also t her eby p arasiti c. In the case of the radical En light enm ent, doubly so. Fi rst, i t is para sitic on it s adver sari e s for the expre s sion of its ow n mo ral sourc e s , it s o wn words of p o wer, a nd henc e for its contin uing mo ral fo rce . Bu t s ec ond, si nce it und ermine s all previou s formul ations of th e cons titutive good which could gr oun d th e li f e goods it r ec ognizes , witho u t putti ng a ny in its place , it als o live s to s o m e degree on the s e e arl ier fo rmula t ions. We saw how utilit ar ianism cont inue s and bui lds on an existing tur n of argument , in, e.g., denouncing ce rt ai n philo sophies for t he pride wi t h which they elev a te certai n go als over ou r common and sens ual fulfilm ents. The i nvoc at ion of p ride made sense wi thi n the or igina l Ch ris tian context, i n contras t t o t he hum ili ty which is p ro per to those who ar e a ll eq ually c hildren of God . This is denie d, but no ne w cont e xt is provi d ed. Nietzsc he's ch alleng e br ough t out the un a vowed b or r ow in g from Chris tiani ty that un derp ins this nat uralist hum anism and a t the same time showed how v ulnerable this mak e s it. Classical utilitariani s m lives off moral insights which are widespread in t he c ultur e, but which it itself has given no justified place to a nd perhap s c an n ot gi ve a pl ace to. And this is the second facet of its parasitism. It no t o nl y ne eds enem ies to generate its words of power; sometimes it draws its m o r al ide als, if not directly from its enemies, at least from a moral culture w h i ch the y have bet ter articulated. The utilitarian E n l i gh tenmen t is in this way shot through with contradic t io n.