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 Three Women (2019)

  Maggie quits. This is how Maggie handles adversity. If someone criticizes her in the wrong way, not taking the time to tell her that she is still worth something, she doesn’t try to do better. She just says, Fuck it, fuck yourself. She forsakes what she loves. She doesn’t have advisers telling her to relax, to hang back and think it over. To work hard on JV and prove the coaches wrong. Her old man is strong, but drunk. He has been trying to get a new job since being laid off from the one he’s held his whole life, but he doesn’t take the right steps. She knows the two new coaches think she’s uppity. They think she doesn’t know her place. Fargo doesn’t like one of its own to get out of line. America wants you to pay your dues. Maggie sees only the unfairness, everywhere. Then there are teachers like Mr. Knodel, who know how to talk to her. There are people out there who are like the trains in the distance, glorious and forward-moving and unswerving, and she wants to be one of these. But sometimes she falls on the sword of her own desire. And lies there, and repents too late, and too incorrectly, for anyone to want to save her. Did you continue to confide in Mr. Knodel as you went through high school after having had him as a freshman English teacher and then being in speech and debate and service learning and those sorts of things? You think Hoy’s bushy mustache is decrepit. Skinny old people freak you out. They remind you of your dad’s mom. When you were a kid you always felt her turning a corner to find you in the middle of something sinful. Similarly, Hoy catches you off guard often. He looks at you like you are an underperformer. You gained weight since high school. Maybe he knows his client is guilty. Probably he does. In any case he looks at you like he is surprised that Aaron went for you. Sometimes you want to pull out pictures of yourself from back then. Show people your smile, your little body. You want to tell Hoy he is an old creep. His wife has probably had more sex-time headaches than any other woman in the history of evanesced desire. I’m sorry, did I— Did you continue to confide in him about your experiences with an adult male in Hawaii over your junior— The prosecutor, Jon Byers, says, I’m going to object to that on relevance and rape shield. It is a terrible thing when you feel grateful that someone who is supposed to defend you finally begins to defend you. Rape shield means you can’t ask an alleged rape victim about other sexual encounters. It means you can’t try to prove that whore is her baseline.

• From The Spiritual Works of Leo Tolstoy (selected nonfiction) (2016)

  He depicted the Duma as the laughing stock of the world, as composed of people so stupid as not even to recognize what fools they were making of themselves. In his "Resurrection " he held up to the view of the world Russia's courts of law, and her iniquitous prison-system, the blocking of justice, the shocking judicial indifference and laxities in cases involving life-long sentences to penal servitude, the "lives that are shed like water upon the ground" during the transport to Siberia, and the crimes and rebellions that are systematically bred by such crying injustice. Little wonder that the government had no love for Tolstoy, and that it suppressed publication after publication of his, and maintained a special corps of censors and spies to watch him. Little wonder that it prohibited demonstrations of sorrow at the announcement of his death, and made use of the church as a cat's paw for holding him up as the Anti-Christ, and arch-fiend, as the enemy of the Czar, Church and people.[2] His demands of the people. Plain and fearless as was his speech to the government it was yet more so to the people. Not a wrong in society, public or private, which he did not know, and which he did not castigate as only he knew how to castigate. Louder and louder, as he grew older, he preached the Law of God against the law of degenerate society. Art and science, commerce and industry were to him as nothing in comparison with the Moral Law, without which he saw no future for mankind. His views respecting marriage and society. The sanctity of the marriage tie, the sobriety and industry of the husband, the domesticity of the wife, were among the most constant of his themes. He loathed the self-exhibiting society woman; in his eyes she was no better than the street-woman. Great to him was the womanly woman, greater the domestic wife, greatest of all the mother, and so many more times greater the more times she was mother.[3] His views respecting labor and capital.

• From Adam, Eve, and the Serpent (1988)

  While granting that the imperial system preserves social order, he charges that it tolerates—or, worse, even enforces—injustice, immorality, and inequality. Roman laws, John says, are, “for the most part, corrupt, useless, and ridiculous.” They expose to torture or execution the man who steals clothes or money, but they ignore worse crimes: “Who would be considered wiser, by most people, than the persons considered worthy to legislate for the cities and nations? But yet to these wise men sexual immorality is unworthy of punishment; at least, none of the pagan laws … bring men to trial for this reason.”14 Chrysostom explains specifically what kind of case he has in mind: “If a married man has intercourse with a female slave, it seems to be nothing to pagan laws, nor to people in general.”15 Most people, he admits, would laugh at anyone who tried to bring such a case to court, and the judge would dismiss it. The same is true for a married man involved with an unmarried woman or with a prostitute. Roman law protects only the man’s rights in such cases, but, Chrysostom declares, “we are punished, though not by the Roman laws, yet by God.”16 Roman laws, John continues, allow dealers to enslave children and to train them in sexual specialties for sale as prostitutes. And pagan tradition praises the legislators as “common benefactors of the city” for instituting public entertainment that features, in the theaters, prostitutes and prostituted children and, in the sports arena, contests between men and wild animals: Those places, too, being full of all senseless excitement, train the people to acquire a merciless and savage and inhuman kind of temperament, and give them practice in seeing people torn in pieces, and blood flowing, and the viciousness of wild beasts upsetting everything. Now all these our wise lawgivers introduced from the beginning—so many plagues—and our cities applaud and admire them.17 So much for the masses; but what about the few who, chastened by the example of Adam’s sin, and recovered from sin through baptism, exercise appropriate restraint over themselves? Such persons, Chrysostom declares, remain exempt from the punishment that falls upon the corrupt majority—exempt, in fact, from the constraints of human government as a whole: “For those who live in a state of piety require no correction on the part of the magistrates, for ‘the law was not made for a righteous man.’ But the more numerous, if they had no fear of these hanging over them, would fill the cities with innumerable evils.”18

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  All these permutations of power stumble into our adult intimacies, and gender does matter. Boys and girls undergo a radically different initiation in wielding power. Men become adept at direct expressions of power, women at indirect expressions; and these differences are discernible in our sexual scripts. As adults, we seek control in part as a defense against the vulnerability inherent in love. When we put our hopes on one person, our dependence soars. So do our frustrations and disappointments. The greater our helplessness, the more dangerous the threat of humiliation. The more we need, the angrier we are when we don’t get. Kids know this; lovers do, too. No one can bring us to the boiling point as quickly as our partner (except maybe our parents, the original locus of dependent rage). Love is always accompanied by hate. While we fear the depth of our dependence, many of us are even more frightened by the depth of our rage. We resort to intricate relational contortions in order to keep all this combustion in check. Yet the couples who most successfully implement this model of placidity are rarely passionate lovers. When we confuse assertion with aggression, neutralize otherness, adjust our longings, and reason away our hostility, we assemble a calmness that is reassuring but not very exciting. Stephen Mitchell makes the point that the capacity to contain aggression is a precondition for the capacity to love. We must integrate our aggression rather than eradicate it. He explains, “The degradation of romance, the waning of desire, is due not to the contamination of love by aggression, but to the inability to sustain the necessary tension between them.” Jed and Coral Jed is unassuming. He is a clean-shaven, mild-mannered architect, brilliant and well-spoken. He is kind, never the sort of person to get in your face about anything. But sexually, he’s another man. Jed discovered S-M (sadomasochism) as a teenager, and for years he has used eroticism as a venue for aggression. He loves leather, hard surfaces, chains, handcuffs. “I used to be shy, and it was hard for me to assert myself. But at the same time I was angry a lot, and I didn’t know where to go with it. I was too afraid of hurting people, so I kept it all inside.” “I can see why S-M was so attractive to you,” I reply. “You could make demands and not fear hurting anyone. The unambiguous codes, the negotiating beforehand, made it safe for you. Emotionally, you tend to put other people first. Sexual domination is a way for you to override the other person’s supremacy. It’s a clever answer to your more typical emotional subordination.” “Exactly,” he says. “But at the same time, you know, it’s all about their needs. I’m pleasing them—that’s the key piece. They want it. They have to be really into it, or it’s a no-go for me.”

• From Adam, Eve, and the Serpent (1988)

  The tyranny of external government sharply contrasts with the liberty enjoyed by those capable of autonomous self-rule—above all, by those who, through Christian baptism, have recovered the capacity for self-government.19 Chrysostom, like the apologists, identifies the former with the Roman Empire and the latter with the emerging new society that constitutes the Christian church: “There, everything is done through fear and constraint; here, through free choice and liberty.”20 The use of force, the driving energy of imperial society, is utterly alien to church government: Christians, more than all people, are not allowed to correct by force the faults of those who sin. Secular judges, indeed, when they have captured wrongdoers under the law, demonstrate that their authority is great by preventing them, even against their own will, from following their own desires; but in our case the wrongdoer most be corrected not by force, but by persuasion.21 What prevents church leaders from exercising the same authority as imperial magistrates, he explains, has nothing to do with lack of power, much less inferior status. On the contrary, he says, a priest’s authority far surpasses the emperor’s. What restrains a priest from attempting to use such authority, however, is religious principle: For neither has the authority of this kind to restrain sinners been given to us by law, nor, if it had been given, should we have any place to exercise our power, since God rewards those who abstain from evil out of their own choice, and not out of necessity.… If a person wanders away from the right path, great effort, perseverance, and patience are required; for he cannot be dragged back by force, nor restrained by fear, but must be led back by persuasion to the truth from which he originally swerved.22 The Christian leader, refraining not only from the use of force but even from the subtler pressures of fear and coercion, must evoke each member’s voluntary participation. Failing that, he must respect, however misguided he considers it to be, each member’s freedom of choice and action: We do not have “authority over your faith,” beloved, nor do we command these things as your lords and masters. We are appointed for the teaching of the word, not for power, nor for absolute authority. We hold the place of counsellors to advise you. The counsellor speaks his own opinions, not forcing his listener, but leaving him full master of his own choice in what is said. He is blameworthy only in this respect, if he fails to say the things that present themselves.23 Church government, unlike Roman government, remains wholly voluntary and, although hierarchically structured, is essentially egalitarian, reflecting, in effect, the original harmony of Paradise.

• From Open (2009)

  Under Gil’s care and close supervision I pack on ten pounds of muscle by August 1990. We go to New York for the U.S. Open and I feel lean and rangy and dangerous. I take out Andrei Cherkasov, from the Soviet Union, in an easy three-setter. I punch and scratch my way to the semis, beat Becker in four furious sets, and still have plenty of rocket fuel in my tank. Gil and I drive back to the hotel and watch the other men’s semi to see who I’ll get tomorrow. McEnroe or Sampras. It doesn’t seem possible, but the kid I thought I’d never see again has reconstituted his game. And he’s giving McEnroe the fight of his life. Then I realize he’s not giving McEnroe a fight—McEnroe is giving him a fight, and losing. My opponent tomorrow, incredibly, will be Pete. The camera moves close on Pete’s face, and I see that he has nothing left. Also, the commentators say his heavily taped feet are covered with blisters. Gil makes me drink Gil Water until I’m ready to throw up, and then I go to bed with a smile, thinking about all the fun I’m going to have, running Pete’s ass off. I’ll have him sprinting from side to side, left to right, from San Francisco to Bradenton, until those blisters bleed. I think of my father’s old maxim: Put a blister on his brain. Calm, fit, cocksure, I sleep like a pile of Gil’s dumbbells. In the morning I feel ready to play a ten-setter. I have no hairpiece issues—because I’m not wearing my hairpiece. I’m using a new, low-maintenance camouflaging system that involves a thicker headband and brightly colored highlights. There’s simply no way I can lose to Pete, that hapless kid I watched with sympathy last year, that poor klutz who couldn’t keep the ball in the court. Then a different Pete shows up. A Pete who doesn’t ever miss. We’re playing long points, demanding points, and he’s flawless. He’s reaching everything, hitting everything, bounding back and forth like a gazelle. He’s serving bombs, flying to the net, bringing his game right to me. He’s laying wood to my serve. I’m helpless. I’m angry. I’m telling myself: This is not happening. Yes, this is happening. No, this cannot be happening. Then, instead of thinking how I can win, I begin to think of how I can avoid losing. It’s the same mistake I made against Gómez, with the same result. When it’s all over I tell reporters that Pete gave me a good old-fashioned New York street mugging. An imperfect metaphor. Yes, I was robbed. Yes, something that belonged to me was taken away. But I can’t fill out a police report, and there is no hope of justice, and everyone will blame the victim.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  Shortly after the end of the war, Lewis published a collection of poems entitled Spirits in Bondage in March 1919 under the pseudonym ‘Clive Hamilton’.52 Lewis’s ‘Ode for New Year’s Day’, written when under fire from German artillery near the French town of Arras in January 1918, protests against a silent uncaring heaven, a disinterested spectator of the carnage of the war. The existence of evil and suffering in the world was a moral outrage that would lead any intelligent person to reject belief in God. This is an influential argument, and many have experienced its force. David Hume, for example, argued that the world we know and experience is so clearly inadequate that it could only have been made by an ‘infant deity’, or some elderly deity in his dotage, who urgently needed to be retired from duty. Yet there is a problem with this argument. How can Hume reach this conclusion? He has no knowledge of any other universe, so cannot make a comparative judgement. His belief that this world of suffering and pain is inadequate or substandard seems to rest on an intuition, a feeling that there must surely be a better universe than the one we know. It is important to pause here, and note how much influence emotions, feelings and intuitions have on human reasoning. As the psychologist Jonathan Haidt points out, many of our supposedly ‘rational’ moral arguments reflect emotional stances; moral reasoning is usually a post hoc construction, generated after a judgement has been reached on other grounds.53 Hume himself argued that moral judgements, like aesthetic judgements, derive from sentiment rather than reason, so that we achieve moral knowledge by ‘immediate feeling’ rather than by a ‘chain of argument’.54 Steven Wykstra points to the problem that emerges here: the way we feel about our world does not count as evidence. Most of us, he notes, have at some times in our lives felt instances of suffering in this world to be evidence against theism, according to which the universe is the creation of a wholly good Being who loves his creatures, and who lacks nothing in wisdom and power. If it has proven hard to turn this feeling into a good argument, it has, perhaps, proven just as hard to get rid of it.55 Lewis – who initially studied and taught philosophy at Oxford – was aware of Hume’s argument. Yet he came to see this as a vulnerable line of reasoning, dependent on unacknowledged prior beliefs which could not be proved to be true, and might simply amount to matters of personal taste. My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?56

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  evolved from Livingstone’s trading organization – and through the projected railway, was the power most closely involved, the Protestants felt the obligation to protest against royal depravity fell on them; at any rate, that is what they did. Thus the royal house came to fear the Protestants, and to align itself with the Catholics (and, on occasion, with the Moslems). Both Christian groups built up parties, which armed themselves. The climax came under Mutesa’s heir, Mwanga. In 1885 he had James Hannington, an Anglican bishop, speared to death; and when Christian boys refused to submit to his sodomitic practices – learnt from the Arabs, so the missionaries claimed – he murdered thirty-two of them, three being roasted alive. From the coast, Captain Lugard and a detachment of Askaris were summoned; and in 1892 they fought, and won, the so-called Battle of Mengo against the royalists and their Catholic allies. The event took place perhaps appropriately on a Sunday, and was decided by Lugard’s new Maxim gun. He did not blame the missionaries, but the Africans (probably rightly): ‘My own belief was that the Baganda were par excellence the greatest liars of any nation or tribe I had met or heard of, and that it appeared to be a point of honour that each side should out-lie the others, especially to their missionaries.’ In the House of Commons, Sir Charles Dilke said that the only person who had benefited from the British presence in East Africa was Mr Hiram Maxim; and Sir William Lawson claimed that Uganda was being ‘turned into the Belfast of Africa’. Two years later, Anglican pressure led Britain to take Uganda into protective custody. The Mengo affair caused great scandal at the time, but largely among agnostics and professional anti-Christians. It does not seem to have damaged the image of any of the Christian sects among the Africans; on the contrary, Catholics and Protestants alike reported an increase in converts; and it was a Baganda, Canon Apolo Kivebulaya of Kampala Cathedral, who translated the Gospel of St Mark into pidgin. Indeed, it is a curious and perhaps melancholy fact that violence seems nearly always to have stimulated Christian evangelism. Thus, from 1835 in Madagascar, the native Christians were ferociously persecuted by Queen Ranavalona for more than a quarter of a century. At least two hundred were killed, by being thrown over a cliff, burned alive or scalded to death in pits. But during this time the Christians increased four-fold, and eventually reached forty per cent of the population. It was, with variations, the same story all over the world. Despite difficulties, Christianity appeared to have made advances everywhere during the second half of

• From Introduction to the Hebrew Bible and Deutero-Canonical Books (2018)

  In Nehemiah 13 we are told that “on the day they read from the book of Moses . . . it was found written that no Ammonite or Moabite should ever enter the assembly of God. . . . When the people heard the law they separated from Israel all those of foreign descent.” It seems incredible that anyone would have been unaware of this law less than a generation after Ezra’s reform. This passage, however, only serves as an introduction to a confrontation between Nehemiah and “the priest Eliashib” who had given a room in the temple to Tobiah the Ammonite, to whom he was related. The episode illustrates the violent character of Nehemiah: “I threw all the household furniture of Tobiah out of the room” (Neh 13:8). It also shows the difficulty of instituting any lasting reform. Tobiah had been ensconced in the temple when Nehemiah was recalled to the Persian court. We learn in 13:28 that one of the grandsons of Eliashib was the son-in-law of Sanballat of Samaria. The purist policies of Ezra and Nehemiah could not erase the ties that bound the high priesthood in Jerusalem to the upper classes of the neighboring peoples. It appears that Nehemiah’s first term as governor was largely occupied with the security of Jerusalem and the building of the wall. In his second term he devoted more of his attention to religious problems. In 13:15-22 we read of his attempts to enforce the observance of the Sabbath. The book ends with yet another problem involving intermarriage. “In those days also I saw Jews who had married women of Ashdod, Ammon, and Moab, and half of their children spoke the language of Ashdod, and they could not speak the language of Judah. . . . And I contended with them and cursed them and beat some of them and pulled out their hair” (13:23-27). We can appreciate Nehemiah’s concern for the erosion of Jewish identity. His tactics in beating people who did not conform, however, are uncomfortably reminiscent of the behavior of the Taliban when they were in control of Afghanistan. Nehemiah emerges from his memoir as a person of great integrity. We should bear in mind, of course, that we only have his own account and that it has a clear apologetic character. If Eliashib had left a memoir, he would presumably have shown things in a quite different light. Nonetheless, we cannot doubt Nehemiah’s sincerity. He insists that he sought no personal gain and did not even avail of the allowance traditionally given to the governor (Neh 5:14-19). His legacy was less controversial than that of Ezra. In the words of Ben Sira: “The memory of Nehemiah also is lasting; he raised our fallen walls” (Sir 49:13).

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Luther now felt that he was dealing directly with the powers of hell. Alas, there was nothing else to think. What had happened before was one thing, but now he had shone a light down into the hole and saw the writhing nest of serpents within. The crudest, vilest means were being brought out against him and against what he knew without a doubt to be the good and holy and glorious Gospel of Jesus. There was no longer any pretense of logic from those who opposed him and certainly no fragrance of Jesus in any of it. He now believed what he had feared, that the church had in his own generation been overtaken by the forces of Antichrist. Therefore, not to speak against it boldly when he had finally seen it so clearly and unmistakably was impossible. It was not only impossible; it was unthinkable and would be an abrogation of everything good and true and beautiful. If the End of All Things was at hand, somehow he had been given the privilege to know it, and he could not be silent. He feared God more than death, and God would not allow him to be silent. This was a unique moment in history, and he would do what God called him to do. He had no excuse for hesitating, and he would not hesitate. God would see him through as God saw fit. And suddenly now there was at least one rumor of a death threat against him. In April, Luther wrote to Spalatin that he had been “warned and advised” of it by the provost of the Neuwerk chapter in Halle: Even certain of my enemies who were sorry for me sent me a warning through friends from Halberstadt that there is a certain doctor of medicine who, with the help of magic, can make himself invisible at will and then kill someone; he [supposedly] has the order to kill Luther and is to arrive here next Sunday when the relics are being shown. This is a persistent rumor. Farewell.26 In a world that was still breathing the vapors of the Middle Ages, it should be little wonder the prospect of an eerie assassin crawling out of thin air was thought possible. In a letter to Spalatin, Luther wrote, “I think that everyone in Rome has gone crazy; they are ravingly mad, and have become inane fools and devils.” In a response to Prierias’s lunatic writing, Luther proclaimed God’s judgment like an Old Testament prophet: “So farewell, ill-fated, doomed, blasphemous Rome; the wrath of God has come over you.”27 Luther and his pen would be a goodly part of that wrath.

• From A History of God (1993)

  There was always a danger that the cult of Yahweh would eventually be submerged by the popular paganism. This became particularly acute during the latter half of the ninth century. In 869 King Ahab had succeeded to the throne of the northern Kingdom of Israel. His wife, Jezebel, daughter of the King of Tyre and Sidon in what is now Lebanon, was an ardent pagan, intent upon converting the country to the religion of Baal and Asherah. She imported priests of Baal, who quickly acquired a following among the northerners, who had been conquered by King David and were lukewarm Yahwists. Ahab remained true to Yahweh but did not try to curb Jezebel’s proselytism. When a severe drought struck the land toward the end of his reign, however, a prophet named Eli-Jah (“Yahweh is my god!”) began to wander through the land, clad in a hairy mantle and a leather loincloth, fulminating against the disloyalty to Yahweh. He summoned King Ahab and the people to a contest on Mount Carmel between Yahweh and Baal. There, in the presence of 450 prophets of Baal, he harangued the people: how long would they dither between the two deities? Then he called for two bulls, one for himself and one for the prophets of Baal, to be placed on two altars. They would call upon their gods and see which one sent down fire from heaven to consume the holocaust. “Agreed!” cried the people. The prophets of Baal shouted his name for the whole morning, performing their hobbling dance around their altar, yelling and gashing themselves with swords and spears. But “there was no voice, no answer.” Elijah jeered: “Call louder!” he cried, “for he is a god: he is preoccupied or he is busy, or he has gone on a journey; perhaps he is asleep and he will wake up.” Nothing happened: “there was no voice, no answer, no attention given them.”

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  JEROME. By His armies we understand the Romans under Vespasian and Titus, who having slaughtered the inhabitants of Judæa, laid in ashes the faithless city. PSEUDO-CHRYSOSTOM. The Roman army is called God’s army; because The earth is the Lord’s, and the fulness thereof; (Ps. 24:1.) nor would the Romans have come to Jerusalem, had not the Lord stirred them thither. GREGORY. (ubi sup.) Or, The armies of our King are the legions of His Angels. He is said therefore to have sent His armies, and to have destroyed those murderers, because all judgment is executed upon men by the Angels. He destroys those murderers, when He cuts off persecutors; and burns up their city, because not only their souls, but the body of flesh they had tenanted, is tormented in the everlasting fire of hell. ORIGEN. Or, the city of those wicked men is in each doctrine the assembly of those who meet in the wisdom of the rulers of this world; which the King sets fire to and destroys, as consisting of evil buildings. GREGORY. (ubi sup.) But when He sees that His invitation is spurned at, He will not have His Son’s marriage-feast empty; the word of God will find where it may stay itself. ORIGEN. He saith to His servants, that is, to the Apostles; or to the Angels, who were set over the calling of the Gentiles, The wedding is ready. REMIGIUS. That is, the whole sacrament of the human dispensation is completed and closed. But they which, were bidden, (Rom. 10:3.) that is, the Jews, were not worthy, because, ignorant of the righteousness of God, and going about to establish their own righteousness, they have not submitted themselves to the righteousness of God. The Jewish nation then being rejected, the Gentile people were taken in to the marriage-feast; whence it follows, Go ye out into the crossings of the streets, and as many as ye shall find, bid to the wedding. JEROME. For the Gentile nation was not in the streets, but in the crossings of the streets. REMIGIUS. These are the errors of the Gentiles. PSEUDO-CHRYSOSTOM. Or; The streets are all the professions of this world, as philosophy, soldiery, and the like. And therefore He says, Go out into the crossings of the streets, that they may call to the faith men of every condition. Moreover, as chastity is the way that leads to God, so fornication is the way that leads to the Devil; and so it is in the other virtues and vices. Thus He bids them invite to the faith men of every profession or condition. HILARY. By the street also is to be understood the time of this world, and they are therefore bid to go to the crossings of the streets, because the past is remitted to all.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  and potential of the land, the value of labor, and critical concepts of breeding. Embarrassing lower-class populations have always been numerous, and have always been seen on the North American continent as waste people. • • • Historical mythmaking is made possible only by forgetting. We have to begin, then, with the first refusal to face reality: most colonizing schemes that took root in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British America were built on privilege and subordination, not any kind of proto-democracy. The generation of 1776 certainly underplayed that fact. And all subsequent generations took their cue from the nation’s founders. A past that relies exclusively on the storied Pilgrims, or the sainted generation of 1776, shortchanges us in more ways than one. We miss a crucial historical competition between northern and southern founding narratives and their distinctive parables minimizing the importance of class. The Declaration of Independence and the federal Constitution, principal founding documents, loom large as proof of national paternity; the six-foot-three-inch Virginian George Washington stands head and shoulders above his countrymen as the figurative “father” of his nation. With Virginia’s claim to an origins story in mind, another founding father, John Adams, heralded the first governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Winthrop, as an earlier and stronger model for an American patrician-patriarch. The lesson is easy: then as now, origins are contested territory. What can’t be denied, however, are the class origins of the anointed leaders. 3 Beyond the web of stories the founding generation itself wove, our modern beliefs have most to do with the grand mythmakers of the nineteenth century. The inspired historians of that period were nearly all New Englanders; they outpaced all others in shaping the historical narrative, so that the dominant story of origins worked in their favor. That is how we got the primordial Puritan narrative of a sentimental community and a commendable work ethic. Of course, the twin attributes of religious freedom and hard work erase from the record all those settlers who did not live up to these high ideals. The landless, the impoverished, the progenitors of future generations of white trash conveniently disappear from the founding saga. There were plays and poems, in addition to standard histories, flowing from the pens of Bostonians as they praised the separatists who established the early

• From Between Us

  In my culture, telling my husband I am mad that he is late for dinner is a way of warning him that I won’t accept his behavior, that I blame him, and that I think I am right, and in the position to expect him to treat me better. By saying I am angry, I am taking a stance in the relationship. Psychologist Brian Parkinson makes the interesting suggestion that saying I am mad is even more powerful than just saying that I don’t accept his behavior, because anger “sends the message that I may not be able to stop myself from following through if the situation does not change, that my action impulse has a momentum of its own.” Thus, “my angry warning of aggression may constitute a compelling threat.” Of course, anger episodes may have many different endings, but if in your culture, or within your relationship, aggression is a likely ending of the anger story, then saying you are angry may add some force. The urge to act is an indisputable characteristic of the emotion story. Others may indeed infer that not acting is no option. Similarly, hasham does not only help an Egyptian Bedouin woman to “write” the story, but also to communicate it to others. And in doing so, it helps to achieve the very goal of hasham: to convey that you defer. Saying you are hasham may be just as powerful as casting your eyes down, avoiding any contact, or disappearing. And again, saying you are hasham is particularly useful because it communicates what we all know to be the right response. There are many other examples. When I tell my partner I feel guilty about something I have done (or not done) that caused them distress, I convey the very script of feeling guilt: my commitment to the relationship, and my preparedness to make up for my wrongdoings. When I tell someone I love them, the very act of saying it works towards the script of romantic love: to give them attention, and to seek closeness. Of course, we can feel guilt and love without saying it, but saying it is “acting”: saying it is working towards the goal of the emotion, which in the case of both love and guilt is (re)commitment to the relationship. There are also times when saying you feel an emotion is nothing more than acting. Saying “Mommy is angry” is primarily an effective way of conveying your nonacceptance. It does not rule out you have angry feelings, but whether or not you do is inconsequential. The same with expressing guilt or regret in friendships. You may say you feel guilty, merely referring to your preparedness to act, even when you do not have the feeling. “I cannot believe I forgot. I feel so bad,” is expressing a wish I had remembered, or that I could have made my act undone. It may, but does not have to describe, a feeling.

• From Girls & Sex (2016)

  Growing up in this very school system, Camila had learned the importance of challenging injustice, of being an “upstander.” So she began to shout the dean’s name. “Mr. Williams! Mr. Williams!” she yelled. He invited her to the front of the auditorium and handed her the mic. “Hi, I’m Camila,” she said. “I’m a twelfth-grader and I think what you just said is not okay and is extremely sexist and promoting ‘rape culture.’ If I want to wear a tank top and shorts because it’s hot, I should be able to do that and that has no correlation to how much ‘respect’ I hold for myself. What you’re saying is just continuing this cycle of blaming the victim.” The students in the auditorium cheered, and Camila handed back the mic. “Thank you, Camila. I totally agree,” Mr. Williams said as she walked back to her seat. Then he added, “But there’s a time and a place for that type of clothing.” This was not the first earful I’d gotten about girls’ provocative dress: from parents, from teachers, from administrators, from girls themselves. Parents went to battle over the skimpiness of shorts, the clingy V-necks, the tush-cupping yoga pants that showed “everything.” Why do girls have to dress like that? moms asked, even as some wore similar outfits themselves. Principals tried to impose decorum, but ended up inciting rebellion. In suburban Chicago, eighth-graders picketed a proposed policy against leggings. High-schoolers in Utah took to the Internet when they discovered digitally raised necklines and sleeves added to female classmates’ shirts in their yearbook photos. Boys run afoul of dress codes when they flout authority: “hippies” defying the establishment, “thugs” in saggy pants. For girls, the issue is sex. Enforcing modesty is considered a way both to protect and to contain young women’s sexuality; and they, by association, are charged with controlling young men’s. After the assembly, the dean of attendance, who was female, stopped Camila in the hallway. “I totally get that you’re trying to empower yourself,” she told the girl, “but it’s a bit distracting. You have male teachers, and there are male students.” “Maybe you shouldn’t be hiring male teachers that are focused on staring at my boobs!” Camila shot back. The dean said they could continue the conversation later. “Later” never came.

• From Girls & Sex (2016)

  That was three months ago, and Camila was still furious. “The truth is, it doesn’t matter what I wear,” she said. “Four out of five days going to school I will be catcalled, I will be stared at, I will be looked up and down, I will be touched. You just accept it as part of going to school. I can’t help my body type, and it’s super distracting to me to know that every time I get up to sharpen my pencil there’s going to be a comment about my butt. That doesn’t happen to guys. No guy has ever had to walk down the hall and had girls going, ‘Hey, boy, your calves are looking great! Your calves are hot.’” Camila is right. Addressing boys directly is the only way to challenge the assumption by some that girls’ bodies exist for them to judge—and even touch—however and whenever they wish. The previous year at the girls’ high school, a group of boys created an Instagram account to “expose” the campus THOTs, an acronym for That Ho Over There. (Every generation seems to invent a new Scarlet Letter word—strumpet, hussy, tramp, slut, skank, ho—with which to demonize girls’ sexuality.) They downloaded pictures from girls’ Instagram or Twitter accounts (or snapped one in the hallways), captioning each with the girl’s purported sexual history. All the girls singled out were black or Latina. Camila was one of them. “It was such a violation,” she said. “Part of the caption was ‘I dare you to go fuck her for a good time.’ I had to go to school with that out there.” When she lodged a formal complaint, she was placed in a room with four male school security guards who, she said, asked whether she had actually performed the acts attributed to her on the site. Humiliated, she let the matter drop. The Instagram account eventually petered out; the perpetrators were never caught. Whether online or IRL (“in real life”), Camila’s was hardly an isolated case. Another girl, a high school junior in nearby Marin County, California, who played varsity volleyball, told me how boys from the soccer team gathered in the bleachers to harass her teammates during practice, yelling things like “Nice gooch!”(urban dictionary slang for perineum) when the girls lunged to make a shot. (There are, incidentally, hundreds of close-up, rear-view photos of underage girls in volleyball shorts on the Internet.) A senior in San Francisco described how, within days of arriving at an elite summer journalism program she attended in Chicago, the boys created a “slut draft” (akin to a fantasy football league), ranking their female peers in order of “who they wanted to fuck.”

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Catholic, since it was denying its own mystical spirit: ‘... the political forces in the church have always been against what is mystical, and particularly what is mystical in a Christian sense.’ Leo XIII was also upset by the French Church’s anti-Dreyfus posture, but for a more realistic reason: he thought they were backing a loser, since the facts were bound to prevail in the end. In an interview with the pro-Dreyfus Figaro in March 1899, he made the point that, since it was now obvious Dreyfus was innocent, it was the institutions of the republic, rather than the Jew, which were on trial; and he added: ‘Happy is the victim whom God recognizes as sufficiently just to confound his cause with that of his own son who was sacrificed.’ Coming from anyone else, the remark would have been denounced as blasphemous, since in effect it compared Devil’s Island with Golgotha and Dreyfus with Christ. But Leo was now ninety, and French Catholics too embattled and angry to take much notice of him. In any case, the papal intervention, such as it was, did not alter the fact that the bulk of identifiable Catholic opinion was anti-Dreyfus. When the rightwing League for the French Fatherland was formed in 1899, as a response to the Dreyfusard League of the Rights of Man, the prominent Catholic members of the Académie Française joined it en bloc. Hardly any well-known Catholics supported Dreyfus; the bishops kept silent with one exception – and he championed the discredited army. Hence, when the Dreyfusard politicians triumphed under Emile Combes, in 1902, the machinery of the State was turned against the Church as in the 1790s. Combes was a former Catholic teacher who had lost his faith – though he was more of a heretic than a renegade. When Théodore Ribot said to him: ‘You cannot confine the policy of a great country to a mere struggle against the religious orders’, he replied: ‘I took office solely for that purpose.’ As Paul Deschanel put it, the idea of a neutral state was dropped: ‘They look upon Catholicism as error.... They turn upon the principle announced by Bossuet when he said “The prince must use his authority to destroy false religions.”’ The grip of the French Church on education was broken, never to be restored; the concordat was ended, Church and State separated; and the ideologies and strategies of the Dreyfus affair became models for other anti-clerical regimes, in Portugal and Spain, and throughout Latin America. The danger of European Catholics becoming locked in a struggle against a republican form of government was that it imperilled the position of Catholics in the United States who, thanks to emigration, were becoming one of the largest (and certainly by far the richest) Catholic communities in the world. Leo XIII, in his

• From Why Is Sex Fun? The Evolution of Human Sexuality (1997)

  In a flash, rage swept over Art. He screamed inwardly to himself, “She’s back to her affairs! Now she’s having some bastard stay overnight in my bed! He even answers the phone!” Art had rapid visions of rushing home, killing his wife’s lover, and smashing Judy’s head into the wall. Still hardly able to believe his ears, he stammered into the telephone, “Who . . . is . . . this?” The voice at the other end cracked, rose from the baritone range to a soprano, and answered, “Daddy, don’t you recognize me?” It was Art and Judy’s fourteen-year-old son, whose voice was changing. Art gasped again, in a mixture of relief, hysterical laughter, and sobbing. Art’s account of that phone call drove home for me how even we humans, the only rational animal species, are still held in the irrational thrall of animal-like behavioral programs. A mere one-octave change in the pitch of a voice uttering half a dozen banal syllables caused the image conjured up by the speaker to flip from threatening rival to unthreatening child, and Art’s mood to flip from murderous rage to paternal love. Other equally trivial cues spell the difference between our images of young and old, ugly and attractive, intimidating and weak. Art’s story illustrates the power of what zoologists term a signal: a cue that can be recognized very quickly and that may be insignificant in itself, but which has come to denote a significant and complex set of biological attributes, such as sex, age, aggression, or relationship. Signals are essential to animal communication—that is, the process by which one animal alters the probability of another animal behaving in a way that may be adaptive to one or both individuals. Small signals, which in themselves require little energy (such as uttering a few syllables at a low pitch), may release behaviors that require a lot of energy (such as risking one’s life in an attempt to kill another individual). Signals of humans and other animals have evolved through natural selection. For example, consider two individual animals of the same species, differing slightly in size and strength, facing each other over some resource that would benefit either individual. It would be advantageous to both individuals to exchange signals that accurately indicate their relative strength, and hence the likely outcome of a fight. By avoiding a fight, the weaker individual is spared the likelihood of injury or death, while the stronger individual saves energy and risk.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  attack.’ The Jesuit La Civilta Catholica commented in 1898: ‘If a judicial error has indeed been committed, the Assembly of 1791 was responsible when it accorded French nationality to Jews.’ The Jesuit intervention was particularly unfortunate since it led to accusations of an elitist anti-republican conspiracy, particularly in the army, where many of the senior officers were practising Catholics. Attention centred on the Jesuit Père du Lac, headmaster of the Society’s leading Paris school, who had converted Edouard Drumont, and was the confessor of Albert de Mun and General de Boisdeffre, chief of the army general staff. Joseph Reinarch, the most impressive of the Dreyfusard propagandists, described his study and its central importance in the campaign to deny Dreyfus justice: ‘The orders of the day emanate from Pere du Lac’s simple cell. In it, there is a crucifix on the wall, and on the writing table an annotated copy of the Army List.’ The Church’s problems were compounded by the fact that some of the most vociferous and embarrassing anti-semites were not themselves Catholics but were, rather, authoritarian ideologues in the de Maistre tradition who regarded Rome as a natural defence against the Left. Thus Jules Le Maitre, prominent in the anti-Dreyfus League of Patriots, wrote: ‘We want to make love of the fatherland a kind of religion . . . the equivalent of the denominational faith which Frenchmen no longer hold.’ Again, Charles Maurras, who founded the anti-Dreyfus Action Française in 1898, was an agnostic, but virtually all his followers in the movement were passionate Catholics, and its so-called Institute had a professorial chair endowed in honour of the Syllabus of Errors. Maurras had no scruples in taking the supposedly Jesuitical line that the end justified the means. He had nothing but praise for Major Henry, whose anti-Dreyfus forgery was exposed and who committed suicide on the eve of arrest, and only regretted that his crime had been unsuccessful: ‘Colonel, there is not a drop of your precious blood that does not cry out wherever the heart of the nation beats.’ And L’Action française added: ‘We need money to buy all the tools we require and to provide the necessary bribes. We must buy women and consciences, and we must buy disloyalty.’ This was just what the anti-clericals wanted to hear. The tragedy was that a number of young, thoughtful Catholics were strongly pro- Dreyfus. Charlés Peguy wrote that, so long as Dreyfus remained condemned unjustly, France was ‘living in a state of mortal sin’. How could Catholics, of all people, and the Church, of all institutions, deny justice in the name of patriotism? He argued powerfully that the Church, in its anti-Dreyfus posture, was being un-

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

  [image file=image_rsrcDZA.jpg] Henceforth the two kingdoms went their separate ways. Situated near important trade routes, the northern Kingdom of Israel prospered, with royal shrines in Bethel and Dan and an elegant capital in Samaria. We know very little about its ideology, because the biblical editors favored the smaller and more isolated Kingdom of Judah. But both probably conformed to local traditions. Like most Middle Eastern kings, the king of Judah was raised to a semidivine “state of exception” during the coronation ritual, when he became Yahweh’s adopted son and a member of the Divine Assembly of gods.83 Like Baal, Yahweh was celebrated as a warrior god who defended his people from their enemies: “When he grows angry he shatters kings, he gives the nations their deserts; smashing their skulls, he heaps the world with corpses.”84 The chief responsibility of the king was to secure and extend his territory, the source of the kingdom’s revenues. He was therefore in a perpetual state of conflict with neighboring monarchs, who had exactly the same goals. Israel and Judah were thus drawn inexorably into the local network of trade, diplomacy, and warfare. The two kingdoms had emerged when the imperial powers of the region were in eclipse, but during the early eighth century, Assyria was in the ascendant again, its military might forcing weaker kings into vassal status. Yet some of these conquered kingdoms flourished. King Jeroboam II (786–746 BCE) became a trusted Assyrian vassal, and the Kingdom of Israel enjoyed an economic boom. But because the rich became richer and the poor even more impoverished, the king was castigated by the prophet Amos.85 The prophets of Israel kept the old egalitarian ideals of Israel alive. Amos chastised the aristocracy for trampling on the heads of ordinary people, pushing the poor out of their path,86 and cramming their palaces with the fruits of their extortion.87 Yahweh, he warned, was no longer unconditionally on Israel’s side but would use Assyria as his instrument of punishment.88 The Assyrians would invade the kingdom, loot and destroy its palaces and temples.89 Amos imagined Yahweh roaring in rage from his sanctuary at the war crimes committed by the local kingdoms, Israel included.90 In Judah too, the prophet Isaiah inveighed against the exploitation of the poor and the expropriation of peasant land: “Cease to do evil. Learn to do good, search for justice, help the oppressed, be just to the orphan, and plead for the widow.”91 The dilemma was that this callowness was essential to the agrarian economy and had the kings of Israel and Judah fully implemented these compassionate policies, they would have been easy prey for Assyria.92