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 Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  Effort of attention is thus the essential phenomenon of will.[509] Every reader must know by his own experience that this is so, for every reader must have felt some fiery passion's grasp. What constitutes the difficulty for a man laboring under an unwise passion of acting as if the passion were unwise? Certainly there is no physical difficulty. It is as easy physically to avoid a fight as to begin one, to pocket one's money as to squander it on one's cupidities, to walk away from as towards a coquette's door. The difficulty is mental; it is that of getting the idea of the wise action to stay before our mind at all. When any strong emotional state whatever is upon us the tendency is for no images but such as are congruous with it to come up. If others by chance offer themselves, they are instantly smothered and crowded out. If we be joyous, we cannot keep thinking of those uncertainties and risks of failure which abound upon our path; if lugubrious, we cannot think of new triumphs, travels, loves, and joys; nor if vengeful, of our oppressor's community of nature with ourselves. The cooling advice which we get from others when the fever-fit is on us is the most jarring and exasperating thing in life. Reply we cannot, so we get angry; for by a sort of self-preserving instinct which our passion has, it feels that these chill objects, if they once but gain a lodgment, will work and work until they have frozen the very vital spark from out of all our mood and brought our airy castles in ruin to the ground. Such is the inevitable effect of reasonable ideas over others —if they can once get a quiet hearing; and passion's cue accordingly is always and everywhere to prevent their still small voice from being heard at all. "Let me not think of that! Don't speak to me of that!" This is the sudden cry of all those who in a passion perceive some sobering considerations about to check them in mid-career. "Hœc tibi erit janua leti," we feel. There is something so icy in this cold-water bath, something which seems so hostile to the movement of our life, so purely negative, in Reason, when she lays her corpse-like finger on our heart and says, "Halt! give up! leave off! go back! sit down!" that it is no wonder that to most men the steadying influence seems, for the time being, a very minister of death.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  "There are outbreaks of rage so groundless and unbridled that all must admit them to be expressions of disease. For the medical layman hardly anything can be more instructive than the observation of such a pathological attack of rage, especially when it presents itself pure and unmixed with other psychical disturbances. This happens in that rather rare disease named transitory mania. The patient predisposed to this—otherwise an entirely reasonable person—will be attacked suddenly without the slightest outward provocation, and thrown (to use the words of the latest writer on the subject, O. Schwartzer, Die transitorische Tobsucht, Wien, 1880), 'into a paroxysm of the wildest rage, with a fearful and blindly furious impulse to do violence and destroy.' He flies at those about him; strikes, kicks, and throttles whomever he can catch; dashes every object about which he can lay his hands on; breaks and crushes what is near him; tears his clothes; shouts, howls, and roars, with eyes that flash and roll, and shows meanwhile all those symptoms of vaso-motor congestion which we have learned to know as the concomitants of anger. His face is red, swollen, his cheeks hot, his eyes protuberant and their whites bloodshot, the heart beats violently, the pulse marks 100-120 strokes a minutes. The arteries of the neck are full and pulsating, the veins are swollen, the saliva flows. The fit lasts only a few hours, and ends suddenly with a sleep of from 8 to 12 hours, on waking from which the patient has entirely forgotten what has happened."[425] In these (outwardly) causeless emotional conditions the particular paths which are explosive are discharged by any and every incoming sensation. Just as, when we are seasick, every smell, every taste, every sound, every sight, every movement, every sensible experience whatever, augments our nausea, so the morbid terror or anger is increased by each and every sensation which stirs up the nerve-centres. Absolute quiet is the only treatment for the time. It seems impossible not to admit that in all this the bodily condition takes the lead, and that the mental emotion follows. The intellect may, in fact, be so little affected as to play the cold-blooded spectator all the while, and note the absence of a real object for the emotion.[426] A few words from Henle may close my reply to this first objection:

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  "We have all seen men dumb, instead of talkative, with joy; we have seen fright drive the blood into the head of its victim, instead of making him pale; we have seen grief run restlessly about lamenting, instead of sitting bowed down and mute; etc., etc., and this naturally enough, for one and the same cause can work differently on different men's blood-vessels (since these do not always react alike), whilst moreover the impulse on its way through the brain to the vaso-motor centre is differently influenced by different earlier impressions in the form of recollections or associations of ideas."[417] In short, any classification of the emotions is seen to be as true and as 'natural ' as any other, if it only serves some purpose; and such a question as "What is the 'real' or 'typical' expression of anger, or fear?" is seen to have no objective meaning at all. Instead of it we now have the question as to how any given 'expression' of anger or fear may have come to exist; and that is a real question of physiological mechanics on the one hand, and of history on the other, which (like all real questions) is in essence answerable, although the answer may be hard to find. On a later page I shall mention the attempts to answer it which have been made. DIFFICULTY OF TESTING THE THEORY EXPERIMENTALLY. I have thus fairly propounded what seems to me the most fruitful way of conceiving of the emotions. It must be admitted that it is so far only a hypothesis, only possibly a true conception, and that much is lacking to its definitive proof. The only way coercively to disprove it, however, would be to take some emotion, and then exhibit qualities of feeling in it which should be demonstrably additional to all those which could possibly be derived from the organs affected at the time. But to detect with certainty such purely spiritual qualities of feeling would obviously be a task beyond human power. We have, as Professor Lange says, absolutely no immediate criterion by which to distinguish between spiritual and corporeal feelings; and, I may add, the more we sharpen our introspection, the more localized all our qualities of feeling become (see above, Vol. I. p. 300) and the more difficult the discrimination consequently grows.[418]

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  The hunting instinct has an equally remote origin in the evolution of the race.[391] The hunting and the fighting instinct combine in many manifestations. They both support the emotion of anger; they combine in the fascination which stories of atrocity have for most minds; and the utterly blind excitement of giving the rein to our fury when our blood is up (an excitement whose intensity is greater than that of any other human passion save one) is only explicable as an impulse aboriginal in character, and having more to do with immediate and overwhelming tendencies to muscular discharge than to any possible reminiscences of effects of experience, or association of ideas. I say this here, because the pleasure of disinterested cruelty has been thought a paradox, and writers have sought to show that it is no primitive attribute of our nature, but rather a resultant of the subtle combination of other less malignant elements of mind. This is a hopeless task. If evolution and the survival of the fittest be true at all, the destruction of prey and of human rivals must have been among the most important of man's primitive functions, the fighting and the chasing instincts must have become ingrained. Certain perceptions must immediately, and without the intervention of inferences and ideas, have prompted emotions and motor discharges; and both the latter must, from the nature of the case, have been very violent, and therefore, when unchecked, of an intensely pleasurable kind. It is just because human bloodthirstiness is such a primitive part of us that it is so hard to eradicate, especially where a fight or a hunt is promised as part of the fun.[392]

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  "Take a child of six months, and there is absolutely no such brainpower existent as mental inhibition; no desire or tendency is stopped by a mental act. . . . At a year old the rudiments of the great faculty of self-control are clearly apparent in most children. They will resist the desire to seize the gas-flame, they will not upset the mild-jug, they will obey orders to sit still when they want to run about, all through a higher mental inhibition. But the power of control is just as gradual a development as the motions of the hands. . . . Look at a more complicated act, that will be recognized by any competent physiologist to be automatic and beyond the control of any ordinary inhibitory power, e.g., irritate and tease a child of one or two years sufficiently, and it will suddenly strike out at you; suddenly strike at a man, and he will either perform an act of defence or offence, or both, quite automatically, and without power of controlling himself. Place a bright tempting toy before a child of a year, and it will be instantly appropriated. Place cold water before a man dying of thirst, and he will take and drink it without power of doing otherwise. Exhaustion of nervous energy always lessens the inhibitory power. Who is not conscious of this? 'Irritability' is one manifestation of this. Many persons have so small a stock of reserve brain-power—that most valuable of all brain-qualities —that it is soon used up, and you see at once that they lose their power of self-control very soon. They are angels or demons just as they are fresh or tired. That surplus store of energy or resistive force which provides, in persons normally constituted, that moderate excesses in all directions shall do no great harm so long as they are not too often repeated, not being present in these people, overwork, over-drinking, or small debauches leave them at the mercy of their morbid impulses without power of resistance. . . . Woe to the man who uses up his surplus stock of brain-inhibition too near the bitter end, or too often! . . . The physiological word inhibition can be used synonymously with the psychological and ethical expression self-control, or with the will when exercised in certain directions. It is the characteristic of most forms of mental disease for self-control to be lost, but this loss is usually part of a general mental affection with melancholic, maniacal, demented, or delusional symptoms as the chief manifestation of the disease. There are other cases, not so numerous, where the loss of the power of inhibition is the chief and by far the most marked symptom. . . . I shall call this form 'Inhibitory Insanity.' Some of these cases have uncontrollable impulses to violence and destruction, others to homicide, others to suicide prompted by no depressed feelings, others to acts of animal gratification (satyriasis, nymphomania, erotomania, bestiality), others to drinking too much

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  In childhood it takes this form. The boys who pullout grasshoppers' legs and butterflies' wings, and disembowel every frog they catch, have no thought at all about the matter. The creatures tempt their hands to a fascinating occupation, to which they have to yield. It is with them as with the 'boy-fiend' Jesse Pomeroy, who cut a little girl's throat, 'just to see how she'd act.' The normal provocatives of the impulse are all living beasts, great and small, toward which a contrary habit has not been formed—all human beings in whom we perceive a certain intent towards us, and a large number of human beings who offend us peremptorily, either by their look, or gait, or by some circumstance in their lives which we dislike. Inhibited by sympathy, and by reflection calling up impulses of an opposite kind, civilized men lose the habit of acting out their pugnacious instincts in a perfectly natural way, and a passing feeling of anger, with its comparatively feint bodily expressions, may be the limit of their physical combativeness. Such a feeling as this may, however, be aroused by a wide range of objects. Inanimate things, combinations of color and sound, bad bills of fare, may in persons who combine fastidious taste with an irascible temperament produce real ebullitions of rage. Though the female sex is often said to have less pugnacity than the male, the difference seems connected more with the extent of the motor consequences of the impulse than with its frequency. Women take offence and get angry, if anything, more easily than men, but their anger is inhibited by fear and other principles of their nature from expressing itself in blows. The hunting-instinct proper seems to be decidedly weaker in them than in men. The latter instinct is easily restricted by habit to certain objects, which become legitimate 'game,' while other things are spared. If the hunting-instinct be not exercised at all, it may even entirely die out, and a man may enjoy letting a wild creature live, even though he might easily kill it. Such a type is now becoming frequent; but there is no doubt that in the eyes of a child of nature such a, personage would seem a sort of moral monster.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  which the attention consists. If I have received an insult, I may not be actively thinking of it all the time, yet the thought of it is in such a state of heightened irritability, that the place where I received it or the man who inflicted it cannot be mentioned in my hearing without my attention bounding, as it were, in that direction, as the imagination of the whole transaction revives. Where such a stirring-up occurs, organic adjustment must exist as well, and the ideas must innervate to some degree the muscles. Thus the whole process of involuntary derived attention is accounted for if we grant that there is something interesting enough to arouse and fix the thought of whatever may be connected with it. This fixing is the attention; and it carries with it a vague sense of activity going on, and of acquiescence, furtherance, and adoption, which makes us feel the activity to be our own. This reinforcement of ideas and impressions by the pre-existing contents of the mind was what Herbart had in mind when he gave the name of apperceptive attention to the variety we describe. We easily see now why the lover's tap should be heard—it finds a nerve-centre half ready in advance to explode. We see how we can attend to a companion's voice in the midst of noises which pass unnoticed though objectively much louder than the words we hear. Each word is doubly awakened; once from without by the lips of the talker, but already before that from within by the premonitory processes irradiating from the previous words, and by the dim arousal of all processes that are connected with the 'topic' of the talk. The irrelevant noises, on the other hand, are awakened only once. They form an unconnected train. The boys at school, inattentive to the teacher except when he begins an anecdote, and then all pricking up their ears, are as easily explained. The words of the anecdote shoot into association with exciting objects which react and fix them; the other words do not. Similarly with the grammar heard by the purist and Herbart's other examples quoted on page 276. Even where the attention is voluntary, it is possible to conceive of it as an effect, and not a cause, a product and not an agent, The things we attend to come to us by their own laws. Attention creates no idea; an idea must already be there before we can attend to it. Attention only fixes and retains what the ordinary laws of association bring 'before the footlights' of consciousness. But the moment we admit this we see that the attention per se , the feeling of attending need no more fix and retain the ideas than it need bring them. The associates which bring them also fix them by the interest which they lend. In short, voluntary and involuntary attention may be essentially the same. It is true that where the ideas are intrinsically very unwelcome and

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  the same sort." 'Stand for,' not know ; 'becomes general,' not becomes aware of something general; 'particular ideas,' not particular things —everywhere the same timidity about begging the fact of knowing, and the pitifully impotent attempt to foist it in the shape of a mode of being of 'ideas.' If the fact to be conceived be the indefinitely numerous actual and possible members of a class, then it is assumed that if we can only get enough ideas to huddle together for a moment in the mind, the being of each several one of them there will be an equivalent for the knowing , or meaning , of one member of the class in question; and their number will be so large as to confuse our tally and leave it doubtful whether all the possible members of the class have thus been satisfactorily told off or not. Of course this is nonsense. An idea neither is what it knows, nor knows what it is; nor will swarms of copies of the same 'idea,' recurring in stereotyped form, or 'by the irresistible laws of association formed into one idea,' ever be the same thing as a thought of 'all the possible members' of a class. We must mean that by an altogether special bit of consciousness ad hoc . But it is easy to translate Berkeley's, Hume's, and Mill's notion of a swarm of ideas into cerebral terms, and so to make them stand for something real; and, in this sense, I think the doctrine of these authors less hollow than the opposite one which makes the vehicle of universal conceptions to be an actus purus of the soul. If each 'idea' stand for some special nascent nerve-process, then the aggregate of these nascent processes might have for its conscious correlate a psychic 'fringe,' which should be just that universal meaning, or intention that the name or mental picture employed should mean all the possible individuals of the class. Every peculiar complication of brain-processes must have some peculiar correlate in the soul. To one set of processes will correspond the thought of an indefinite taking of the extent of a word like man ; to another set that of a particular taking; and to a third set that of a universal taking, of the extent of the same word. The thought corresponding to either set of processes, is always itself a unique and singular event, whose dependence on its peculiar nerve-process I of course am far from professing to explain.[400] Truly in comparison with the fact that every conception, whatever it be of, is one of the mind's immutable possessions, the question whether a single thing, or a whole class of things, or only an unassigned quality, be meant by it, is an insignificant matter of detail. Our meanings are of singulars, particulars, indefinites, and universals, mixed together in every way. A singular individual is as much conceived when he is isolated and identified away from the rest of the world

• From Story of O (1954)

  given half her life to forget - she was going out of her mind having to submit to their orders, to listen to them, merely having to see them. Whenever she saw her mother lifting a piece of sugar to her mouth before drinking her tea, Jacqueline would set down her own glass and retreat to her dry and dusty pigsty, leaving all three of them behind, her grandmother, her mother, and her mother's sister, with their hair dyed black, their closely knit eyebrows, and their wide, doelike, disapproving eyes - there in her mother's room which doubled as a living room, there where, besides, the fourth female, the maid, ended by resembling them. She fled, banging the doors behind her, and they called after her: "Choura, Choura, little dove," just as in the novels of Tolstoy, for her name was not Jacqueline. Jacqueline was her professional name, a name chosen to forget her real name, and with it this sordid but tender gynaeceum, and to set herself up in the French sun, in a solid world where there are men who do marry you and not disappear, as had the father she had never known, into the vast arctic wastes from which he had never returned. She took after him completely, she used to tell herself with a mixture of anger and delight, she had his hair and high cheekbones, his complexion and his slanting eyes. All she was grateful for to her mother was having given her this blond devil as a father, this demon whom the snows had reclaimed as the earth reclaims other men. What she resented was that her mother had forgotten him quickly enough to have given birth one fine day to a dark-complexioned little girl the issue of a short-lived liaison, her half-sister by an unknown father, whose name was Natalie. Now fifteen, Natalie only saw them during vacation. Her father, never. But he provided for Natalie's room and board in a lycée not far from Paris, and gave her mother a monthly stipend on which the three women and the maid - and even Jacqueline till now - had subsisted, albeit poorly, in an idleness which to them was paradise. Whatever remained from Jacqueline's earnings as a model, after she had bought her cosmetics and lingerie, and her shoes and dresses - all of which came from the top fashion houses and were, even after the discount she received as a model, frightfully expensive - was swallowed by the gaping maw of the family purse and disappeared, God only knows where.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  to have no moral or religious feeling if his actions shock the observer unduly. A child will be assumed without self-consciousness because he talks of himself in the third person, etc., etc. No rules can be laid down in advance. Comparative observations, to be definite, must usually be made to test some pre-existing hypothesis; and the only thing then is to use as much sagacity as you possess, and to be as candid as you can. THE SOURCES OF ERROR IN PSYCHOLOGY. The first of them arises from the Misleading Influence of Speech . Language was originally made by men who were not psychologists, and most men to-day employ almost exclusively the vocabulary of outward things. The cardinal passions of our life, anger, love, fear, hate, hope, and the most comprehensive divisions of our intellectual activity, to remember, expect, think, know, dream, with the broadest genera of aesthetic feeling, joy, sorrow, pleasure, pain, are the only facts of a subjective order which this vocabulary deigns to note by special words. The elementary qualities of sensation, bright, loud, red, blue, hot, cold, are, it is true, susceptible of being used in both an objective and a subjective sense. They stand for outer qualities and for the feelings which these arouse. But the objective sense is the original sense; and still to-day we have to describe a large number of sensations by the name of the object from which they have most frequently been got. An orange color, an odor of violets, a cheesy taste, a thunderous sound, a fiery smart, etc., will recall what I mean. This absence of a special vocabulary for subjective facts hinders the study of all but the very coarsest of them. Empiricist writers are very fond of emphasizing one great set of delusions which language inflicts on the mind. Whenever we have made a word, they say, to denote a certain group of phenomena, we are prone to suppose a substantive entity existing beyond the phenomena, of which the word shall be the name. But the lack of a word quite as often leads to the directly opposite error. We are then prone to suppose that no entity can be there; and so we come to overlook phenomena whose existence would be patent to us all, had we only grown up to hear it familiarly recognized in speech.[195] It is hard to focus our attention on the nameless, and so there results a certain vacuousness in the descriptive parts of most psychologies. But a worse defect than vacuousness comes from the dependence of psychology on common speech. Naming our thought by its own objects, we almost all of us assume that as the objects are, so the thought must be. The thought of several distinct things can only consist of several distinct bits of thought, or 'ideas;' that of an abstract or universal object can only be an abstract or universal idea. As each object may come and go, be forgotten and then thought of again,

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  not the direct state of tire; when I say "I feel angry,' it is not the direct state of anger. It is the state of saying-I-feel-tired , of saying-I-feel-angry ,—entirely different matters, so different that the fatigue and anger apparently included in them are considerable modifications of the fatigue and anger directly felt in the previous instant. The act of naming them has momentarily detracted from their force.[193] The only sound grounds on which the infallible veracity of the introspective judgment might be maintained are empirical. If we had reason to think it has never yet deceived us, we might continue to trust it. This is the ground actually maintained by Herr Mohr. "The illusions of our senses." says this author," have undermined our belief in the reality of the outer world; but in the sphere of inner observation our confidence is intact, for we have never found ourselves to be in error about the reality of an act of thought or feeling. We have never been misled into thinking we were not in doubt or in anger when these conditions were really states of our consciousness."[194] But sound as the reasoning here would be, were the premises correct, I fear the latter cannot pass. However it may be with such strong feelings as doubt or anger, about weaker feelings, and about the relations to each other of all feelings, we find ourselves in continual error and uncertainty so soon as we are called on to name and class, and not merely to feel. Who can be sure of the exact order of his feelings when they are excessively rapid? Who can be sure, in his sensible perception of a chair, how much comes from the eye and how much is supplied out of the previous knowledge of the mind? Who can compare with precision the quantities of disparate feelings even where the feelings are very much alike. For instance, where an object is felt now against the back and now against the cheek, which feeling is most extensive? Who can be sure that two given feelings are or are not exactly the same? Who can tell which is briefer or longer than the other when both occupy but an instant of time? Who knows, of many actions, for what motive they were done, or if for any motive at all? Who can enumerate all the distinct ingredients of such a complicated feeling as anger ? and who can tell offhand whether or no a perception of distance be a compound or a simple state of mind. The whole mind-stuff controversy would stop if we could decide conclusively by introspection that what seem to us elementary feelings are really elementary and not compound. Mr. Sully, in his work on Illusions, has a chapter on those of Introspection from which we might now quote. But, since the rest of this volume will be little more than a collection of illustrations of the difficulty of discovering by direct introspection exactly what our

• From Story of O (1954)

  O was standing in the middle of the room, facing René. He told her to turn around; she was rooted to the spot. "She also crosses her legs," Jacqueline added, "but that you won't be able to see, of course. As you won't be able to see the way she accosts the boys." "That's not true," O shouted, "you're the one!" and she leaped at Jacqueline. René grabbed her just as she was about to hit Jacqueline, and she went on struggling in his arms merely for the sake of feeling weaker than he, of being at his mercy, when, lifting her head, she saw Sir Stephen standing in the doorway looking at her. Jacqueline had thrown herself down on the sofa, her tiny face hardened with anger and fear, and O could feel that René, though he had his hands full trying to subdue her, had eyes only for Jacqueline. She ceased resisting and crestfallen at the idea of having been found wanting in the presence of Sir Stephen, she repeated, this time almost in a whisper: "It's not true, I swear it's not true."

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  But even Flaubert and his misogynistic prosecutors could never have dreamed up the punishments said to befall immodest women among the Tzotzil Maya of Central America. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy explains that “the h’ik’al, a super-sexed demon with a several-foot-long penis,” seizes women who have misbehaved, “carrying them off to his cave, where he rapes them.” Little girls are told that any woman unlucky enough to become pregnant by the h’ik’al “swells up and then gives birth night after night, until she dies.” 10 This apparent need to punish female sexual desire as something evil, dangerous, and pathological is not limited to medieval times or remote Mayan villages. Recent estimates by the World Health Organization suggest that approximately 137 million girls undergo some form of genital mutilation every year. The Force Required to Suppress It Afire is never sated by any amount of logs, nor the ocean by rivers that flow into it; death cannot by sated by all the creatures in the world, nor a fair-eyed woman by any amount of men. T HE K AMA S UTRA Before the war on drugs, the war on terror, or the war on cancer, there was the war on female sexual desire. It’s a war that has been raging far longer than any other, and its victims number well into the billions by now. Like the others, it’s a war that can never be won, as the declared enemy is a force of nature. We may as well declare war on the cycles of the moon. There is a pathetic futility animating the centuries-long insistence—against overwhelming evidence to the contrary—that the human female is indifferent to the insistent urgings of libido. Recall the medical authorities in the antebellum South who assured plantation owners that slaves trying to break out of their chains were not human beings deserving of freedom and dignity, but sufferers of Drapetomania, a medical disorder best cured with a good lashing. And who can forget the “well-intentioned” Inquisition that forced Galileo to disown truths as obvious to him as they were offensive to minds calcified by power and doctrine? In this ongoing struggle between what is and what many post-agricultural patriarchal societies insist must be, women who have dared to renounce the credo of the coy female are still spat upon, insulted, divorced, separated from their children, banished, burned as witches, pathologized as hysterics, buried to their necks in desert sand, and stoned to death. They and their children—those “sons and daughters of bitches”—are still sacrificed to the perverse, conflicted gods of ignorance, shame, and fear. If psychiatrist Mary Jane Sherfey was correct when she wrote, “The strength of the drive determines the force required to suppress it” (an observation downright Newtonian in its irrefutable simplicity), then what are we to make of the force brought to bear on the suppression of female libido?

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  28 Tierney cites Chagnon’s own doctoral thesis, showing that in the thirteen years prior to his arrival, no Namowei (a large branch of the Yanomami) had been killed in warfare. But during his thirteen-month residence among them, ten Yanomami died in a conflict between the Namowei and the Patanowateri (another branch). Kenneth Good, an anthropologist who first went to live with the Yanomami as one of Chagnon’s graduate students and stayed on for twelve years, described Chagnon as “a hit-and-run anthropologist who comes into villages with armloads of machetes to purchase cooperation for his research. Unfortunately,” wrote Good, “he creates conflict and division wherever he goes.” 29 Part of Chagnon’s disruptiveness no doubt resulted from his blustery, macho self-conception, but his research goals may have been an even bigger source of problems. He wanted to collect genealogical information from the Yanomami. This is a tricky proposition, to say the least, given that the Yanomami consider it disrespectful to speak names out loud. Naming the dead requires breaking one of the strongest taboos in their culture. Juan Finkers, who lived among them for twenty-five years, says, “To name the dead, among the Yanomami, is a grave insult, a motive of division, fights, and wars.” 30 Anthropologist Marshall Sahlins described Chagnon’s research as “an absurdist anthropological project,” trying to work out ancestor-based lineages “among a people who by taboo could not know, could not trace and could not name their ancestors—or for that matter, could not bear to hear their own names.” 31 Chagnon dealt with his hosts’ taboo by playing one village off against another. In his own account, he: began taking advantage of local arguments and animosities in selecting my informants…. traveling to other villages to check the genealogies, picking villages that were on strained terms with the people about whom I wanted information. I would then return to my base camp and check with local informants the accuracy of the new information. If the informants became angry when I mentioned the new names I acquired from the unfriendly group, I was almost certain that the information was accurate…. I occasionally hit a name that put the informant into a rage, such as that of a dead brother or sister that other informants had not reported. 32 To recap: Our hero swashbuckles into Yanomami lands, bringing machetes, axes, and shotguns he presents to a few select groups, thereby creating disruptive power imbalances between groups. He detects and aggravates preexisting tensions between communities by goading them to disrespect each other’s honored ancestors and dead loved ones. Inflaming the situation further, Chagnon reports the offenses he’s provoked, using the resulting rage to confirm the validity of his genealogical data. Having thus inflicted and salted the Yanomami’s wounds, Chagnon sallies forth to seduce the American public with tales of derring-do among the vicious and violent “savages.” The word anthro has entered the vocabulary of the Yanomami.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Considering its almost total lack of muscle tissue, the female breast wields amazing power. Curvaceous women have leveraged this power to manipulate even the most accomplished, disciplined men for as long as anyone’s been around to notice. Empires have fallen, wills have been revised, millions of magazines and calendars sold, Super Bowl audiences scandalized … all in response to the mysterious force emanating from what are, after all, small bags of fat. One of the oldest human images known, the so-called Venus of Willendorf, created about 25,000 years ago, features a bosom of Dolly Parton-esque dimensions. Two hundred fifty centuries later, the power of the exaggerated breast shows little sign of getting old. According to the American Society of Plastic Surgery, 347,254 breast augmentation procedures were performed in the United States in 2007, making it the nation’s most commonly performed surgical procedure. What gives the female breast such transcendent influence over heterosexual male consciousness? First, let’s dispense with any purely utilitarian interpretations. While the mammary glands contained in women’s breasts exist for the feeding of infants, the fatty tissue that confers the magical curve of the human breast—the swell, sway, and jiggle—has nothing to do with milk production. Given the clear physiological costs of having pendulous breasts (back strain, loss of balance, difficulty running), if they aren’t meant to advertise milk for babies, why did human females evolve and retain these cumbersome appendages? Theories range from the belief that breasts serve as signaling devices announcing fertility and fat deposits sufficient to withstand the rigors of pregnancy and breastfeeding 12 to “genital echo theory”: females developed pendulous breasts around the time hominids began walking upright in order to provoke the excitation males formerly felt when gazing at the fatty deposits on the buttocks. 13 Theorists supporting genital echo theory have noted that swellings like those of chimpanzees and bonobos would interfere with locomotion in a bipedal primate, so when our distant ancestors began walking upright, they reason that some of the female’s fertility signaling moved from the rear office, as it were, to the front showroom. In a bit of historical ping-pong, the dictates of fashion have moved the swelling back and forth over the centuries with high heels, Victorian bustles, and other derrière enhancements. The visual similarity between these two bits of female anatomy has been facilitated by the recent popularity of low-cut jeans that teasingly reveal the nether cleavage. “The butt crack is the new cleavage,” writes journalist Janelle Brown, “reclaimed to peek seductively from the pants of supermodels and commoners alike…. It’s naughty and slightly tawdry,” she continues, “but with the soft round charm of a perfect pair of breasts.” 14 If your moon is waning, you can always don a “butt bra” from Bubbles Bodywear, which promises to create the effect that’s been turning male heads since before men existed.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  They were beginning to move about in large groups more often than they had ever done in the old days. They were sleeping near camp and arriving in noisy hordes early in the morning. Worst of all, the adult males were becoming increasingly aggressive. … Not only was there a great deal more fighting than ever before, but many of the chimps were hanging around camp for hours and hours every day [emphasis added].” 17 Margaret Power’s doubts concerning Goodall’s provisioning of the chimps have been largely left unaddressed by most primatologists, not just Wrangham. 18 Michael Ghiglieri, for example, went to study the chimps in Kibale Forest in nearby Uganda specifically in response to the notion that the intergroup conflict Goodall’s team had witnessed might have been due to the distorting effects of those banana boxes. Ghiglieri writes, “My mission … [was] to find out whether these warlike killings were normal or an artifact of the researchers having provisioned the chimps with food to observe them.” 19 But somehow Margaret Power’s name doesn’t even appear in the index of Ghiglieri’s book, published eight years after hers. We lack the space to adequately explore the questions Power raised, or to address subsequent reports of intergroup conflict among some (but not all) unprovisioned chimps in other study areas. 20 While we’ve got our doubts about the motivations of Pinker and Chagnon (see below), like Margaret Power, we have none about Jane Goodall’s intentions or scientific integrity. Still, with all due respect to Goodall, Power’s questions deserve consideration by anyone seriously interested in the debate over the possible primate origins of warfare. The Spoils of War Margaret Power’s questions cut to the heart of the matter: why fight if there’s nothing worth fighting over? Before the scientists started provisioning the apes, food appeared throughout the jungle, so the chimps spread out in search of something to eat each day. Chimps often call out to the others when they find a fruiting tree; mutual aid helps everyone, and feeding in the forest isn’t a zero-sum endeavor. But once they learned that there would be a limited amount of easy food available in the same place each day, more and more chimps started arriving in aggressive, “noisy hordes” and “hanging around.” Soon after, Goodall and her students began witnessing the now-famous “warfare” between chimp groups. Perhaps for the first time ever, the chimps had something worth fighting over: a concentrated, reliable, yet limited source of food. Suddenly, they lived in a zero-sum world. Applying this same reasoning to human societies, we’re left wondering why immediate-return hunter-gatherers would risk their lives to fight wars. Over what, exactly? Food? That’s spread out in the environment. Societies indigenous to areas where food is concentrated by natural conditions, like the periodic salmon runs of the Pacific Northwest of the United States and Canada, tend not to be immediate-return hunter-gatherers. We’re more likely to find complex, hierarchical societies like the Kwakiutl (discussed later) in such spots. Possessions?

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Even more troubling, these scholars often remain mute on the distorting effects on chimps of food provisioning, ever-shrinking habitats under siege from armies of hungry soldiers and poachers, reduced living space, food, and genetic vigor. Equally troubling is their silence on the crucial effects of population demographics and the rise of the agricultural state on the likelihood of human conflict. The Napoleonic Invasion (The Yanomami Controversy) nonAs the summer of love was winding down and Jane Goodall’s first reports of chimpanzee warfare were exploding into public consciousness, Napoleon Chagnon suddenly became the world’s most famous living anthropologist with the publication of Yanomamö: The Fierce People. The year 1968 was a good one to come out with a dashing anthropological adventure yarn claiming to prove that warfare is ancient and integral to human nature. The year began with the “velvet revolution” in Prague and the TET offensive in Vietnam. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s worst dream came true in Memphis, Robert Kennedy was felled on a Los Angeles stage, and blood and chaos ran in the streets of Chicago. Richard Nixon slinked into the White House, Charles Manson and his lost followers plotted mayhem in the dry hills above Malibu, and the Beatles put the final touches on The White Album. The year ended with three American astronauts, for the first time ever, gazing back upon this fragile blue planet floating in eternal silence, praying for peace. 27 Given all that, perhaps it’s not surprising that Chagnon’s account of the “chronic warfare” of the “innately violent” Yanomami struck a public nerve. Desperate to understand human murderousness, the public lapped up his depictions of the day-to-day brutality of people he described as our “contemporary ancestors.” Now in its fifth edition, Yanomamö: The Fierce People is still the all-time bestseller in anthropology, with millions of copies sold to university students alone. Chagnon’s books and films have figured prominently in the education of several generations of anthropologists, most of whom accepted his claims to have demonstrated the inherent ferocity of our species. But Chagnon’s research should be approached with caution, as he employs a host of dubious techniques. Ferguson found, for example, that Chagnon conflates common murder with war in his statistics, as does Pinker in his discussion of the Gebusi. But more importantly, Chagnon fails to account for the effects of his own disruptive, rather Hemingway-esque presence among the people he studied. According to Patrick Tierney, author of Darkness in El Dorado, “The wars that made Chagnon and the Yanomami famous—the ones he wrote about with such relish in The Fierce People —began on November 14, 1964, the same day the anthropologist arrived with his shotguns, outboard motor, and a canoe full of steel goods to give away.”

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  24 Of course, sharp-thinking readers will point out that these correlations don’t imply causation: maybe men with higher levels of testosterone simply seek more affairs. Probably so, but there is good reason to believe that even casual contact with novel, attractive women can have a tonic effect on men’s hormonal health. In fact, researcher James Roney and his colleagues found that even a brief chat with an attractive woman raised men’s testosterone levels by an average of 14 percent. When these same men spent a few minutes talking with other men, their testosterone level fell by 2 percent. 25 In the 1960s, anthropologist William Davenport lived among a group of Melanesian islanders who regarded sex as natural and uncomplicated. All the women claimed to be highly orgasmic, with most reporting several orgasms to each of her partner’s one. Nevertheless, reported Davenport, “it is assumed that after a few years of marriage, the husband’s interest in his wife will begin to pale.” Until the recent imposition of colonial laws stopped the practice, these Melanesians avoided monotomy by allowing married men to have young lovers. Rather than being jealous of these concubines, wives regarded them as status symbols, and Davenport claimed that both men and women regarded the loss of this practice the worst result of contact with European culture. “Older men often comment today that without young women to excite them and without the variety once provided by changing concubines, they have become sexually inactive long before their time.” 26 Closer to home, William Masters and Virginia Johnson reported that “loss of coital interest engendered by monotony in a sexual relationship is probably the most constant factor in the loss of an aging male’s interest in sexual performance with his partner.” They note that this loss of interest can frequently be reversed if the man has a younger lover—even if the lover is not as attractive or sexually skilled as the man’s wife. Kinsey concurred, writing, “There seems to be no question but that the human male would be promiscuous in his choice of sexual partners throughout the whole of his life if there were no social restrictions.” 27 We know that many female readers aren’t going to be happy reading this, and some will be enraged by it, but for most men, sexual monogamy leads inexorably to monotomy. It’s important to understand this process has nothing to do with the attractiveness of the man’s long-term partner or the depth and sincerity of his love for her. Indeed, quoting Symons, “A man’s sexual desire for a woman to whom he is not married is largely the result of her not being his wife.” 28 Novelty itself is the attraction. Though they’re unlikely to admit it, the long-term partners of the sexiest Hollywood starlets are subject to the same psychosexual process. Frustrating? Unfair? Infuriating? Humiliating on both sides? Yes, yes, yes, and yes. But still, true. What to do about it?

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Antidepressants are the most prescribed drug in the United States, with 118 million prescriptions written in 2005 alone. One of the most prominent side effects of these drugs is the dampening of libido, so maybe the whole issue will just fade away—chemical castration. If not, there’s always Viagra, with well over a billion tablets doled out in the decade since it was introduced in 1998. But Viagra creates blood flow, not desire. Now men can fake sexual interest too. Progress? It’s not the same, is it? And isn’t there something humiliating (not to say emasculating) about sneaking off at night to look at porn on your computer? This course often leads to serious anger and resentment that can destroy a relationship. 3. Serial monogamy: divorce and start over. This option seems to be the “honest” approach recommended by most experts—including many relationship counselors. Serial monogamy is a symptomatic response to the issues posed by the conflict between what society dictates and what biology demands. It solves nothing in terms of snowballing male (and thus, female) sexual frustration in long-term sexually monogamous relationships. Though often presented as the honorable response to the conundrum, the serial monogamy cop-out has led directly to the current epidemic of broken homes and single-parent families. How is it “adult” to inflict emotional trauma on our children because we’re unable to face the truth about sex? Susan Squire, author of I Don’t: A Contrarian History of Marriage, asks: “Why does society consider it more moral for you to break up a marriage, go through a divorce, disrupt your children’s lives maybe forever, just to be able to fuck someone with whom the fucking is going to get just as boring as it was with the first person before long?” 34 A man who pursues long-term happiness by leaving behind a string of hurt, embittered women and emotionally wounded children is little more than a dog chasing tail—his own. And if you’re a woman whose husband is “cheating,” your options are no better: pretend you don’t notice what’s going on, go out and have your own revenge affair (even if you don’t feel like it), or destroy your own family and marriage by calling in the lawyers. These are all losing scenarios. Even the term we use to describe this betrayal of self and family, “cheating,” echoes the standard narrative of human sexuality in its implication that marriage is a game that one player can win at the expense of the other. The woman who “tricks” a man into supporting children he thinks are his has, according to this model, cheated—and won. Another big winner, according to the standard narrative, is the “baby-daddy” who manages to impregnate a string of women who then raise his children while he’s already on to his next conquest. But in any true partnership —married or not—cheating cannot lead to any sort of victory.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Come, tell us how does your land do—does it pay?' said Levin, and at once in Sviazhsky's eyes he detected that fleeting expression of alarm which he had noticed whenever he had tried to penetrate beyond the outer chambers of Sviazhsky's mind. Moreover, this question on Levin's part was not quite in good faith. Madame Sviazhsky had just told him at tea that they had that summer invited a German expert in book-keeping from Moscow, who for a consideration of five hundred roubles had investigated the management of their property, and found that it was costing them a loss of three thousand odd roubles. She did not remember the precise sum, but it appeared that the German had worked it out to the fraction of a farthing. The grey-whiskered landowner smiled at the mention of the profits of Sviazhsky's farming, obviously aware how much gain his neighbour and marshal was likely to be making. 'Possibly it does not pay,' answered Sviazhsky. 'That merely proves either that I'm a bad manager, or that I've sunk my capital for the increase of my rents.' 'Oh, rent!' Levin cried with horror. 'Rent there may be in Europe, where land has been improved by the labour put into it; but with us all the land is deteriorating from the labour put into it—in other words, they're working it out; so there's no question of rent.' 'How no rent? It's a law.' 'Then we're outside the law; rent explains nothing for us, but simply muddles us. No, tell me how there can be a theory of rent? . . . ' 'Will you have some junket? Masha, pass us some junket or raspberries.' He turned to his wife. 'Extraordinarily late the raspberries are lasting this year.' And in the happiest frame of mind Sviazhsky got up and walked off, apparently supposing the conversation to have ended at the very point when to Levin it seemed that it was only just beginning. Having lost his antagonist, Levin continued the conversation with the grey-whiskered landowner, trying to prove to him that all the difficulty arises from the fact that we don't find out the peculiarities and habits of our labourer; but the landowner, like all men who think independently and in isolation, was slow in taking in any other person's idea, and particularly partial to his own.