Anxiety

Passages

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

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• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  But the Persians were not the only people guilty of this overweening pride. At this time, some Athenians were beginning to worry about their own hubris in invading other poleis, and using the spoils of war to fund their expensive building projects. Xerxes’ warning probably struck home.95 In 470, when the wealthy island of Naxos tried to secede from the Delian League, Athens promptly attacked the city, razed its walls, and forced it back into line. The league had been designed to encourage friendship among the poleis, but it was becoming clear that its real purpose was to serve Athenian interests. The following year, the cities of the league defeated the Persian fleet at Pamphylia, in a battle that marked the end of the Persian wars. Many must have wondered whether the league served any further purpose, now that the Persian threat had been contained. There was also tension at home. Since Salamis, the thetes, the lower classes that formed the backbone of the navy, had become more prominent in the city. They were not so constrained by traditional ideas, and were likely to support any radical policy that gave them a higher profile in the assembly. There was new friction between the classes, and Athens was becoming a divided city. All these anxieties surfaced in Aeschylus’s Seven Against Thebes, which was presented in 467 and told the story of the apparently futile war between Oedipus’s two sons, Polynices and Eteocles. This grim story of fraternal rivalry may have recalled the recent tragedy of Naxos, when Greek had attacked Greek. Polynices, who had invaded his native polis, was guilty of hubris, while Eteocles seemed to embody the restraint and self-control that should characterize a true citizen: he loathes the ancient, irrational religion of the chorus of frightened women, who rush periodically onto the stage in ones and twos, asking disconnected questions and uttering witless and incomprehensible ritual cries. Yet Eteocles himself, the man of logos, falls prey to the pollution that his father, Oedipus, had unleashed, and that had contaminated the whole family.96 At the end of the play, this miasma finally drove the two brothers to kill each other outside the walls of Thebes.

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

  He says he wants to tell me something about that comment I made about always making friends at work. “When I first took this job,” he says, “I knew I was going to be working with you. So I got in touch with someone who knows you, a person you worked with. I asked them what you’re like. You know what they said? They said, ‘Smart guy, but acerbic.’” He looks at me, expecting a response. “Everybody knows I’m acerbic,” I say. “It’s what I’m known for.” “I guess I’m not making this clear,” Trotsky says. “What I mean is, when you say that you always made friends at your past jobs, maybe that’s not really how it was.” “I always left on good terms. I have friends from Forbes , people I’ve known for fifteen years, and we’re still really good friends. Same at Newsweek .” “Well,” Trotsky says, “I’m sure that you liked them . But I’m suggesting that maybe your perception of those situations was not the same as the perception that other people had about you.” “So what are you saying? That people at those places didn’t like me either? That I’ve been walking around for years thinking that people are my friends, when really, behind my back, they all don’t like me?” He does a sort of shrug and smile, as if to say, I guess so . “Who did you talk to? Who told you I was acerbic?” “I can’t tell you that.” “Okay. Fine. But you know, telling me that story is a pretty sick move on your part. Because now I’m going to walk around all day wondering who that is. Who would say that to you? Who’s the person that I think is my friend but who actually talks shit about me behind my back? You know what I mean? That’s going to gnaw at me.” “I know,” he says, with a huge grin. “Consider that my gift to you.” I walk out to the lobby, feeling numb. We’re up on the fourth floor, overlooking the atrium. Down below, on the ground floor, twenty-something HubSpotters are sitting at tables, drinking coffee and having meetings. Suddenly there’s a burst of laughter—three people cracking up. Their laughter rises up through the atrium and rings off the skylights. I stand there, reeling. My heart is racing. My face, I’m sure, is flushed. All that stuff Trotsky just told me about the people who don’t like me—is any of that even true, or did he just make it up? Is there really some former colleague of mine from Forbes or Newsweek who goes around telling people I’m a jerk? Did Tracy really refuse to comment for my review? I have no idea what to make of any of this. I call a friend of mine in New York and tell her what just happened, how HubSpot grades people on HEART and that my HEART has been found lacking. “Are you serious? That’s hilarious!” she says.

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

  The Shang attributed their victories to Di, the war god. Yet there also seems to have been considerable anxiety, because it was impossible to rely on him.20 As we can see from the surviving oracle bones and turtle shells on which the royal diviners inscribed questions for Di, he often sent drought, flooding, and disaster and was an undependable military ally. Indeed, he could “confer assistance” on the Shang but just as easily support their enemies. “The Fang are harming or attacking us,” mourned one oracle. “It is Di who orders them to make disaster for us.”21 These scattered pieces of evidence suggest a regime constantly poised for attack, surviving only by ceaseless martial vigilance. There are also references to human sacrifice: prisoners of war and rebels were routinely executed and, although the evidence is not conclusive, may have been offered up to the gods.22 Later generations certainly associated the Shang with ritual murder. The philosopher Mozi (c. 480–390 BCE) was clearly revolted by the elaborate funerals of a Shang aristocrat: “As for the men who are sacrificed in order to follow him, if he should be a [king], they will be counted in hundreds or tens. If he is a great officer or a baron, they will be counted in tens or units.”23 Shang rituals were violent because martial aggression was essential to the state. And even though the kings implored Di for help in their wars, in reality they owed their success to their military skills and bronze weapons.

• From The Diary of a Young Girl (The Definitive Edition) (2020)

  THURSDAY, JULY 6, 1944 Dearest Kitty, My blood runs cold when Peter talks about becoming a criminal or a speculator; of course, he’s joking, but I still have the feeling he’s afraid of his own weakness. Margot and Peter are always saying to me, “If I had your spunk and your strength, if I had your drive and unflagging energy, could. . . Is it really such an admirable trait not to let myself be influenced by others? Am I right in following my own conscience? To be honest, I can’t imagine how anyone could say “I’m weak” and then stay that way. If you know that about yourself, why not fight it, why not develop your character? Their answer has always been: “Because it’s much easier not to!” This reply leaves me feeling rather discouraged. Easy? Does that mean a life of deceit and laziness is easy too? Oh no, that can’t be true. It can’t be true that people are so readily tempted by ease. . . and money. I’ve given a lot of thought to what my answer should be, to how I should get Peter to believe in himself and, most of all, to change himself for the better. I don’t know whether I’m on the right track. I’ve often imagined how nice it would be if someone were to confide everything to me. But now that it’s reached that point, I realize how difficult it is to put yourself in someope else’s shoes and find the right answer. Especially since “easy” and “money” are new and completely alien concepts to me. Peter’s beginning to lean on me and I don’t want that, not under any circumstances. It’s hard enough standing on your own two feet, but when you also have to remain true to your character and soul, it’s harder still. I’ve been drifting around at sea, have spent days searching for an effective antidote to that terrible word “easy.” How can I make it clear to him that, while it may seem easy and wonderful, it will drag him down to the depths, to a place

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

  The oil embargo imposed by the Gulf States during the 1973 October War had sent the price soaring, and the kingdom now had all the petrodollars it needed to find practical ways of imposing Wahhabism on the entire ummah.16 Deeply disconcerted by the success of the Shii revolution in Iran, which threatened their leadership of the Muslim world, the Saudis intensified their efforts to counter Iranian influence and replaced Iran as the chief ally of the United States in the region. The Saudi-based Muslim World League opened offices in every region inhabited by Muslims, and the Saudi ministry of religion printed and distributed translations of the Quran, Wahhabi doctrinal tracts, and the works of Ibn Taymiyyah, Qutb, and Maududi to Muslim communities in the Middle East, Africa, Indonesia, the United States, and Europe. In all these places, they funded the building of Saudi-style mosques, creating an international aesthetic that broke with local architectural traditions, and established madrassas that provided free education for the poor, with, of course, a Wahhabi curriculum. At the same time, the young men from the more disadvantaged Muslim countries, such as Egypt and Pakistan, who came to work in the Gulf, associated their new affluence with Wahhabism. When they returned home, they chose to live in new neighborhoods with Saudi mosques and shopping malls that segregated the sexes. In return for their munificence, Saudis demanded religious conformity. The Wahhabi rejection of all other forms of Islam as well as other faith traditions would reach as deeply into Bradford, England, and Buffalo, New York, as into Pakistan, Jordan, or Syria, everywhere gravely undermining Islam’s traditional pluralism. The West played an unwitting role in this surge of intolerance, since the United States welcomed the Saudis’ opposition to Iran, and the kingdom depended on the U.S. military for its very survival.17

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

  He taught the Christians of Byzantium to believe that the ruthless militarism and systemic injustice of the Roman Empire would be transformed by the Christian ideal. But Constantine was a soldier, with very little knowledge of his new faith. It was more likely that Christianity would be converted to imperial violence. Constantine may have felt the ambiguity of his position, because he delayed his baptism until he was on his deathbed. 10 In the very last year of his life, he was planning an expedition against Persia, but when he fell sick, Eusebius reported, “he perceived that this was the time to purify himself from the offences which he had at any time committed, trusting that whatever sins it had been his lot as a mortal to commit, he could wash them from his soul.” 11 He told the bishops: “I shall now set for myself rules of life which befit God,” tacitly admitting, perhaps, that for the last twenty-five years he had been unable to do so. 12 The emperor had experienced these contradictions before he arrived in the East when he had to deal with a case of Christian heresy in North Africa. 13 Constantine felt quite entitled to intervene in such matters because, as he famously said: “I have been established by God as the supervisor of the external affairs of the church.” 14 Heresy ( airesis ) was not simply a dogmatic issue but also a political one: the word meant “to choose another path.” Because religion and politics were inseparable in Rome, lack of consensus in the Church threatened the Pax Romana. In matters of state, no Roman emperor could permit his subjects to “go their own way.” Once he had become sole emperor of the western provinces, Constantine had been bombarded with appeals from the Donatist separatists and was concerned that “such disputes and altercations … might perhaps arouse the highest deity not only against the human race, but also against myself, to whose care he has … committed the regulation of all things earthly.” 15 A significant number of North African Christians had refused to accept the episcopal consecration of Caecilian, the new bishop of Carthage, and had set up their own church with Donatus as their bishop. 16 Because Caecilian’s orders were accepted as valid by all the other African churches, the Donatists were destroying the consensus of the Church. Constantine decided that he had to act. Like any Roman emperor, his first instinct was to crush dissent militarily, but he settled instead for the confiscation of Donatist property.

• From The Diary of a Young Girl (The Definitive Edition) (2020)

  Last night I dreamed we were kissing each other, but Peter’s cheeks were very disappointing: they weren’t as soft as they looked. They were more like Father’s cheeks -- the cheeks of a man who already shaves. FRIDAY, MARCH 10, 1944 My dearest Kitty, The proverb “Misfortunes never come singly” definitely applies to today. Peter just got through saying it. Let me tell you all the awful things that have happened and that are still hanging over our heads. First, Miep is sick, as a result of Henk and Aagje’s wedding yesterday. She caught cold in the Westerkerk, where the service was held. Second, Mr. Kleiman hasn’t returned to work since the last time his stomach started bleeding, so Bep’s been left to hold down the fort alone. Third, the police have arrested a man (whose name I won’t put in writing). It’s terrible not only for him, but for us as well, since he’s been supplying us with potatoes, butter and jam. Mr. M., as I’ll call him, has five children under the age of thirteen, and another on the way. Last night we had another little scare: we were in the middle of dinner when suddenly someone knocked on the wall next door. For the rest of the evening we were nervous and gloomy. Lately I haven’t been at all in the mood to write down what’s been going on here. I’ve been more wrapped up in myself. Don’t get me wrong, I’m terribly upset about what’s happened to poor, good-hearted Mr. M., but there’s not much room for him in my diary. Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday I was in Peter’s room from four-thirty to five-fifteen. We worked on our French and chatted about one thing and another. I really look forward to that hour or so in the afternoon, but best of all is that I think Peter’s just as pleased to see me. Yours, Anne M. Frank 213 SATURDAY, MARCH 11, 1944 Dearest Kitty,

• From The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (2001)

  I really can’t remember whether our host penetrated me, on the other hand I do know that I apathetically let Lucien have me. The eiderdown was a deep chasm, and my tummy sank deeper into it. My vagina, worked on smoothly by Lucien (who must have realised I wasn’t feeling well), softened and sank, drawn into that great depth, while a paralysing force kept my head, neck, shoulders and even my partially spread arms flat on the bed. I did somehow find the strength to get up. How many times in the night? Four, five times? I crossed the kitchen naked, and went into the garden. It was pouring with rain. I stood and vomited straight onto the ground in the middle of the alley, not looking for somewhere to hide. It has to be said that each spasm converted the blacksmith’s hammering inside my skull into something that felt like a final disintegration of the beaten piece of metal. The whole body flows into the mass of the head and forms a fist tightly grasping a lacerating blade. The cold rain momentarily appeased the pain. On my way back to the bedroom, I rinsed my mouth out in the kitchen sink. The following morning, when the life-saving medicine had been brought from the chemist when it was all over, Lucien assured me that he had fucked me several times during the night and that I had seemed to enjoy it. It is one of the rare situations when I was not conscious of what I was doing. A few months later the young woman came to see me. She and her boyfriend had had a terrible car crash. He had died and his family had turned her out of the house they had lived in together. I felt genuine compassion for her while at the same time having a strange feeling that this was just the continuation of a nightmare.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  Many saw this imminent catastrophe as a divine punishment for the irreligion of the philosophers. They regarded Socrates’ teaching as blasphemous, even though he was traditionally devout and attended the public rituals as scrupulously as he performed his military service. But anxiety was about to turn into hysteria. In 416, Alcibiades made an emotional speech in the assembly, arguing that Athens should go to the aid of its ally Segesta, in Sicily, which was being attacked by the nearby city of Selinus. The general Niceas (Socrates’ sparring partner) was against the expedition, but Alcibiades and the younger generation carried the day. It was a disastrous decision, since most of the citizens who voted for the war had no idea of the size and power of Sicily. Just before the fleet disembarked, somebody vandalized the Herms, the phallic statues of the god Hermes that were placed throughout the city to protect streets and houses. Nobody knew who was responsible, but the incident shook Athens to the core. People were convinced that this blatant sacrilege would call down divine vengeance. There were witch hunts, suspects were executed, and eventually Alcibiades himself was recalled from Sicily to answer charges of blasphemy. There ensued a series of disasters. The Athenian navy was blockaded in the harbor at Syracuse, and the troops were incarcerated in nearby stone quarries. At a stroke, Athens lost about forty thousand men and half its fleet. In 411, a pro-Spartan cabal overturned the democratic government in Athens. The coup was short-lived, and democracy was restored the following year, but it was a sign of Athens’s new vulnerability. The war with Sparta continued until 405, when the Spartan general Lysander forced Athens to surrender. Yet again, an oligarchy was established under a government of thirty pro-Spartan aristocrats, who killed so many citizens in the ensuing reign of terror that it was overthrown, and democracy reestablished after only a year. Athens had regained its independence, its democracy, and its fleet, but its power was broken, the empire dismantled, and Pericles’ great defensive wall demolished. Against this terrifying backcloth, two great tragedies were enacted in Athens. Just before Athens conceded defeat in 406, Euripides died, and his final dark, bitter plays, lurid with a sense of looming catastrophe, were performed posthumously. The last was The Bacchae, presented in 402. 42 As the play opened, the god Dionysus arrived incognito in Thebes, the city that had rejected his mother, Semele, when she had fallen pregnant, and had consistently prohibited his cult. But now most Thebans were enchanted by the fascinating stranger who had suddenly turned up in their midst. The women of the city, who had not been properly initiated into the Dionysian mystery, abandoned themselves to unbridled frenzy, roaming through the woods, clad in animal pelts.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  Aeschylus had depicted a torn society, painfully caught between two irreconcilable worlds. Like Eteocles and the philosophers, some citizens looked down on the old religion, but could not entirely shake it off. It still held sway in the deeper, less rational regions of their minds. At the end of the play, the Erinyes, the ancient chthonian Furies, triumphed over the modern forces of logos. Athenians might regard themselves as rational men of the polis, in charge of their own destiny, but they still felt that they could be overtaken by a divinely inspired pollution that had a life of its own. Would Athenian hubris in Naxos produce fresh miasma and bring their city to ruin? The Greek mind was straining in two directions, and Aeschylus did not propose an easy solution. In their final lament, the chorus was split, half siding with Polynices, the others attending the funeral of Eteocles. In 461 a group of young Athenians led by Ephialtes and his friend Pericles mounted a concerted attack on the elders in the Assembly, which then deprived the Areopagus Council of all its powers. Their slogan was demokratia (“government by the people”). The coup completely overturned the political order. The Areopagus was replaced by the Council of Five Hundred and decisions were henceforth made by all citizens in the Popular Assembly. But the new democracy was not entirely benign. Debates were often rude and aggressive. The courts were made up of citizens, who were both judge and jury. There was no rule of law, and a trial was essentially a battle between the accused and his accusers. The Oresteia, a trilogy written by Aeschylus shortly afterward, shows how deeply Athens had been shaken by this revolution. Again, Aeschylus depicted a clash between old and new—between the Erinyes and the more modern, “political” gods of Olympus. The trilogy traced the emergence of the polis from tribal chaos and vendetta to the relative order of Athens, where citizens could take control of their lives; it marked the painful passage from an ethos of blind force to nonviolent debate. Yet Aeschylus made it clear that the ideal differed from the reality, that there were no easy answers, and that the final vision of law and order could only be an aspiration rather than an achieved fact.

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

  The Zhou king was supported by a four-tier aristocracy of “gentlemen” (junzi); Western scholars have translated their titles as “duke,” “marquis,” “earl,” and “baron.” The shi, children of younger sons and second-class wives, served as men-at-arms but also as scribes and ritual experts, forming an early “civil” wing of government. The Zhou confederacy of more than a hundred small principalities survived until 771, when their western capital was overrun by the Qong Rang barbarians. The Zhou fled to the east but never fully recovered. Yet the succeeding period witnessed not merely the decline of a dynasty but also the decay of the feudal system. The kings remained nominal rulers but were increasingly challenged by the more aggressive “gentlemen” in the principalities, who were casting aside the deference on which feudalism depended.25 The boundaries of the Chinese states were also shifting. By this time, the Chinese had absorbed several “barbarian” populations, all with very different cultural traditions that challenged the old Zhou ethos. Cities located far away from the traditional centers of Chinese civilization were becoming locally prominent, and by the end of the eighth century, when Chinese history starts to emerge from the mists of legend, they had become capitals of kingdoms: Jin in the north, Qi in the northwest, and Chu in the south. These states ruled thousands of barbarian subjects, whose grasp of Chinese custom was at best superficial. The small principalities in the center of the great plain had now become extremely vulnerable, because these peripheral states were determined to expand. During the seventh century, they broke with tradition and began to mobilize peasants as fighting foot soldiers; Jin and Chu even brought barbarians into the army, offering them land in return for military service. Deeply threatened by these aggressive kingdoms, some of the traditional principalities were also riven by internal conflict. With the decline of the Zhou, public order had deteriorated, and increasingly, brute force was becoming the norm. It was not uncommon for princes to kill ministers who dared to challenge their policies; ambassadors could be murdered and rulers assassinated during visits to another principality. To add to the tension, it seems that there was also an environmental crisis.26 Centuries of aggressive hunting and land clearance that destroyed animal habitats meant that huntsmen were returning empty-handed and there was far less meat at the bin banquets, so the old carefree extravagance was no longer possible. In this climate of uncertainty, people wanted clear directives, so the shi ritual experts of the principality of Lu recodified the traditional Chinese custumal law to provide guidance.27

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

  I said that seemed a bit extreme, but he responded: “You’re fucking with a company that’s worth a billion and a half dollars. These people take this shit seriously.” Suddenly the whole thing seemed not funny at all, not even a little bit. To make things worse, all this was happening just as I was about to leave Boston for Los Angeles, to spend several months as a writer on the third season of Silicon Valley . I left with massive anxiety, fearing that Sasha and the kids might be in danger. Sasha assured me that I was worrying about ghosts that didn’t exist. If something happened, she had friends and neighbors and relatives nearby. On weekends I would fly home to Boston. Nevertheless, I left for Los Angeles still feeling that that none of us was really safe. What came next was a kind of police procedural, as I set out to discover what had happened. Beyond the question of what HubSpot had done to me lay a second and more intriguing question, which was why they had done it. Why would anyone go to such lengths to get hold of a memoir whose essential purpose was to entertain? It occurred to me, and to others as well, that HubSpot might be worried that I had stumbled on some damaging piece of information. What could they be so worried about? Just as I was thinking that the book was pretty much done, I wanted to dive back in and find out what I’d missed. Lawyer friends told me I should expect to hear from law enforcement and that I should hire an attorney. I retained Steven A. Cash, a lawyer from Washington, DC. Cash and I started trying to piece together a timeline of events. There were three key dates. On June 22, Halligan sent me an email asking about the book. I told him it was a funny memoir about being a middle-aged journalist trying to fit in at a company with a kooky culture. He said he was concerned that the word “bubble” was in the title, because he didn’t think HubSpot was a bubble company. Sales were growing 50 percent! After a few messages, he went dark. On July 13, I emailed a draft of the manuscript to my editor. On July 29, sixteen days after I sent the manuscript, HubSpot announced that Volpe had been fired. These three dates seemed to form a kind of narrative, but we still had no idea what had happened. We knew that the board had hired Boston law firm Goodwin Procter to conduct an investigation. Members of the board had read the report produced by Goodwin Procter, so they knew what Volpe had done. Perhaps this was naïve, but I hoped that someone from HubSpot’s board of directors would contact me and offer an explanation. No one ever did. Bear in mind that I’ve met some of these people.

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

  In an effort to gain popular support for Jamaat, Maududi agreed to lead a campaign against the so-called heretical Ahmadi sect in 1953 and wrote an inflammatory pamphlet, which sparked riots and put him in prison. 29 This, however, was an aberration. Maududi continued to denounce the violence of Pakistani politics and condemned the aggressive activities of Jamaat’s affiliate IJT (Islami Jamiat-i-Taliban), the Society of Islamic Students, which organized strikes and demonstrations against Bhutto, paralyzed the communication systems, disrupted urban commerce and educational establishments, and led militant confrontations with the police. While other members of Jamaat succumbed to Pakistan’s endemic violence, Maududi remained committed to achieving an Islamic state democratically. He repeatedly insisted that an Islamic state could not be a theocracy, because no group or individual had the right to rule in God’s name. An Islamic government must be elected by the people for a fixed term; there must be universal adult franchise, regular elections, a multiparty system, an independent judiciary, and guaranteed human rights and civil liberties—a system not very different from the parliamentary democracy of Westminster. 30 When Zia al-Haqq seized power in a coup in 1977, established a dictatorship, and announced that Pakistan would follow Shariah law, he drew heavily on Maududi’s writings in his speeches. He also brought several senior Jamaat officials into his cabinet and employed thousands of Jamaat activists in the civil service, education, and the army. Shariah courts were established, and traditional Islamic penalties for alcohol, theft, prostitution, and adultery were introduced. By this time, Maududi was in failing health, and the current Jamaat leaders supported Zia’s military regime, regarding it as a promising beginning. But Maududi had profound misgivings. How could a dictatorship, which usurped God’s sovereignty and ruled with martial and structural violence, be truly Islamic? Shortly before his death, he penned a brief note to this effect: The implementation of Islamic laws alone cannot yield the positive result Islam really aims at.... For, merely by dint of this announcement [of Islamic laws] you cannot kindle the hearts of the people with the light of faith, enlighten their minds with the teachings of Islam, and mold their habits and manners corresponding to the virtues of Islam. 31 Future generations of Muslim activists would have done well to heed this lesson. Western modernity had conferred two blessings in the places it was first conceived: political independence and technical innovation. But in the Middle East, modernity arrived as colonial subjugation, and there was little potential for innovation, with the West so far ahead that Muslims could only imitate. 32 The unwelcome changes, imposed as foreign imports from without, were uncongenially abrupt. A process that had taken centuries in Europe had to be effected in a matter of decades, superficially and often violently. The almost insuperable problems faced by modernizers had already become clear in the career of Muhammad Ali (1769–1849).

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

  Adolphus is often presented as the hero of the Protestant cause, but he did not mention religion in his declaration of intent in June 1630 and found it difficult at first to attract allies. 95 The most powerful German Protestant princes saw the Swedish invasion as a threat and formed a third party, holding aloof from both the Swedes and the Habsburgs. When Lutheran German peasants tried to drive the Lutheran Swedes out of their country in November 1632, they were simply massacred. 96 Eventually, however, after Adolphus’s first victory over the Catholic League of German princes at Magdeburg in 1631, many territories that had tried to remain neutral joined the Swedish offensive. Inadequate methods of financing, supplying, and controlling the troops meant that Swedish soldiers resorted to looting the countryside, killing huge numbers of civilians. 97 The mass casualties of the Thirty Years’ War can partly be attributed to the use of mercenary armies who had to provision themselves and could only do so by brutally sacking civilian populations, abusing women and children, and slaughtering their prisoners. Catholic France had come to the rescue of the Protestant Swedes in January 1631, promising to supply their campaign, and later dispatched troops to fight the imperial forces in the winter of 1634–35. They received the backing of Pope Urban VIII, who wanted to weaken Habsburg control of the Papal States in Italy. To counter the combined Swedish, French, and papal alliance, the Protestant principalities of Brandenburg and Saxony were reconciled with the Catholic emperor at the Peace of Prague (1635), and within a few months most of the Lutheran states also made peace with Ferdinand. The Protestant armies were absorbed into the imperial forces, and German Catholics and Protestants fought together against the Swedes. The rest of the Thirty Years’ War now became largely a struggle between Catholic France and the Catholic Habsburgs. Neither could achieve a decisive victory, and after a long, enervating struggle, treaties were signed, known collectively as the Peace of Westphalia (1648), which left the Austrian Habsburgs in control of their hereditary lands and the Swedes in possession of Pomerania, Bremen, and the Baltic region. Prussia emerged as the leading German Protestant state, and France gained much of the Alsace. Finally Calvinism became a licit religion in the Holy Roman Empire. 98 By the end of the Thirty Years’ War, Europeans had fought off the danger of imperial rule. There would never be a large unified empire on the Persian, Roman, or Ottoman model; instead, Europe would be divided into smaller states, each claiming sovereign power in its own territory, each supported by a standing, professional army and governed by a prince who aspired to absolute rule—a recipe, perhaps, for chronic interstate warfare. “Religious” sentiments were certainly present in the minds of those who fought these wars, but to imagine that “religion” was yet distinguishable from the social, economic, and political issues is essentially anachronistic.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  There was, however, an undercurrent of anxiety in P. The legislation surrounding leprosy, discharge, and menstruation, inspired by a fear of the body’s walls being breached, revealed the displaced community’s concern to establish clear boundaries. P’s evocation of a world in which everything had its place sprang from the trauma of dislocation. The national integrity of the exiles had been violated by a ruthless display of imperial power. The great achievement of the exilic priests and prophets had been the avoidance of a religion based on resentment and revenge, and the creation of a spirituality that affirmed the holiness of all life. At the beginning of the sixth century, the social crisis that had disrupted many of the poleis in the Greek world finally hit Athens. The farmers in the rural areas of Attica complained of exploitation and banded together against the aristocrats. Civil war seemed inevitable. The noblemen were vulnerable: they were not united, had no army or police force at their disposal, and many of the farmers were trained hoplites, and therefore armed and dangerous. The only way out of the impasse was to find an impartial mediator who could arbitrate fairly between the contending parties. Athens chose Solon, and in 594 appointed him city magistrate, with a mandate to reform the constitution. Solon belonged to the circle of independent intellectuals who gave advice to various poleis during crises. At first they had been consulted on purely practical matters: the economy, unemployment, or bad harvests. But increasingly, the “wise men” had started to consider more abstract, political issues. Solon had traveled widely in Greece, and in his discussions with other members of the circle had considered the besetting problems of the polis. He told Athenians that they were living in dysnomia (“disorder”) and heading for disaster. Their only hope was to create eunomia (“right order”) by returning to the norms that had originally governed Greek society. Farmers were essential to the polis, both as hoplites and as producers of wealth. By attempting to suppress them, the aristocrats had created an unhealthy imbalance in society that could only be self-destructive.

• From Cultish (2021)

  I just think I want someone to tell me how to live my life.” Following a guru who provides an identity template—from one’s politics to one’s hairstyle—eases that chooser’s paradox. This concept can be applied to spiritual extremists like Scientologists and 3HO members, but also to loyalists of social media celebrities and “cult brands” like Lululemon or Glossier. Just being able to say “I’m a Glossier girl” or “I follow Dr. Joe Dispenza” (a dubious self- help star we’ll meet in part 6) softens the burden and responsibility of having to make so many independent choices about what you think and who you are. It cuts the overwhelming number of answers you need to have down to a manageable few. You can simply ask, “What would a Glossier girl do?” And base your day’s decisions—your perfume, your news sources, all of it—on that framework. The tide of change away from mainstream establishments and toward nontraditional groups is not at all new. It’s something we’ve seen all over the world at several different junctures in human history. Society’s attraction to so- called cults (both the propensity to join them and the anthropological fascination with them) tends to thrive during periods of broader existential questioning. Most alternative religious leaders come to power not to exploit their followers, but instead to guide them through social and political turbulence. Jesus of Nazareth (you may be familiar) arose during what is said to be the most fraught time in Middle Eastern history (a fact which speaks for itself). The violent, encroaching Roman Empire left people searching for a nonestablishment guide who could inspire and protect them. Fifteen hundred years later, during the tempestuous European Renaissance, dozens of “cults” cropped up in rebellion against the Catholic Church. In seventeenth-century India, fringe groups grew out of the social discord that resulted from the shift to agriculture, and then as a reaction to British imperialism. Compared to other developed nations, the US boasts a particularly consistent relationship with “cults,” which speaks to our brand of distinctly American tumult. Across the world, levels of religiosity tend to be lowest in countries with the highest standards of living (strong education levels, long life expectancies), but the US is exceptional in that it’s both highly developed and full of believers —even with all our “Nones” and “Remixed.” This inconsistency can be explained in part because while citizens of other advanced nations, like Japan and Sweden, enjoy a bevy of top-down resources, including universal healthcare and all sorts of social safety nets, the US is more of a free-for-all. “The Japanese and the Europeans know their governments will come to their aid in their hour of need,” wrote Dr. David Ludden, a language psychologist at Georgia Gwinnett College, for Psychology Today.

• From The Diary of a Young Girl (The Definitive Edition) (2020)

  Invasion fever is mounting daily throughout the country. If you were here, I’m sure you’d be as impressed as I am at the many preparations, though you’d no doubt laugh at all the fuss we’re making. Who knows, it may all be for nothing! The papers are full of invasion news and are driving everyone insane with such statements as: “In the event of a British landing in Holland, the Germans will do what they can to defend the country, even flooding it, if necessary.” They’ve published maps of Holland with the potential flood areas marked. Since large portions of Amsterdam were shaded in, our first question was what we should do if the water in the streets rose to above our waists. This tricky question elicited a variety of responses: “It’ll be impossible to walk or ride a bike, so we’ll have to wade through the water.” “Don’t be silly. We’ll have to try and swim. We’ll all put on our bathing suits and caps and swim underwater as much as we can, so nobody can see we’re Jews.” “Oh, baloney! I can just imagine the ladies swimming with the rats biting their legs!” (That was a man, of course; we’ll see who screams loudest!) “We won’t even be able to leave the house. The warehouse is so unstable it’ll collapse if there’s a flood.” “Listen, everyone, all joking aside, we really ought to try and get a boat.” “Why bother? I have a better idea. We can each take a packing crate from the attic and row with a wooden spoon.” “I’m going to walk on stilts. I used to be a whiz at it when I was young.” “Jan Gies won’t need to. He’ll let his wife ride piggyback, and then Miep will be on stilts.” So now you have a rough idea of what’s going on, don’t you, Kit? This lighthearted banter is all very amusing, but reality will prove otherwise. The

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  thus leading to breakaway movements. Prophecy has, in fact, become the characteristic form of Christianity in Africa, the only large area (apart from Latin America) where Christian missions were faced not with other imperial cults but with primitive pagan religions which could be overborne. Christianity is thus making headway in Africa, but in ways which the official Christian churches find disturbing or even horrific. The history of separatist native Christian churches in Africa now goes back nearly a century, to the Native Baptist Church (1888) organized in West Africa by David Vincent. The motive was, from the start, independence from white-controlled churches, and the emotional framework was nationalist and racialist. Vincent renamed himself Mojola Agbebi, and he wrote: ‘. . . when no bench of foreign bishops, no conclave of cardinals lord over Christian Africa, when the Captain of Salvation, Jesus Christ himself, leads the Ethiopian host, and when our Christianity ceases to be London-ward and New York-ward, but Heaven-ward, then will be an end to Privy Councils, Governors, Colonels, Annexations, Displacements, Partitions, Cessions and Coercions.’ Vincent defended secret societies, human sacrifice and cannibalism, and he was plainly anxious to bring about a Christian absorption of African customs; but he was not strictly speaking prophetic since he did not claim a personal revelation. The Liberian episcopalian, William Wade Harris, did. He appeared on the French Ivory Coast about 1914, preaching orthodox morality but claiming a direct line to the Deity and urging immediate repentance, rather like John the Baptist. A French observer, Captain Marty, described him as ‘an impressive figure, adorned with a white beard, of magnificent stature, clothed in white, his head enturbaned with a cloth of the same colour, wearing a black stole; in his hand a high cross and on his belt a calabash containing dried seeds, which he shakes to keep rhythm for his hymns.’ The Prophet Harris was immensely successful, and set a completely new pattern for African Christianity. He himself did not attempt to found a personal church, and the orthodox Baptists were the beneficiaries of his converts when he disappeared. But those who followed in his wake had higher ambitions, or less altruistic ones. In the 1920s, Isiah Shembe created the black Nazarite Church, which flourished near Durban in South Africa, and from this point native churches multiplied. Christian native charismatics often fell foul of the colonial authorities. The Congolese baptist Simon Kimbangu, creator of the Church of Christ on Earth, which now has over three million members and is affiliated to the

• From Anxious: Using the Brain to Understand and Treat Fear and Anxiety (2015)

  Self-report is often used in research on consciousness in general, 16 as well as in studies of fear and anxiety in particular, 17 including fear and anxiety disorders. 18 Again, as Rachman noted, self-report is “definitional and essential.” Thus, feelings, being conscious experiences, can be studied experimentally using information-processing approaches such as those that explore the role of attention and working memory in consciousness (Lang, in fact, turned to an information-processing perspective in his later work 19 ). We also know that the discordance between what one says about one’s feelings and how one’s body is reacting in the face of a threat is a natural consequence of brain organization. Bodily responses are products of survival circuits that operate nonconsciously, and working memory, which is crucial to self-reports about consciousness, does not have direct, inside-the-brain access to the implicit systems that control these responses. 20 Working memory acquires information about these states indirectly, by monitoring their noticeable consequences. A verbal report about the way one feels is thus not just another measure. The essence of an emotion like anxiety is, as Freud said, “that we should feel it” (see Chapter 1 ) and conscious states are best assessed via verbal reports. As I’ve argued throughout this book, nonreportable nonconscious factors that contribute to anxiety should not be equated with the conscious experience of anxiety. They are part of the brain’s means of coping with challenges and opportunities, a capacity that, as I’ve noted, has ancient biological roots and is not in the brain to make conscious fear or anxiety. Efforts to redefine fear and anxiety in nonsubjective terms (e.g., as behavioral or physiological responses or nonconscious central states) have complicated and, in fact, impeded the goal of understanding what fear and anxiety really are. 21 The default meanings of mental-state terms like “fear” and “anxiety,” which are borrowed from common usage, will always be the mental state (i.e., phenomenal, subjective, conscious) meaning—the actual feeling of fear or anxiety. When such terms are used as labels for nonconscious states or responses for scientific purposes, it is all too easy to unwittingly slip from talking about fear and anxiety in nonconscious terms to talking about conscious feelings. This leads to confusion about what is meant when fear and anxiety are discussed among scientists and also when scientists communicate with nonscientists; scientists have to guard against these conceptual slippages, which are so natural that they often go unnoticed. 22 More important, they can also lead to research that purports to be about anxiety but turns out to be about something controlled separately in the brain (e.g., defense responses). Scientists have an obligation to communicate their work in a clear and accurate way, even if it is less sexy.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  The villa was older than the streets of the Puerto, though much grass grew between their venerable cobbles. It was older than the oldest villas on the hill, the hill that was known as old Orotava, though their green latticed shutters were bleached by the suns of innumerable semi-tropical summers. It was so old indeed, that no peasant could have told you precisely when it had come into being; the records were lost, if they had ever existed—for its history one had to apply to its owner. But then its owner was always in Spain, and his agent who kept the place in repair, was too lazy to bother himself over trifles. What could it matter when the first stone was laid, or who laid it? The villa was always well let—he would yawn, roll a cigarette in his fingers, lick the paper with the thick, red tip of his tongue, and finally go to sleep in the sunshine to dream only of satisfactory commissions. The Villa del Ciprés was a low stone house that had once been tinted a lemon yellow. Its shutters were greener than those on the hill, for every ten years or so they were painted. All its principal windows looked over the sea that lay at the foot of the little headland. There were large, dim rooms with rough mosaic floors and walls that were covered by ancient frescoes. Some of these frescoes were primitive but holy, others were primitive but distinctly less holy; however, they were all so badly defaced, that the tenants were spared what might otherwise have been rather a shock at the contrast. The furniture, although very good of its kind, was sombre, and moreover it was terribly scanty, for its owner was far too busy in Seville to attend to his villa in Orotava. But one glory the old house did certainly possess; its garden, a veritable Eden of a garden, obsessed by a kind of primitive urge towards all manner of procreation. It was hot with sunshine and the flowing of sap, so that even its shade held a warmth in its greenness, while the virile growth of its flowers and its trees gave off a strangely disturbing fragrance. These trees had long been a haven for birds, from the crested hoopoes to the wild canaries who kept up a chorus of song in the branches. 2 Stephen and Mary arrived at the Villa del Ciprés, not very long after Christmas.