Contempt

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)

  They all claimed to lay aside the abstruse metaphysics of Plato and Aristotle and go back to Socrates, who had tried to teach men how to live. They wanted the peace of mind that Socrates had possessed when he had faced his unjust death with equanimity. They were also popularizers like Socrates, who had talked to everybody, learned and uneducated alike. But Socrates had never claimed that a human being’s sole aim should be to eliminate disturbance. Zeno, Epicurus, and Pyrrho all wanted a quiet life and were determined to avoid the extremity and striving of the great Axial philosophers. They simply wanted ataraxia, to be trouble-free. The Axial sages all pointed out that existence was inherently unsatisfactory and painful, and wanted to transcend this suffering. But they were not content merely to avoid distress and stop caring about anything or anybody; they had insisted that salvation lay in facing up to suffering, not retreating into denial. In Epicurus’s sequestered Garden, there is more than a hint of the Buddha’s pleasure park. The similarity becomes more pointed when we reflect that most Epicureans had private means to finance their retreat, which would not have been available to the hoi polloi. Instead of seeking ataraxia, the Axial thinkers had forced their contemporaries to accept the reality of pain. Jeremiah had denounced those who retreated into denial as “false prophets.” The tragedians of Athens had put suffering onstage and commanded the audience to weep. You could achieve liberation only by going through sorrow, not by going to elaborate lengths to make sure that it never impinged on your protected existence. The experience of dukkha was a prerequisite for enlightenment, because it enabled the aspirant to empathize with the grief of others. But the Hellenistic philosophies were entirely focused on the self. True, the Stoics were urged to take part in public life and work generously for the good of others. But they were not allowed to empathize with the people they served, because that would disturb their equilibrium. This cold self-sufficiency was alien to the Axial Age. Friendship and kindness were crucial to Epicurus’s commune, but they were not extended outside the Garden. And however kindly intentioned, there was more than a hint of aggression in the Skeptics’ therapy, as they went around picking arguments with other people in order to undermine their convictions. The approach was markedly different from that of the Buddha and Socrates, who always started from where their interlocutors actually were, not where they thought they ought to be. Many Axial thinkers were mistrustful of pure logos and reason, but the Hellenistic philosophies were based on science rather than intuition. Epicurus, for example, developed the atomism of Democritus to show that it was a waste of the precious lives we had to fear death, which would inevitably occur when the atoms fell apart.

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

  Then Mrs. van D. really flies off the handle: “You should have been at our house, where children were brought up the way they should be. I don’t call this a proper upbringing. Anne is terribly spoiled. I’d never allow that. If Anne were my daughter. ..” This is always how her tirades begin and end: “If Anne were my daughter. . .” Thank goodness I’m not. But to get back to the subject of raising children, yesterday a silence fell after Mrs. van D. finished her little speech. Father then replied, “I think Anne is very well brought up. At least she’s learned not to respond to your interminable sermons. As far as the vegetables are concerned, all I have to say is look who’s calling the kettle black.” Mrs. van D. was soundly defeated. The pot calling the ketde black refers of course to Madame herself, since she can’t tolerate beans or any kind of cabbage in the evening because they give her “gas.” But I could say the same. What a dope, don’t you think? In any case, let’s hope she stops talking about me. It’s so funny to see how quickly Mrs. van Daan flushes. I don’t, and it secredy annoys her no end. Yours, Anne MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 28,1942 Dearest Kitty, I had to stop yesterday, though I was nowhere near finished. I’m dying to tell you about another one of our clashes, but before I do I’d like to say this: I think it’s odd that grown-ups quarrel so easily and so often and about such petty matters. Up to now I always thought bickering was just something children did and that they outgrew it. Often, of course, there’s sometimes a reason to have a real quarrel, but the verbal exchanges that take place here are just plain bickering. I should be used to the fact that these squabbles are daily occurrences, but I’m not and never will be as long as I’m the subject of nearly every discussion.

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

  The Byzantine literature presents a vast mass of learning without an animating, controlling and organizing genius. "The Greeks of Constantinople," says Gibbon,768 with some rhetorical exaggeration, "held in their lifeless hands the riches of the fathers, without inheriting the spirit which had created and improved that sacred patrimony: they read, they praised, they compiled; but their languid souls seemed alike incapable of thought and action. In the revolution of ten centuries, not a single discovery was made to exalt the dignity or promote the happiness of mankind. Not a single idea has been added to the speculative systems of antiquity; and a succession of patient disciples became in their turn the dogmatic teachers of the next servile generation. Not a single composition of history, philosophy or literature has been saved from oblivion by the intrinsic beauties of style or sentiment, of original fancy, and even of successful imitation .... The leaders of the Greek church were humbly content to admire and copy the oracles of antiquity, nor did the schools or pulpit produce any rivals of the fame of Athanasius and Chrysostom." The theological controversies developed dialectical skill, a love for metaphysical subtleties, and an over-estimate of theoretical orthodoxy at the expense of practical piety. The Monotheletic controversy resulted in an addition to the christological creed; the iconoclastic controversy determined the character of public worship and the relation of religion to art. The most gifted Eastern divines were Maximus Confessor in the seventh, John of Damascus in the eighth, and Photius in the ninth century. Maximus, the hero of Monotheletism, was an acute and profound thinker, and the first to utilize the pseudo-Dyonysian philosophy in support of a mystic orthodoxy. John of Damascus, the champion of image-worship, systematized the doctrines of the orthodox fathers, especially the three great Cappadocians, Basil, Gregory of Nazianzum, and Gregory of Nyssa, and produced a monumental work on theology which enjoys to this day the same authority in the Greek church as the "Summa" of Thomas Aquinas in the Latin. Photius, the antagonist of Pope Nicolas, was the greatest scholar of his age, who read and digested with independent judgment all ancient heathen and Christian books on philology, philosophy, theology, canon law, history, medicine, and general literature. In extent of information and fertility of pen he had a successor in Michael Psellus (d. 1106).

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  Sadly, we know next to nothing about either the Harappans or their religion, even though there are tantalizing hints that some religious cults that would become very important after the Axial Age may have derived from the Indus Valley civilization. Archaeologists have found figurines of a Mother Goddess, stone lingams, and three stamp seals depicting a figure sitting, surrounded by animals, in what looks like the yogic position. Was this the god Shiva? In classical Hinduism, Shiva is lord of animals and a great yogin, but he is not an Aryan deity and is never mentioned in the Sanskrit Vedas. In the absence of any hard evidence, we cannot prove continuity. By the time the first Aryans arrived in the region, the Harappan empire had practically disappeared, but there may have been squatters in the ruined cities. There could have been overlap and interchange, and some of the Aryans may have adopted elements of the local faith and merged it with their own. The Aryan immigrants had no desire to rebuild the ancient cities and revivify the empire. Always on the move themselves, they looked down on the security of settled life and opted for yoga, the “yoking” of their horses to the chariots at the beginning of a raid. Unlike the Zoroastrians, they had no interest in a quiet, peaceful existence. They loved their war chariots and powerful bronze swords; they were cowboys, who earned their living by stealing their neighbors’ livestock. Because their lives depended on cattle rustling, it was more than a sport; it was also a sacred activity with rituals that gave it an infusion of divine power. The Indian Aryans wanted a dynamic religion; their heroes were the trekking warrior and the chariot fighter. Increasingly, they found the asuras*2 worshiped by Zoroaster boring and passive. How could anybody be inspired by an asura like Varuna, who simply sat around in his celestial palace, ordering the world from a safe distance? They much preferred the adventurous devas, “who drove on wheels, while the asuras sat at home in their halls.”32

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

  Thus while the ruler and the military lived by the “extraordinary,” the Confucians promoted the predictable, routinized orthodoxy of wen, the civil order based on benevolence (ren), culture, and rational persuasion. They performed the invaluable task of convincing the public that the emperor really had their interests at heart. They were not mere lackeys—many of the ru were executed for reminding the emperor too forcibly of his moral duty—but their power was limited. When Dong Zhongshu objected that the imperial usurpation of land caused immense misery, Emperor Wu seemed to agree, but ultimately Dong had to compromise, settling for a moderate limitation of land tenure.125 The fact was that while the administrators and bureaucrats championed Confucianism, the rulers themselves preferred the Legalists, who despised the Confucians as impractical idealists; in their view, King Zhao of Qin had said it all: “The ru are no use in running a state.” In 81 BCE, in a series of debates about the monopoly of salt and iron, the Legalists argued that the uncontrolled, private “free enterprise” advocated by the ru was wholly impractical.126 The Confucians were nothing but a bunch of impoverished losers: See them now present us with nothing and consider it substance, with “emptiness” and call it plenty! In their coarse gowns and cheap sandals they walk gravely along, sunk in meditation as though they had lost something. These are not men who can do great deeds and win fame. They do not even rise above the vulgar masses.127 The ru could therefore only bear witness to an alternative society. The word ru is related etymologically to ruo (“mild”), but some modern scholars argue that it meant “weakling” and was first used in the sixth century to describe the impoverished shi who had eked out a meager living by teaching.128 In imperial China, Confucians were political “softies,” economically and institutionally weak.129 They could keep the benevolent Confucian alternative alive and make it a presence in the heart of government, but they would always lack the “teeth” to push their policies through.

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

  Amalarius was a deacon and priest in Metz, and died in 837, as abbot of Hornbach in the same diocese. It is not known when or where he was born. During the deposition of Agobard (833–837), Amalarius was head of the church at Lyons. He was one of the ecclesiastics who enjoyed the friendship of Louis the Pious, and took part in the predestination controversy, but his work against Gottschalk, undertaken at Hincmar’s request, is lost. He was prominent in councils. Thus he made the patristic compilation from the Fathers (particularly from Isidore of Seville) and councils upon the canonical life, which was presented at the Diet at Aix-la-Chapelle in 817,1166 and partly that upon image-worship in the theological congress of Paris, presented Dec. 6, 825. In 834, as representative of Agobard, he held a council at Lyons and discoursed to the members for three days upon the ecclesiastical offices, as explained in his work mentioned below. The majority approved, but Florus of Lyons did not, and sent two letters to the council at Diedenhofen, calling attention to Amalarius insistence upon the use of the Roman order and his dangerous teaching: that there was a threefold body of Christ, (1) the body which he had assumed, (2) the body which he has in us so long as we live, (3) the body which is in the dead. Hence the host must be divided into three parts, one of which is put in the cup, one on the paten and one on the altar, corresponding to these three forms respectively. Farther he was charged with teaching that the bread of the Eucharist stood for the body, the wine for the soul of Christ, the chalice for his sepulchre, the celebrant for Joseph of Arimathea, the archdeacon for Nicodemus, the deacons for the apostles, the sub-deacons for the women at the sepulchre. But the council had business in hand of too pressing a character to admit of their investigating these charges. Not discouraged, Florus sent a similar letter to the council of Quiercy (838), and by this council the work of Amalarius was censured.1167 His writings embrace (1) Rules for the canonical life,1168 already referred to. It treats of the duties of ecclesiastics of all grades.

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

  The king, hard pressed by the rebellious Saxons, at first yielded, and dismissed the five counsellors; but, as soon as he had subdued the rebellion (June 5, 1075), he recalled them, and continued to practice shameful simony. He paid his soldiers from the proceeds of Church property, and adorned his mistresses with the diamonds of sacred vessels. The pope exhorted him by letter and deputation to repent, and threatened him with excommunication. The king received his legates most ungraciously, and assumed the tone of open defiance. Probably with his knowledge, Cencius, a cousin of the imperial prefect in Rome, shamefully maltreated the pope, seized him at the altar the night before Christmas, 1075, and shut him up in a tower; but the people released him and put Cencius to flight. Henry called the bishops and abbots of the empire to a council at Worms, under the lead of Archbishop Siegfried of Mainz, Jan. 24, 1076. This council deposed Gregory without giving him even a hearing, on the ground of slanderous charges of treason, witchcraft, covenant with the devil, and impurity, which were brought against him by Hugo Blancus (Hugh Leblanc), a deposed cardinal. It was even asserted that he ruled the Church by a senate of women, Beatrix, Matilda of Tuscany, and Agnes, the emperor’s mother. Only two bishops dared to protest against the illegal proceeding. The Ottos and Henry III. had deposed popes, but not in such a manner. Henry secured the signatures of the disaffected bishops of Upper Italy at a council in Piacenza. He informed Gregory of the decree of Worms in an insulting letter: — "Henry, king, not by usurpation, but by God’s holy ordinance, to Hildebrand, not pope, but a false monk. How darest thou, who hast won thy power through craft, flattery, bribery, and force, stretch forth thy hand against the Lord’s anointed, despising the precept of the true pope, St. Peter: ’Fear God, honor the king?’ Thou who dost not fear God, dishonorest me whom He has appointed. Condemned by the voice of all our bishops, quit the apostolic chair, and let another take it, who will preach the sound doctrine of St. Peter, and not do violence under the cloak of religion. I, Henry, by the grace of God, king, with all my bishops, say unto thee, Come down, come down!"67

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

  Qin had arguably developed the first secular state ideology, but Shang separated religion from politics, not because of its inherent violence but because religion was impracticably humane. Religious sentiment would make a ruler too benign, which ran counter to the state’s best interests. “A State that uses good people to govern the wicked will be plagued by disorder and be destroyed,” Shang insisted. “A state that uses the wicked to govern the good always enjoys peace and becomes strong.” 105 Instead of practicing the Golden Rule, a military commander should inflict on the enemy exactly what he did not wish for his own troops. 106 Unsurprisingly, Qin’s success was deeply troubling to the Confucians. Xunzi (c. 310–219), for example, believed that a ruler who governed by ren would be an irresistible force for good and his compassion would transform the world. He would take up arms only “to put an end to violence, and to do away with harm, not in order to compete with others for spoil. Therefore when the soldiers of the benevolent man encamp they command a godlike respect; and where they pass, they transform the people.” 107 But his pupil Li Si laughed at him: Qin was the most powerful state in China, because it had the strongest army and economy; it owed its success not to ren but to its opportunism. 108 During Xunzi’s visit to Qin, King Zhao told him bluntly: “The Confucians [ ru ] are no use in running a state.” 109 Shortly afterward Qin conquered Xunzi’s native state of Zhao, and even though the Zhao king surrendered, Qin troops buried 400,000 of his soldiers alive. How could a junzi exert any restraining influence over such a regime? Xunzi’s pupil Li Si now emigrated to Qin, became its prime minister, and masterminded the lightning campaign that resulted in Qin’s final victory and the establishment of the Chinese Empire in 221 BCE. Paradoxically, the Legalists drew on the same pool of ideas and spoke the same language as the Daoists. They also believed that the king should “do nothing” ( wu wei ) to interfere with the Dao of the Law, which should run like a well-oiled machine. The people would suffer if the laws kept changing, maintained the Legalist Han Feizi (c.

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

  But modern “religion” would try to subvert this natural dynamic by turning the seeker in upon himself, and inevitably, many would rebel against this unnatural privatization of their faith. Unable to extend the natural human rights they were establishing to the indigenous peoples of the New World, the Renaissance humanists had already revealed the insidious underside of early modern ideas that still inform our political life. Locke, who was among the first to formulate the liberal ethos of modern politics, also revealed the darker aspect of the secularism he proposed. A pioneer of tolerance, he was adamant that the sovereign state could not accommodate either Catholicism or Islam; 118 he endorsed a master’s “Absolute, Arbitrary, Despotical Power” over a slave that included “the power to kill him at any time.” Himself directly involved in the colonization of the Carolinas, Locke argued that the native “kings” of America had no legal jurisdiction or right of ownership of their land. Like the urbane Thomas More, he found it intolerable that the “wild woods and uncultivated waste of America be left to nature, without any improvement, tillage and husbandry,” when it could be used to support the “needy and wretched” of Europe. 119 A new system of violent oppression was emerging that would privilege the liberal, secular West at the expense of the indigenous peoples of its colonies. On the issue of colonization, most early modern thinkers agreed with Locke. Grotius contended that any military action against the natives was just because they had no legal claim to their territory. 120 Hobbes believed that because they had not developed an agrarian economy, the Native Americans—“few, savage, short-lived, poor and mean”—must relinquish their land. 121 And in a sermon delivered in London in 1622 to the Virginia Company, which had received a royal charter to settle all the terrain between what is now New York and South Carolina, John Donne, dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, argued that: “In the Law of Nature and Nations, a Land never inhabited by any or utterly derelicted and immemorially abandoned by the former Inhabitants, becomes theirs that will possess it.” 122 The colonists would take this belief with them to North America—but unlike these early modern thinkers, they had absolutely no intention of separating church and state. 11 Religion Fights Back D uring the twentieth century, there would be many attempts to resist the modern state’s banishment of religion to the private sphere. To committed secularists, these religious efforts seemed like so many efforts to turn the clock back, but in fact all were modern movements that could have flourished only in our own time. Indeed, some commentators have seen them as postmodern, since they represented a widespread dissatisfaction with many of the canons of modernity.

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

  This fearful catastrophe must have been before the mind of St. John in the Apocalypse when he wrote his funeral dirge of the downfall of imperial Rome (Apoc. 18). The cause of the conflagration is involved in mystery. Public rumor traced it to Nero, who wished to enjoy the lurid spectacle of burning Troy, and to gratify his ambition to rebuild Rome on a more magnificent scale, and to call it Neropolis.522 When the fire broke out he was on the seashore at Antium, his birthplace; he returned when the devouring element reached his own palace, and made extraordinary efforts to stay and then to repair the disaster by a reconstruction which continued till after his death, not forgetting to replace his partially destroyed temporary residence (domus transitoria) by "the golden house" (domus aurea), as a standing wonder of architectural magnificence and extravagance. The Persecution of the Christians. To divert from himself the general suspicion of incendiarism, and at the same time to furnish new entertainment for his diabolical cruelty, Nero wickedly

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  The turning point, even for the most blind, should have come on 30 June 1934, when the Nazi State carried out its mass-purge. Among those murdered were, for example, Dr Erich Klausener, General-Secretary of Catholic Action, Adalbert Probst, Director of the Catholic Sports Organization, Dr Fritz Gerlich, editor of a Munich Catholic weekly, and Father Bernard Stempfle, editor of an anti-semitic Bavarian newspaper; Hitler refused to hand over their bodies to relatives and had them cremated in defiance of Catholic teaching. But the Catholic bishops made no protest, no statement at all. Nor did the Evangelicals. What reaction there was was favourable. Dr Dietrich, Evangelical bishop of Nassau-Hessen, sent Hitler a telegram of ‘warmest thanks for the first rescue operation’, followed by a circular letter claiming that the blood-bath ‘demonstrated to the world’ the ‘unique greatness of the Führer’; ‘he has been sent to us by God’. The failure of the churches at this great turning-point, which demonstrated the essential criminality of the regime and opened the way for all the horrors ahead, proved Hitler was right in his estimate of organized Christianity in Germany. ‘Why should we quarrel?’ he asked. ‘They will swallow everything in order to keep their material advantages. Matters will never come to a head. They will recognise a firm will, and we need only show them once or twice who is the master.’ The churches were on Hitler’s pay-roll. Both Evangelicals and Catholics, as state churches, benefited from public taxation. Hitler pointed out, in a speech in January 1939, that the two churches were, after the State, the largest landowners in Nazi Germany, and that they had accepted state subsidies which rose from 130 million marks in 1933 to 500 million in 1938; during the war they further increased to over 1,000 million. In fact, both churches, in the main, gave massive support to the regime. The Catholic bishops welcomed ‘the new, strong stress on authority in the German state’; Bishop Bornewasser told the Catholic youth in Trier Cathedral: ‘With raised heads and firm step we have entered the new reich and we are prepared to serve it with all the might of our body and soul.’ In January 1934, Hitler saw twelve Evangelical leaders, and after this meeting they withdrew any support for the Pastors’ Emergency League and issued a communiqué which pledged ‘the leaders of the German Evangelical Church unanimously affirm their unconditional loyalty to the Third Reich and its leader. They most sharply condemn any intrigue or criticism against the state, the people or the [Nazi] movement, which are designed to endanger the Third Reich. In particular they deplore any activities on the part of the foreign press which

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  Lord Shang’s methodical, rational reform completely transformed daily life in Qin, which under his tutelage became a deadly efficient fighting machine. Conscription in the army and the corvée was compulsory, and the harsh discipline of army life was imposed on the whole country. Lord Shang’s most important innovation was to link agricultural production with the military. Successful peasant-soldiers became landowners and were given titles and pensions, while the old nobility was dismantled. Aristocrats who did not perform well on the battlefield were demoted and became commoners; those who did not participate efficiently in Shang’s ambitious land-clearance schemes were sold into slavery. Everybody was subject to the same laws: even the crown prince was executed when found guilty of a minor offense. Not only was Lord Shang unconcerned about the morality of the prince; he believed that a virtuous sage would make a disastrous king. “A state that uses good people to govern the wicked will be plagued by disorder and destroyed,” he declared. “A state that uses the wicked to govern the good always enjoys order and becomes strong.”7 The Confucians, who preached peace, were dangerous. If everybody practiced the li, they would become so moderate and restrained that a prince would never persuade anybody to fight. Lord Shang was openly contemptuous of the Golden Rule. A truly effective prince would inflict upon the enemy exactly what he would not wish to have done to his own troops. “If in war you perform what the enemy would not venture to perform, you will be strong,” he told his officials. “If in enterprises you undertake what the enemy would be ashamed to do, you have the advantage.”8 His draconian reforms were a great success. In 340, Qin inflicted a massive defeat on Wei, its major rival, and became a major contender for imperial power. Lord Shang had expected to receive a generous gift of land as a reward for his services, but instead he became a victim of the new ruthlessness. In 338, after the death of his royal patron, his rivals got the ear of the new prince, and Shang was ripped to pieces by the war chariots he had procured for Qin. But a new generation of Legalists would continue along the lines that he had mapped out, and other states began to follow Qin’s example.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  His reform, which flouted many of the major principles of the Axial Age, made the backward, isolated kingdom of Qin the most powerful and advanced state in China. At the end of the third century, as a result of Shang’s far-reaching measures, Qin would conquer all the other states, and in 221 its ruler would become the first historical emperor of China. Lord Shang felt no loyalty to past tradition. “When the guiding principles of the people become unsuited to their circumstances,” he argued, “their standard [ fa ] of value must change. As conditions in the world change, different principles are practised.” 4 It was no use dreaming of a golden age of compassionate sage kings. If people were more generous in the past, this was not because they had practiced ren, but because the population was smaller and there was enough food to go round. Similarly, the corruption and conflict of the Warring States period was not the result of dishonesty, but occurred simply because resources were scarce. 5 Instead of promoting nonviolence, Lord Shang wanted the people of Qin to be as eager for war and bloodshed as a hungry wolf. He had only one objective: “the enrichment of the state and the strengthening of its military capacity.” 6 To meet its targets, governments had to exploit the fear and greed of the population. Very few people wanted to expose themselves to the perils of modern warfare, but Shang devised such dire punishments for deserters that death on the battlefield seemed preferable. He also rewarded the outstanding military service of peasants and noblemen alike with a grant of agricultural land. Lord Shang’s methodical, rational reform completely transformed daily life in Qin, which under his tutelage became a deadly efficient fighting machine. Conscription in the army and the corvée was compulsory, and the harsh discipline of army life was imposed on the whole country. Lord Shang’s most important innovation was to link agricultural production with the military. Successful peasant-soldiers became landowners and were given titles and pensions, while the old nobility was dismantled. Aristocrats who did not perform well on the battlefield were demoted and became commoners; those who did not participate efficiently in Shang’s ambitious land-clearance schemes were sold into slavery. Everybody was subject to the same laws: even the crown prince was executed when found guilty of a minor offense. Not only was Lord Shang unconcerned about the morality of the prince; he believed that a virtuous sage would make a disastrous king. “A state that uses good people to govern the wicked will be plagued by disorder and destroyed,” he declared. “A state that uses the wicked to govern the good always enjoys order and becomes strong.” 7 The Confucians, who preached peace, were dangerous.

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

  "I found the outside to be composed entirely of spikes, all laid with symmetry, so as to present the points of the nails outward. In the centre of this mass was the nest, composed of finely-divided fibres of hemp-packing. Interlaced with the spikes were the following: about two dozen knives, forks, and spoons; all the butcher's knives, three in number; a large carving-knife, fork, and steel; several large plugs of tobacco, ... an old purse containing some silver, matches, and tobacco; nearly all the small tools from the tool-closets, with several large angers, ... all of which must have been transported some distance, as they were originally stored in different parts of the house....The outside casing of a silver watch was disposed of in one part of the pile, the glass of the same watch in another, and the works in still another."[400] In every lunatic asylum we find the collecting instinct developing itself in an equally absurd way. Certain patients will spend all their time picking pins from the floor and hoarding them. Others collect bits of thread, buttons, or rags, and prize them exceedingly. Now, 'the Miser' par excellence of the popular imagination and of melodrama, the monster of squalor and misanthropy, is simply one of these mentally deranged persons. His intellect may in many matters be clear, but his instincts, especially that of ownership, are insane, and their insanity has no more to do with the association of ideas than with the precession of the equinoxes. As a matter of fact his hoarding usually is directed to money; but it also includes almost anything besides. Lately in a Massachusetts town there died a miser who principally hoarded newspapers. These had ended by so filling all the rooms of his good-sized house from floor to ceiling that his living-space was restricted to a few narrow channels between them. Even as I write, the morning paper gives an account of the emptying of a miser's den in Boston by the City Board of Health. What the owner hoarded is thus described:

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

  children when it comes to external matters, while, inwardly, we’re much older than other girls our age. Even though I’m only fourteen, I know what I want, I know who’s right and who’s wrong, I have my own opinions, ideas and principles, and though it may sound odd coming from a teenager, I feel I’m more of a person than a child -- I feel I’m completely independent of others. I know I’m better at debating or carrying on a discussion than Mother, I know I’m more objective, I don’t exaggerate as much, I’m much tidier and better with my hands, and because of that I feel (this may make you laugh) that I’m superior to her in many ways. To love someone, I have to admire and respect the person, but I feel neither respect nor admiration for Mother! Everything would be all right if only I had Peter, since I admire him in many ways. He’s so decent and clever! Yours, Anne M. Frank SATURDAY, MARCH 18, 1944 Dearest Kitty, I’ve told you more about myself and my feelings than I’ve ever told a living soul, so why shouldn’t that include sex? Parents, and people in general, are very peculiar when it comes to sex. Instead of telling their sons and daughters everything at the age of twelve, they send the children out of the room the moment the subject arises and leave them to find out everything on their own. Later on, when parents notice that their children have, somehow, come by their information, they assume they know more (or less) than they actually do. So why don’t they try to make amends by asking them what’s what? A major stumbling block for the adults -- though in my opinion it’s no more than a pebble -- is that they’re afraid their children will no longer look upon marriage as sacred and pure once they realize that, in most cases, this purity is a lot of nonsense. As far as I’m concerned, it’s not wrong for a man to bring a little experience to a marriage. After all, it has nothing to do with the marriage itself, does it? Soon after I turned eleven, they told me about menstruation.

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

  In the end Doerr got nothing out of Google Glass except some publicity, but maybe that was the point all along. In the old days, Silicon Valley venture capitalists embraced a California version of clubby East Coast white-shoe culture. All of the top VC firms literally sit beside one another on the same street, a big boulevard called Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park. For decades these firms resembled snooty private gentlemen’s clubs—in the British upper class sense of the word. They were almost exclusively male and were run by former engineers who shunned publicity and quietly voted Republican. Today generating hype has become a central part of the venture capital business. There are so many new firms and so much new money floating around that VC firms feel pressure to raise their profile. They make kooky videos, just like start-ups. They hire publicists. They launch blogs and podcasts, and hire former journalists to run them. Every year only a handful of Silicon Valley companies deliver big paydays. If you’re a VC, you must have money parked in those companies. But getting into those deals is not so easy. Investors actually have to compete to get into hot deals. How do you get that entrepreneur to take your money? How do you stand out? You generate publicity. You have your picture taken wearing Google Glass and call yourself a visionary, someone who can “see around corners,” as they say in Silicon Valley. Even as valuations climb to record levels, you insist that you are not overpaying. “It’s not a bubble; it’s an unprecedented, long boom,” Doerr told Bloomberg in June 2015. Then again, Doerr is in the business of selling companies to the public markets. What do you expect him to say? Asking a venture capitalist if private companies are overvalued is like asking a car salesman if he thinks you’re paying too much for the new Mercedes he’s selling you. When it comes to getting publicity, Doerr is a piker compared to Andreessen. Think of Rodney Dangerfield’s character in Caddyshack —big and loud, throwing money around—and you get the idea of how Andreessen has elbowed his way into the clubby world of venture capital: by paying more than everyone else and drawing a lot of attention to himself. In 2009 Andreessen was just another guy with a new venture fund, albeit a guy with a famous name. Six years later he is probably the best known and arguably the most influential investor in Silicon Valley. “Guys running start-ups love him. They all want to meet him,” one Boston-based venture capitalist says. “Every time I meet with a start-up, the first question they ask me is, ‘Do you know Marc Andreessen? Can you introduce us to him?’ He’s like a rock star.” Says another venture capitalist: “If you take money from Andreessen Horowitz, your valuation doubles or triples just because they’re involved. Why?

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

  It was ironic that Bush announced the liberation of captives. In October 2003, the media published photographs of U.S. military police abusing Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib, Saddam’s notorious prison; later, almost identical cruelty was shown to have taken place in British-run prisons. These photographs were a cruder vision of the official U.S. media presentation of the Iraq War. Hooded, naked, writhing on the ground, the Iraqis were depicted as dehumanized, craven, bestial, and utterly dominated by America’s superior power. The cocky stance of the low-ranking GIs implied: “We are high, they are low; we are clean, they are dirty; we are strong and brave, they are weak and cowardly; we are lordly, they are virtually animals; we are God’s chosen, they are estranged from everything divine.”92 “The photos are us,” the late Susan Sontag declared. Nazis were not the only people to commit atrocities; Americans do so too, “when they are led to believe that the people they are torturing belong to an inferior, despicable race or religion.”93 Clearly the GIs saw nothing untoward in their behavior and had no fear of punishment. “It was just for fun,” said Private Lynndie England, who had appeared in the photographs walking a prisoner on a leash like a dog. They behaved in this way, the official investigation concluded, “simply because they could.”94 Within a month of Bush’s carrier speech, Iraq had descended into chaos. Most Iraqis gave no credence to Bush’s exalted rhetoric; instead they were convinced that the United States simply wanted their oil and intended to use their country as a military base from which to defend Israel. They may have been glad to get rid of Saddam, but they did not regard the American and British troops as liberators. “They’re walking over my heart,” said one Baghdad resident. “Liberate us from what?” demanded another. “We have [our own] traditions, morals, customs.”95 The Iraqi cleric Sheikh Muhammad Bashir complained that if the Americans had brought freedom to the country, it was not for the Iraqis: It is the freedom of occupying soldiers in doing what they like.… No one can ask them what they are doing, because they are protected by their freedom.… No one can punish them, whether in our country or in their country. They expressed the freedom of rape, the freedom of nudity, and the freedom of humiliation.96 The overwhelming 2004 U.S. assault on Fallujah, the iconic “city of mosques,” has been called the Arab 9/11: hundreds of civilians were killed and 200,000 made homeless. By the following year 24,000 civilians had been killed in Iraq and 70,000 injured.97 Instead of bringing peace to the region, the occupation inspired an insurgency of Iraqis and mujahidin from Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Jordan, who responded to this foreign invasion with the heretofore unusual technique of suicide bombing, eventually breaking the long-standing record of the Tamil Tigers.98

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

  For how great is the abyss between the mere sensation in the hand and the ideas of causality, materiality, and movement through Space, occurring in Time! The feeling in the hand, even with different contacts and positions, is something far too uniform and poor in content for it to be possible to construct out of it the idea of Space with its three dimensions, of the action of bodies on each other, with the properties of extension, impenetrability, cohesion, shape, hardness, softness, rest, and motion—in short, the foundations of the objective world. This is only possible through Space, Time, and Causality...being preformed in the Intellect itself, ... from whence it again follows that the perception of the external world is essentially an intellectual process, a work of the Understanding, to which sensation furnishes merely the occasion, and the data to be interpreted in each particular case." [273] I call this view mythological, because I am conscious of no such Kantian machine-shop in my mind, and feel no call to disparage the powers of poor sensation in this merciless way. I have no introspective experience of mentally producing or creating space. My space-intuitions occur not in two times but in one. There is not one moment of passive inextensive sensation, succeeded by another of active extensive perception, but the form I see is as immediately felt as the color which fins it out. That the higher parts of the mind come in, who can deny? They add and subtract, they compare and measure, they reproduce and abstract. They inweave the space-sensations with intellectual relations; but these relations are the same when they obtain between the elements of the space-system as when they obtain between any of the other elements of which the world is made. The essence of the Kantian contention is that there are not spaces, but Space—one infinite continuous Unit—and that our knowledge of this cannot be a piecemeal sensational affair, produced by summation and abstraction. To which the obvious reply is that, if any known thing bears on its front the appearance of piecemeal construction and abstraction, it is this very notion of the infinite unitary space of the world. It is a notion, if ever there was one; and no intuition. Most of us apprehend it in the barest symbolic abridgment: and if perchance we ever do try to make it more adequate, we just add one image of sensible extension to another until we are tired. Most of us are obliged to turn round and drop the thought of the space in front of us when we think of that behind. And the space represented as near to us seems more minutely subdivisible than that we think of as lying far away. The other prominent German writers on space are also 'psychical stimulists.'

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

  He created the world, and shall we liken ourselves unto Him in seeking to penetrate into the mysteries of His creation? Shall we say, Behold this star spinneth round that star, and this other star with a tail goeth and cometh in so many years! Let it go! He from whose hand it came will guide and direct it. "But thou wilt say unto me, Stand aside, O man, for I am more learned than thou art, and have seen more things. If thou thinkest that thou art in this respect better than I am, thou art welcome. I praise God that I seek not that which I require not. Thou art learned in the things I care not for; and as for that which thou has seen, I spit upon it. Will much knowledge create thee a double belly, or wilt thou seek Paradise with thine eyes? "O my friend! if thou wilt be happy, say, There is no God but God! Do no evil, and thus wilt thou fear neither man nor death; for surely thine hour will come! "The meek in spirit (El Fakir) ''IMAUM ALI ZADI." THE GENESIS OF THE PURE SCIENCES. I have now stated in general terms the relation of the natural sciences to experience strictly so called, and shall complete what I have to say by reverting to the subject on a later page. At present I will pass to the so-called pure or a priori sciences of Classification, Logic, and Mathematics. My thesis concerning these is that they are even less than the natural sciences effects of the order of the world as it comes to our experience. THE PURE SCIENCES EXPRESS RESULTS OF COMPARISON exclusively; comparison is not a conceivable effect of the order in which outer impressions are experienced—it is one of the house-born (p. 627) portions of our mental structure; therefore the pure sciences form a body of propositions with whose genesis experience has nothing to do. First, consider the nature of comparison. The relations of resemblance and difference among things have nothing to do with the time—and space-order in which we may experience the latter. Suppose a hundred beings created by God and gifted with the faculties of memory and comparison. Suppose that upon each of them the same lot of sensations are imprinted, but in different orders. Let some of them have no single sensation more than once. Let some have this one and others that one repeated.

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

  Again, you could take religion out of the state but not out of the nation. The army officers wanted to secularize but found themselves ruling devout nations for whom a secularized Islam was a contradiction in terms.37 Undeterred, these rulers declared war on the religious establishment. Following the aggressive methods of the French revolutionaries, Muhammad Ali had starved the clergy financially, taking away their tax exemption, confiscating the religiously endowed properties (awqaf) that were their principal source of income, and systematically robbing them of any shred of power.38 For the Egyptian ulema, modernity was forever tainted by this ruthless assault, and they became cowed and reactionary. Nasser changed tack and turned them into state officials. For centuries the ulema’s learned expertise had guided the people through the intricacies of Islamic law, but they had also stood as a protective bulwark between the people and the systemic violence of the state. Now the people came to despise them as government lackeys. This deprived them of responsible and expert religious authority that was aware of the complexity of the Islamic tradition. Self-appointed religious leaders and more simple-minded radicals would step into the breach, often to disastrous effect.39 Throughout the Muslim world, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881–1938), founder of the modern republic of Turkey, seemed to personify the violence of secularism. After the First World War, he had managed to keep the British and French out of Anatolia, the Ottoman heartland, so Turkey had the great advantage of avoiding colonization. Determined to deprive Islam of all legal, political, and economic influence, Atatürk is often admired in the West as an enlightened Muslim leader.40 In fact, he was a dictator who hated Islam, which he described as a “putrefied corpse.”41 He proceeded in the usual belligerent manner to outlaw the Sufi orders, seize their properties, shut down the madrassas, and appropriate the awqaf. Most important, he abolished Shariah law, replacing it with a legal code essentially adopted from Switzerland that was meaningless to most of the population.42 Finally, in 1925, Atatürk declared the caliphate null and void. It had long been a dead letter politically but had symbolized the unity of the ummah and its link with the Prophet; at this bleak moment in their history, Sunni Muslims everywhere experienced its loss as a spiritual and cultural trauma. Western approval of Atatürk led many to believe that the West sought to destroy Islam itself.