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

  2: Christ the Desire of all Nations, or the Unconscious Prophecies of Heathendom (a commentary on the star of the wise men, Matt. ii.). Cambr. 4th ed. 1854 (also 1850). L. Preller: Griechische Mythologie. Berlin, 1854, 3d ed. 1875, 2 vols. By the same; Römische Mythologie. Berlin, 1858; 3d ed., by Jordan, 1881–83, 2 vols. M. W. Heffter: Griech. und Röm. Mythologie. Leipzig, 1854. Döllinger: Heidenthum und Judenthum, quoted in § 8. C. Schmidt: Essai historique sur la societé civil dans le monde romain et sur sa transformation par le christianisme. Paris, 1853. C. G. Seibert: Griechenthum und Christenthum, oder der Vorhof des Schönen und das Heiligthum der Wahrheit. Barmen, 1857. Fr. Fabri: Die Entstehung des Heidenthums und die Aufgabe der Heidenmission. Barmen, 1859. W. E. Gladstone (the English statesman): Studies on Homer and Homeric Age. Oxf. 1858, 3 vols. (vol. ii. Olympus; or the Religion of the Homeric Age). The same: Juventus Mundi: the Gods and Men of the Heroic Age. 2d ed. Lond. 1870. (Embodies the results of the larger work, with several modifications in the ethnological and mythological portions.) W. S. Tyler (Prof. in Amherst Coll., Mass.): The Theology of the Greek Poets. Boston, 1867. B. F. Cocker: Christianity and Greek Philosophy; or the Relation between Reflective Thought in Greece and the Positive Teaching of Christ and his Apostles. N. York, 1870. Edm. Spiess: Logos spermaticós. Parallelstellen zum N. Text. aus den Schriften der alten Griechen. Ein Beitrag zur christl. Apologetik und zur vergleichenden Religionsforschung. Leipz. 1871. G. Boissier: La religion romaine d’Auguste aux Antonins. Paris, 1884, 2 vols. J Reville: La religion à Rome sous les Sévères. Paris, 1886. Comp. the histories of Greece by Thirlwall, Grote, and Curtius; the histories of Rome by Gibbon, Niebuhr, Arnold, Merivale, Schwegler, Ihne, Duruy (transl. from the French by W. J. Clarke), and Mommsen. Ranke’s Weltgeschichte. Th. iii. 1882. Schiller’s Gesch. der römischen Kaiserzeit. 1882. Heathenism is religion in its wild growth on the soil of fallen human nature, a darkening of the original consciousness of God, a deification of the rational and irrational creature, and a corresponding corruption of the moral sense, giving the sanction of religion to natural and unnatural vices.63 Even the religion of Greece, which, as an artistic product of the imagination, has been justly styled the religion of beauty, is deformed by this moral distortion. It utterly lacks the true conception of sin and consequently the true conception of holiness. It regards sin, not as a perverseness of will and an offence against the gods, but as a folly of the understanding and an offence against men, often even proceeding from the gods themselves; for "Infatuation," or Moral Blindness ( [Ath), is a "daughter of Jove," and a goddess, though cast from Olympus, and the source of all mischief upon earth. Homer knows no devil, but he put, a devilish element into his deities.

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

  For the people who are going to work in the sales department this process will be particularly brutal. The reps have high quotas, and if you fall short, you get cut. Most companies put sales reps on a quarterly or annual quota. At HubSpot the quotas are monthly, which means sales reps never come up for air. The sales department churns through these young hires. Bring them in, burn them out, toss them away, find new ones—that’s the model. In every aspect of life, we’re told, there is a HubSpotty way of doing things. Nobody can really explain what HubSpotty means, but it is a real word that people use, all the time. Some people are more HubSpotty than others. Some are 100 percent HubSpotty, possessed of a HubSpottiness that is so complete as to be beyond reproach. Those people “bleed orange.” Their ideas cannot be questioned. They can do pretty much anything they want. They are the HubSpot equivalent of a Level 8 Operating Thetan in Scientology. Newcomers are by definition not HubSpotty yet. We have to earn that designation, and it takes time. Nobody just comes in and gets accepted. A big part of establishing your HubSpottiness involves being relentlessly upbeat and positive. HubSpot is like a corporate version of Up with People, the inspirational singing group from the 1970s, but with a touch of Scientology. It’s a cult based around marketing. The Happy!! Awesome!! Start-up Cult, I began to call it. Instead of ID badges, the company gives out rubber ID bracelets with the HubSpot logo on them. The bracelets contain a transponder that unlocks doors into different parts of the office. It feels ridiculous and cultish to wear a special bracelet, but you can’t get anywhere without one. I’ve spent years writing incredibly over-the-top satire about the technology industry, inventing stories in which Steve Jobs possesses the power to hypnotize people just by staring at them, and depicting Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, California, as a crazy cult compound policed by rifle-toting public relations people and populated by brainwashed corporate zombies who speak their own private jargon and all truly believe they are doing incredibly important work, making the world a better place. Now I am encountering a real-life version of this, at a company in Kendall Square. It’s amazing. It’s the craziest, best thing ever. I love this place the way I love movies like Showgirls and Battlefield Earth and anything with Nicolas Cage—movies that are so bad you can’t believe they exist, yet you’re glad they do, movies that are so bad that they’re good. Five [image "image" file=Image00003.jpg] HubSpeakS o I can be the DRI on this, or Jan and I can be DRIs together, and we’ll coordinate with Courtney to work up some potential KPIs, and then we can all meet again in like a week or two and we’ll present some ideas and then we can develop an SLA.

• From The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures (2018)

  These efforts, generally known as social Darwinism, resulted in eugenic recommendations in Europe and in the United States. Later, during the Third Reich, biological facts were misinterpreted and applied to human societies with the goal of producing a radical sociocultural transformation. The result was a horrifying and massive extermination of specific human groups targeted because of their ethnic background or political and behavioral identity. Biology was unfairly but understandably blamed for this inhumane perversion. It would take decades for the relation between biology and cultures to become an acceptable subject of scholarship. 2 By the last quarter of the twentieth century and thereafter, sociobiology and the discipline it spawned, evolutionary psychology, have made a case not only for a biological perspective on the cultural mind but for the biological transmission of culture-related traits. 3 The latter efforts concentrated on the relationship between cultures and the genetic replication process. The fact that the worlds of feeling and reason are in endless interplay and that cultural ideas, objects, and practices are inevitably caught in their accommodations and contradictions has not been the focus of those efforts (although evolutionary psychologists have included the action component of the world of affect—such as emotions—in their proposals). The same applies to the topic I privilege in this book: the ways in which the cultural mind copes with human drama and exploits human possibilities, and the manner in which cultural selection completes the cultural mind’s job and complements the achievements of genetic transmission. I am not favoring affect and human drama, to the exclusion of other participants in the cultural process. I am simply focusing attention on affect—and feeling in particular—in the hope that it can be more clearly incorporated in accounts of the biology of cultures. To achieve this, I must insist on the role of homeostasis and of its conscious deputy—feeling—in the cultural process. In spite of all the historical forays of biology into the world of cultures, the notion of homeostasis, even in the conventional and narrow sense of life regulation, is absent from classical treatments of culture. As noted earlier, Talcott Parsons did mention homeostasis when he considered cultures from the perspective of systems, but in his account homeostasis was unrelated to feelings or to individuals. 4 How does one connect the state of homeostasis to the making of a cultural instrument capable of correcting a homeostatic deficit? As I suggested, the bridge is provided by feeling, a mental expression of the homeostatic state.

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

  Crunchbase, a website that tracks venture capital investments, lists Cranium as one of three participants in HubSpot’s Series A round of funding in 2007, the year he joined the company. Cranium believes he is a marketing genius. He has people surrounding him who believe that, too. But sometimes I wonder if Cranium knows what he’s doing. One of his ploys to get attention involves publishing an article on Mashable, a technology news site, with the provocative headline 10 REASONS WHY I IGNORED YOUR RESUME . In the article Cranium makes fun of the awful resumes he fields in his position as a world-famous marketing superstar. Cranium says people need to proofread their resumes, catch typos, and spell things correctly—but his article contains typos, and includes a reference to the actor Will Ferrell, but misspells his name as Will Farrell . Some readers post comments praising the article, but others savage Cranium, not only for the Will Ferrell mistake and typos, but for his snooty tone. “Would anyone want to work for HubSpot after the CMO writes something like this?” one person writes. “All the money in the world as payment would not be enough to work for this moron,” another commenter writes. “Someone has a power/ego problem,” says a third. Cranium perceives himself as being skilled at recruiting and hiring, yet turnover in his department is so high that people in other parts of HubSpot refer to the marketing department as “the French Revolution.” People are constantly being hired and fired, or “graduated,” as Cranium says in his emails to the group. I keep making friends, only to have them disappear. These “graduations” sometimes happen suddenly, with no warning. In my second week at HubSpot I have lunch with a woman named Bettina. She’s right out of college, working in her first job, and wants to write a book about marketing to Millennials. That night everyone in the department gets an email saying Bettina has “graduated” and will not be back in the morning. I email Bettina and ask why she never mentioned this at lunch. She tells me she didn’t know. Her boss just fired her, out of the blue, and told her to never come back. Usually, Cranium has other people do the firing for him, and he typically does not speak to the “graduates,” even in cases where the person being fired has spent years working in his department. Before my time, Cranium created a weekly video podcast called HubSpot TV, starring himself and a co-host. The show streamed live, every Friday afternoon. I can’t imagine many people outside HubSpot actually watched it. Cranium didn’t care! He and his co-host kept doing the podcast for four years and recorded 225 episodes. Those videos still exist online someplace. They are like a real-life version of the comedy done by Ricky Gervais in the British version of The Office , where the goal is not so much to make you laugh as to make you feel uncomfortable.

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

  The world "in disconnection dead and spiritless,., 1 0 or the world as seen through Blake ' s vegetative eye, has some affini ty with the Waste Land of Eliot. There is a continuing thread here, a critique of th e mechanistic and instrument al, as a way of seeing , and as a way of livi ng, and then as the very pri nciple of our social existence, which runs through an immense varie ty of differ e nt articu lations , interpretations, and suggested remedies. An allegiance to epiphanic an has almost invariably been accompanied by a strong hostility to t h e developing commercial-industrial-capitalist society, from Schiller to Marx t o M arcuse and Adorno; from Blake to Baudelaire to Pound and Eliot. But just speaking of the moral significance of epiphanic art leaves an important ambiguity unexamined. The relation to morality of the wholene ss or intensity it p r omises is very problematic. Already Schiller, in his famous Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, seems to offer two incompatibl e views of the relation of beauty to morality. On one view, play and the beauty it creates is an aid to the moral will. This will define s the content of h um an perfection, and beauty is an auxiliary, even though an indispensable one, in attaining this. 1 1 B ut another view is · constantly suggested through the wor k, and occasionally formulated: play and the aesthetic offer a higher fulfilm e n t than th e merely moral, because the moral only realizes one side of us, form and not matter, while beauty can make us whole, give us harmony an d freedom . 12 M orality her e is understood in the terms of the eighteenth centu ry, wh er e justice and benevolence, and the control of the desires by reason, constitu t e its essence. The new thought emerging in Schiller's text is that beauty mi gh t offer us a higher goal. At least on Schiller's version this woul d incorporate Visions of the Post-Romantic Age • 4 2. 3 morality and be fully compatible with it. The harm9nized, free being who p lays would spontaneously want to be good in the accepted senses; he would ju st have something more than the stern follower of duty. But the worrisome po ssibility is now open that this higher fulfilment might take us outside the received morality; i t might lead us to turn aside from it , as Pater feared; 13 or it might even demand that we repudiate it; as Nietzsche affirms of the e thic o f benevolence. The germ was t here in the new aesthetic which developed in the eighteenth century.

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  A PARADOXICAL POINT OF VIEWYour ability to probe the mysteries of the erotic mind insightfully—and to benefit from your discoveries—will be enhanced enormously if you consciously cultivate a stance toward the erotic that allows you to appreciate fully its rich complexity. The two predominant schools of thought in contemporary psychology—which I call the pathological and the neat-and-clean—have unwittingly limited our understanding of eroticism at least as much as they have advanced it. These two viewpoints extend way beyond psychology, permeating modern attitudes in countless ways. EMPHASIZING PATHOLOGYThe pathology perspective is by far the older and more deeply entrenched. Freud and his psychoanalytic followers have always been the most articulate proponents of this perspective. From its inception psychoanalysis has been very interested in eroticism, largely as a result of Freud’s two great contributions to the study of sex: (1) making us aware of the profound influence the unconscious has in shaping personality and therefore eroticism and (2) forcing us to recognize that children are sexual beings—although not, of course, in the same way as adults. Freud rightly insisted that sexuality and personality unfold in tandem, with much of that process occurring outside conscious awareness. Whereas psychoanalysts have done us all a service by recognizing and investigating the untamed powers of eros, most make their observations through a dark lens. To a far greater degree than today’s theorists of pathology are aware, the pathology model of sex is rooted in the concept of sex-as-sin. Almost like a fire-and-brimstone preacher, Freud himself believed that, if left unchecked, erotic urges would wreak havoc. The psychological word for sin is “perversion,” and in some circles it’s shockingly easy to qualify for that label. Those who are attracted to the “wrong” people, who eroticize inanimate objects, who have the “wrong” kinds of orgasms, or who express “infantile” preferences—such as strong interests in masturbation, oral, or anal stimulation—have, at one time or another, all been stigmatized by the pathology approach to sex. Pathology-oriented psychologies typically propose such a narrow path for “normal” erotic development that hardly anyone ever attains it. Notions of erotic health are often little more than abstractions derived almost entirely from theory and from therapeutic work with those who are sexually troubled. While a great deal can be understood through theory and therapy, unless we also study eroticism in its most positive forms, many of our conclusions are bound to be distorted. SANITIZING EROSThe neat-and-clean perspective is a more recent development based primarily on the precepts of behaviorism and humanism. Behaviorists see human sexuality as governed by predictable rules of learning. They are convinced that the unruly tendencies of eros can be controlled by a little tinkering with rewards and punishments.

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

  One of the things that m akes a doctrine of our affirming power so necessary is j u st our commitment to an e t hic of benevolence , which is why an inability to affirm the goodness of human beings can be threatening. But Nietzsche wins through to his total yea- s aying precisely by jettisoning the ethic of benevolence, which is inextri cably linked in his view with self-negating morality. He presents us a cruel dilemma. Is it one we have to face? 24 EPIPHANIES OF MODERNISM 24.1 All these devel o pments have helped to create an epiphanic art in the twentie th century which is in some respects very different from the Romantic prototyp e . Th e forms which dominate our century are often loosely collected under the title 'moderni s t'. Two differences are striking in relation to the grea t Romantics, features which paradoxically go together although they seem to be opposed. T wentieth-century art has gone more inward, has tended to exp l ore, even to celebrat e s ubjectivity; it has expl o red new recesses of feelin g , entered the stream of consciousness, spawned schools of art rightly called 'ex p ressionist.' But at the same time, at its greatest it has often involved a decentring of the subject: an art emphatically not con ceived as self-expression , an art displacing the cen tre of interest onto language, or onto poetic transmutatio n itself, o r even dissolvin g t he self as usually conceived in favou r of some new constellation. There seems to be a slide to subjectivism and an anti-subjectivist thrust at the same time. These shoul d be opposed, and they are certainly in tension. But in their genesis they belong together, and this may not be too diffi cult to explain. The modernists found themselves in opposition to their world for reas ons wh ich were continuous with those of the Romantics. The world seen just a s mechanism, as a field for instrumental reason, seemed to the latter shallo w and debased. By the twentieth century the encroachments of instrume nt a l r eason were incomparably greater, and we find the modernist writers a nd art ists in protest against a world dominated by technology, standardiz ati on , the decay o f community, mass society, and vulgarizatio n. There was, indeed , a minority, like the Futurists, which took a positive stance towards tech nology and wanted to celebrate its creative potentialities; but the y too w e r e ap palled at the passivity and ugliness which they s aw as the actual con s e qu ences of mass industrial s_ociety.

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

  All we have to do is click on a link and a tweet will go out from our account, urging our followers to check out this amazing new article about a brilliant management technique. Our tweets will contain a link to Dharmesh’s post on LinkedIn. The lazy tweets make life easier for us, but having a bunch of people from HubSpot suddenly flood Twitter with exactly the same messages at exactly the same time doesn’t strike me as the smartest way to promote an article. On the Internet, ginning up fake grassroots support is called astroturfing, and the tactic is generally frowned upon. I’m surprised to see HubSpot doing it, because the company touts its expertise at social media marketing and claims it can teach small business owners how to attract attention online by creating unique, “lovable” content and being “remarkable.” But here we are, bludgeoning social media with a barrage of identical tweets, all telling everyone we know to go read this great new article by our boss. I’m willing to help, but before I post any tweets I take a few minutes to read the article—and what Dharmesh has written nearly knocks me off my chair. The title of the article is “Your Customers Are Not Ignorant, Selfish Control Freaks.” Our company’s “thought leader” claims he has made an innovative breakthrough in management science: He now brings a teddy bear to meetings, and he recommends that everyone else do the same. That’s right. A teddy bear. Dharmesh argues that a company should always be “solving for the customer,” or SFTC as people call it at HubSpot. This means that in everything you do, you should be putting the needs of your customers ahead of everything else. To remind his HubSpot colleagues of that, Dharmesh has acquired a teddy bear, and he sits her at the table during meetings as a stand-in for the customer. Her name is Molly. Dharmesh goes on to say that he started out just placing an empty chair at the conference table and pretending that the chair was a customer. But the empty chair wasn’t enough, he decided. So now he has taken his innovation to the next level and brought in Molly. Dharmesh’s LinkedIn article even includes a photograph of Molly sitting at a meeting, next to Cranium. In the photo, Cranium is the big guy in the white shirt at the right side, and Molly is the little one next to him, drinking what appears to be a Red Bull and looking like she’s ready to carve someone a new asshole. [image "image" file=Image00004.jpg] I cannot believe this. Here are grown men and women, who I presume are fully sentient adult human beings, and they are sitting in meetings, talking to a teddy bear . And I am working with these people. No: worse! I am working for them. At Newsweek I worked for Jon Meacham, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his biography of Andrew Jackson.

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

  In other chapters other qualities have seemed, and will again seem, more important parts of psychology. Men are so ingrained partial that, for common-sense and scholasticism (which is only common-sense grown articulate), the notion that there is no one quality genuinely, absolutely, and exclusively essential to anything is almost unthinkable. "B thing's essence makes it what it is. Without an exclusive essence it would be nothing in particular, would be quite nameless, we could not say it was this rather than that. What you write on, for example,—why talk of its being combustible, rectangular, and the like, when you know that these are mere accidents, and that what it really is, and was made to be, is just paper and nothing else?" The reader is pretty sure to make some such comment as this. But he is himself merely insisting on an aspect of the thing which suits his own petty purpose, that of naming the thing; or else on an aspect which suits the manufacturer's purpose, that of producing an article for which there is a vulgar demand. Meanwhile the reality overflows these purposes at every pore. Our usual purpose with it, our commonest title for it, and the properties which this title suggests, have in reality nothing sacramental. They characterize us more than they characterize the thing. But we are so stuck in our prejudices, so petrified intellectually, that to our vulgarest names, with their suggestions, we ascribe an eternal and exclusive worth. The thing must be, essentially, what the vulgarest name connotes; what less usual names connote, it can be only in an 'accidental' and relatively unreal sense. [343] Locke undermined the fallacy. But none of his successors, so far as I know, have radically escaped it, or seen that the only meaning of essence is teleological, and that classification and conception are purely teleological weapons of the mind. The essence of a thing is that one of its properties which is so important for my interests that in comparison with it I may neglect the rest. Amongst those other things which have this important property I class it, after this property I name it, as a thing endowed with this property I conceive it; and whilst so classing, naming, and conceiving it, all other truth about it becomes to me as naught. [344] The properties which are important vary from man to man and from hour to hour. [345] Hence divers appellations and conceptions for the same thing. But many objects of daily use—as paper, ink, butter, horse-car—have properties of such constant unwavering importance, and have such stereotyped names, that we end by believing that to conceive them in those ways is to conceive them in the only true way.

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

  A gap like this surfaced in the discussion above, wh er e som e n aturalist s pr opose to t rea t all moral on tologie s a s ir relevant stories, without validity, while the y themselves go on arguing like the rest of us about what objects are fit and what reactions appropriate. What generall y happens here is that the reductive explanation itself, often a sociobiological one, which supposedl y justifies this exclusion, itself takes on t he role of moral ontology. That is, it starts to provide the basis for discriminations about app ro pri ate obj ects or valid resp on ses . Wha t st arts off in ch apter I as a ha rd- n osed scient i fic theory ju stifying an error theory of moral ity becomes i n t he co nclus ion the basis for a ne w 's cientific' or 'evol utio na ry' ethic . 5 Here, o ne is fo rced to con cl ude, there reig ns an ideol ogical ly ind uce d illus ion ab out t he n a ture of the mor al ont o l o gy that the think ers con cerned a ctually rely on. The re is a very contro ve rsial but very im porta n t job of ar tic ula tion to be done zo • I DENTITY AND THE GOOD here, in the teeth of the people co ncerned , which can show to what extent the real spiritual basis of their own moral judgements deviates fr om what is officially admitted. It will be my claim that there is a gr eat deal of motiva ted supp res sion of moral ontol o gy among our contempo ra ries, in part because the pluralist na tur e of modern society m akes it easier to liv e that way, but also beca use of the grea t weight of modern epistemology (as with the naturalists evoked above} and, behind this, of the spiritual outlook associated w ith this epistemology. So the work I am embarked u p on her e could be called in large degree an essay in· retrieval.

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

  fully persuaded that the tenor of his life and conduct among the Jews was the best apology that could possibly be made in his behalf .... And even now he preserves the same silence, and makes no other answer than the unblemished lives of his sincere followers; they are his most cheerful and successful advocates, and have so loud a voice that they drown the clamors of the most zealous and bigoted adversaries." II. To their defence the Christians, with the rising consciousness of victory, added direct arguments against heathenism, which were practically sustained by, its dissolution in the following period. (1) The popular religion of the heathens, particularly the doctrine of the gods, is unworthy, contradictory, absurd, immoral, and pernicious. The apologists and most of the early church teachers looked upon the heathen gods not as mere imaginations or personified powers of nature or deifications of distinguished men, but as demons or fallen angels. They took this view from the Septuagint version of Ps. 96:5,104 and from the immorality of those deities, which was charged to demons (even sexual intercourse with fair daughters of men, according to Gen. 6:2). "What sad fates," says Minucius Felix, "what lies, ridiculous things, and weaknesses we read of the pretended gods! Even their form, how pitiable it is! Vulcan limps; Mercury has wings to his feet; Pan is hoofed; Saturn in fetters; and Janus has two faces, as if he walked backwards .... Sometimes Hercules is a hostler, Apollo a cow-herd, and Neptune, Laomedon’s mason, cheated of his wages. There we have the thunder of Jove and the arms of Aeneas forged on the same anvil (as if the heavens and the thunder and lightning did not exist before Jove was born in Crete); the adultery of Mars and Venus; the lewdness of Jupiter with Ganymede, all of which were invented for the gods to authorize men in their wickedness." "Which of the poets," asks Tertullian, "does not calumniate your gods? One sets Apollo to keep sheep; another hires out Neptune to build a wall; Pindar declares Esculapius was deservedly scathed for his avarice in exercising the art of medicine to a bad purpose; whilst the writers of tragedy and comedy alike, take for their subjects the crimes or the miseries of the deities. Nor are the philosophers behindhand in this respect. Out of pure contempt, they would swear by an oak, a goat, a dog. Diogenes turned Hercules into ridicule; and the Roman Cynic Varro introduces three hundred Joves without heads." From the stage abuser the sarcastic African father selects, partly from his own former observation, those of Diana being flogged, the reading of Jupiter’s will after his decease, and the three half-starved Herculesses!

• From The Pisces (2018)

  Alas, our fearless leader was deeply single and trying to be at peace with it. I wondered if she even had a boyfriend. How could she lead a group on sex and love issues? Who would want to take love advice from a single woman who convinced herself she was happy using store-bought sayings she posted on her wall? And what kind of doctor was she anyway? I didn’t see a PhD next to her name. Was she a doctor of love? Dr. Jude had yellowish teeth and a Dorothy Hamill haircut. I guess the yellow teeth meant that she accepted herself and would not be changing for anyone. I was oddly intrigued by her positivity in the face of the abyss, as though I were an anthropologist encountering a new culture for the first time. But when she quoted E. E. Cummings in an attempt to say that we could only be ourselves, I decided she was stupid. Also, she used the words radical acceptance a lot. I didn’t want to radically accept anything. When I returned to Phoenix I wanted everything to be radically different. I didn’t like her. But compared to the disaster that was the rest of the group, Dr. Jude seemed like a winner. Our youngest member was Amber: mid-twenties, built like a female wrestler, sweatpants covered in dog hair. Amber had been in the group longest and was furthest along in terms of “doing the work” in the personal growth and love department. She made sure we all knew that. Immediately, in my mind I called her Chickenhorse, as her head was long and horse-shaped but she had a beaky nose and big pink gums that resembled a chicken’s comb and wattles. She seemed to get aroused by telling all of us we were wrong. Dr. Jude had encouraged Chickenhorse to start dating again, but she had not yet begun. Instead, she focused on problematic interactions she had with people in her life. “My boss is emotionally abusive. He’s victimizing me,” she said. “Can you tell us more?” asked Dr. Jude. “I can’t explain it, it’s just a feeling,” she said. “And as the victim, I don’t think I should have to explain myself.” “Understandable,” said Dr. Jude. “It’s my truth. And I’m afraid to bring it up to his supervisors, because this is what happened with my last boss too. He was another abuser; there’s a pattern of abuse. When I came forward about it at my last job, everyone started gaslighting me by acting like I’m the crazy one.”

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

  Margot and Mother do the dishes, Mr. and Mrs. van D. head for the divan, Peter for the attic, Father for his divan, Dussel too, and Anne does her homework. What comes next is the quietest hour of the day; when they’re all asleep, there are no disturbances. To judge by his face, Dussel is dreaming of food. But I don’t look at him long, because the time whizzes by and before you know it, it’ll be 4 P.M. and the pedantic Dr. Dussel will be standing with the clock in his hand because I’m one minute ,late clearing off the table. Yours, Anne SATURDAY, AUGUST 7, 1943 Dearest Kitty, A few weeks ago I started writing a story, something I made up from beginning to end, and I’ve enjoyed it so much that the products of my pen are piling up. Yours, Anne MONDAY, AUGUST 9, 1943 Dearest Kitty, We now continue with a typical day in the Annex. Since we’ve already had lunch, it’s time to describe dinner. Mr. van Daan. Is served first, and takes a generous portion of whatever he likes. Usually joins in the conversation, never fails to give his opinion. Once he’s spoken, his word is final. If anyone dares to suggest otherwise, Mr. van D. can put up a good fight. Oh, he can hiss like a cat. . . but I’d rather he didn’t. Once you’ve seen it, you never want to see it again. His opinion is the best, he knows the most about everything. Granted, the man has a good head on his shoulders, but it’s swelled to no small degree. Madame. Actually, the best thing would be to say nothing. Some days, especially when a foul mood is on the way, her face is hard to read. If you analyze the discussions, you realize she’s not the subject, but the guilty

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

  Victorian piety and sentimentality seemed to have captured the Romantic spirit. For those who saw this whole world as spiritually hollow and flat, Romanticism could appear as integral to what they rejected as instrumental ism was. It merely o ffered trivialized, ersatz , or inauthentic meanings to compens ate for a meaningless world. For those who hungered after som e purer, deeper, o r stronger moral source that the world of disengaged reason c ouldn't provide, the expression of simply personal emotio n or the celebration of routinized fulfilments was a traves ty . And so the modernists as heirs to t h e Romantics turned against what they saw as Romanticism. The breach w it h th eir world had to be more th o r oughgoing . They couldn't turn for sola c e to merely subjective feeling or to the confidence that the world emanate s fr om the spirit. 2 That is why many of the path-breaking modernist writers had l ess in common with the stance of the great Romantics than with that of a Baudelaire, whose stance seeks the epiphan y no longer in a fallen nature bu t some how beyond or outside it. And that is why they frequently foun d Epiphanies of Modernism • 459 themselves in sympathy with the Nietzschean a ppe al to the heroic virtues, against what they saw as the comfortable, flabby humanitarianism of their time. 3 Hulme, who drew from both these sources, attacked Romanticism for its denial of original sin; he correctly saw the origins of this denial in Rousseau and in the doctrines of nature as source , and wanted to repudiate the one with the other. Romanticism was just "spilt religion"; 4 its error w a s to have elided religion and nature, where they should have been kept strictly apart, It failed "to realize that there is an absolute, and not a relative, difference between humanism (whi ch we can take to be the highest expression of the vital) and the religiou s spiri t. The divine is not life at its intense s t. It c ontains in a way an almost anti-vital element". 5 To take this st an c e was to reje ct what I called earlier the epiphanies of being. This can produce a p oetics which strips the aura from things. Early Eliot is a striking example, precisely under the influence of Baudelaire and T. E. Hulme. But we see a parallel development in rather different terms with Thomas Mann, t hi s time under a Schopenha uerian influence. Hans Castorp's epiph any i n the "Snow" passage of The Magic Mountain shows how the harmonious beauties of the sunlit classical world are built on the horrors of old age, decay, and human sacrifice.

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

  I don’t mean to imply that women should stop having children; on the contrary, nature intended them to, and that’s the way it should be. What I condemn are our system of values and the men who don’t acknowledge how great, difficult, but ultimately beautiful women’s share in society is. I agree completely with Paul de Kruif, the author of this book, when he says that men must learn that birth is no longer thought of as inevitable and unavoidable in those parts of the world we consider civthzed. It’s easy for men to talk -- they don’t and never will have to bear the woes that women do! I believe that in the course of the next century the notion that it’s a woman’s duty to have children will change and make way for the respect and admiration of all women, who bear their burdens without complaint or a lot of pompous words! Yours, Anne M. Frank FRIDAY, JUNE 16, 1944 Dearest Kitty, New problems: Mrs. van D. is at her wit’s end. She’s talking about getting shot, being thrown in prison, being hanged and suicide. She’s jealous that Peter confides in me and not in her, offended that Dussel doesn’t respond sufficiently to her flirtations and afraid her husband’s going to squander all the fur-coat money on tobacco. She quarrels, curses, cries, feels sorry for herself, laughs and starts allover again. What on earth can you do with such a silly, sniveling specimen of humanity? Nobody takes her seriously, she has no strength of character, she complains to one and all, and you should see how she walks around: von hinten Lyzeum, yon vorne Museum.* [Acts like a schoolgirl, looks like a frump.] Even worse, Peter’s becoming insolent, Mr. van Daan irritable and Mother cynical. Yes, everyone’s in quite a state! There’s only one rule you need to remember: laugh at everything and forget everybody else! It sounds egotistical, but it’s actually the only cure for those suffering from self-pity. Mr. Kugler’s supposed to spend four weeks in Alkmaar on a work detail. He’s trying to get out of it with a doctor’s certificate and a letter from Opekta. Mr. Kleiman’s hoping his stomach will be operated on soon. Starting at eleven last night, all private phones were cut off. Yours, Anne M. Frank FRIDAY, JUNE 23, 1944 Dearest Kitty, Nothing special going on here. The British have begun their all-out attack on Cherbourg. According to Pim and Mr. van Oaan, we’re sure to be liberated before October 10. The Russians are taking part in the campaign; yesterday they started their offensive near Vitebsk, exactly three years to the day that the Germans invaded Russia. Bep’s spirits have sunk lower than ever. We’re nearly out of potatoes; from now on, we’re going to count them out for each person, then everyone can do what they want with them. Starting Monday, Miep’s taking a week of vacation. Mr. Kleiman’s doctors haven’t found anything on the X rays.

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

  One person goes to get some newspapers; another, the knives (keeping the best for himself, of course); the third, the potatoes; and the fourth, the water. Mr. Dussel begins. He may not always peel them very well, but he does peel nonstop glancing left and right to see if everyone is doing it the way he does. No, they’re not! “Look, Anne, I am taking peeler in my hand like so and going from the top to bottom! Nein, not so . . . but so!” “I think my way is easier, Mr. Dussel,” I say tentatively. “But this is best way, Anne. This you can take from me. Of course, it is no matter, you do the way you want.” We go on peeling. I glance at Dussel out of the corner of my eye. Lost in thought, he shakes his head (over me, no doubt), but says no more. I keep on peeling. Then I look at Father, on the other side of me. To Father, peeling potatoes is not a chore, but precision work. When he reads, he has a deep wrinkle in the back of his head. But when he’s preparing potatoes, beans or vegetables, he seems to be totally absorbed in his task. He puts on his potato-peeling face, and when it’s set in that particular way, it would be impossible for him to turn out anything less than a perfectly peeled potato. I keep on working. I glance up for a second, but that’s all the time I need. Mrs. van D. is trying to attract Dussel’s attention. She starts by looking in his direction, but Dussel pretends not to notice. She winks, but Dussel goes on peeling. She laughs, but Dussel still doesn’t look up. Then Mother laughs too, but Dussel pays them no mind. Having failed to achieve her goal, Mrs. van D. is obliged to change tactics. There’s a brief silence. Then she says, “Putti, why don’t you put on an apron? Otherwise, I’ll have to spend all day tomorrow trying to get the spots out of your suit!” “I’m not getting it dirty.” Another brief silence. “Putti, why don’t you sit down?’ “I’m fine this way. I like standing up!” Silence. “Putti, look out, du spritzt schon!”.* [*Now you’re splashing!] “I know, Mommy, but I’m being careful.” Mrs. van D. casts about for another topic. “Tell me, Putti, why aren’t the British carrying out any bombing raids today?” “Because the weather’s bad, Kerli!” “But yesterday it was such nice weather and they weren’t flying then either.” “Let’s drop the subject.” “Why? Can’t a person talk about that or offer an opinion?’ “Well, why in the world not?” “Oh, be quiet, Mammichen!”* [*Mommy] “Mr. Frank always answers his wife.” Mr. van D. is trying to control himself. This remark always rubs him the wrong way, but Mrs. van D.’s not one to quit: “Oh, there’s never going to be an invasion!” Mr. van D.

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

  2.8. The English version is q u oted in Charles Russell, Poets , Prophets and Revolutionaries (Ox ford: Oxford University Press, 198 5), p. 9 1. 37. Marinetti, as qu oted in Russell, Poets, pp. 9 1-92.. Point 4 of the "Manifesto del Futurismo" reads in part: "Noi affermiamo che la magnificenza del m ondosi e arrichita di una belleza nuova: la belleza della velocita ... un automobile ruggente, ... e piu hello della Vittoria di Samotracia"; in II Futurismo ital iano, ed. Gherarducci, p. 2. 7 . 3 8. From a Futurist manifesto of 1910, quoted in II Futurismo italiano, ed. Gherarducci, p . 93. 39. From Breton's "Deux manifestes Dada" , quoted in ibid., p. 12.6. 40. Andre Breton, "Second Manifeste du Surrealisme" (1930) , in Manifestes d u Surrealisme (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), p. 9 2.; translatio n quoted in Russell, Poets, p. 13 3. 41. From the "Man i feste d u Surrealisme" (192.4), in Manifestes, p. 34; transla tion quoted in Russell, Poets, p. 142.. In the "Second Manifeste", Breton talks about "ces produits de l'activite ps y chique, aussi distraits que possible de la volonte de signifier, aussi alleges que possibles des idees de responsabilite toujours pretes a agir comme £reins , aussi independants que possibl e de tou t ce qui n'est pas l a vi e passive de /'intelligence"; Manifestes, p. 1 2.1 . 42. . From Breton's "Manifeste du Surrealisme't, Manifestes, p. 40; translation qu oted in Russell, Poets, pp. 142.-143. 4 3. Andre Breton, from the "Second Manifeste " , Manifestes , p. 12. 1 n; tran slat ion quoted in Russell, Poets, p. 1 33. 44. In f act, the Futurists' p o litical views were rather repellent from the beginning . Here are some quotes from the founding Manifesto: 9. Noi v oglia mo gl orifica re la gue rra -sol a ig i ene d el mo ndo -i l militarism o, il p atr ioti smo, ii ge sto distru ttore dei lib ertari , le be ll e idee p er cu i si muore e ii dis pr ezz o d e lla do nna. 1 0. Noi v og liamo dis trugg er e i m usei, le b ib il otecche, le acca dem ie d'ogni specie, e co mba ttere contro ii moralism o, ii f emmin i sm o e c o ntr o o gni vil t a oppo rt uni stica o ut ilitar ia. Notes to Pages 471-473 · 5 87 9. We will glori f y war-the world's only hygiene-militarism, patrio tism, the destructive gesture of freedom -bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for women. 10 . We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind, will fight moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or u tilitarian coward ice. JI Futurismo italiano, ed. Gherarducci, p.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  Throughout the Xunzi, we find an insistent plea for yu wei, disciplined, conscious effort. Xunzi had learned from his visit to Qin that if they tried hard enough, human beings could turn their society around. But they must take responsibility for themselves. Heaven was not a god who intervened in the affairs of the world. It was no use relying on Heaven for help, or trying to bend Heaven’s will by consulting oracles. Xunzi hated these old manipulative superstitions. Heaven was nature itself; the Way of Heaven could be seen in the order and regularity of the heavenly bodies and the succession of the seasons. Heaven’s Way was entirely separate from human beings. It could give them no guidance or help, but it had made available the resources they needed to find their own path. This was the mission of the junzi. It was pointless to contemplate the Way of Heaven and neglect human affairs, as Zhuangzi had done. It was wrong to withdraw from society. Civilization was a magnificent achievement; it had given human beings divine status, and made them equal partners with Heaven and Earth. “Is it better to obey Heaven and sing hymns to it,” Xunzi asked, “or to grasp the mandate of Heaven and make use of it?” Was it better to yearn for Heaven, like the Daoists, or to make use of the resources that Heaven had provided and “bring them to completion”?18 If we concentrated on Heaven and neglected what man could do, Xunzi insisted again and again, “we fail to understand the nature of things.”19 But this involved hard, dedicated effort. Xunzi had learned from the Legalists that people needed to be reformed. Unlike Mencius, he believed that human nature was not good but evil. Everybody, he said, “is born with feelings of envy and hate, and if he indulges these, they will lead him into violence and crime, and all sense of loyalty and good faith will disappear.”20 He used the same imagery as the Legalists: “A warped piece of wood must wait until it has been laid against the straightening board, steamed and forced into shape, before it can become straight.”21 But if he worked hard enough, anybody could become a sage. He could not achieve this alone; first he must find a teacher and submit himself to the rites (li): only then would he be able to observe the dictates of courtesy and humility, obey the rules of society and achieve order.22 It was no good doing what came naturally, like Yangists and Daoists. Goodness was the result of conscious endeavor. The junzi used artifice to redirect his passions into constructive channels. This would not warp human nature, but bring out its full potential.

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

  So that’s what venture capitalists in Silicon Valley try to make for them, selecting “college dropouts with insane ideas going after tiny markets with no idea how to monetize,” as venture capitalist Ben Horowitz of Andreessen Horowitz once put it. At one time, venture capitalists who invested in a tech start-up with a young founder would insist on bringing in “adult supervision,” meaning an experienced executive to help build the business. But today the conventional wisdom among venture capitalists is that it’s better to leave a young founder in charge and give him (and it’s almost always a him ) free rein. Compounding the problem is the fact that Silicon Valley now attracts a different kind of person—young, male, amoral, perhaps not as evil as Patrick Bateman, the investment banker serial killer antihero of American Psycho , but cut from the same cloth. Guys who once would have gone to work on Wall Street hoping to get rich now move to San Francisco, where venture capitalists entrust them with millions of dollars and tell them to do their worst. “In all too many cases, what venture capitalists are investing in is assholes,” Sarah Lacy, editor of the tech blog Pando, wrote in a 2014 essay that was widely read and shared in Silicon Valley. Give millions of dollars to young entitled assholes, provide no adult supervision, and what happens next is predictable. You get Gurbaksh Chahal, the CEO of a start-up called RadiumOne, relieved of duty after being charged with domestic violence for allegedly beating up his girlfriend. (Chahal maintained his innocence and pled guilty to two misdemeanors.) Chahal previously appeared on the reality TV show Secret Millionaire and posed sitting on his bed, which had a headboard with gold trim and a gold crown over a golden initial G. You get Mahbod Moghadam, co-founder of Rap Genius, booted out of his own company after posting tasteless jokes about a murder spree on the UC Santa Barbara campus. You get Whitney Wolfe, the female co-founder of Tinder, suing the company for sexual harassment, claiming she endured months of harassment in a frat-house culture where she was subjected to racist, sexist, homophobic, misogynistic and insulting texts, including one calling Wolfe a “whore.” (The lawsuit was settled.) You end up with GitHub, a tiny start-up, raising $100 million and using the money to create a replica of the Oval Office, and Tom Preston-Werner, the president of GitHub, resigning after a female employee complains about sexual harassment and retaliation. You get Snapchat founder Evan Spiegel, age twenty-three, raising $850 million and needing to explain emails he sent in college urging his frat brothers to “have some girl put your large kappa sigma dick down her throat.” Along with personal misbehavior there have been allegations of misbehavior at the corporate level. Facebook was accused of invading people’s privacy and made a settlement (admitting no wrongdoing) with the FTC. Path was caught using people’s personal information without their permission, and apologized.

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

  Theodore of Mopsuestia, the able founder of the Antiochian Christology, set forth the elevation of the man to sonship with God (starting from Luke ii. 53) under the aspect of a gradual moral process, and made it dependent on the progressive virtue and meritoriousness of Jesus, which were completed in the resurrection, and earned for him the unchangeableness of the divine life as a reward for his voluntary victory of virtue. The Antiochian and Nestorian theory amounts therefore, at bottom, to a duality of person in Christ, though without clearly avowing it. It cannot conceive the reality of the two natures without a personal independence for each. With the theanthropic unity of the person of Christ it denies also the theanthropic unity of his work, especially of his sufferings and death; and in the same measure it enfeebles the reality of redemption.1575 From this point of view Mary, of course, could be nothing more than mother of the man Jesus, and the predicate theotokos, strictly understood, must appear absurd or blasphemous. Nestorius would admit no more than that God passed through (transiit) the womb of Mary. This very war upon the favorite shibboleth of orthodoxy provoked the bitterest opposition of the people and of the monks, whose sympathies were with the Alexandrian theology. They contradicted Nestorius in the pulpit, and insulted him on the street; while he, returning evil for evil, procured corporal punishments and imprisonment for the monks, and condemned the view of his antagonists at a local council in 429.1576 His chief antagonist in Constantinople was Proclus, bishop of Cyzicum, perhaps an unsuccessful rival of Nestorius for the patriarchate, and a man who carried the worship of Mary to an excess only surpassed by a modern Roman enthusiast for the dogma of the immaculate conception. In a bombastic sermon in honor of the Virgin1577 he praised her as "the spotless treasure-house of virginity; the spiritual paradise of the second Adam; the workshop, in which the two natures were annealed together; the bridal chamber in which the Word wedded the flesh; the living bush of nature, which was unharmed by the fire of the divine birth; the light cloud which bore him who sat between the Cherubim; the stainless fleece, bathed in the dews of Heaven, with which the Shepherd clothed his sheep; the handmaid and the mother, the Virgin and Heaven." Soon another antagonist, far more powerful, arose in the person of the patriarch Cyril of Alexandria, a learned, acute, energetic, but extremely passionate, haughty, ambitious, and disputatious prelate. Moved by interests both personal and doctrinal, he entered the field, and used every means to overthrow his rival in Constantinople, as his like-minded uncle and predecessor, Theophilus, had overthrown the noble Chrysostom in the Origenistic strife. The theological controversy was at the same time a contest of the two patriarchates.