Despair

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.

Page 38 of 267 · 20 per page

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

  Bu t for Kierke gaard this higher end is n ot obeyi ng a ratio n al law but livi n g in the dimension of infinite choice. I accede to it no t b y submit ting my na tur e to rea so n but by a radical shih in stance toward s li fe . Ki erkega ard in his later writ ing s evolved be y o nd this de fini tion o f th e ethica l, which came to be seen as a stage which w as in turn tru mpe d by t h e rel igious. B u t this reta ins s o me of the features of B's p osition in Eit her/ O r. I n pa rticular, t he idea rem ains of a tran sfor m ation whic h depends on a ne w Visions of the Post-Romantic Age • 45 1 s tance towards oneself, overcoming despair and dread. Only now it is made clearer how this depends on our relation to God. 7 1 Dostoyevsky in his early life was deeply influenced by the German Romantics, in particular by Schiller. Visions of this kind are still articulated by characters in later novels. I am thinking, for instance, of the picture of a restored humanity in Raw Youth , matched b y Stavrogin's dream in the appendix to The Devils. It also comes out in his sympathy for the elder Verkho vensky in that novel. Moreover, in the great statement o f Zossima in The Brothers Karamazov, we have a pi ct ure o f grace as a current flowing through nature, which marries certain traditional themes of Christian thought and the Romantic vision. But one of Dostoyevsky's central insights turns on the way in which w e close or open ourselves to grace. The ultimat e sin is to close oneself, but on e ' s re asons for doing so can be of the highest. In a sense, the person wh o is closed is in a vicious circle from which it is hard t o es cape. We are closed to grace, because we close ourselves to the world in which it circulates; and we do that out of loathing fo r ourselves and for this world. But paradoxically, the more noble and sensitive and morally insightful one is, the more one is liable to feel this loathing.

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  Back and forth, back and forth. There is wallpaper to the left of the bed, of tiny carousel horses floating untethered through a creamy backdrop. Except they aren’t angry like the horses attached to the bed. There are no flared nostrils and you cannot see the whites of their eyes. They have furling ribbons tied to their forelocks and cranberry colored jewels decorating their saddles. To the right of the bed is a baby blue wall and centered in the middle of it, a brick fireplace. Sometimes I look at the blue wall, other times I like to count the little carousel horses on the wallpaper. And then there are times I squeeze my eyes shut so tight and pretend I’m at home in my own bed. My sheets are different, and the weight of the blanket, but if I lie very still… That’s when things get a little crazy. I’m not even sure I want to be in my own bed. It was figuratively just as cold as this one. There is nowhere I want to be. I should embrace the cold and the snow and the prison. I should be like Corrie Ten Boom and try to find purpose in suffering. I get catatonic at that point. My thoughts, having run in circles for most of the day, shut down. I just stare until Isaac eventually carries in a plate of food and sets it on the table next to the bed. I don’t touch anything. Not for days, until he pleads with me to eat. To move. To talk to him. I stare at one of the two walls and see how long I can go without feeling. I pee in the bed. The first time it’s an accident; my bladder, stretched like a water balloon, reaches its limit. There’s another time. In my sleep I roll away from it, find a new spot. I wake up closer to the fireplace, my clothes barely damp. It doesn’t bother me. I’m finally in the place where nothing bothers me. Spalsh I squirm under hot water, writhing in shock. I come up gasping, trying to claw my way out of the tub. He dropped me in like a human bath bead. Water sloshes over the side of the tub and soaks into his pant legs and socks. I fight for a few more seconds, his hands holding me in the water. I don’t have the energy to fight. I let myself sink. The bath is so full that I can submerge myself completely. I sink, sink, sink into the ocean.

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

  This is the only relevant issue. So the radical utilitar ians rejected the qmstitutive good of Deism, th e providential order ; but at the same time, they were if anything even m o r e stron gly committed t o t he life goods this order had underpinned. Thr ee o f these stand out, as central to their outlook: 1. The ideal of self-responsible reason. This entailed, as we s aw, a fre edom from all authority, and was link ed with a notion of dignity . 2.. The notion that the ordinary fulfilments that we seek by nature, th e pursuit of happiness in the char acteristic hum an way , through pr o duction an d family life, have a central significance; that is, they no t o n l y are what we desire b ut are worthy of being pursued a nd furthered. 3 . The ideal of universal and imp art ial benevolence. I n a way, this constellation-rejecti n g the constitutive goods, and c l eavi ng nevertheless to the life goods-is not surprisi ng. For these life goods were, a s we saw, carried by the whole broad movement of modern culture in these centuries. They didn't just com e on the scene with the philosophies of i nterlocking desig n; nor did they depend exclusively on these philosophies for their credibility . Moreover, this picture of the order of nature w as itself under some strain. It was in fact too good, too serenely satisfied with the way things w ere, to be generally believed. This was so in tw o ways, in fact. The first was that in portraying everything as designed for the best, it strained the credulity of anyone who was forced to take disaster and suffering seriously. This is the aspect of the doctrine, best known in the Leibnizia n formulation, that this is the best of a ll p ossible worlds, which was made famous in the character of Dr. Pan g loss in Voltaire's Candide. Voltaire's sardonic portrayal said more than volum es o f philosophical argument. For those who did want to argue, the Lisbon earthquake of 17 5 7, which took some 70,000 lives, seemed u nanswerab le. What strained the credulity of oth e rs was the picture of a world in whi c h virtue and self-interest came so neatly together. The stru gg le betwee n g oo d a nd evil seemed to have been resol ved into a misunderstanding. "Pleasu re , o r wro ng or rightly understood / Our greatest evil, or ou r greates t good" . If t h e first o b jection might be called a n ti- P anglossia n , we might call this th e anti-levelling one.

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

  The greatest, the most influential misanthrope o f the nineteenth cent u ry-the great "pessimist"-was Schopenhauer. In a s ense what Schopenhauer offered was an expressivism with the value signs reversed. For he rook the idea of n ature as a source, a power which comes to expression in things. This po wer 'objectified' itself in the different realities we see around us, and thes e 'objectifications ' constituted a hierarchy, all the way from the lowest, most in animate level to conscious beings at the summit. This all-pervading power is the Schopenhauerian will. But it is not a spiritual source of good. On the contrary, it is nothing but wild , blind, uncontrolled striving, n ever satisfied, incapable of satisfaction, dri vin g u s on, agai nst all principles, law, morality, all standards of dignity, to an insatiable search for the unattainable. The will stri ves only to perpetuate itself and its objectifications; and what we think are our desires are in a sense only its unconscious strategies to achieve this end. We love and we try to attai n happiness, but sexual desir e is by its very nature incapable of bringing h app iness. It is only another device of the will to perpetuate itself throu gh us. Schopenhauer's reversal of sign relative to Romantic expressivism is st rangely reminiscen t of the hyper-Augustinian reactions to Christian human ism. Indeed, the notion of a spiritual force uniting nature plainly descends from Renaissance ne o-Platonism and its doctrine of love. Fi c ino is one of the a ncestors of express ivism, a s we h av e seen. Continuing this parallel, we can say that what the Jansenists were to St. Fran�ois de Sales or Camus, Schopenhauer was t o Sch elling and Hegel. Within their ex p ressivist met a physic, he introduces radical vitiation. The source from whi ch all reality flows a s expression is poisoned. It is not the source of good, but of insatiabl e desire, of an imprisonment in evil, whi c h makes us miserable, exhausts us, an d degrades us. The p arallel with Baudelaire is e v ident. Within the categories of Romantic ex pr essivism, the spiritual and moral outlook re c urs that these categories wer e originally me a nt to exclude.

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

  25 Seen from this perspective, the legislative, self- p roc laiming God is a great benefactor t o mankind. I believe that this is how Locke saw him, and tha t this was the basis of a genuine and deepl y felt piety. Toda y this m ay be hard to cr edit, because the contemporary scene is dominated on one side by unbelievers and on the other by belie v ers from whom this kind of faith seems a t best flat and even repugnant (I confess to being in this latter category). But it would be anachronistic to conclude from this that Locke's faith was either insincere or perip h eral to his life. O n the contrar y , if one starts from a vision of humans as potentially r ationa l but with an inherent penchant for irrationality and evil, doomed on t hei r o wn resources even to frustrate their own best potentiality, one can see t hat their condition cried out for a God who would pull them beyond it. God a lone gives sense and h o pe t o a human condition which is otherwise the s ource of irremediable despair and potentially endless sel f -destruction. God h as to exist for humans t<? give some order to their life. That is why Locke w as induced to except atheists from his otherwise wide rule of toleration. Such people had spurne d the very basis o f human civil life. In s o lifting us, God use s our self-love. It is a basic fact about humans that t hey desire pleasure and seek t o a v oid pain. This is not a failing but an u nalterable feature o f their ma ke-u p (2..2.0.2.-3 , 2.. 2.1 . 42., 2..2.8.5 ). But there 2. 42. • THE AFFIRMATION O F ORDINARY LIF E are irrational, destructive and wrong forms of self.lo ve , and a rational, mora l form. God helps to lift us from the fir st to the second. But the basic self•love which makes this operation possible, our fear of endless pain and our desire for "un s peakable" joys, is not evil. It is made by God and therefore good. Locke is already preparing the ground for the later Enlightenment doctrine o f the innocence of natural self·love; but he himself was too aware of the innate sources of depravity in man to propound a similar view.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  The practice of mindfulness made him even more acutely aware of the impermanence and transitory nature of human existence and of its countless frustrations and disappointments. It was not simply the big traumas of old age, sickness, and death that made life so unsatisfactory. “Pain, grief and despair are dukkha,” he explained later. “Being forced into proximity with what we hate is suffering; being separated from what we love is suffering; not getting what we want is suffering.” 79 He also observed the way one craving after another took possession of his mind and heart, noticing how he was ceaselessly yearning to become something else, go somewhere else, and get something that he did not have. In this endless stream of desire, it seemed as though human beings were continually seeking a new kind of existence—a new life, or rebirth. He could see it in his physical restlessness, the way he constantly shifted his position or set off for another part of the forest. “The world, whose very nature is to change, is constantly determined to become something else,” he concluded. “It is at the mercy of change, it is only happy when caught up in the process of change, but this love of change contains a measure of fear, and this fear is itself dukkha.” 80 These were not simply logical reflections. Gotama was a very skilled yogin, and practiced this mindfulness with the disciplined concentration that enabled him to see these truths more “directly,” without the filter of self-protecting egotism that distorts them. But he did not stop at contemplating these negative truths; he also fostered the more “skillful” (kusala) states while performing his yogic exercises, sitting cross-legged, and practicing the breathing rituals of pranayama. He was not only eliminating hatred from his mind, but making sure that it was also “full of compassion, desiring the welfare of all living beings.” He was not only freeing him-self of laziness and inertia, but cultivating “a mind that is lucid, conscious of itself, and completely alert.” By systematically banishing one anxious thought after another, he found that his mind became “calm and still . . . had outgrown debilitating doubt,” and was no longer plagued by “unprofitable [akusala] mental states.” 81 If performed at sufficient depth, in the yogic manner, these mental exertions could, he believed, transform the restless and destructive tendencies of the unconscious and conscious mind. In later years, Gotama claimed that this yogic mindfulness brought to birth a different kind of human being, one that was not dominated by craving, greed, and selfishness. He had almost killed himself by undergoing excessive mortification, and was convinced that disciplined, systematically acquired compassion could take the place of the old punitive asceticism, and give the aspirant access to hitherto unknown dimensions of his humanity. Every day, while practicing yoga, he entered into an alternative state of consciousness, fusing each successive trance with a feeling of positive benevolence toward the entire world. He called these meditations “the immeasurables” (appamana).

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

  To see the sta ndard Enlightenment view as o ne-dimensi o nal is to see n o The Expressivist Turn · 3 8 3 p lace in it for what makes life significant. Human life seems a matter merely of desire-fulfilme n t, but the very basis for strong evaluation, for there being d esires or goals which are int rin sically worth fulfilling, seems missing. Naturalism is especially vulnerable, because it explicitl y attempts to subvert t he traditional distinctions which have grounded e arlier forms of strong eva luation. As I argued in the previous chapter, it relies strongly on its own im plicit reco gnition of the significance of human life, but there are great resistances to the open articulation of this significance. In the wake of this m odern naturalism, and its supposed debunking of the traditional bases of strong evaluation, it has become com mon to wonder w hether there is any such basis at all. It seems a propos to ask if the very notion that certain human fulfilments have a special significance is not a c omfortable fiction , a projection of our feelings onto reality, whether this aris e s as a detached philosophical conj ecture or as an anguished existential issue. And yet the whole Enlightenment et h ic demands so m e such notion of si gnificance. The Kantian view finds its second dim ension in the notion of a radical autonomy of rational agents. The life of mere desire-fulfilment is not only flat but also heteronomous. This critique has been the point of origin of a family of theories which have defined human d ig n ity in terms of freedom. The fully significant life is the on e which is self-chosen. Expressivist views find their second dimension in nature as a source. The life of instrumental reason lacks the forc e, the depth, t he vibrancy, the joy which comes from being co nn ected to the elan of nature. But there is worse. It doesn't just lack this. The instrumental stance towards nature constitutes a bar to our ever attaining it. The instrumental stance involves our objectifying nature, which means, as I described earlier, that we see it as a neutral order of thi n gs. That is, n o facts about how things stand in this order amount to a consideration by itself in favour of o n e or other definition of the good life, but only, if at all, in com bination with some value p remiss drawn from elsewhere. In objectifying or neut ralizing something, we declare our separation from it, our moral inde pen dence. Naturalism neutralizes nature, both without us, and i n ourselves.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  As he watched the whole of China mobilizing for war, it seemed that human beings were about to erase themselves from the face of the earth. If they could not curb their selfishness and greed, they would destroy one another. The only way they could survive was by cultivating a boundless sympathy that did not depend upon emotional identification but on the reasoned, practical understanding that even their enemies had the same needs, desires, and fears as themselves. Toward the end of the fifth century, a kshatriya from the republic of Sakka, in the foothills of the Himalayas, shaved his head and beard, put on the saffron robe of the renouncer, and set out on the road to Magadha. His name was Siddhatta Gotama, and he was twenty-nine years old. Later he recalled that his parents wept bitterly when he left home. We are also told that before leaving he stole into his wife’s bedroom while she was asleep to take one last look at her and their newborn son, as though he did not trust his resolve should she beg him to stay. 70 He had begun to find his father’s elegant house constricting: a miasma of petty duties weighed him down. When he looked at human life, Gotama could see only the grim cycle of suffering, which began with the trauma of birth and proceeded inexorably to “aging, illness, death, sorrow and corruption,” only to start again with the next life cycle. But like the other renouncers, Gotama was convinced that these painful states must have their positive counterparts. “Suppose,” he said, “I start looking for the unborn, unaging, deathless, sorrowless, incorrupt and supreme freedom from all this bondage?” 71 He called this blissful liberation nibbana *4 (“blowing out”), because the passions and desires that tied him down would be extinguished like a flame. He had a long, arduous quest ahead, but he never lost hope in a form of existence—attainable in this life—that was not contingent, flawed, and transient. “There is something that has not come to birth in the usual way, which has neither been created and which remains undamaged,” he insisted. “If it did not exist, it would be impossible to find a way out.” 72 He believed that he did find it, as did the monks who followed his teachings and transmitted them orally, until they reached their present form about a hundred years after Gotama’s death. They called him the Buddha, the “enlightened” or “awakened” one. These Buddhist scriptures were composed in Pali, one of the Sanskrit dialects of northeast India, and are our main source of information about the Buddha’s life. As in most of the new schools that were springing up in the eastern Ganges plain, Buddhist teachings and practices (dhamma) *5 were based on the life experience of the founder, and the Pali texts therefore emphasize those aspects of his biography that would help others to achieve nibbana.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  But Prometheus thought that the arrangement was unfair and wanted to help humans to improve their lot. After one of these sacrifices, he tried to trick Zeus into accepting the inedible bones of the victim, so that men could enjoy the meat. But Zeus saw through the ruse: gods did not need food; they could sustain themselves on the smoke that rose when the victim’s bones were burned on the altar. Sacrifice, therefore, revealed the gods’ superiority to mortals, who could survive only by eating the flesh of dead animals. Angered by Prometheus’s crafty stratagem, Zeus decided to penalize humans by depriving them of the fire they needed to cook their food. Yet again, Prometheus defied him, stole the fire, and gave it back to humanity. Zeus took his revenge by chaining Prometheus to a pillar, and this time he punished humans by sending them a woman who had been put together by the divine craftsman Hephaestus. In the Golden Age, there had been no division between the sexes; humans had not been defined by gender. Pandora, the first woman, was a “beautiful evil.” She carried a jar that she opened “and scattered pains and sufferings among men.” Men were fatally paired with womankind, who brought sickness, old age, and suffering into their world. This is one of the few overtly misogynous moments of the Axial Age. Hesiod intended it to illustrate the ambiguous nature of life in the Iron Age, representing humanity’s fall from grace. 55 Henceforth good and evil were inextricably combined. Sacrifice brought men and gods together, but it also revealed the impassable distinction between them. Suffering was now an inescapable fact of life—a major theme of the Axial Age. In India, the sages were determined to create the spiritual technology that would enable human beings to transcend pain and mortality. Hesiod had no such ambition. Indeed, he was convinced that men should not seek to ascend to the divine world. The story of Prometheus put humans firmly in their place, midway between gods and animals and surrounded on all sides by the evils released by Pandora. Men of the Iron Age could not escape their suffering. They might want to rebel like Prometheus, but hubris was self-destructive: all that Prometheus’s rebellion had achieved was pain for himself and ceaseless toil for humanity. Other Greeks felt that resignation was not the answer. Increasingly, as the political crisis became more acute, farmers and peasants demanded economic relief, return of confiscated property, and security before the law, and gave their support to ambitious aristocrats who championed their cause, using this popular acclaim to achieve political power.

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

  But nevertheless as f ar as they themselves are concerned, this go o d has an incomparable place in their lives. For those with a strong commitment to such a good , wha t it means is t h a t this above all others provides the lan dmarks for what they judge to b e t he direction of their lives. While they reco gn i z e a whole ran ge of quali ta tive Et hic s of Inarticulacy • 63 d i s ti n ct io ns, while all of these involve strong evaluation, so that t he y judge th e m s elv es and others by the degr ee they attain the goods concerned and a d m ir e or look down on people in function of this, nevertheless th e one h i gh es t go od has a special place. It is orientation to this which comes clo sest t o d e fi nin g my identity, and theref ore my direction to this good is of uniq ue i m po rt a nce to me. Whereas I natur al l y want to be well placed in relation to a ll a n d any of the goods I recogni ze and to be moving towards rathe r than a w a y fr om them, my direction in relation to this good has a crucial i m po rt anc e. Just because my orientation to it is essential to my identity , so the recognition that my life is turned away from i t , or can never approach i t, would b e devastating and insuffe rable. It threatens t o plunge me into a d e sp air at my unworthiness which strikes at the very roots of my being as a pe rson. Symmetrically, the assura nce that I am turned towards this good gives me a sense of wholene ss, of fulness of being as a person or self, that n othing else can.

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

  Socrates is serenely untroubled. Jesus suffers agony of soul in the garden, and is driven t o despair on the cross, when he cries, "Why hast thou forsaken m e?" A t no p oint in the Passion is he serene an d untroubled. The g reat difference between Stoic and Christian renunciation is this: for the Stoic, what is renounced is, if rightly renounced, ipso facto not part of the g ood . For the Christian, what is renounced is thereby affirmed as good-both in the sense that the renunciation would lose its meaning if the thing were i ndifferent and in t he sense that the renunciation is in further a nce of God's w il l , which precisely affirms the goodness of the kinds of things renou nced: health, feedom, life. Paradoxically, Christian renunciation is an affirmation o f the goodness of what is renounced. For the Stoic, the loss of health, f re edom, life do es not affect t he integrity of the good. On the contrary, the lo s s is part of a whole which i s integrally good and couldn't be cha nged without making it less so. Stoics are drawn to ima g es like that of the shadow which is needed to set off the brilliance of the light. In the Christian p erspective, however, the loss is a breach in the integrity of the good. Th at is w hy Christianity requires an eschatological perspective of the restoral of that i nt egrity, even though this has been va riously understood. The contrast has tended to be lost from view. This is because the Christian p i c tur e didn't j u st displace the ancient one but came to enter a partnership, which led to a fusion, or rather a number of alternative fusions, of which the 2.2.0 • THE AFFIRMATION OF ORD IN AR Y LIFE Augustinian and Thomistic are the two most famous and influential i n Western Christendom. There were strong re asons supporting a convergence . One of the most powerful was Plato's id e a of the Good , a connection which August ine clinched for Western mediaeval culture. Plato also offered a jus tification for seeing all being as good , and this helped Augustine to go beyond his Manichaean phase.

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

  rhetoric masks the fact that beneath the covers, there is chaos. “HubSpot was the first software company I worked for, and it was extremely eye-opening,” says a salesperson who joined the company during its early days and has since worked for other early-stage tech companies, which were equally clueless and out of control. “People in these companies live day-to-day. They don’t know how to run a sales team. They don’t have a sales process. They don’t even know what the product itself is going to be. The product itself keeps changing. It’s mind-boggling, the amount of time and money that gets wasted.” Nine [image "image" file=Image00003.jpg] In Which I Make a Very Big MistakeB y August, four months into my tenure at HubSpot, I am ready to give up. I’m stuck in the content factory writing articles for imbeciles. I cannot do this for a living. I’ve already appealed to Wingman and pitched him on a project that would be a better use of my time—the one where we launch an online magazine called Inbound , with me in charge—and he has rejected it outright. As I see it, there is only one way out at this point. I can leap over Wingman and go straight to the top. I will pitch my idea directly to Halligan and Shah. They’re the guys who run the company. And they are the ones who hired me. To be sure, Wingman isn’t going to appreciate me doing an end run around him. On the other hand, what do I have to lose? I’m not going to stay in the content factory, banging out listicles and how-to articles for Marketing Mary. If Halligan and Shah don’t put me in charge of something worthwhile, I will put in my year and leave anyway. I find a day and time when Halligan and Shah will both be in the office and send them a calendar invite, asking for a meeting. They accept. We meet in one of the tiny conference rooms on the second floor. It’s just the three of us. I explain to them that I’ve now been working here for four months, and that I’ve been stuck in the content factory, where I’m cranking out articles like “What Is HTML?” “There’s no point in having me here if that’s what I’m going to do,” I say. “And that’s not what you hired me to do.” It seems to me that these guys are exactly the kind of rule-breaking iconoclasts who will appreciate my chutzpah. These are start-up guys. Isn’t this the HubSpotty thing to do? I’m showing initiative! I’m being remarkable! One of the famous stories at HubSpot is about a young sales guy who had a huge argument with Halligan about creating a new division in sales. The sales guy turned out to be right, and he now runs that division. “Here’s what I think we should do,” I say.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  Parishioners who balked at making contributions or buying unwanted materials were told they were in violation of church ethics, and their progress in Scientology was blocked or threatened. Members who pledge more than they can afford can find themselves in a compromised situation. One Scientologist who was a bank teller says he was told to comply with a robbery in order to pay off his debt to the church; the robbers took four thousand dollars. In 2009, Nancy Cartwright’s fiancé, Stephen E. Brackett, a contractor, had taken a substantial construction advance to renovate a restaurant. The company that insured the project later sued Cartwright, claiming that she and Brackett had diverted the money to the Church of Scientology. Brackett, an OT V, had been featured in a church ad for the Super Power Building, identified as a “key contributor.” “Mankind needs your help,” Brackett was quoted as saying in the ad. He later took his life by jumping off a bridge on Pacific Coast Highway near Big Sur. 4 The biggest financial scandal involving church members was a Ponzi scheme operated by Reed Slatkin; he was one of the co-founders, with Paul Haggis’s friend Sky Dayton, of EarthLink. Slatkin’s massive fraud involved more than half a billion dollars in investments; much of the initial “profit” was returned to Scientology investors, such as Daniel and Myrna Jacobs, who earned nearly $3 million on a $760,500 “investment.” According to Marty Rathbun, Slatkin’s Scientology investors included Anne Archer and Fox News commentator Greta Van Susteren. Later investors were not so lucky. Slatkin was convicted of defrauding $240 million; it is still not known how much of that money went directly to the church, although the court found that about $50 million was funneled to the church indirectly by investors with massive gains. In 2006, groups affiliated with the Church of Scientology, including the Celebrity Centre, agreed to pay back $3.5 million. IN JULY 2004 Miscavige hosted Tom Cruise’s forty-second birthday party aboard the Scientology cruise ship Freewinds. The Golden Era Musicians, including Miscavige’s father on trumpet, played songs from Cruise’s movies as film clips flickered on the giant overhead screens installed especially for the occasion. Cruise himself danced and sang “Old Time Rock and Roll,” reprising a famous scene in Risky Business, the movie that firmly established him as a star. Occasionally, the Freewinds is used to confine those Sea Org members that the church considers most at risk for flight. Among the crew on the ship during Cruise’s birthday party was Valeska Paris, a twenty-six-year- old Swiss woman. Paris had grown up in Scientology and joined the Sea Org when she was fourteen.

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

  Certain modern doctrine s have tried to take u p this challe nge, 3 5 but we perhaps do n 't need to examine their in a dequacies in detail to see that the challenge cann o t be met. The error is in thinking that it ought to be. Once we make this error, we cannot but despair of practical reaso n, and we are then readier to surrender to naturalist reduction. But if our moral ontology springs from the best account of the hu man domain we can arrive at, and if this account must be in anthropocentric terms, terms which relate to the meanings things have for us, then the deman d to start outside of all such meanings, not to rely on our m o ral intuitions or on what we find morally movin g, is in fact a proposal to chan ge the subject. How then does practical re asoning pr oceed? H o w do we rationally convince each other or ourselves? Practical reasoning, a s I have argued elsewhere, 36 is a re a soning in transitions. It aims to establish, n ot that some positio n is correct absolutely, but rather that some position is superior to some other. It i s concer ned, c overtly or openly, implicitly or explicitly, with comparative pr opo sitions. We show one of these comparative claims to be well founded when we can show that the move from A to 8 constitutes a gain epis temically. This is something w e do when we s ho w, for instance, that we ge t from A to 8 by identifyin g and resolving a contradiction in A or a confusion which A relied on, o r by acknowledgin g the im p ortance of some factor which A screened out, or something of the sort. The argument fixes on the nature o f the transition from A to 8. The nerve of the rational proof consists in s h owing that this transition i s an error-reducing one. The argument turns on rival interpretations of possible transitions from A t o 8, o r B to A. 37 This form of argument has its s o urce in biographical narrative. We a re c onvinced that a certain view is superior because we have lived a transition which we understand as error-reducing and hence as epistemic gain. I se e that I was confused about the relati o n of rese nt ment and love, o r I see that there is a depth to love conferred by time, which I was quite insensitive to before. But this doesn't mean that we don't a nd can't argue. Our conviction th at we have grow n morally can be challenged by another. It may, after all, b e illus io n.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  The Mahabharata tells the story of a catastrophic war between two sets of cousins, the Kauravas and the Pandavas, who were competing for control of the Kuru-Panchala region. Not only was the family torn apart; the war almost resulted in the annihilation of the entire human race. It brought the heroic age to an end, and ushered in the Kali Yuga, our own deeply flawed era. This was an apocalyptic war, and yet it is not presented in the Mahabharata as a struggle between good and evil. The Pandavas were destined to win, but they managed to defeat the Kauravas only by resorting to some highly dubious maneuvers that were suggested by their friend and ally Krishna, the chieftain of the Yadava clan. Even though they had no choice but to act as they did, the Pandavas felt deeply impaired by their dishonorable conduct, and when they surveyed the devastated, depopulated world at the end of the war, their victory seemed hollow. In contrast, many of the Kauravas seemed noble, exemplary warriors. When their leader Duryodhana was killed in battle, his spirit ascended immediately to heaven and a shower of heavenly petals covered his corpse. In some respects, the religious world of the Mahabharata seems untouched by the Axial Age. The epic reminds us that only an elite group was involved in the Great Transformation. Most people retained the older religious practices and—superficially, at least—appeared to have been unaffected by the new developments. Indra, for example, was still the most important god in the Mahabharata—he clearly remained popular among the kshatriyas long after he had faded from the sophisticated priestly speculations. In the epic, the cosmic events of the ancient Vedic myths were transposed into a historical setting: the war of the Pandavas and Kauravas replicated the wars between devas and asuras, and each of the Pandava brothers was the son and earthly counterpart of a Vedic god. The epic was based on the theology of the early Vedic period. A warrior who died in battle went straight to the world of the gods; there was no hint that he would have to return and suffer another death. There were no modern renouncers in the poem, but only old-fashioned hermits tending their sacrificial fires in the forest. There were a few yogins in the Mahabharata, but they were usually more interested in exploiting the magical potential of their enhanced mental powers than in suppressing their egos. The Axial Age had insisted on the personal responsibility of the individual, but in the epic the main characters had no choice at all, and were often compelled by the gods to act against their better judgment. The archaic spirit of the Mahabharata is particularly evident in its preoccupation with the ancient sacrificial lore. The five Pandava brothers, for example, were all married to their sister, Draupadi.

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

  In his reply, Freud described the human condition with merciless clarity and lamented to Einstein that given the forces at play he had no good advice to offer, no help, no solution, I’m so sorry. 9 The main reason for his pessimism, it should be noted, was the internally flawed condition of the human. He did not primarily blame the cultures or specific groups. He blamed the human beings. Then as now, what Freud called a “death wish” remains an important factor behind human social failures, although I would describe it in less mysterious and poetic words. That factor, as I see it, is a structural component of the human cultural mind. In contemporary neurobiological terms, Freud’s “death wish” corresponds to the unrestrained triggering of a specific set of negative emotions, their subsequent disruption of homeostasis, and the overwhelming havoc they cause on individual and collective human behaviors. These emotions are part of the machinery of affect discussed in chapters 7 and 8. We know that several “negative” emotions are actually important protectors of homeostasis. They include sadness and grief, panic and fear, and disgust. Anger is a special case. It has remained in the human emotion tool kit because it can, under certain circumstances, give an advantage to the angry subject by causing the adversary to recoil. But even when it gives advantages anger tends to have high costs, especially when it escalates to ire and violent rage. Anger is a good example of a negative emotion whose benefits have been diminishing in evolution. So are envy, jealousy, and contempt prompted by humiliations and resentments of all sorts. It is commonly said that the engagement of such negative emotions is a return to our animal emotionality, but that is an unnecessary insult to so many animals. The assessment is partly correct but does not begin to capture the bleaker nature of the problem. In humans, the destructiveness of raw greed, anger, and contempt, for example, has been responsible for unthinkable cruelty perpetrated by humans on other humans since prehistoric times. It does resemble, in many ways, the cruelty of our ape cousins, famous for tearing into the bodies of rivals, real or presumed, but it has been made worse by human refinements. Chimpanzees have never crucified other chimpanzees, but Romans invented crucifixion and crucified humans. It takes creative human invention to design new methods for torturing and killing. Human anger and malice are assisted by abundant knowledge, twisted reasoning, and the unbridled powers of technology and science that humans have at their disposal. It does appear that fewer humans today engage in the malicious destruction of others, and that is a sign that some progress has been made. But the potential for mass destruction that those fewer individuals have at their disposal has never been greater.

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

  And the discussion we have just fini s hed about the sources of benevolen ce br ought u s also to a crucial conflict, which has been illuminatingly explored in rather different wa y s by Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky: the demands of benevol ence can ex act a high cost in self-love and self-fulfilment , which ma y i n the end require paym ent in self-destruction or even in violence. A nd indeed, there ha s been some awareness of this for some centuries n o w in our culture. The natura l ist rebellion against the ascetic demands o f reli gi o n and t h e earlier quiet rejection of Christianity by discreet individuals in th e name of paganism reflect at least in part the recognition that a terribly hi g h cost was being dema n ded. In our day, the conflict has b een further articulated by writers who h a v e drawn o n Nietzsc he. One of the important themes one can find in the w o rk of the late Michel Foucault is the understanding of the way in which hi gh ethical and spiritual ideals are often interwoven with exclusions and relatio ns o f domination. William Connolly has formulated this aspect of Foucault's The Conflicts of Modernity · 5x9 thought ve ry aptly. 30 And contemporary feminist critiqu e has also contrib uted greatly to this understanding, in showing how certain conceptions of the lif e of the spirit exclude women, accord them a lesser place, or assume their subordination. 31 The sense that in this and other ways hypergoods can stifle or oppress us has been one of the motives for the naturalist revolt against traditional religion and morality, as I argued in Part I (sections 3.2.-3). From all these examples, in my view, a general truth emerges, which is th at the highest spiritual ideals and aspirations also threaten to lay the most crushin g burdens on humankind. The great s piritual visions of human history have al so been poisoned chalices, the causes of untold misery and even s avagery. From the very beginning of the human story religion, our link with the highest, has been recurrently associated w ith sacrifice, even mutilation, as though something of us has to be torn away or immolated if we are to please the gods. This is an old theme, well explore d by Enlightenment thinkers, and particul arly by those with what I called the 'neo-Lucretian' outlook (section 19.3). But the sad story doesn't end with religion. The Kharkov famine and the Killing Fields were perpetrated by atheists in an attempt to realize the most lofty ideals of human perfection. Well, then, one might say, the danger attends religion, or else millenarist ideologies which are somewhat similar to religion in putting moral passion before hard evidence. What we need is a sober, scientific-minded, secular humanism.

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

  But in spite of the richness, as yet not fully explored, of the neo-Lucretian stance, this still seems to me too simple. And the reason lies in the crucial difference between the perspective I have been exploring here and the variotis naturalist and Nietzschean critiques of self-immolation. Characteristically, these take the self-destructive consequence s of a spiritual aspiration as a refutation of this aspiration. They make once again what I believe is the c ardina l mistake of believing that a good must be invalid if it leads to suffering or destruction. Thus Enlightenment naturalism thought it was refuting Christianity in sho wing the cost of asceticism; Nietzsche often gives a picture of 'morality' which shows it to be merely envy, or a device of the weak, or ressentiment, and which thus deprives it of all claim on our allegiance. 32 Foucault in his writings seemed to be claiming (I believe) impossible neutrality, which recognized no claims as binding. But I have argued that this way of reasoning is deeply mistaken. Not only can s ome potentially destructive ideals be directed to genuine goods; some of them undoubtedly are. The ethic of Plato and the Stoics can' t be written off a s mere illusion. And even non-believers, if t hey don't block it off, will feel a 52.0 • CONCLUSION powerful appeal in the gospel, which they will interpret in a secular fashion; just as Chris tians, unless immured in blinkered self-sufficiency, will recognize the appalling destruction wrought in history in the name of the faith. That is why adopting a stripped-down secular outlook, without any re ligious dimension or radical hope in history, is no t a way of avoiding the dilemma, although it may be a g ood way to live with it. It doesn't avoid it, because this too involves its 'mutilation'. It involves stifling the response in us to some of the deepest and most powerful spiritual aspiratio ns that humans have conceived. This, too, is a heavy price to pay. This is not to sa y, though, that if we have to pay some price, this may not be the safest. Prudence constantly advises us to scale down our hopes and circumscribe our vision. But we deceive ourselves if we prete nd that nothing is denied thereby of our humanity. I s this the last word? D oes so mething have to be denied ? Do we have to choose between various kinds of spiritual lobotomy and self-inflicted wounds? Perhaps. Certainly most of the outlooks which promise us that we will be spared these choices are based on selective blindness. This is perhaps the major point elaborated in this book. But I didn't undertake it in this downbeat a spirit.

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

  5 The instrumental society may bring this about through the images of life it offers and celebrates, just by occluding deeper meanings and making them hard to discern. This is a criticism frequently made today of the mass media. Or it may do so by inducing and facilitating a merely instrumental stance, or eve n an overriding c o ncern wit h a "pitiable comfort". This is a criticism frequently levelled at consumer society. But the society's action can also be seen as more direct and forceful . The charg e may be that t he instrumental mode of life, by dissolving t raditional communities or driving out earlier, less instrumental ways of living with nature, has destroyed the matrices in which meaning could formerly flourish. Or the action may be quasi-coer cive, as we see, for instance, in Max Weber's notion of mo dern society as an "iron cage" 6 or Marx's theory of capitalism (from which Weber b orrowed). Here the exigencies of survival in capitalist ( or technological) society are thought to dictate a purely instrumental patte rn of action, which has the inevitable effect of destroyin g or marginali zing purposes of intrinsic value. T h e loss of meaning can be formulated in other ways. Weber, picking up a theme from Schiller, talks of the 'disenchantmenf (Entzauberung) of the world. The world, from being a locus of 'magic', or the sacred, or the Ideas , comes simply to be seen as a neutral domain of potential means to ou r purposes. O r else it can be formulated in terms of di vision or fragmentation. To take an instrumental stance to nature is to cut us off from the sources of meanin g in it. An instrumental stance to our own feelings divides us within, split s reason from sense. And the atomistic focus on our individual goals dissolves The Conflicts of Modernity • JOI co mmunity and divides us from each· other. This is a theme we've se en before, a rticulated by Schiller. But it was also taken up by Marx (at least in his early w ork), and later by Lukacs, Adorno, a nd Horkheimer, a nd Marcus e , as well a s in the student movement of May 1968. Or people speak of a loss of resonance, depth, or richness in our human s urroundings; both in the things we use and in the ties which bind us to others. "All that is solid mel t s in air", Marx sa i d; Mar s hall Berman has e choed this lin e from the Communist Manifesto in the title of his influential b ook . 7 On the one hand, the solid, lasting, often expressive objects whi c h serve d us in the past are being set as ide for the quick, shoddy, replaceable commod ities with which we now surround ourselves.

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  *Lead-in (Morin):* Once Regina broke silence about abuse by her stepfather, she saw seduction wasn’t about pleasure—for control and being valued only as object. **Voice — Regina / Morin narration:** Once Regina broke the stranglehold of silence about the sexual abuse inflicted on her by her stepfather, she was able to see that her need to seduce men had little to do with pleasure. She seduced to reassure herself that she was in control and to reaffirm the conviction that her value was as a sexual object. No matter how much she expected him to use and abandon her, he refused. Instead he genuinely enjoyed her company, listened to her eagerly, held and caressed her passionately—and all without pushing for intercourse, which he sensed made her uncomfortable. One of the last mysteries Regina confronted in therapy was the irrational truth that this man’s love had somehow pushed her toward self-destruction. The jagged cuts on her arms were symbolic reminders that she couldn’t tolerate affection without suffering. “If he would just use me,” she explained with extraordinary insight, “I would know who I am. It hurts to be loved!” Her pain was caused by the stretching of her identity.