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.

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• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  His unflinching and courageous stand expressed one of the essential principles of the Axial Age: people must see things as they really are. They could not function spiritually or practically if they buried their heads in the sand and refused to face the truth, however painful and frightening this might be. Jeremiah hated being a prophet. He seemed compelled, against his will, to cry “Violence and ruin!” all day long; when he tried to stop, it felt as though his heart and bones were on fire, and he was forced to prophesy again. He had become a laughingstock, and wished he had never been born. 7 Like Amos and Hosea, he felt that his own subjectivity had been taken over by God; the pain that wracked his every limb was Yahweh’s pain: God also felt humiliated, ostracized, and abandoned. 8 Instead of denying his suffering, Jeremiah presented himself to the people as a man of sorrows, opening his heart to the terror, rage, and misery of his time, and allowing it to invade every recess of his being. Denial was not an option; it could only impede enlightenment. Shortly after the first deportation, in 597, Jeremiah heard that there were some so-called prophets at work in Babylon, who were giving the exiles false hope. So he wrote an open letter to the deportees. They were not going to return home in the near future; in fact, Yahweh was going to destroy Jerusalem. They must resign themselves to at least seventy years in captivity, so they should settle down, build houses, take wives, and have children. Above all, the exiles must not give way to resentment. This was Yahweh’s message. “Work for the good of the city to which I have exiled you; pray to Yahweh on its behalf, since on its welfare yours depends.” If they could face facts, turn their backs on false consolation, and refuse to allow their hearts to be poisoned by hatred, they would enjoy “a future full of hope.” 9 Jeremiah was convinced that it was the exiles of 597, not the people who had remained behind, who would save Israel. If they could come through this time of trial, they would develop a more interior spirituality. Yahweh would make a new covenant with them. This time it would not be inscribed on stone tablets, like the old covenant with Moses: Deep within them I will plant my law, writing it on their hearts. Then I will be their God and they shall be my people. There will be no further need for neighbour to try to teach neighbour, or brother to say to brother, “Learn to know Yahweh!” No, they will all know me, the least no less than the greatest. 10 Having lost everything, some of the people of Israel were turning within. Each individual must take responsibility for him- or herself; they were starting to discover the more interior and direct knowledge of the Axial Age.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  We know almost nothing about the kings who ruled after King Cheng, but a hundred years after the Zhou conquest, it was clear that despite its mandate from Heaven, the Zhou dynasty had started to decline. The feudal system had an inbuilt weakness. Over the years, the blood ties that linked the rulers of the various cities to the royal house became attenuated, so that the princes of the cities were merely distant cousins of the king, twice or even thrice removed. The kings continued to rule from their western capital, and by the tenth century it was clear that the more easterly cities were becoming restive. The Zhou empire was beginning to disintegrate, but the dynasty retained a religious and symbolic aura long after the Zhou kings had ceased to be important politically. The Chinese would never forget the early years of the Zhou dynasty; their Axial Age would be inspired by the search for a just ruler, who would be worthy of Heaven’s mandate. In the twelfth century, the eastern Mediterranean was engulfed in a crisis that swept away the Greek, Hittite, and Egyptian kingdoms and plunged the whole region into a dark age. We do not know exactly what happened. Scholars used to blame the “sea peoples” mentioned in Egyptian records, anarchic hordes of rootless sailors and peasants from Crete and Anatolia who raged through the Levant and vandalized towns and villages. But it seems that the sea peoples may have been a symptom of the catastrophe rather than its cause. Climatic or environmental change may have led to extensive drought and famine that wrecked the local economies, which lacked the flexibility to respond creatively to the disruption. For centuries, the Hittites and Egyptians had divided the Near East between them. The Egyptians had controlled the whole of southern Syria, Phoenicia, and Canaan, while the Hittites had ruled Asia Minor and Anatolia. By 1130, Egypt had lost most of its foreign provinces; the Hittite capital was in ruins; the large Canaanite ports of Ugarit, Megiddo, and Hazor had been devastated; and in Greece, the Mycenaean kingdom had disintegrated. Desperate, dispossessed peoples roamed the region in search of employment and security. [image file=image_rsrc5JP.jpg] The terrible finality of the crisis made an indelible impression on everybody who had experienced it. Two of the Axial peoples emerged during the ensuing dark age. A new Greek civilization rose from the rubble of Mycenae, and a confederation of tribes called Israel appeared in the highlands of Canaan. Because this really was a dark age, with few historical records, we know very little about either Greece or Israel during this period. Until the ninth century, we have virtually no reliable information about the Greeks, and only a few, fragmentary glimpses of early Israel.

• From Between Us

  BETWEEN US . . . . . . . . . . . . HOW CULTURES CREATE EMOTIONS . . . . . . . . . . . . B ATJA M ESQUITA CONTENTS Preface Chapter 1 ​ Lost in Translation Chapter 2 ​ Emotions: MINE or OURS? Chapter 3 ​ To Raise Your Child Chapter 4 ​ “Right” and “Wrong” Emotions Chapter 5 ​ Being Connected and Feeling Good Chapter 6 ​ What’s in a Word? Chapter 7 ​ Learning the Waltz Chapter 8 ​ Emotions in a Multicultural World Afterword Acknowledgments Notes Index PREFACE I became a psychologist because I was intrigued by what people felt. I wanted to understand their inner lives, what made them tick. Though it is hard to reconstruct my interest in emotions, it may have had something to do with my background. I am from a Dutch Jewish family and my parents survived the Holocaust in hiding. I was a “psychologically minded” child, always trying to figure out how my parents felt. Many of my parents’ emotions were not rooted in the circumstances that I saw right in front of my eyes, but rather in events long (or perhaps not so long) past. Desperation was around the corner, and lurking under the surface was the hurt of rejection and discrimination. A small defiance on my side could meet with my parents’ hurt feelings or desolation; my adolescent rebellion against the culture and religion was taken by my dad as disrespect, or worse, lack of love. My coming to the topic of emotions was my sense that people keep deep inside themselves these emotions that can erupt. It was easy for me to see emotions as a property of the individual, because many of the ones I observed were stronger than warranted by the current situations or relationships. It was my childhood aspiration to become a psychiatrist or a clinical psychologist who could help individuals whose emotions made them suffer. And I imagined that I could change these emotions by changing the person from the inside. My view of emotions as part of our deep inner lives was helped by a broader cultural focus on feelings. In Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) cultures, the 1960s and ’70s were the time of emancipation of feelings. Authenticity and freedom of choice reigned supreme, and so it was important to know what you really felt and really wanted. What moved you inside should determine how you lived. Soul- and emotion-searching were utterly important, because they would help you to make better choices. The focus was inward. My generation in WEIRD cultures questioned institutional rules, and put personal feelings and preferences center stage. I have done my share of soul-searching, and in my younger years I focused inward to find my emotions.

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

  The protracted negotiating process required for governance efforts is necessarily embedded in the biology of affect, knowledge, reasoning, and decision making. Humans are inevitably caught inside the machinery of affect and its accommodations with reason. There is no exit from that condition. — Leaving aside the successes of the past, how likely is it that a civilizational effort will succeed today? In one possible scenario, it will not succeed at all, because the very instruments with which we invent cultural solutions—a complicated interplay of feelings and reasons—are undermined by the conflicting homeostatic goals of different constituencies: the individual, the family, the cultural identity group, and larger social organisms. In this version of our predicament, the periodic failure of cultures would be due to the very old and prehuman biological origins of some of our distinctive behavioral and mental features, a sort of unwashable original sin whose features permeate and corrupt the solutions for human conflict as well as their application. Because current cultural solutions or their application or both would not have gained independence from their biological origins, some of our best and noblest intents would be inevitably thwarted. No amount of transgenerational educational effort would be likely to correct that flaw. We would be repeatedly pulled down in the good tradition of Sisyphus, who, as punishment for his arrogance, was condemned to push a big stone up a hill, only to see it roll down and have to start again. A sidebar to the failure scenario has been articulated by historians and philosophers versed in the world of AI and robotics. 12 As noted in the previous chapter, they imagine that scientific and technological progress will downgrade the status of humans and humanity; they forecast the emergence of superorganisms; and they predict that neither feelings nor consciousness will have a place in future organisms. The science behind these dystopian visions is open to dispute, and the predictions may be inaccurate. But even if the predictions were to be accurate, I see no reason to acquiesce in this version of the future without resistance. — In another scenario, cooperation eventually comes to dominate thanks to a sustained civilizational endeavor over multiple generations. In many respects, notwithstanding the deadly human catastrophes of the twentieth century, there have been numerous positive developments over human history. After all, we did abolish slavery, a widespread cultural practice for thousands of years, and it is difficult to imagine a sane human being capable of defending the practice today. In the culturally advanced Athens of the Plato, Aristotle, and Epicurus that we so justifiably admire, out of a population of about 150,000, only 30,000 were citizens; the rest were slaves. 13 Vagaries and downturns aside, attention has been paid and advances have been made.

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

  This is a question which has come to the fore with certain contemporary •po st-modern' writers, influenced by Nietzsch e, like Jacques Derrida and Michel Fou c ault. We can call these conflicts, respectively, (1) the issue about sources, (2.) the issue about instrumentalism, and (3) the issue about morali ty. 25.2 I want to look briefly at these from the standpoint o f the picture of the m odern identity I have drawn. Of course, this discussion really demands another book (at least) to do justice t o it. But my goal here is less to contribute to the debate than it is to clarify further my portrait of the modern id entity by indicatin g what this view inclines one to say, and I will take the lic ence o f a prospectus to be terse and dogmatic, to offer a number o f beliefs without fully adequate proof. I hope to trace a path through the controversies about modernity which is distinct from some of the most trav e lled ones of o ur tim e . Perhaps o ne day I'll be able to return to this question to show why one has to tread this p a th. Let us begin wit h the second issue, the c ontroversy about the dise n gaged instrumental mode of life, because that has been the centre of the most i nfluenti al theories of modernity over the last two centuries. Fr om the Romantic perio d , th e dr i ft towards this mode of life in modern 500 • CONCLUSI O N society has been attacked. The attack has been on two levels, as I mentioned in Chapter 2. 1: that the disengaged, instrumental mode empties life of meaning, and t h at it threatens public freedom, that is, the institutions an d practices of self- g overnment. In other words, the negative conse quences of instrumentalism are allegedly twofold, experiential and public. Again and again, in a host of different ways, the claim has been made that an instrumenta l society, one in which, say, a utilitarian value outlook is e ntrenched in the institutions of a commercial, capitalist, and finally a bureaucratic mode of existence, tends to empty life of its richness, dept h , or mea ning. The experiential charge takes various forms: that there is no mor e room for heroism, or aristocratic virtues, or high purposes in life, or thin gs worth dying for-Tocqueville sometimes talked like this, and he somewhat influenced Mill to have the same fears. Another claim is that nothing i s left whi c h can give life a deep and powerful sense of purpose; there is a loss of passion. Kierkegaard saw "the present age" in these terms; 4 and Nietzsche' s "last men" are an extreme case of this decline, having no aspiration left in life but to a "pitiable comfort".

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  Far from seeking the welfare of the Babylonians, however, some of the exiles wanted to smash their children’s heads against a rock. 11 Exile is not simply a change of address. It is also a spiritual dislocation. Cut off from the roots of their culture and identity, refugees often feel that they have been cast adrift, have lost their orientation, that they are withering away and becoming insubstantial. 12 The Judean exiles were reasonably well treated in Babylon. They were not kept in a prison or a camp. King Jehoiachin, who had freely surrendered to Nebuchadnezzar in 597, was under house arrest, but was given a stipend and lived in comfort with his entourage in the southern citadel of Babylon. 13 Some of the deportees lived in the capital, while others were housed in undeveloped areas, near newly dug canals. 14 They could, to an extent, manage their own affairs. 15 But they were still displaced persons. In Jerusalem, many had been men of authority and influence; in Babylonia they had no political rights and were on the margins of society, their position lower than that of the poorest of the local people. Some were even forced into the corvée. 16 They had suffered a shocking loss of status. When they described the exile, they frequently used words like “bonds” (maserah) and “fetters” (ziggin). 17 They may not technically have been slaves, but they felt as though they were. Some of the refugees could no longer worship Yahweh, who had been so soundly worsted by Marduk, god of Babylon. 18 The book of Job, based on an ancient folktale, may have been written during the exile. One day, Yahweh made an interesting wager in the divine assembly with Satan, who was not yet a figure of towering evil but simply one of the “sons of God,” the legal “adversary” of the council. 19 Satan pointed out that Job, Yahweh’s favorite human being, had never been truly tested but was good only because Yahweh had protected him and allowed him to prosper. If he lost all his possessions, he would soon curse Yahweh to his face. “Very well,” Yahweh replied, “all that he has is in your power.” 20 Satan promptly destroyed Job’s oxen, sheep, camels, servants, and children, and Job was struck down by a series of foul diseases. He did indeed turn against God, and Satan won his bet. At this point, however, in a series of long poems and discourses, the author tried to square the suffering of humanity with the notion of a just, benevolent, and omnipotent god. Four of Job’s friends attempted to console him, using all the traditional arguments: Yahweh only ever punished the wicked; we could not fathom his plans; he was utterly righteous, and Job must therefore be guilty of some misdemeanor.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  Arjuna was not impressed by Krishna’s first set of arguments. “I will not fight!” he insisted. 80 Warfare on this scale must be wrong. It could not be right to shed blood for worldly gain. Perhaps he should become a renouncer? But he respected Krishna, and turned back to him in desperation, begging for his help. In agreeing to be Arjuna’s guru, Krishna had the difficult job of countering the arguments of the Jains, the Buddhists, and those ascetics who believed that all worldly action was incompatible with liberation. But this meant that the vast majority had no hope of salvation. Arjuna had put his finger on a major flaw of the Indian Axial Age. Krishna wanted him to consider the problem from a different perspective, but instead of proposing a wholly new teaching that canceled out the other schools, he attempted a new synthesis of the old spiritual disciplines with the new concept of bhakti. Krishna proposed that Arjuna practice an alternative kind of yoga: karma-yoga. He made a shocking suggestion: even a warrior who was fighting a deadly battle could achieve moksha. To achieve this, he had to dissociate himself from the effect of his action—in this case the battle, and the death of his kinsfolk. Like any yogin, the man of action (karma) must give up desire. He could not permit himself to lust after the fame, wealth, or power that would result from the military campaign. It was not the actions themselves that bound human beings to the endless round of rebirth, but attachment to the fruits of these deeds. The warrior must perform his duty without hope of personal gain, showing the same detachment as a yogin: Be intent on action Not on the fruits of action; Avoid attraction to the fruits And attachment to inaction! Perform actions, firm in discipline, Relinquishing attachment; Be impartial to failure and success— This equanimity is called discipline. 81 But greed and ambition were deeply rooted in human consciousness, so the warrior could achieve this state of dispassion only by the exercise of yoga, which would dismantle his ego. The warrior must take the “me” and “mine” out of his deeds, so that he acted quite impersonally. Once he had achieved this, he would in fact be “inactive,” because “he” would not be taking part in the war: “always content, independent, he does nothing at all even when he engages in action.” 82 A kshatriya had responsibilities; he could not simply retire to the forest. But by practicing karma-yoga he would in fact be detached from the world, even while he was living and active in it. Krishna instructed Arjuna in the usual yogic disciplines, but the meditation he proposed was tailor-made for the kshatriya, who could not spend hours every day in contemplation. There was a more exacting form of meditation for a professional ascetic, but karma-yoga could be performed by a man or woman who had worldly duties.

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

  But no: Now it’s March 2014, and I’m roaming around the Adobe Digital Marketing Summit in Salt Lake City, fantasizing about hurling myself over the railing of the convention center and wondering whether the fall to the first floor would kill me or just leave me paralyzed, when I get a call from the 310 area code. It’s an assistant at WME. He asks if I can please hold for a guy named Ryan, whose name I remember. Back in 2010, Ryan was the assistant who placed the calls on behalf of the agents. Now Ryan is an agent. He’s my agent, apparently. Ryan says there is a new show on HBO called Silicon Valley , and they’re just about to start airing the first episodes, and my old pal Larry Charles has told the showrunner on Silicon Valley about me, and if the show gets picked up for a second season would I like to come to Los Angeles and join the writing staff? “Dude, I wish you could see where I am right now,” I say. I’m looking at a horde of hungry marketing schmucks who are shuffling down the sides of a buffet table, stacking their plates with pasta salad and various kinds of meat in various kinds of gravy. “If you could, you would not even need to ask.” Yes! I’m in. I’m so in. Ryan says it’s not a sure thing, and I will have to interview with the showrunner, Alec Berg, and we’ll have to see if the show gets renewed for a second season, but he thinks it will. Great. Whatever. I call Sasha and tell her what just happened. I’m feeling dizzy. Back in my room, I write an article for the HubSpot blog about some presentation that I just sat through, but in my mind I’m already seven hundred miles away, sitting on a beach in Santa Monica. As soon as I finish the article I start looking at guesthouse rentals in Laurel Canyon. I can’t believe this. The gig feels like a gift from the gods, or maybe a cruel practical joke that one of my friends is playing on me. I feel like George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life —I was just about to jump when an angel appeared. Ryan, my new agent, is that angel. He’s my Clarence. God bless you, Ryan. I talk to Alec Berg. We hit it off. The show gets renewed. Ryan negotiates my deal. As soon as it’s official, I set a meeting with Trotsky. Taking the gig at Silicon Valley means I’ll have to quit HubSpot, but who cares? That’s fine by me, and in fact it gives me a way to slide out of HubSpot while saving face. We plunk down on our beanbag chairs and I tell him what I’ve been offered: fourteen weeks on an HBO show.

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

  As a young adult, James was plagued with a number of physical illnesses. He suffered a wide array of symptoms and was diagnosed as having a condition known as neurasthenia. Neurasthenia, though no longer an included diagnosis in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders by the American Psychiatric Association, included symptoms such as fatigue, depression, anxiety, digestive disorders, and headaches, among other symptoms. James often suffered from bouts of depression in his young adulthood, contemplating suicide at some points. This ailment came on at the start of America's Civil War, and though two of his other brothers enlisted, William did not, citing his neurasthenia as the cause. This period in his life very likely had a profound impact on his eventual contribution to the field of psychology. While still in college, James began studying the field of medicine in 1864. He took a break the following year to join an expedition along the Amazon. He went with a man named Louis Aggasiz, a naturalist who tried getting James interested in his field. The ultimate goal of the journey was to collect specimens from the river and surrounding area for further study. The trip was expensive for James, and though he began the trip excited for the adventure that lay ahead, he fell into deep depression from the moments of isolation he felt during the voyage. This was the greatest distance he had ever been from his family, which compounded the intensity of his isolation. Within eight months of starting the trip, James quit and returned home to continue his studies at the medical school at Harvard. In April 1867, James once again became afflicted with the symptoms of his neurasthenia. This time, however, the affliction was so painful that he collapsed. This event served as the impetus for his deciding to try and discover a cure for his condition. After telling his family about the incident, he travelled to Europe to continue his medical studies in physiology. This was, however, a masked attempt to find a cure for the physical symptoms he suffered, most notably the back pain. He went to Germany and France, staying in various places on the continent until November 1868. At that point he returned to America to continue his studies without having been able to find the cure-all for his ailments.

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

  The consciousness of the insatiable and unsto ppabl e will is the consciousness of sin; and the miracle whi c h takes us beyond is a redemption of love. Once more, as with Wagner and the young Nietzsche but even more markedly, Mahler seems to be saying that the development of the will through its fragmented phase was for the sake of this crowning achievement, in which we accede to the vision of oneness with the All. Once again, in spite of the negation, we find that a lot has remained of the original Romantic-expressive constellation. One thing is a sense of nature as a great reservo ir of force, one that we need to regain contact with. It is no longer seen as a domain of sp irit, of goodness; quite the contra ry . But to be cu t off from it is to fall into desiccation, em ptiness, dullness, a narrow and shrivelled life, egoism, and cowardice. This is Nietzsche's claim in Schopen hauer as Educator, and we find it often repeated among Scho p enhauerians. 68 We cannot cut ourselves off from this fermenting source of pow er , from the " Dio nysian ,, , as we all too easily do in our civilization based on ' r eason'; for we find that our lives shrivel and d ry up to insignificance. But at the same time, we dare not plunge too deeply, too p r ecipitately, too unguardedly into it, because it is wild, formless, unreason itself. Thi s idea of nature as a great reservoir of amoral force, with whi c h we must not lose contact, is one of the important bequests of the post S chopenhauerian period to twentieth-centu ry art and sensibilit y . We find ec h oe s of it in a host o f places, in Fauvism, Surrealism, D. H. Lawr ence. 6 9 But it is also a m oral vi sion; and this too has had its effects, some of them c atas trophic on a wo rld scale. Anoth er im po n an t le gacy, and here there i s a convergenc e with the other 446 • S U BT LE R LA NG U A GE S negations/ continuations of Romanticism, is the enhanced sense of our ow n expressive powers. It is through the articulations of the creative imaginatio n that the will is tapped and tr an smuted into beauty.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  During the Axial Age, people would realize that getting beyond the limitations of selfishness brought deeper satisfaction than mere self-indulgence: “He who curbs his desires in accordance with the Way will be joyful and free from disorder, but he who forgets the Way in the pursuit of desire will fall into delusion and joylessness.” 54 During the Chinese Axial Age, some of the philosophers would reject the artifice of ritual, but others would build a profound spirituality based upon these liturgical ceremonies. The establishment of the rites was one of the great achievements of the Zhou, and later generations recognized this. The Record of Rites, a text that was only completed after the Axial Age, remarked that the Shang had put the spirits in first place, and the rites second, but the Zhou put the rites first and the spirits second. 55 The Shang had wanted to use their rituals to control and exploit the gods, but the Zhou had intuitively realized that the rites themselves contained a much stronger transformative power. By the end of the ninth century, it was clear that the Zhou dynasty was in dire straits. In 842, King Lih was deposed and forced into exile. The embarrassing failure of the kings made some people skeptical. If the sons of Heaven were so incompetent and shortsighted, what did that say about the High God himself? Poets began to write satirical odes: “Di on High is so contradictory, that the people below are all exhausted,” one wrote. The kings and their royal rites no longer embodied the Way: “You utter talk that is not true . . . and there is no substance at the altar.” 56 When King Lih died in exile in 828, his son was restored to power. But the Way was not reestablished; poets noted that in these days there was one natural disaster after another. Despite the meticulous performance of the rites, drought was burning up the country, and the ancestors did nothing at all to help: The great mandate is about to end. Nothing to look ahead to or back upon. The host of dukes and past rulers Does not help us. As for Mother and Father and the ancestors How can they treat us so? 57 The rituals were still performed beautifully, and still had a profound effect on the participants, but a few tough-minded critics were beginning to lose faith in their magical efficacy. Yet the response to this growing crisis would be more ritual—not less. By the ninth century, ritual experts in India had embarked on a liturgical reformation that inaugurated India’s Axial Age.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  It was a full-time job that could not be combined with the demands of everyday life. But other sages would later find a way to develop a yoga that would give the laity intimations of enlightenment. Meanwhile, China was in crisis. When Chu had defeated the armies of the league of Chinese states in 597, the region became engulfed in an entirely new kind of aggression. The gloves were off. Chu had no time for the old ritualized warfare, and the other large states also began to cast aside the constraints of tradition, determined to expand and conquer more territory, even if this meant the destruction of the enemy. Warfare became very different from the stately campaigns of the past. In 593, for example, during a lengthy siege, the people of Song were reduced to eating their own children. The old principalities faced political annihilation. They knew that they could not compete with the bigger states but were drawn into the fray against their will, as their territories became a battleground of competing armies. Qi, for example, so frequently encroached on the tiny principality of Lu that Lu was forced to appeal to Chu for aid—but all to no avail. By the end of the sixth century, Chu had been defeated and Qi had become so dominant that the duke of Lu only managed to retain a modicum of independence with the help of the western state of Qin. The states were also weakened by internal problems. During the sixth century, Qi, Jin, and Chu were all fatally debilitated by chronic civil wars. In Lu, three competing baronial families had reduced the legitimate duke to a mere puppet. This in itself was a sign of the times. The descendant of the great duke of Zhou had been stripped of all power except his ritual duties, and was financially dependent upon the usurpers. Old political and social structures were disintegrating, and China seemed to be rushing headlong into anarchy. Yet these struggles signaled a deeper change. The noblemen who rebelled against their princes were certainly motivated by greed and ambition, but they were also trying to free themselves from the domination of the older families. The Chinese were painfully moving toward a more egalitarian polity that would undermine the hitherto unchallenged rule of the hereditary princes. 88 In Cheng and Lu, there were fiscal and agricultural reforms that improved the lot of the peasants. In the second half of the sixth century, Zichan, prime minister of the principality of Cheng, inscribed and displayed the penal laws on large bronze cauldrons. There was now a definite law code, which anybody could consult to challenge arbitrary rule.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  As an anti-aristocratic gesture he henceforth wrote his surname as one word, Lammenais; and his Paroles d’un Croyant (1834) was a sustained attack on tyranny, an aggressive defence of democracy, and a plea for ‘a free church in a free state’ – he prophesied that God would shortly transform society by casting down the oppressors of the poor, and by inaugurating a new age of justice, peace and love. Thus Lammenais in his own lifetime had come full circle, from a legitimist condemnation of revolution to the hope of a Christian millenium. The book was the subject of an explicit papal condemnation, and for the rest of his life (he died in 1854) Lammenais, though never excommunicated, was pushed into the shadows of Catholic disapproval. The failure of his movement meant that the Church in France lost the romantic intellectuals – Victor Hugo, Alfred de Musset, Alfred de Vigny, Lamartine and many others. Thus at the very moment when the Oxford intellectuals – or some of them – were moving to Rome and even crossing the Tiber, the Paris intellectuals were moving out. Intellectually, they met on the drawbridge – some pursuing authority, others fleeing it. But it would not be true to say that the Church, or even specifically the triumphalists, learned nothing from Lammenais. They accepted his view that the Church could become a popular institution, and the Pope a populist leader. What they denied was his assumption that the Church needed to compromise on its traditional social attitudes to win such support. Indeed some of them, if only dimly, grasped the important point that it was the very refusal of the papacy to compromise that, for many, formed its chief attraction. What repelled a Lammenais attracted a Manning; and not just Mannings but men and women of all classes and nations who saw the Vatican fortress as a security-symbol. It was this instinct which lay behind the success of Giovanni Mastari-Ferretti, who became Pope as Pius IX on the death of Gregory XVI in 1846. His life was a Lammenais-type pilgrimage in reverse. He was an aristocrat and a soldier, but epilepsy forced him to give up the army. He had been to Latin-America during the anti-colonial period, and he began his pontificate with a series of liberal reforms in the papal states. He visited prisons and released political prisoners, allowed some freedom of the press, reformed the criminal code, excused Rome’s Jews from attending compulsory sermons, installed gas-lighting and built a railway. The desperate revolutionary year of 1848 turned him round completely: thereafter, for the next thirty years, he aligned himself totally with reaction in Church and State, and set his face steadily against liberalism in any form. In his old age, indeed, he seemed to have taken an almost physical delight in his personal struggle to hold the liberal world at bay, and a pride in epitomizing the traditions and characteristics of the ancien régime.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  Israel’s Axial Age began in earnest after the destruction of Jerusalem and the enforced deportation of the exiles to Babylonia, where the priestly writers started to evolve an ideal of reconciliation and ahimsa. China’s Axial Age developed during the Warring States period, when Confucians, Mohists, and Daoists all found ways to counteract widespread lawless, lethal aggression. In Greece, where violence was institutionalized by the polis, despite some notable contributions to the Axial ideal—especially in the realm of tragedy—there was ultimately no religious transformation. Nevertheless, the critics of religion are right to point to a connection between violence and the sacred, because homo religiosus has always been preoccupied by the cruelty of life. Animal sacrifice—a universal practice of antiquity—was a spectacularly violent act designed to channel and control our inherent aggression. It may have been rooted in the guilt experienced by the hunters of the Paleolithic period when they slaughtered their fellow creatures. The scriptures often reflect the agonistic context from which they emerged. It is not difficult to find a religious justification for killing. If seen in isolation from the tradition as a whole, individual texts in, for example, the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, or the Qur’an can easily be used to sanction immoral violence and cruelty. The scriptures have constantly been used in this way, and most religious traditions have disgraceful episodes in their past. In our own day, people all over the world are resorting to religiously inspired terrorism. They are sometimes impelled by fear, despair, and frustration; sometimes by a hatred and rage that entirely violates the Axial ideal. As a result, religion has been implicated in some of the darkest episodes of recent history. What should be our response? The Axial sages give us two important pieces of advice. First, there must be self-criticism. Instead of simply lambasting the “other side,” people must examine their own behavior. The Jewish prophets gave a particularly strong lead here. At a time when Israel and Judah were threatened by the imperial powers, Amos, Hosea, and Jeremiah all told them to scrutinize their own conduct. Instead of encouraging a dangerous righteousness, they wanted to puncture the national ego. To imagine that God is reflexively on your side and opposed to your enemies was not a mature religious attitude. Amos saw Yahweh, the divine warrior, using Assyria as his instrument to punish the kingdom of Israel for its systemic injustice and social irresponsibility. After his deportation to Babylon, when the exiles had been the victims of massive state aggression, Ezekiel insisted that the people of Judah look into their own violent behavior. Jesus would later tell his followers not to condemn the splinter in their neighbor’s eye while ignoring the beam in their own.

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

  Experience had taught me that flight, so far from enabling me to persevere in my resolutions, tended on the contrary to weaken and destroy them; I was inclined therefore to subject myself to a still more severe trial, imagining from the obstinacy and peculiarity of my character that I should succeed most certainly by the adoption of such measures as would compel me to make the greatest efforts. I determined never to leave the house, which, as I have already said, was exactly opposite that of the lady; to gaze at her windows, to see her go in and out every day, to listen to the sound of her voice, though firmly resolved that no advances on her part, either direct or indirect, no tender remembrances, nor in short any other means which might be employed, should ever again tempt me to a revival of our friendship. I was determined to die or liberate myself from my disgraceful thraldom. In order to give stability to my purpose, and to render it impossible for me to waver without the imputation of dishonor, I communicated my determination to one of my friends, who was greatly attached to me, and whom I highly esteemed. He had lamented the state of mind into which I had fallen, but not wishing to give countenance to my conduct, and seeing the impossibility of inducing me to abandon it, he had for some time ceased to visit at my house. In the few lines which I addressed to him, I briefly stated the resolution I had adopted, and as a pledge of my constancy I sent him a long tress of my ugly red hair. I had purposely caused it to be cut off in order to prevent my going out, as no one but clowns and sailors then appeared in public with short hair. I concluded my billet by conjuring him to strengthen and aid my fortitude by his presence and example. Isolated in this manner in my own house, I prohibited all species of intercourse, and passed the first fifteen days in uttering the most frightful lamentations and groans. Some of my friends came to visit me, and appeared to commiserate my situation, perhaps because I did not myself complain; but my figure and whole appearance bespoke my sufferings. Wishing to read something I had recourse to the gazettes, whole pages of which I frequently ran over without understanding a single word. . . I passed more than two months till the end of March 1775, in a state bordering on frenzy; but about this time a new idea darted into my mind, which tended to assuage my melancholy."

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

  I can only cry out and implore, “Oh, ring, ring, open wide and let us out!” Yours, Anne THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 11, 1943 Dearest Kitty, I have a good title for this chapter: Ode to My Fountain Pen In Memoriam My fountain pen was always one of my most prized possessions; I valued it highly, especially because it had a thick nib, and I can only write neatly with thick nibs. It has led a long and interesting fountain-pen life, which I will summarize below. When I was nine, my fountain pen (packed in cotton) arrived as a “sample of no commercial value” all the way from Aachen, where my grandmother (the kindly donor) used to live. I lay in bed with the flu, while the February winds howled around the apartment house. This splendid fountain pen came in a red leather case, and I showed it to my girlfriends the first chance I got. Me, Anne Frank, the proud owner of a fountain pen. When I was ten, I was allowed to take the pen to school, and to my surprise, the teacher even let me write with it. When I was eleven, however, my treasure had to be tucked away again, because my sixth-grade teacher allowed us to use only school pens and inkpots. When I was twelve, I started at the Jewish Lyceum and my fountain pen was given a new case in honor of the occasion. Not only did it have room for a pencil, it also had a zipper, which was much more impressive. When I was thirteen, the fountain pen went with me to the Annex, and together we’ve raced through countless diaries and compositions. I’d turned fourteen and my fountain pen was enjoying the last year of its life with me when . . . It was just after five on Friday afternoon. I came out of my room and was about to sit down at the table to write when I was roughly pushed to one side to make room for Margot and Father, who wanted to practice their Latin. The fountain pen remained unused on the table, while its owner, sighing, was forced to make do with a very tiny corner of the table, where she began rubbing beans. That’s how we remove mold from the beans and restore them to their original state. At a quarter to six I swept the floor, dumped the dirt into a news paper, along with the rotten beans, and tossed it into the stove. A giant flame shot up, and I thought it was wonderful that the stove, which had been gasping its last breath, had made such a miraculous recovery. All was quiet again. The Latin students had left, and I sat down at the table to pick up where I’d left off. But no matter where I looked, my fountain pen was nowhere in sight. I took another look. Margot looked, Mother looked, Father looked, Dussel looked. But it had vanished.

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

  The im po rta nce of th is mo ral hor izon bec o mes glaringly evi dent as so on a s we see th at it is not th e on ly pos sible one, th at ma ter ial ism or hedo nism c an fo rm par t of a qu ite di fferent mor al outlo ok. Fo r instance, they cou ld be th e ba sis of a des pa i r ing amo ral i s m. O r else, t hey cou ld be the ba si s of a r e duc tiv e morality , in which aspirat ion to h on our and altr uis m hav e no p l ace. D i dero t sen ses t his redu ctiv e spi rit in Helvetius' work, and h e dedica te s his e x te n sive not e s on the ref utation of the la tter's post humous de /' Hom me to a ttack ing it. Speaking of the philosophes them s elves, "nos contemporain s et nos a mis ", who pu t themsel ves at risk attacking priests and kings, he as k s: 33 4 • THE VOICE OF NATURE Comment resoudrez-vous en derniere analyse a des plaisirs sensuels, sans un pitoyable abus des mots, ce genereux enthousiasme qui les e xpose a la pert e de leur liberte, de leur fortune, de leur honneur meme et d e leur vie ? How could you equate in th e last analysis to se n sual pleasure, without a pitiful abuse of words, this generous enthusiasm which e xposes them t o the loss of their liberty, of their fortune, of their honour itself and their life? 29 More dangerous was a morality of purely egoistic gratification , which could find a basis in radical materialism. Both Holbach and Dide rot saw a view of this kind in La Mettrie's work, and attacked it energetically. On assure qu'il s'est trouve des philosophes et des athees qui ont nie la distinction du vice et de la v ertu, et qui ont preche la debauche et la licence dans les moeurs. L ' auteur q ui vient tout recemment de publier L'Homme Machine a raisonne sur les moeurs comme un vrai frenetique. We are assured t hat there have been philosophers and athe ists who have denied the distinction between virtue and vice, ahd who hav e preached debauchery and licence in their morals. T h e author who h as recently published L'Homme Machine has argued concerni n g morals like a frenzied madman.

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

  They frequently offer a bounty, so much per head. It’s like the slave hunts of the olden days. I don’t mean to make light ofthisj it’s much too tragic for that. In the evenings when it’s dark, I often see long lines of good, innocent people, accompanied by crying children, walking on and on, ordered about by a handful of men who bully and beat them until they nearly drop. No one is spared. The sick, the elderly, children, babies and pregnant women -- all are marched to their death. We’re so fortunate here, away from the turmoil. We wouldn’t have to give a moment’s thought to all this suffering if it weren’t for the fact that we’re so worried about those we hold dear, whom we can no longer help. I feel wicked sleeping in a warm bed, while somewhere out there my dearest friends are dropping from exhaustion or being knocked to the ground. I get frightened myself when I think of close friends who are now at the mercy of the cruelest monsters ever to stalk the earth. And all because they’re Jews. Yours, Anne FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 20, 1942 Dearest Kitty, We don’t really know how to react. Up to now very little news about the Jews had reached us here, and we thought it best to stay as cheerful as possible. Every now and then Miep used to mention what had happened to a friend, and Mother or Mrs. van Daan would start to cry, so she decided it was better not to say any more. But we bombarded Mr. Dussel with questions, and the stories he had to tell were so gruesome and dreadful that we can’t get them out of our heads. Once we’ve had time to digest the news, we’ll probably go back to our usual joking and teasing. It won’t do us or those outside any good if we continue to be as gloomy as we are now. And what would be the point of turning the Secret Annex into a Melancholy Annex? No matter what I’m doing, I can’t help thinking about those who are gone. I catch myself laughing and remember that it’s a disgrace to be so cheerful. But am I supposed to spend the whole day crying? No, I can’t do that. This gloom will pass. Added to this misery there’s another, but of a more personal nature, and it pales in comparison to the suffering I’ve just told you about. Still, I can’t help telling you that lately I’ve begun to feel deserted. I’m surrounded by too great a void. I never used to give it much thought, since my mind was filled with my friends and having a good time. Now I think either about unhappy things or about myself. It’s taken a while, but I’ve finally realized that Father, no matter how kind he may be, can’t take the place of my former world.

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

  I wander from room to room, climb up and down the stairs and feel like a songbird whose wings have been ripped off and who keeps hurling itself against the bars of its dark cage. “Let me out, where there’s fresh air and laughter!” a voice within me cries. I don’t even bother to reply anymore, but lie down on the divan. Sleep makes the silence and the terrible fear go by more quickly, helps pass the time, since it’s impossible to kill it. Yours, Anne WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 3, 1943 Dearest Kitty, To take our minds off matters as well as to develop them, Father ordered a catalog from a correspondence school. Margot pored through the thick brochure three times without finding anything to her liking and within her budget. Father was easier to satisfy and decided to write and ask for a trial lesson in “Elementary Latin.” No sooner said than done. The lesson arrived, Margot set to work enthusiastically and decided to take the course, despite the expense. It’s much too hard for me, though I’d really like to learn Latin. To give me a new project as well, Father asked Mr. Kleiman for a children’s Bible so I could finally learn something about the New Testament. “Are you planning to give Anne a Bible for Hanukkah?” Margot asked, somewhat perturbed. “Yes. . . Well, maybe St. Nicholas Day would be a better occasion,” Father replied. Jesus and Hanukkah don’t exactly go together. Since the vacuum cleaner’s broken, I have to take an old brush to the rug every night. The window’s closed, the light’s on, the stove’s burning, and there I am brushing away at the rug. “That’s sure to be a problem,” I thought to myself the first time. “There’re bound to be complaints.” I was right: Mother got a headache from the thick clouds of dust whirling around the room, Margot’s new Latin dictionary was caked with dirt, and rim grumbled that the floor didn’t look any different anyway. Small thanks for my pains. We’ve decided that from now on the stove is going to be lit at seven-thirty on Sunday mornings instead of five-thirty. I think it’s risky. What will the neighbors think of our smoking chimney? It’s the same with the curtains. Ever since we first went into hiding, they’ve been tacked firmly to the windows. Sometimes one of the ladies or gentlemen can’t resist the urge to peek outside. The result: a storm of reproaches. The response: “Oh, nobody will notice.” That’s how every act of carelessness begins and ends. No one will notice, no one will hear, no one will pay the least bit of attention. Easy to say, but is it true? At the moment, the tempestuous quarrels have subsided; only Dussel and the van Daans are still at loggerheads. When Dussel is talking about Mrs. van D., he invariably calls her’ ‘that old bat” or “that stupid hag,” and conversely, Mrs. van D.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  In his later work, we see a harshness that could have been accentuated by his second Sicilian adventure. After the death of the tyrant Dionysius I of Syracuse, Plato unwisely became involved in the political conspiracy that led to the assassination of his old protégé Dion in 354. At one point, Plato was put under house arrest and narrowly escaped execution. Not only had his philosophical ideas proved wholly ineffective, but he himself was personally scarred, and from this time forward he took a harder line. Plato’s vision of the forms had introduced a new dynamic into Greek religion. Since Homer, Greeks had been encouraged to accept reality as it was, and had no ambition to transcend it or radically change their condition. Poets, scientists, and tragedians had insisted that existence was transitory, moribund, and often cruelly destructive. Human life was dukkha; not even the gods could change this unsatisfactory state of affairs. This was the true reality, and a mature human must face up to it, either with heroic defiance or with tragic or philosophical insight. Plato reversed this. Our earthly, corporeal life was indeed miserable and awry, but it was not the true reality. It was unreal, compared with the immutable, eternal world of the forms, and this perfect world was accessible to human beings. People did not have to put up with suffering and death. If they were prepared to devote themselves to a long, exacting philosophical initiation, their souls could ascend to the divine world without any help from the gods and achieve an immortality that had once been the prerogative of the Olympians. After Plato there was a yearning for an ineffable reality that existed beyond the gods. In his later years, however, Plato turned back to the world and his theology became more concrete. In Timaeus, Plato suggested that the world had been created by a divine craftsman (demiourgos), who was eternal and wholly good but not omnipotent; he was not free to fashion the cosmos as he chose but had to model his creation upon the forms. The craftsman was not a figure that could inspire a religious quest, because he had no interest in humanity. He was not the Supreme God: a higher god existed, but he was also irrelevant to the human predicament. “To find the maker and father of this universe is hard enough,” Plato remarked, “and even if I succeeded, to declare him to everyone is impossible.” 97 Plato’s aim was not religious. He simply wanted to devise a rational cosmology. Created according to the forms, imbued with reason, his universe had an intelligible pattern that could be investigated empirically. There would be no more arbitrary Olympian interventions. The cosmos was ruled by a comprehensive plan, which men could understand if they applied themselves to it logically.