Disgust

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 Between Us

  Some of the children of Japanese descent in Minoura’s study—after having spent considerable time in the U.S. because of their parents’ jobs, experienced difficulty reentering Japanese culture. One of them, seventeen-year-old Jiro, tells Minoura: “I had to make a Japanese out of myself. . . .” Jiro’s “emotions” had become Americanized at the expense of being Japanese. Other Japanese-born teens also noted they had adopted the American way of doing emotion to the exclusion of the Japanese way. They had a hard time conforming and communicating in the indirect ways that are normative in Japan; some actually went as far as to feel “disgusted” with the Japanese ways. Jiro’s experience may reflect the fate of many immigrants, as a study by my colleague Jozefien De Leersnyder suggests. De Leersnyder took our emotion profile questionnaire to Turkey and Korea, and established the Turkish and Korean emotion “norms” for the different situation types. In a situation like the one Ayse reported about the teacher publicly reprimanding her, the Turkish profile might have primarily consisted of shame and respect. When De Leersnyder compared the emotion profiles of immigrant populations with the normative emotions of their culture of origin, she found that the immigrant groups had lost some of their original emotional culture. On average, the emotions of second-generation Turkish Belgians were not Turkish anymore—no more “Turkish” than those of a Belgian-majority sample. Similarly, the emotions of Korean Americans were not “Korean” anymore: no more “Korean” than the emotions of their European American counterparts. Only the first-generation Turkish Belgians still experienced “Turkish” emotions: they were just as “Turkish” as the emotions in the Turkish sample. As you will remember, the emotions of the first-generation Belgian Turks were hardly aligned with the Belgian ways of doing emotions yet. But does the learning of a new way of doing emotions necessarily replace the old way? The story of Jiro, the Japanese teen in Minoura’s study, suggests that it does not. Three years after his return to Japan, he finds an opportunity to go back to the U.S., where he reflects on both cultures’ ways of doing emotions, and now also recognizes the advantages of the Japanese system of conformity and amae. Jiro is aware that the relational goals in the US and Japan are different, and he can relate to them both:

• From Sin: The Early History of an Idea (2012)

  In the larger context of the Jewish Diaspora, Paul was unusual in making such a demand. Diaspora communities for centuries before this period and for centuries after encouraged the admiration and the support of their pagan neighbors, and they embraced pagans as patrons of and even as participants in synagogue activities. Outsider affiliation with the diaspora synagogue was ad hoc and voluntary: pagans affiliated as pagans while continuing in their native cults as well. Only if a pagan chose to become an “ex-pagan”—that is, if he chose to affiliate with the synagogue community as a proselutos, a full “convert”—would he have to repudiate his former gods. Sympathizers, however, did not. The Acts of the Apostles routinely mention such people as “god-fearers”; pagan, Jewish, and later Christian sources also use this term, as well as another: “Judaizers.” Both terms are vague, which suits the range of affiliation and activity that they describe. The larger point is the important one: Jews and pagans mixed in the synagogue communities of the Diaspora no less that in the larger religious institution, the ancient pagan city, that was their matrix. As with the temple in Jerusalem (where gentiles had the largest courtyard), so with communities in the Diaspora: Jews made room for pagans qua pagans to show respect to the god of Israel.17 This practical and stable social arrangement between diaspora synagogue communities and interested pagans drawn from the wider city contrasts sharply with an equally long-lived Hellenistic Jewish rhetorical tradition, one that immediately informs Paul’s writings. This rhetoric discoursed lavishly upon the immoral and demeaning consequences of idolatry, defining the pagans’ worship of idols as their root sin, and as the root cause of their sin. “How miserable are those, their hopes set on dead things, who give the name ‘gods’ to the works of human hands,” exclaims the author of Wisdom of Solomon, sometime in the first century BCE (Wisdom 13.10). Such people kill children in their initiation ceremonies and give themselves over to frenzied reveling; they defile their own marriages with adultery, their societies with treacherous murders; they prophesy falsehoods and commit perjury; they lie, cheat and steal (Wisdom 14.23–28). We see here, transposed into Greek, the reuse of the old anti-Canaanite biblical polemic, wherein the worship of idols invariably leads to fornication and murder.18

• From Scandalous Liaisons (2007)

  He was hard again, the sensual heat of her body over his making him lustful. But Julienne was likely sore and tired. He could wait. She belonged to him now. He had a lifetime ahead with her. A lifetime to love her. She raised her head from his chest, and her mouth curved seductively. “You’re so sweet, my love, with your beautiful words. I would never have guessed you could be so romantic.” Her hand brushed his sweat-dampened hair away from his forehead. “But if you don’t mind, could you tell me how much you love me later, and just show me instead?” With a delighted laugh, Lucien did not hesitate to oblige her. Her Mad Grace Chapter One Derbyshire, December 1814 Rotting. To Hugh La Coeur’s mind, that was the most apt description for the moldering mansion on the hill. Usually the bright white of newly fallen snow brought a peaceful serenity to the landscape. Not so with this property. Even the pristine beauty of winter could not hide the neglect apparent in everything about the place. He hesitated for a moment, taking in the view with a disgusted snort. Ominous clouds roiled above him, but the sky was darkening for another reason—the day was ending. Thoughts of returning the way he’d come, through the snow and without light, forced Hugh to proceed. If his need were less dire, he’d ride on in search of a more hospitable-looking home. But he was desperate, and the curling smoke rising from the manor’s chimneys told him the place was inhabited. Help was at hand, and he couldn’t ignore it, no matter how much he desired to. He tied his mount, one of his prized carriage bays, to the metal ring protruding from a nearby stone pillar. At one time the pillar had held up the park gate, but not any longer. One side of the gate remained upright, while the other leaned precariously atop the frozen ground. “Atrocious,” Hugh muttered to his horse, as he edged his way through the opening and started the long walk up the drive to the main house. He glanced around with morbid fascination. It was easy to imagine how beautiful the property must have been once, a source of pride for its noble occupants. But fate had dealt a cruel blow to the peer and family who owned the place. It had obviously gone without maintenance for many years. Vines, long dead, crawled over the brick exterior. Places where paint had once brightened the façade now peeled and warped from lack of care. The wind picked up, and soft, powdery snow began to swirl around Hugh’s polished Hessians. His hair blew across his forehead, his hat long lost in a ditch. The storm would be upon them soon. His legs lengthened their strides. He would have to hurry.

• From Sex Matters: How Modern Feminism Lost Touch with Science, Love, and Common Sense (2018)

  Later, Steinem remembered the pre–sexual revolution days with revulsion. “There was always the fear that you might be punished for being sexual,” she told David Allyn, author of Make Love, Not War: “The young miss, for example, must never take any real initiative in courtship…must never go home with a man whom she has just met at a dance, lest he consider her ‘just a pick-up’…must not act too intelligent when she’s with a boy because ‘boys don’t like you to be smart’…must never phone a fellow unless she is going steady with him.”120 Sexual pleasure became a rallying cry. A revolutionary cell calling itself New York Radical Women published a pamphlet called “The Myth of Vaginal Orgasm.” The National Organization for Women lobbied for abortion on demand. The National Abortion Rights Action League was founded. Everyone quoted a best seller called The Hite Report, which proposed that women were miserably unhappy in their sexual relations with men. Shere Hite’s methodology was so poor that even reviewers from friendly publications such as the Los Angeles Times and Time magazine felt obliged to note that her data were not at all representative of American women. Hite claimed that 98 percent of women were dissatisfied with their relationships with men, but a Washington Post/ABC News poll in 1987 found that 93 percent of women said their relationships were good or excellent. Hite’s various reports were, like those of Alfred Kinsey, textbook cases of junk science.121 Other sexual revolutionaries, such as Hugh Hefner, welcomed feminists’ support for eliminating traditional obstacles to male sexual license. Hefner, the founder of Playboy Enterprises, offered financial support to the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund, supported the Equal Rights Amendment, and filed amicus curiae briefs in abortion cases before the Supreme Court. “I was a feminist before there was such a thing as feminism,” he boasted.122 The crusaders for “free love” got the “free” part. Whether people got the “love” is another matter. Examining the origins of the feminist embrace of the sexual revolution, Barbara Ehrenreich, Elizabeth Hess, and Gloria Jacobs reflected the common view: that sexual freedom and female power were linked. “Early feminist writers on sex…insisted, at least implicitly, that sex should have no ultimate meaning other than pleasure, and no great mystery except how to achieve it. They realized that for women to insist on pleasure was to assert power.”123 Is any of that true?

• From Sex Matters: How Modern Feminism Lost Touch with Science, Love, and Common Sense (2018)

  Feminists saw porn—accurately, in my judgment—as a degradation of women. Yet they always interpret life through the narrow lens of women’s oppression by men, which prevents them from seeing that its harm is to human dignity and not just to women as a class. Porn encourages immorality because it treats people as means, not ends—which is exactly what casual sex does. Porn is, in a sense, the logical end point of the sexual revolution because it completes the separation of sex from love and relationships. Sexual release is commodified, packaged, and sold. The right to pleasure may be assured, 24/7, but it carries with it the debasement of human beings. Helen Gurley Brown got the ball rolling by promising young women that their “sex lives,” as distinct from their romantic or family lives, would be delicious when they dove into casual sex. For men, with far greater sex drives and visually oriented arousal, their “sex lives” could easily become porn lives and prowling sexual harassment. Feminists have proved incapable of admitting their own role in assisting the trends they so condemned. The pornography industry could not have flourished without the green light provided by the sexual revolution. Though porn has a long history that stretches back centuries, it did not go mainstream until the 1960s, when the culture was in the midst of a sexual revolution. Sexual harassment has a long history too, but the libertine sexual ethic of the past few decades fueled its foul expansion. Feminists played a large role in opening this particular Pandora’s box. Once opened, it’s difficult to close. Still, it’s worth recalling that in the original myth, after evils such as misery and sickness flew out of Pandora’s box, there remained one last thing: hope. CHAPTER 2VIVE LA DIFFERENCE“Why can’t a woman be more like a man?” —“A Hymn to Him,” My Fair Lady People have strong intuitions that men and women are different, and they are right. Even though it rarely makes headlines, a steady drumbeat of scientific research shows that differences between men and women are real, quantifiable, and even fun. Brain research, the study of hormones, and animal studies all confirm that males and females are innately, inherently different. These dissimilarities are not drastic, mind you—we are not different species, though it may feel that way when men forget to lower the toilet seat—but they can be significant. One reason so many American women aren’t drawn to feminism is that feminists so often come off as scolds, not just of society but also of other women. Many women detect that the feminist agenda is about making women more like men, instead of speaking for women as they really are. And men don’t like hearing feminists portray them as the eternal enemy of women.

• From Sex Matters: How Modern Feminism Lost Touch with Science, Love, and Common Sense (2018)

  We may think it’s unjust that women are the smaller and weaker sex; that only women menstruate, often painfully; that only women give birth (speaking of pain!) and suckle. But these are the realities. They shaped our ancestors, and they shape us. If evolutionary psychology is right, then the nature of men (to be more aggressive and risk taking) is the result of women choosing those traits in the men they had sex with (i.e., through sexual selection). In any case, it’s surely not worthwhile to chew over grievances with our prehistorical foremothers and forefathers. It is useful to consider whether to be at peace with our natures or at war with them. Sugar and SpiceEvery preschool teacher can testify to the average differences between boys and girls. So can parents. One way to describe people who insist there are no innate differences between the sexes is “childless.” When my oldest child, who had some developmental issues, was four, I accompanied him to preschool a couple of days a week to ease his transition to school. When the children were released to the playground, the boys, mine very much included, acted as if they’d been shot out of a cannon. They careened around the play equipment, shouting at the top of their lungs, zigzagging, chasing, and throwing whatever came to hand. Some of the girls played on the swings and other equipment, but in a much less frenzied fashion. Their preferred location seemed to be under the slide, where a committee would gather to talk. Little girls tend to take turns far more often than little boys, and are less likely to treat a toy as a weapon.40 Boys can turn anything, even a Barbie doll, into a play gun. Again, these are generalizations, not absolutes. Our second child, also a boy, was much less active and rough than his older brother. He was more talkative, though his preoccupations were also quite typical of his sex. He adored dinosaurs, and learned all their names and geological eras. During the phase when dinosaurs dominated his life, I remember coming across a quote from a paleontologist about why boys in particular were so drawn to dinosaurs. “It’s simple,” he explained. “They’re big, they’re mean, and they’re dead.” As the mother of three boys, I had to repress my own natural disgust at snakes and other reptiles because the little guys found them delightful. When a snake curled up on the windowsill outside my office, I suppressed the urge to scream, and instead called the kids to come see the “cool snake.” At the zoo, you could find me, plaster smile in place, admiring the Komodo dragon or the alligator snapping turtle. My reward was dragging everyone to the exhibits featuring sea otters and great cats. The boys enjoyed the cute animals as well, though not with the passion they brought to poisonous, dangerous, creepy things.

• From The City of God

  As to the demons, these false and deceitful mediators, who, though their uncleanness of spirit frequently reveals their misery and malignity, yet, by virtue of the levity of their aerial bodies and the nature of the places they inhabit, do contrive to turn us aside and hinder our spiritual progress; they do not help us towards God, but rather prevent us from reaching Him. Since even in the bodily way, which is erroneous and misleading, and in which righteousness does not walk,--for we must rise to God not by bodily ascent, but by incorporeal or spiritual conformity to Him,--in this bodily way, I say, which the friends of the demons arrange according to the weight of the various elements, the aerial demons being set between the ethereal gods and earthy men, they imagine the gods to have this privilege, that by this local interval they are preserved from the pollution of human contact. Thus they believe that the demons are contaminated by men rather than men cleansed by the demons, and that the gods themselves should be polluted unless their local superiority preserved them. Who is so wretched a creature as to expect purification by a way in which men are contaminating, demons contaminated, and gods contaminable? Who would not rather choose that way whereby we escape the contamination of the demons, and are cleansed from pollution by the incontaminable God, so as to be associated with the uncontaminated angels? 19. _That even among their own worshippers the name "demon" has never a good signification._ But as some of these demonolators, as I may call them, and among them Labeo, allege that those whom they call demons are by others called angels, I must, if I would not seem to dispute merely about words, say something about the good angels. The Platonists do not deny their existence, but prefer to call them good demons. But we, following Scripture, according to which we are Christians, have learned that some of the angels are good, some bad, but never have we read in Scripture of good demons; but wherever this or any cognate term occurs, it is applied only to wicked spirits. And this usage has become so universal, that, even among those who are called pagans, and who maintain that demons as well as gods should be worshipped, there is scarcely a man, no matter how well read and learned, who would dare to say by way of praise to his slave, You have a demon, or who could doubt that the man to whom he said this would consider it a curse? Why, then, are we to subject ourselves to the necessity of explaining away what we have said when we have given offence by using the word demon, with which every one, or almost every one, connects a bad meaning, while we can so easily evade this necessity by using the word angel? 20. _Of the kind of knowledge which puffs up the demons._

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  Jared Diamond (1997) rejected the aesthetic dangle hypothesis because of anecdotal evidence that many women do not find men’s penises particularly attractive. However, I think these responses from contemporary women are likely to be highly influenced by the fact that penises are mostly covered up in the modern world by clothing. Because they are rarely seen, women have little opportunity to evaluate them comparatively. By comparison, I think that noses would look pretty weird and unattractive as well if they were rarely visible and only revealed immediately before kissing began. An aesthetic function: Smith (1984). mate choice does not have to end: William Eberhard (1985, 1996) established that mate choice can act on features evaluated during copulation in those species that mate multiply. girls of normal body weight: See Haworth (2011). an anonymous man wrote a piece: The way in which this anonymous sexual liaison story was used during the campaign against the political candidate was so unfair and irresponsible that I hesitated to mention it. But the man’s story provides an extraordinarily vivid example of the power of cultural fashion to shape human sexual behavior, so I have left out the details of the politician’s name and so on. “the waxing trend”: The increasing prevalence and recent rapid increase in extreme forms of pubic hair grooming by American women have recently been documented by Rowen et al. (2016). men are quite sexually picky: As this anonymous report documents, many cultures police sexual practices by deploying the powerful emotion of disgust. Although disgust is a deeply biologically structured emotion, the specific things that elicit disgust—foods, odors, or sexual practices—can be extremely variable and highly culturally determined. Sexual practices can be particularly effectively regulated through cultural stories that recruit the emotion of disgust. The disgust with pubic hair reported by this anonymous blogger is an example of how fast these cultural mechanisms can change. the evolution of lactose tolerance in adults: Studies of the coevolution of genes, culture, and human diversity were pioneered by William Durham (1991), who introduced lactase expression evolution as an example of a cultural top-down effect. Genetic and genomic research on the evolution of lactase expression in adult humans has been reviewed by Curry (2013). In the absence of lactase, lactose ingested into the digestive system is broken down by bacteria in the large intestine, causing bloating, pain, and gas.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  I couldn’t focus on what they said because I was too enraptured by the way Becky’s lips flopped loosely as she spoke; and the way the nooks of Mrs. Callahan’s teeth had food crammed into them like putty. Every few minutes, she stuck her finger in her mouth, cleared out the gunk, licked it off her finger and swallowed. When it was clear that Norm and I weren’t eating the liver, Becky tapped her mother on her bony elbow and nodded her salad-bowl head toward us. Mrs. Callahan slammed her fist on the table and said, “You two are disrespectin’ me! Go to your room.” Mr. Callahan continued to eat as if no outburst had occurred. Becky grinned, her face flushing pink as she watched us leave. When the other kids returned to the bunkroom, there was a stiff-edged silence. I wondered if Becky or Mrs. Callahan was waiting outside the door, trying to catch one of us saying something bad about them. Finally Jason broke the news, smiling as if he was taking joy in the message: “Mrs. Callahan says that you don’t get any meals for a whole week and you better eat everything you can at school ’cause that’s all your getting.” Norm and I both laughed. After going without food, or with very little food on the weekends, school lunches were a banquet to us. We’d been living on free school lunches for years. This was something so normal for us, it didn’t even register as a punishment. Jason looked bewildered. He grinned bigger and then he said, “AND—” We looked at him silently. “A-a-a-a-and what?” Brian asked. “And, you have bucket duty for the week, too,” Jason said. “S-s-s-sorry,” Brian said. “Not your fault,” Norm said, and then he turned to me and said, “We’ll take turns and I’ll go first if you want. It won’t be the worst thing we’ve ever done.” “I’ll go first,” I said. “I want to get it over with.” Jason and Brian explained to me exactly where to go and what to do with the bucket in the morning. It seemed nutty to me that anyone with running water and working toilets would use the bucket system instead. At eight o’clock the single light bulb went out and everyone hushed. Then there was the click of a key in the doorknob lock, followed by the firm clink of a bolt lock sliding into place. The descending footsteps that followed were neither Becky’s slumping waddle nor Mrs. Callahan’s flat-footed slaps. They were firm, solid footsteps. The silent Mr. Callahan. I guess he knew we were there, after all, though by the look on his face at dinner, you’d think he was blind to everything but the plate in front of him. I lay in bed and listened to the TV in the room below us. Mork and Mindy was on. The last time I’d seen that show I was at the home of a friend from school.

• From The Spiritual Works of Leo Tolstoy (selected nonfiction) (2016)

  Other soul-saving measures, according to this faith, are the visiting of monasteries and the kissing of miracle-working images and relics. According to this faith, miracle-working images and relics concentrate in themselves particular holiness, strength, and grace, and nearness to these objects—touching, kissing them, placing tapers before them, crawling up to them—contributes very much to a man's salvation, and so do masses, which are ordered before these sacred objects. It is this faith, and no other, which is called Orthodox, that is, the right faith, and which has, under the guise of Christianity, been impressed upon the people for many centuries by the exercise of all kinds of force, and is now being impressed with particular effort. And let it not be said that the Orthodox teachers place the essence of the teaching in something else, and that these are only ancient forms which it is not considered right to destroy. That is not true: throughout all of Russia, nothing but this faith has of late been impressed upon the people with particular effort. There is nothing else. Of something else they talk and write in the capitals, but only this is being impressed on one hundred million of people, and nothing else. The churchmen talk of other things, but they enjoin only this with every means at their command. All this, and the worship of persons and images, is introduced into theologies, into catechisms; the masses are carefully taught this theoretically, and, being hypnotized practically, with every means of solemnity, splendour, authority, and violence, are made to believe in this, and are jealously guarded against every endeavour to be freed from these savage superstitions. In my very presence, as I said in reference to my book, Christ's teaching and his own words concerning non-resistance to evil were a subject of ridicule and circus jokes, and the churchmen not only did not oppose this, but even encouraged the blasphemy; but allow yourself to say a disrespectful word concerning the monstrous idol, which is blasphemously carried about in Moscow by drunken persons under the name of the Iberian Virgin, and a groan of indignation will be raised by these same churchmen. All that is preached is the external cult of idolatry. Let no one say that one thing does not interfere with the other, that "these ought ye to have done, and not to have left the other undone," that "all, therefore, whatsoever they bid you observe, that observe and do; but do not ye after their works: for they say, and do not" (Matt. xxiii. 23, 3).

• From A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (BDB) (1907)

  N11) DID MT) DEN Nu 11” (JE) and it (the flesh) become to you a loathsome thing (© «is xorkepav, YB in nauseam), prob.err. for 7M (Sam.) 111. [15] vb. press down and out (Aram. זיר‎ press together, Syr. 96), 91 compress; cf. Ar. 53h twist the lip of a beast)—Qal Pf. 3 pl. MIs 1° (pass; > 771, Ar. כ‎ draw forcibly together O1'** *°! KG"); Impf. 3 ms. I Ju 6%, 3 fs. sf. TMA Ib 39; Pt. pass. 1. זורָה‎ (=n Ges!) Is 59°; — press (twist or 2 זר wring) out a fleece Ju6*; not pressed out, of sore (fig. of continued disaster) Is 1°; press under foot an egg, Jb 39” (||¥), Is 59° (pass.) n.m. circlet, border (orig. that which‏ זרז presses, binds, cf. also Aram. [7 bracelet, 81"‏ wreath, crown, NH VI id., 1" ring, wrestler’s‏ Ex 2574 30%‏ זֶר זָהָב-(זרר + ring ; others fr. a‏ Bee ny Ex 30% 3771 (all P}‏ adj. girded, girt (cf. Ba °°") —only‏ זרזיר1 DWN WN that which is‏ אוחתיש 30% estr. Pr‏ girt in the loins, etc., named with lion, he-goat,‏ and king, as stately in motion. Perh.=grey-‏ hound Ew 156 De al.,or war-horse Bo Ges Hial.;‏ Vrss. cock, Talm. raven, v. De Now (NH 1!‏ starling (war-horse only in interpr. of Pr 30%),‏ Aram. 2.33); Lexx. also $0434 starling, in Ar.‏ OR perh. loan-wd. Others der. fr. a 71,‏ y. supr.)‏ n.[m.] wound (as needing to have‏ מזור its matter pressed out)—fig. of injury to, or‏ sufferings of, Isr. and Judah: Wt Ho5* also‏ (Gf Che RVm; but accents Ew Ges Gie‏ 30% 16 AV RV for pressing, i.e. binding up); "2 Ho‏ .מזר Is 1°).— Wt) Ob? v. sub‏ זור .111 (cf.‏ "5 .זוז TM y. sub‏ vb. remove, displace (Ar. 2‏ מהחןז wij‏ מו push, thrust away; comp. also Aram.‏ move, move away (intrans.))—Niph. Impf,,‏ Ex 28% and that the‏ ולא TANT by no ny‏ breast-piece be not displaced etc., 39” (both P).‏ 1 [ MH] vb. shrink back, crawl away (Aram. om crawl (also drop, drip, of water : so NH bm), mnt worm ; Syr. 1-21 locust (as crawling) ; Ar. NES withdraw, retire to a dis- tance (vy. Lane, Wetzst in De ™°?* *), and Sab. Sr withdraw, humble oneself DHM 243% 00 —Qal only .2%6. pl. estr. זחלי‎ Dt 32% Mi 7™ ;-- crawl, of reptiles (pt.) זחלי עָפֶר‎ Dt 32% i.e. ser- pents (as poisonous), instruments of Yahweh’s judgment on Isr.; ז' אריץ‎ Mi 7” id. (as crawl- ing into the earth to hide), sim. of nations in fear of ”. i noni n.f. mng. dub.; perh. crawling thing, serpent (We iene cites Ar. Zukal =Saturn, in connex. with 1K 1°; cf. Lane & Wetzst in 126 ל‎ * ** on view that Zuhal=he who withdraws, because of planet Saturn’s remoteness)—only 0. art., in design. loc. DY nonia אָבָן‎ x א‎ x° (cf. 128 ad fin.) 67 זד

• From The Spiritual Works of Leo Tolstoy (selected nonfiction) (2016)

  What cunning and what effort must be exerted by the churches, if, in spite of all these conditions which are subversive of faith, they are to continue building churches, celebrating masses, preaching, teaching, converting, and, above all, receiving for it a fat income, like all these priests, pastors, intendants, superintendents, abbots, archdeacons, bishops, and archbishops. Especial, supernatural efforts are needed. And such efforts, which are strained more and more, are used by the churches. With us, in Russia, they use (in addition to all other means) the simple, coarse violence of the civil power, which is obedient to the church. Persons who depart from the external expression of faith and who give expression to it are either directly punished or deprived of their rights; while persons who strictly adhere to the external forms of faith are rewarded and given rights. Thus do the Orthodox; but even all other churches, without exception, use for this all such means, of which the chief is what now is called hypnotization. All the arts, from architecture to poetry, are put into action, to affect the souls of men and to stultify them, and this action takes place without interruption. Particularly evident is this necessity of the hypnotizing action upon men, in order to bring them to a state of stupefaction, in the activity of the Salvation Army, which uses new, unfamiliar methods of horns, drums, songs, banners, uniforms, processions, dances, tears, and dramatic attitudes. But we are startled by them only because they are new methods. Are not the old methods of the temples, with especial illumination, with gold, splendour, candles, choirs, organs, bells, vestments, lackadaisical sermons, and so forth, the same? But, no matter how strong this action of hypnotization may be, the chief and most deleterious activity of the churches does not lie in this. The chief, most pernicious activity of the church is the one which is directed to the deception of the children, those very children of whom Christ said that it will be woe to him who shall offend one of these little ones. With the very first awakening of the child, they begin to deceive him and to impress upon him with solemnity what those who impress do not believe in themselves, and they continue to impress him, until the deception, becoming a habit, is engrafted on the child's nature. The child is methodically deceived in the most important matter of life, and when the deception has so grown up with his life that it is difficult to tear it away, there is revealed to him the whole world of science and of reality, which can in no way harmonize with the beliefs instilled in him, and he is left to make the best he can out of these contradictions.

• From Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

  happened by a process called associative activation: ideas that have been evoked trigger many other ideas, in a spreading cascade of activity in your brain. The essential feature of this complex set of mental events is its coherence. Each element is connected, and each supports and strengthens the others. The word evokes memories, which evoke emotions, which in turn evoke facial expressions and other reactions, such as a general tensing up and an avoidance tendency. The facial expression and the avoidance motion intensify the feelings to which they are linked, and the feelings in turn reinforce compatible ideas. All this happens quickly and all at once, yielding a self-reinforcing pattern of cognitive, emotional, and physical responses that is both diverse and integrated—it has been called associatively coherent . In a second or so you accomplished, automatically and unconsciously, a remarkable feat. Starting from a completely unexpected event, your System 1 made as much sense as possible of the situation—two simple words, oddly juxtaposed—by linking the words in a causal story; it evaluated the possible threat (mild to moderate) and created a context for future developments by preparing you for events that had just become more likely; it also created a context for the current event by evaluating how surprising it was. You ended up as informed about the past and as prepared for the future as you could be. An odd feature of what happened is that your System 1 treated the mere conjunction of two words as representations of reality. Your body reacted in an attenuated replica of a reaction to the real thing, and the emotional response and physical recoil were part of the interpretation of the event. As cognitive scientists have emphasized in recent years, cognition is embodied; you think with your body, not only with your brain. The mechanism that causes these mental events has been known for a long time: it is the association of ideas. We all understand from experience that ideas follow each other in our conscious mind in a fairly orderly way. The British philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries searched for the rules that explain such sequences. In An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding , published in 1748, the Scottish philosopher David Hume reduced the principles of association to three: resemblance, contiguity in time and place, and causality. Our concept of association has changed radically since Hume’s days, but his three principles still provide a good start. I will adopt an expansive view of what an idea is. It can be concrete or abstract, and it can be expressed in many ways: as a verb, as a noun, as an adjective, or as a clenched fist. Psychologists think of ideas as nodes in a vast network, called associative memory, in which each idea is linked to many others. There are different types of links: causes are linked to their effects (virus

• From The Spiritual Works of Leo Tolstoy (selected nonfiction) (2016)

  And is not the same being done in Anglicanism, Lutheranism, and in every Protestantism which has formed itself into a church? The same demands from the congregation for a belief in dogmas which were expressed in the fourth century and have lost all meaning for the men of our time, and the same demand for idolatry, if not before relics and images, at least before the Sabbath and the letter of the Bible. It is still the same activity, which is directed upon concealing the real demands of Christianity and substituting for them externals, which do not put a man under any obligations, and "cant," as the English beautifully define the occupation to which they are particularly subject. Among the Protestants this activity is particularly noticeable, since they do not even have the excuse of antiquity. And does not the same take place in the modern Revivalism,—the renovated Calvinism, Evangelism,—out of which has grown up the Salvation Army? Just as the condition of all the church doctrines is the same in reference to Christ's teaching, so are also their methods. Their condition is such that they cannot help but strain all their efforts, in order to conceal the teaching of Christ, whose name they use. The incompatibility of all the church confessions with Christ's teaching is such that it takes especial efforts to conceal this incompatibility from men. Indeed, we need but stop and think of the condition of any adult, not only cultured, but even simple, man of our time, who has filled himself with conceptions, which are in the air, from the fields of geology, physics, chemistry, cosmography, history, when he for the first time looks consciously at the beliefs, instilled in him in childhood and supported by the churches, that God created the world in six days; that there was light before the sun; that Noah stuck all the animals into his ark, and so forth; that Jesus is the same God, the son, who created everything before this; that this God descended upon earth for Adam's sin; that He rose from the dead, ascended to heaven, and sits on the right of the Father, and will come in the clouds to judge the world, and so forth. All these propositions, which were worked out by the men of the fourth century and had a certain meaning for the men of that time, have no meaning for the men of the present. The men of our time may repeat these words with their lips, but they cannot believe, because these words, like the statements that God lives in heaven, that the heavens opened and a voice said something from there, that Christ rose from the dead and flew somewhere to heaven and will again come from somewhere in the clouds, and so forth, have no meaning for us.

• From Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

  Speaking of Control “She did not have to struggle to stay on task for hours. She was in a state of flow .” “His ego was depleted after a long day of meetings. So he just turned to standard operating procedures instead of thinking through the problem.” “He didn’t bother to check whether what he said made sense. Does he usually have a lazy System 2 or was he unusually tired?” “Unfortunately, she tends to say the first thing that comes into her mind. She probably also has trouble delaying gratification. Weak System 2.” 4 The Associative Machine To begin your exploration of the surprising workings of System 1, look at the following words: Bananas Vomit A lot happened to you during the last second or two. You experienced some unpleasant images and memories. Your face twisted slightly in an expression of disgust, and you may have pushed this book imperceptibly farther away. Your heart rate increased, the hair on your arms rose a little, and your sweat glands were activated. In short, you responded to the disgusting word with an attenuated version of how you would react to the actual event. All of this was completely automatic, beyond your control. There was no particular reason to do so, but your mind automatically assumed a temporal sequence and a causal connection between the words bananas and vomit , forming a sketchy scenario in which bananas caused the sickness. As a result, you are experiencing a temporary aversion to bananas (don’t worry, it will pass). The state of your memory has changed in other ways: you are now unusually ready to recognize and respond to objects and concepts associated with “vomit,” such as sick, stink, or nausea, and words associated with “bananas,” such as yellow and fruit, and perhaps apple and berries. Vomiting normally occurs in specific contexts, such as hangovers and indigestion. You would also be unusually ready to recognize words associated with other causes of the same unfortunate outcome. Furthermore, your System 1 noticed the fact that the juxtaposition of the two words is uncommon; you probably never encountered it before. You experienced mild surprise. This complex constellation of responses occurred quickly, automatically, and effortlessly. You did not will it and you could not stop it. It was an operation of System 1. The events that took place as a result of your seeing the words

• From The Spiritual Works of Leo Tolstoy (selected nonfiction) (2016)

  Then the pupil is impressed with the necessity of doing the same, that is, crossing himself, in presence of any church or image; then he is told that on holidays (holidays are days on which Christ was born, though no one knows when that was, and circumcised, on which the Mother of God died, the cross was brought, the image was carried in, a saintly fool saw a vision, etc.,) he must put on his best clothes and go to church, buy tapers there and place them in front of images of saints, hand in little notes and commemorations and loaves, that triangles may be cut in them, and then pray many times for the health and welfare of the Tsar and the bishops, and for himself and his acts, and then kiss the cross and the priest's hand. Besides this prayer he is enjoined to prepare himself at least once a year for the holy sacrament. To prepare himself for the holy sacrament means to go to church and tell the priest his sins, on the supposition that his imparting his sins to a stranger will completely cleanse him of his sins, and then to eat from a spoon a bit of bread with wine, which purifies him even more. Then it is impressed upon a man and a woman, who want their carnal intercourse to be sacred, that they must come to church, put on metallic crowns, drink potions, to the sound of singing walk three times around a table, and that then their carnal intercourse will become sacred and quite distinct from any other carnal intercourse. In life people are impressed with the necessity of observing the following rules: not to eat meat or milk food on certain days, on other certain days to celebrate masses for the dead, on holidays to receive the priest and give him money, and several times a year to take the boards with the representations out of the church and carry them on sashes over fields and through houses. Before death a man is enjoined to eat from a spoon bread with wine, and still better, if he has time, to have himself smeared with oil. This secures for him happiness in the next world. After a man's death, his relatives are enjoined, for the purpose of saving the soul of the defunct, to put into his hands a printed sheet with a prayer; it is also useful to have a certain book read over the dead body and the name of the dead man pronounced several times in church. All this is considered an obligatory faith for everybody. But if one wants to care for his soul, he is taught, according to this faith, that the greatest amount of blessedness is secured for the soul in the world to come by contributing money for churches and monasteries, by putting holy men thus under obligation to pray for him.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, Part 4 (300 – 1300, Rome) (2009)

  ‘filth’.49 There was much criticism of this theology of grace at the time, and it has alternately repelled and fascinated both Catholic and Protestant down to the present day. One of Augustine’s modern admirers and biographers, having wrestled with the man for a lifetime, is prepared bluntly to say that ‘Augustinian predestination is not the doctrine of the Church but only the opinion of a distinguished Catholic theologian.’50 Western theologians, Catholic and Protestant, would do well to ponder that. Eastern theologians, so influenced by the Eastern monastic tradition of spiritual endeavour which encompasses both Chalcedonians and non-Chalcedonians, have never found Augustine’s approach to grace congenial. Contemporary opponents, in particular the clever and outspoken Pelagian aristocrat Julian, Bishop of Eclanum, pointed to Augustine’s personal history and his involvement with the Manichees, with their dualist belief in the eternal struggle between equally balanced forces of good and evil.51 Such critics said that this was the origin of both Augustine’s pessimistic view of human nature and his emphasis on the role of sexual reproduction in transmitting the Fall. It would probably do more justice to Augustine to say that he was heir to the world-denying impulses of Platonists and Stoics. Augustine’s early grounding in Neoplatonism undoubtedly stayed with him; references to the heritage of Plato (of whose actual works he had in fact read little), and Platonic modes of thought, shape much of his writing. Amid many approving references to Plato in The City of God, he can assert at length that Platonists are near-Christians; ‘that is why we rate the Platonists above the rest of the philosophers’.52 This helps explain why Plato remained close to the heart of Christian thinking through the medieval period, even when Christian thinkers began to be excited by their rediscovery of many lost works of Aristotle during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (see pp. 398–9). Augustine did nothing to discourage Christians seeing God through Neoplatonic eyes. God in Platonic mode was transcendent, other, remote. When his image appeared in mosaic or painting, characteristically as the resurrected Christ the Judge of the Last Days, dominating a church building from the ceiling of the apse behind the altar in front of congregation and clergy, it was as a monarch whose stern gaze transfixed the viewer in awe, just as an earthly emperor would do on formal occasions. That created all the more need for the Church to recognize a myriad of courtiers who could intercede with their imperial Saviour for ordinary humans seeking salvation or help in their everyday lives. These were the saints. Their ranks were increasingly extended beyond the ranks of the martyrs from persecution times, who had been honoured since the second century in pilgrimage centres such as that of St Peter in Rome. Now the martyrs were

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

  One can appeal to introspection for proof. When, for example, I go into a slaughter-house into which I once went years ago, and the horrid din of the screaming hogs strikes me with the overpowering sense of identification, when the blood-stained face of the 'sticker,' whom I had long ceased to think of, is immediately recognized as the face that struck me so before; when the dingy and reddened woodwork, the purple-flowing floor, the smell, the emotion of disgust, and all the details, in a word, forthwith re-establish themselves as familiar occupants of my mind; the extraneous associates of the past time are anything but prominent. Again, in trying to think of an engraving, say the portrait of Rajah Brooke prefixed to his biography, I can do so only partially; but when I take down the book and, looking at the actual face, am smitten with the intimate sense of its sameness with the one I was striving to resuscitate,—where in the experience is the element of extrinsic association? In both these cases it surely feels as if the moment when the sense of recall is most vivid were also the moment when all extraneous associates were most suppressed. The butcher's face recalls the former walls of the shambles; their thought recalls the groaning beasts, and they the face again, just as I now experience them, with no different past ingredient. In like manner the peculiar deepening of my consciousness of the Rajah's physiognomy at the moment when I open the book and say "Ah! that's the very face!" is so intense as to banish from my mind all collateral circumstances, whether of the present or of former experiences. But here it is the nose preparing tracts for the eye, the eye preparing them for the mouth, the mouth preparing them for the nose again, all these processes involving paths of contiguous association, as defended in the text. I cannot agree, therefore, with Prof. Höffding, in spite of my respect for him as a psychologist, that the phenomenon of instantaneous recognition is only explicable through the recall and comparison of the thing with its own past image. Nor can I see in the facts in question any additional ground for reinstating the general notion which we have already rejected (supra, p. 394) that a 'sensation' is ever received into the mind by an 'image' of its own past self. It is received by contiguous associates; or if they form too faint a fringe, its neural currents run into a bed which is still 'warm' from just-previous currents, and which consequently feel different from currents whose bed is cold.

• From What Do Women Want?: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire (2013)

  How did Galen’s thinking cling on so tenaciously? The longevity of his teaching is all the more baffling, given that only about one-third of women, nowadays, say they can climax through penetration alone. Were men and women of Galen’s time, and long after, deftly attentive to the clitoris during intercourse? Better coached in the methods of vaginal orgasms? The shards offer up no answers. But, assuming that sexual skill was no better then than now, didn’t women ever volunteer that they’d conceived without the tremor? Hints and theories of procreation without pleasure did emerge over the centuries, yet somehow Galen’s wisdom wasn’t supplanted. In the late sixteen hundreds, the widely used English midwifery manual titled Aristotle’s Masterpiece, which asserted its scientific agreement with Tiresias about women’s superior ecstasy, described the female role in conception this way: “By nature much delight accompanies the ejection of the seed, by the breaking forth of swelling spirit and the stiffness of nerves.” Still, this embrace of women’s sexuality, from Exodus onward, shouldn’t be taken as the prevailing ethos of any period. The ancient wariness and repression of female eros is a story that barely needs telling. There is Eve’s position as first sinner: seductress and source of mankind’s banishment from paradise. There is, from Tertullian, founding theologian of Christianity, the assignment of Eve’s sinfulness to all women. All women were destined to be “the Devil’s gateway.” There are Moses’s transcriptions of God’s warnings in Leviticus. As the Jews encamp at Mount Sinai on their journey toward the land of milk and honey, God descends in a cloud and makes clear, again and again, that the center of a woman’s sexual anatomy overflows with horror, with a monthly blood “fountain” so monstrous that she must be quarantined, “put apart for seven days, and whosoever toucheth her shall be unclean . . . and everything that she lieth upon shall be unclean, everything also that she sitteth upon.” The litany of taint continues, relentlessly, until the decree that those who “uncover” the fountain and have sex will be expelled from the tribe, cast away from God’s people. For the Greeks, the original woman was Pandora. Molded by the gods out of clay, her erotic thrall and threat—her “beautiful evil . . . bedecked with all manner of finery” in the poet Hesiod’s rendition, her “shameless mind and deceitful nature”—made her as dangerous as Eve. Lust-drunk witches of the Middle Ages left men “smooth,” devoid of their genitals; and to the long line of living nightmares caused by female carnality, French and Dutch anatomists of the seventeenth century contributed the clitoris that grew with too much touching into a full-blown phallus, turning women into men who ravished their former sex.

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

  The Libertines taught the community of goods and of women, and elevated spiritual marriage above legal marriage, which is merely carnal and not binding. The wife of Ameaux justified her wild licentiousness by the doctrine of the communion of saints, and by the first commandment of God given to man: "Be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth (Gen. 1:28). The Libertines rejected the Scriptures as a dead letter, or they resorted to wild allegorical interpretations to suit their fancies. They gave to each of the Apostles a ridiculous nickname.734 Some carried their system to downright atheism and blasphemous anti-Christianity. They used a peculiar jargon, like the Gypsies, and distorted common words into a mysterious meaning. They were experts in the art of simulation and justified pious fraud by the parables of Christ. They accommodated themselves to Catholics or Protestants according to circumstances, and concealed their real opinions from the uninitiated. The sect made progress among the higher classes of France, where they converted about four thousand persons. Quintin and Pocquet insinuated themselves into the favor of Queen Marguerite of Navarre, who protected and supported them at her little court at Nérac, yet without adopting their opinions and practices.735 She took offence at Calvin’s severe attack upon them. He justified his course in a reply of April 28, 1545, which is a fine specimen of courtesy, frankness, and manly dignity. Calvin assured the queen, whose protection he had himself enjoyed while a fugitive from persecution, that he intended no reflection on her honor, or disrespect to her royal majesty, and that he wrote simply in obedience to his duty as a minister. "Even a dog barks if he sees any one assault his master. How could I be silent if God’s truth is assailed?736 ... As for your saying that you would not like to have such a servant as myself, I confess that I am not qualified to render you any great service, nor have you need of it … . Nevertheless, the disposition is not wanting, and your disdain shall not prevent my being at heart your humble servant. For the rest, those who know me are well aware that I have never studied to enter into the courts of princes, for I was never tempted to court worldly honors.737 For I have good reason to be contented with the service of that good Master, who has accepted me and retained me in the honorable office which I hold, however contemptible in the eyes of the world. I should, indeed, be ungrateful beyond measure if I did not prefer this condition to all the riches and honors of the world."738 Beza says: "It was owing to Calvin that this horrid sect, in which all the most monstrous heresies of ancient times were renewed, was kept within the confines of Holland and the adjacent provinces."