Excitement

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 37 of 182 · 20 per page

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  No sooner had one been refuted than Luther had come up with another, and more extreme, claim. And people were keen to know what he would say next, and where he would next attack. Forward momentum meant that they wanted to read, discuss, and argue in order to grasp where he was heading. And indeed, Luther soon delivered. In December 1519, picking up on Eck’s taunt that he was a Hussite, Luther argued in a sermon published in German that a Church council ought to consider whether the laity should receive the sacrament in both kinds. 47 23. and 24. Martin Luther, Eyn Sermon von dem Hochwirdigen Sacrament, Wittenberg, 1519. The demand of the cup for the laity was clearly signaled in the illustrations, too. The very first page showed a ciborium, the container in which the Host was kept and displayed to the people. When the page was turned, the reader saw the cup containing the wine, and facing it, Luther’s provocative statement: “For my part, however, I would consider it a good thing if the Church should again decree in a general council that all persons be given both kinds, like the priests.” 48 The sacrament, Luther argued, was instituted by Christ and it consisted of two elements, bread and wine, and so laypeople, not just the clergy, must receive both. By calling for this publicly, and in German, Luther had made a demand that could be easily grasped by laypeople. Duke Georg immediately alerted the Elector to Luther’s latest pronouncement, writing also to the bishops of Merseburg and Meissen. 49 This was Bohemian poison: The cup for the laity was exactly what Jan Hus had advocated. Demanding the sacrament in both kinds was more radical, and heretical, than anything Luther had said in Leipzig. And unlike the insistence on the sinfulness of human works, or the attack on indulgences, this was not a theological argument but a simple demand for practical reform that could be taken up by ordinary people and would lead to far-reaching changes in every parish. Although Luther was careful to concede that those who were given only the bread still received the whole sacrament, the genie could not be put back in the bottle. 50 It was the call for Communion in both kinds that popularized the early Reformation as parish after parish demanded to be given the wine as well as the bread. It was also a frontal attack on the status of the clergy as a separate, priestly estate, who therefore merited receiving the whole sacrament and not just the bread. It would only be a matter of time before Luther launched his attack on the nature of the priesthood itself.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Gush branches opened all over the country. The cadre formed a master plan for the settlement of the whole of the West Bank: the aim was to import hundreds of thousands of Jews into the area and to colonize all the strategic mountain strongholds. Experts on the geography of the region, on demography, and on settlement were consulted. Administrative bodies were established for planning and propaganda. One of these was Mate Mirtzai, which organized settlement operations. 10 Squatters, often led by Levinger, would drive their old, battered trailers to a desolate West Bank hilltop in the dead of night. When the army arrived to expel them, the right-wing parties in the Knesset accused the Labor government of behaving exactly the same way as the British in pre-state days. It was a clever stratagem. The Israeli government was now cast in the role of oppressor, and it was the Gush settlers who seemed to embody Israel’s heroic past. The Gush managed to establish only three settlements during these years, however. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was anxious to conciliate Egypt and Syria during this postwar period, and was ready to make small territorial concessions. He continued to resist the combined pressure of the Gush and the Right. But the Gush continued its propaganda efforts, organizing huge rallies and hikes across the West Bank. In 1975, crowds carried Torah scrolls through the occupied territories, singing, dancing, and clapping, secularists joining the religious Zionists. On Independence Day 1976, nearly twenty thousand armed Jews attended a West Bank “picnic,” marching from one part of Samaria to another. 11 These militant hikes and demonstrations were often timed to coincide with the establishment of a new settlement or with another illegal squat. All these actions encouraged some Israelis to see the territories as essentially Jewish, and helped to break down the taboo against settling in occupied land. Gush was pragmatic, clever, and resourceful. It appealed to atheists and secularists, but for its Orthodox members it was an essentially religious movement. From the Rabbis Kook, they had inherited a kabbalistic piety. Establishing a settlement in what the Gush believed to be Jewish land was to extend the realm of the sacred and to push back the frontiers of the “Other Side.” A settlement was what Christians would call a sacrament, an outward symbol of hidden grace that made the divine present in the profane world in a new and more effective way. It was what Isaac Luria had called tikkun, an act of restoration that would one day transform the world and the cosmos. The hikes, marches, battles with the army, and illegal squats were a form of ritual that brought a sense of ecstasy and release.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  If they contradicted proven facts and the evidence of our senses, they must be cast aside. None of the great insights of the past could be permitted to impede our creation of a glorious new future for humanity. The inventions of science would end human misery, Bacon believed, and inaugurate here on earth the millennial kingdom foretold by the prophets. In Bacon’s writings we sense the excitement of the new age. So confident was he, that he could see no conflict between the Bible and science, and, years before the condemnation of Galileo, he demanded complete intellectual liberty for the men of science, whose work was far too important for the human race to be obstructed by simpleminded clergymen. The Advancement of Learning amounted to a declaration of independence on the part of scientific rationalism, which sought emancipation from myth and declared that it alone could give human beings access to truth. It was an important moment, marking the beginning of science as we know it in the modern West. Hitherto, scientific and rational exploration had always been conducted within a comprehensive mythology which had explained the meaning of these discoveries. The prevailing myth had always controlled these researches and put a brake on their application, as the limitations of conservative society demanded. But by the seventeenth century, European scientists were beginning to liberate themselves from these old constraints. There was no need for them any longer, since the factors that had held agrarian societies back were gradually being overcome. Bacon insisted that science alone was true. His view of science was, admittedly, very different from our own. For Bacon, scientific method consisted chiefly in gathering facts; he did not appreciate the importance of guesswork and hypothesis in scientific research. But Bacon’s definition of truth would be extremely influential, especially in the English-speaking countries. He believed that the only information upon which we could safely rely came from our five senses; anything else was pure fantasy. Philosophy, metaphysics, theology, art, imagination, mysticism, and mythology were all dismissed as irrelevant and superstitious because they could not be verified empirically. People who subscribed to this wholly rational way of life but who wanted to be religious would have to find new ways of thinking about God and spirituality. We see the death of the mythical approach in the philosophy of the French scientist René Descartes (1596–1650), who was able to speak only in logoi, in rational language. His was a lonely vision. For Descartes, the universe was a lifeless machine, the physical world inert and dead. It could give us no information about the divine. The single living thing in the cosmos was the human mind, which could find certainty merely by turning in upon itself. We could not even be sure that anything besides our own doubts and thoughts existed.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  It needed an increasing number of people to take part in the modernization process at quite a humble level. Ordinary folk became printers, machinists, and factory workers, and they too had to acquire, to a degree, modern standards of efficiency. A modicum of education would be required of more and more people. An increasing number of workers became literate, and once that happened they would inevitably demand a greater share in the decision-making processes of their society. A more democratic form of government would be essential. If a nation wanted to use all its human resources to modernize and enhance its productivity, it would be necessary to bring hitherto segregated and marginalized groups, such as the Jews, into mainstream culture. The newly educated working classes would no longer submit to the old hierarchies. The ideals of democracy, toleration, and universal human rights, which have become sacred values in Western secular culture, emerged as part of the intricate modernizing process. They were not simply beautiful ideals dreamed up by statesmen and political scientists, but were, at least in part, dictated by the needs of the modern state. In early modern Europe, social, political, economic, and intellectual change were part of an interlocking process; each element depended upon the others. 2 Democracy was found to be the most efficient and productive way of organizing a modernized society, as became evident when the eastern European states, which did not adopt democratic norms and employed more draconian methods of bringing out-groups into the mainstream, fell behind in the march of progress. 3 This was an enthralling period, therefore, but also one of wrenching political change, which people tried to absorb religiously. The old medieval forms of faith no longer brought comfort, since they could not function clearly in these altered circumstances. Religion had to be made more efficient and streamlined too, as in the Catholic reformation of the sixteenth century. But the reformations of the early modern period showed that, despite the fact that the modernizing process was well under way in the sixteenth century, Europeans still subscribed to the conservative spirit. The Protestant reformers, like the great Muslim reformers we have considered, were trying to find a new solution during a period of change by going back to the past. Martin Luther (1483–1556), John Calvin (1509–64), and Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531) all looked back ad fontes, to the wellsprings of the Christian tradition. Where Ibn Taymiyyah had rejected medieval theology and fiqh in order to return to the pure Islam of the Koran and the Sunnah, Luther likewise attacked the medieval scholastic theologians and sought to return to the pure Christianity of the Bible and the Fathers of the Church. Like the conservative Muslim reformers, therefore, the Protestant reformers were both revolutionary and reactionary. They did not yet belong to the new world that was coming, but were still rooted in the old.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  By 1900, he had been converted to Holiness spirituality, which believed that, as the prophet Joel had foretold, the gifts of healing, ecstasy, tongues, and prophecy enjoyed by the Primitive Church would be restored to the people of God immediately before the Last Days. 40 When Seymour and his friends experienced the Spirit, the news spread like wildfire. Crowds of African Americans and disadvantaged whites poured into his next service in such huge numbers that they had to move to an old warehouse in Azusa Street. Within four years, there were hundreds of Pentecostal groups all over the United States and the movement had spread to fifty countries. 41 This first Pentecostal upsurge was yet another of the popular Awakenings that have exploded from time to time during the modern period when people have become convinced at gut level that a great change is at hand. Seymour and the first Pentecostalists were convinced that the Last Days had begun, and that soon Jesus would return and establish a more just social order. But after the First World War, when it seemed that Jesus would not return as quickly as they had expected, Pentecostalists began to interpret their gift of tongues differently. They now saw it as a new way of speaking to God. St. Paul had explained that when Christians found it difficult to pray, “the Spirit itself intercedes for us with groans beyond all utterance.” 42 They were reaching out to a God that existed beyond the scope of speech. In these early years, it did indeed seem that a new world order was coming into being at these Pentecostal services. At a time of economic insecurity and increased xenophobia, blacks and whites prayed together and embraced one another. Seymour became convinced that it was this racial integration rather than the gift of tongues that was the decisive sign of the Last Days. 43 The Pentecostal movement was not entirely idyllic. There were rivalries and factions, and some white Pentecostals set up their own separatist churches. 44 But the extraordinarily rapid spread of the movement among the people reflected a widespread revolt against the status quo. At a Pentecostal service, men and women spoke in tongues, fell into tranced, ecstatic states, were seen to levitate, and felt that their bodies were laughing in unspeakable joy. People saw bright luminous streaks in the air, and sprawled on the ground, felled by what seemed a weight of glory. 45 This wild ecstasy was potentially dangerous, but in these early days, at least, people did not fall into despair and depression, as some had during the Great Awakening.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Faith was no leap in the dark but depended upon “exact observation and correct thinking.” 38 Doctrines were not theological speculations, but facts. This was an entirely modern religious development, which was light-years from the premodern spirituality of the conservative period. Fundamentalists were trying to create a new way of being religious in an age that valued the logos of science above all else. Time alone would tell how successful this attempt would be religiously, but Dayton had revealed that fundamentalism was bad science, which could not measure up to the scientific standards of the twentieth century. At the same time as the fundamentalists were evolving their modern faith, the Pentecostalists were creating a “postmodern” vision that represented a grassroots rejection of the rational modernity of the Enlightenment. Where the fundamentalists were returning to what they regarded as the doctrinal base of Christianity, Pentecostals, who had no interest in dogma, were returning to an even more fundamental level: the nub of raw religiosity that exists beneath the credal formulations of a faith. While fundamentalists put their faith in the written Word of scripture, Pentecostalists bypassed language, which, as the mystics had always insisted, could not adequately express the Reality that lies beyond concepts and reason. Their religious discourse was not the logos of the fundamentalists, but went beyond words. Pentecostalists spoke in “tongues,” convinced that the Holy Spirit had descended upon them in the same way as it had descended upon Jesus’ apostles on the Jewish feast of Pentecost, when the divine presence had manifested itself in tongues of fire, and given the Apostles the ability to speak in strange languages. 39 The first group of Pentecostalists had experienced the Spirit in a tiny house in Los Angeles on April 9, 1906. The leader of the group was William Joseph Seymour (1870–1915), the son of slaves who had been freed after the Civil War, who had long been searching for a more immediate and uninhibited type of religion than was possible in the more formal white Protestant denominations. By 1900, he had been converted to Holiness spirituality, which believed that, as the prophet Joel had foretold, the gifts of healing, ecstasy, tongues, and prophecy enjoyed by the Primitive Church would be restored to the people of God immediately before the Last Days. 40 When Seymour and his friends experienced the Spirit, the news spread like wildfire. Crowds of African Americans and disadvantaged whites poured into his next service in such huge numbers that they had to move to an old warehouse in Azusa Street. Within four years, there were hundreds of Pentecostal groups all over the United States and the movement had spread to fifty countries.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The court sent the Bab back to prison, gravely underestimating the threat he posed to the regime, for by this time, the Babi movement was no longer simply a call for moral and religious reform; it had become a demand for a new sociopolitical order. Just as Shabbateanism had appealed to all social classes, the Bab was able to attract the masses with his messianism, the philosophically or esoterically inclined with his mystical theology, and the more secularly minded revolutionaries with his social doctrines. As in the earlier Jewish movement, there was an intuitive sense that the old world was passing away and that traditional sanctities would no longer apply. In June 1848, the Babi leaders held a mass meeting in Budasht, Khurasan. The Koran was formally abrogated, and the Shariah was to remain in place only until the Bab was acknowledged by the world. For the time being, the faithful must follow their own consciences and learn to distinguish good from evil by themselves, instead of relying on the ulema. They must feel free to reject the laws of the Shariah if they chose. The charismatic woman preacher Qurrat al-Ain removed her veil as a symbol of the end of female subjection and the end of the old Muslim era. All “impure” objects were henceforth to be regarded as “pure.” Truth was not a doctrine revealed all at once, in one moment of time. God’s decrees were gradually revealed to the masses through the elect. Like Shabbetai himself, the Babis reached toward a new religious pluralism: in the new order, all previously revealed religions would unite as one. 66 Many of the Babis who attended the meeting at Budasht were appalled by this radical message, and fled in horror. Other devout Muslims attacked the heretics, and the meeting ended in disorder. But the leaders’ work had only just begun. They traveled separately back to Mazanderan, where the Babi leader Mullah Husain Bushrui (d. 1849) gathered two hundred men. He delivered a fiery speech: Babis must sacrifice their worldly possessions and take Imam Husain as their model. Only by martyrdom could they inaugurate the New Day, when the Bab would exalt the downtrodden and enrich the poor. Within a year, the Bab would conquer the world and unify all the religions. Bushrui proved to be a brilliant commander; his little army put the royal troops to flight, so that, we read in the court annals, they ran away “like a herd of sheep escaping from wolves.” The Babis raided, looted, plundered, killed, and burned. The religiously inclined believed that their uprising was more important than the Battle of Kerbala, while the poor, who may have joined the movement for more mundane reasons, were the best partisans of all. For the first time, they felt that they counted, and were treated, if not as equals, as valued co-workers.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  makes it all the more noticeable that the Jesus narratives in the Gospels still give such a prominent place to the selection of the Twelve and their role in his ministry. So Jesus was convinced of his special mission to preach a message from God which centred on an imminent transformation of the world, yet he spoke of himself with deliberate irony and ambiguity, and used a delicate humour that is revealed in the content of some of his sayings. He spoke of his special place in a divine plan, looked forward to a last judgement in which he would play a leading part, yet also saw that the way to this final conclusion might result in suffering and death both for himself and for his followers. He made crowds laugh. He shocked or excited them with irreverent comments on authority; so he caricatured rival religious teachers ‘straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel’. He produced outrageous inversions of normality – ‘Leave the dead to bury their own dead,’ Jesus said to a man who wanted to postpone becoming his disciple in order to see to his father’s funeral.40 This saying is clearly authentic, since Gospel writers felt bound to preserve it even though it outrages every pious norm of the ancient world and a universal human instinct; moreover, Christianity has stonily ignored the command throughout its subsequent history. Jesus puzzled people with references which apparently needed spelling out in private even to his closest followers.41 He had power: around him, as with many charismatic leaders over the centuries, there gathered stories of exceptional healings, miracles of providing food and drink, even raising apparent corpses from the dead. For a large part of Christian history, these miracles have provided much of the fascination of Jesus for those drawn to his story, though for three centuries they have increasingly aroused unease or intellectual conflict for Christians formed by the Enlightenment of the West. Still, Jesus was a Jew immersed in the traditions that constituted the identity of his fellow Jews. He is recorded as taking a cavalier attitude to the Jewish Law or obeying its demands in ways which seem capricious, which caused anxious debate for generations about how far Christians should imitate him, and which are still puzzling after much very sophisticated modern analysis of the mixture. Maybe the answer is that Jesus did not care a great deal about being consistent on the issue, given his concentration on the imminent coming of the kingdom, in which all laws would be made anew. So he was not especially worried about special observance of the Jewish weekly holy day (the Sabbath), or various rules for ritual purity, but he cared a great deal about oaths, in particular about an agreement to enter marriage. In this respect Jesus was more hard line than regular Jewish practice embodied in the Law of Moses – too hard line indeed for the Church’s later comfort. We can tell that an absolute prohibition of divorce

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  By the seventeenth century, progress was so assured that many Europeans were already entirely oriented toward the future. They were discovering that they had to be ready to scrap the past and start again if they wanted to find the truth. This forward momentum was diametrically opposed to the mythical return to the past which was the foundation of the conservative spirit. The new science had to look forward; this was the way it worked. Once Copernicus’s theory had been proved satisfactorily, it was no longer possible to bring back the Ptolemaic cosmological system. Later, Newton’s own system, though not his methods, would be discounted. Europeans were evolving a new notion of truth. Truth was never absolute, since new discoveries could always replace the old; it had to be demonstrated objectively, and measured by its effectiveness in the practical world. The success of early modern science gave it an authority which was starting to be stronger than that of mythical truth, which met none of these criteria. This had already been apparent in the Advancement of Learning (1605), written by Francis Bacon (1561–1626), counselor to King James I of England. Bacon insisted that all truth, even the most sacred doctrines of religion, must be subjected to the stringent critical methods of empirical science. If they contradicted proven facts and the evidence of our senses, they must be cast aside. None of the great insights of the past could be permitted to impede our creation of a glorious new future for humanity. The inventions of science would end human misery, Bacon believed, and inaugurate here on earth the millennial kingdom foretold by the prophets. In Bacon’s writings we sense the excitement of the new age. So confident was he, that he could see no conflict between the Bible and science, and, years before the condemnation of Galileo, he demanded complete intellectual liberty for the men of science, whose work was far too important for the human race to be obstructed by simpleminded clergymen. The Advancement of Learning amounted to a declaration of independence on the part of scientific rationalism, which sought emancipation from myth and declared that it alone could give human beings access to truth.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The government must not stamp down on progress and innovation, but lead the way forward, since change was now the law of life. Education was the key; the common people should be educated as they were in France, girls to the same standard as boys. 51 Tahtawi believed that Egypt stood on the brink of a glorious future. He was intoxicated by the promise of modernity; he wrote a poem in praise of the steam engine, and saw the Suez Canal and the transcontinental railways of the United States as engineering feats that would bring the far-flung peoples of the earth together in brotherhood and peace. Let French and British scientists and engineers come and settle in Egypt! This could only accelerate the rate of progress. 52 During the 1870s, a new group of writers from what is now Lebanon and Syria came and settled in Cairo. 53 Most of them were Christians who had been educated in the French and American missionary schools and thus had access to Western culture. They were practitioners of the new journalism and found that they had more freedom in Khedive Ismail’s Cairo than in the Ottoman territories. They established new journals, which published articles on medicine, philosophy, politics, geography, history, industry, agriculture, ethics, and sociology, bringing crucial modern ideas to the general Arab reader. Their influence was enormous. In particular, these Christian Arabs were keen that the Muslim states should become secular, and insisted that science alone and not religion was the basis of civilization. Like Tahtawi they were in love with the West, and communicated this enthusiasm to the people of Egypt. It is poignant to look back at this early admiration in the light of the hostility that developed later. Tahtawi and the Syrian journalists were living in a brief period of harmony between East and West. The old crusading hatred of Islam seemed to have died in Europe, and Tahtawi clearly did not see Britain and France as a political threat, even though his sojourn in Paris coincided with the brutal colonization of Algeria by the French. For Tahtawi, the British and French were simply bearers of progress. But in 1871, an Iranian arrived in Cairo who had come to fear the West, which, he realized, was on the way to achieving world hegemony. Even though he was Iranian and a Shii, Jamal al-Din (1839–97) styled himself “al-Afghani” (the Afghan), probably because he hoped to attract a wider audience in the Islamic world by presenting himself as a Sunni. 54 He had had a traditional madrasah education, which had included both fiqh (jurisprudence) and the esoteric disciplines of Falsafah and mysticism (irfan) , yet he had become convinced, during a visit to British India, that modern science and mathematics were the key to the future.

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  I didn’t know how bad it was—and I’m sorry, and they’ll regret it—but you have to be tough.” And then she left. That was all she had to say on the subject. She’s cute, I thought, but you don’t need to like a girl who treats you like you’re ten: You’ve already got a mom. one hundred twenty-two days before AFTER MY LAST CLASS of my first week at Culver Creek, I entered Room 43 to an unlikely sight: the diminutive and shirtless Colonel, hunched over an ironing board, attacking a pink button-down shirt. Sweat trickled down his forehead and chest as he ironed with great enthusiasm, his right arm pushing the iron across the length of the shirt with such vigor that his breathing nearly duplicated Dr. Hyde’s. “I have a date,” he explained. “This is an emergency.” He paused to catch his breath. “Do you know”—breath—“how to iron?” I walked over to the pink shirt. It was wrinkled like an old woman who’d spent her youth sunbathing. If only the Colonel didn’t ball up his every belonging and stuff it into random dresser drawers. “I think you just turn it on and press it against the shirt, right?” I said. “I don’t know. I didn’t even know we had an iron.” “We don’t. It’s Takumi’s. But Takumi doesn’t know how to iron, either. And when I asked Alaska, she started yelling, ‘You’re not going to impose the patriarchal paradigm on me.’ Oh, God, I need to smoke. I need to smoke, but I can’t reek when I see Sara’s parents. Okay, screw it. We’re going to smoke in the bathroom with the shower on. The shower has steam. Steam gets rid of wrinkles, right? “By the way,” he said as I followed him into the bathroom, “if you want to smoke inside during the day, just turn on the shower. The smoke follows the steam up the vents.” Though this made no scientific sense, it seemed to work. The shower’s shortage of water pressure and low showerhead made it all but useless for showering, but it worked great as a smoke screen. Sadly, it made a poor iron. The Colonel tried ironing the shirt once more (“I’m just gonna push really hard and see if that helps”) and finally put it on wrinkled. He matched the shirt with a blue tie decorated with horizontal lines of little pink flamingos. “The one thing my lousy father taught me,” the Colonel said as his hands nimbly threaded the tie into a perfect knot, “was how to tie a tie. Which is odd, since I can’t imagine when he ever had to wear one.”

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Thus, ministers in many of the mainline churches (even the Anglicans) Christianized the revolutionary rhetoric of such populist leaders as Sam Adams. When they spoke of the importance of virtue and responsibility in government, this made sense of Adams’s fiery denunciations of the corruption of the British officials.51 The Great Awakening had already made New Light Calvinists wary of the establishment and confident of their ability to effect major change. When revolutionary leaders spoke of “liberty,” they used a term that was already saturated with religious meaning: it carried associations of grace, of the freedom of the Gospel and the Sons of God. It was linked with such themes as the Kingdom of God, in which all oppression would end, and the myth of a Chosen People who would become God’s instrument in the transformation of the world.52 Timothy Dwight (1752–1817), president of Yale University, spoke enthusiastically of the revolution ushering in “Immanuel’s Land,” and of America becoming “the principal seat of that new, that peculiar Kingdom which shall be given to the saints of the Most High.”53 In 1775, the Connecticut preacher Ebenezer Baldwin insisted that the calamities of the war could only hasten God’s plans for the New World. Jesus would establish his glorious Kingdom in America: liberty, religion, and learning had been driven out of Europe and had moved westward, across the Atlantic. The present crisis was preparing the way for the Last Days of the present corrupt order. For Provost William Smith of Philadelphia, the colonies were God’s “chosen seat of Freedom, Arts and Heavenly Knowledge.”54 But if churchmen were sacralizing politics, secularist leaders also used the language of Christian utopianism. John Adams looked back on the settlement of America as God’s plan for the enlightenment of the whole of humanity.55 Thomas Paine was convinced that “we have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation such as the present hath not happened since the days of Noah until now. The birthday of a new world is at hand.”56 The rational pragmatism of the leaders would not itself have been sufficient to help people make the fearsome journey to an unknown future and break with the motherland. The enthusiasm, imagery, and mythology of Christian eschatology gave meaning to the revolutionary struggle and helped secularists and Calvinists alike to make the decisive, dislocating severance from tradition.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The sultan agreed and there was huge excitement in Cairo. A French observer wrote that the enthusiasm of the crowds reminded him of the French Revolution. 36 This was the ulema ’s finest hour. Muhammad Ali had secured their support by promising that he would make no changes in Egypt without consulting them first. Everybody assumed that the status quo had been restored and that, after the upheavals of the previous few years, life could at last return to normal. But Muhammad Ali had quite different plans. He had fought the French in Egypt and had been hugely impressed by this modern European army; he wanted an up-to-date and super-efficient army of his own, and he was determined to create a modern state in Egypt that was independent of Istanbul. Muhammad Ali had no interest in the intellectual revolution that had taken place in the West. He was an uneducated man of peasant stock who only learned to read in his forties; all he required of books was that they teach him about government and military science. Like many later reformers, Muhammad Ali simply wanted to acquire the technology and military strength of modernity, and he was perfectly prepared to ignore the effect these changes would have on the cultural and spiritual life of the country. Nevertheless, Muhammad Ali was a remarkable man and his achievement was considerable. When he died in 1849, he had almost single-handedly dragged Egypt, a backward, isolated province of the Ottoman empire, into the modern world. His career provides some illuminating insights into the difficulties of bringing Western modernity to a non-Western society. First, we must remember that the West had come to modernity gradually, under its own steam. It had taken the people of Europe and America nearly three hundred years to acquire the technology and expertise that would bring them world hegemony. But even so, it had been a wrenching, disturbing process that had involved copious bloodshed as well as spiritual dislocation. Now Muhammad Ali was attempting this highly complex transformation in a mere forty years. To achieve his objectives, he found that he had to declare what amounted to war against the people of Egypt. Egypt was in an appalling state. Pillaging and destruction had taken their toll; the fellahin had deserted their lands and fled to Syria; taxes were heavy and arbitrary; the Mamluks threatened to make a comeback. How was it possible to turn this wretched country into a strong, centralized state with a modern administration and a modern army? The West was so far ahead. How could Egypt hope to catch up, beat the West at its own game, and prevent further Western invasion and encroachment? Muhammad Ali started to build his empire by annihilating the Mamluk leaders.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The first group of Pentecostalists had experienced the Spirit in a tiny house in Los Angeles on April 9, 1906. The leader of the group was William Joseph Seymour (1870–1915), the son of slaves who had been freed after the Civil War, who had long been searching for a more immediate and uninhibited type of religion than was possible in the more formal white Protestant denominations. By 1900, he had been converted to Holiness spirituality, which believed that, as the prophet Joel had foretold, the gifts of healing, ecstasy, tongues, and prophecy enjoyed by the Primitive Church would be restored to the people of God immediately before the Last Days.40 When Seymour and his friends experienced the Spirit, the news spread like wildfire. Crowds of African Americans and disadvantaged whites poured into his next service in such huge numbers that they had to move to an old warehouse in Azusa Street. Within four years, there were hundreds of Pentecostal groups all over the United States and the movement had spread to fifty countries.41 This first Pentecostal upsurge was yet another of the popular Awakenings that have exploded from time to time during the modern period when people have become convinced at gut level that a great change is at hand. Seymour and the first Pentecostalists were convinced that the Last Days had begun, and that soon Jesus would return and establish a more just social order. But after the First World War, when it seemed that Jesus would not return as quickly as they had expected, Pentecostalists began to interpret their gift of tongues differently. They now saw it as a new way of speaking to God. St. Paul had explained that when Christians found it difficult to pray, “the Spirit itself intercedes for us with groans beyond all utterance.”42 They were reaching out to a God that existed beyond the scope of speech.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  This, at any rate, was what Americans read in their newspapers in the months after the controversial 1824 election. Spurred on by these articles, people in taverns and halls across the country began talking of how the war hero Andrew Jackson had been wronged, how an insidious aristocratic elite was conspiring to take over the country. So when Jackson declared that he would run again against Adams in the presidential election of 1828—but this time as the leader of a new organization, the Democratic Party—the public was thrilled. Jackson was the first major political figure to have a nickname, Old Hickory, and soon Hickory clubs were sprouting up in America's towns and cities. Their meetings resembled spiritual revivals. The hot-button issues of the day were discussed (tariffs, the abolition of slavery), and club members felt certain that Jackson was on their side. It was hard to know for sure—he was a little vague on the issues—but this election was about something larger than issues: it was about restoring democ-racy and restoring basic American values to the White House. Soon the Hickory clubs were sponsoring events like town barbecues, the planting of hickory trees, dances around a hickory pole. They organized lavish public feasts, always including large quantities of liquor. In the cities there were parades, and these were stirring events. They often took place at night so that urbanites would witness a procession of Jackson supporters holding torches. Others would carry colorful banners with portraits of Jackson or caricatures of Adams and slogans ridiculing his decadent ways. And everywhere there was hickory—hickory sticks, hickory brooms, hickory canes, hickory leaves in people's hats. Men on horseback would Appendix B: Soft Seduction: How to Sell Anything to the Masses • 447 ride through the crowd, spurring people into "huzzahs!" for Jackson. Others would lead the crowd in songs about Old Hickory. The Democrats, for the first time in an election, conducted opinion polls, finding out what the common man thought about the candidates. These polls were published in the papers, and the overwhelming conclusion was that Jackson was ahead. Yes, a new movement was sweeping the country. It all came to a head when Jackson made a personal appearance in New Orleans as part of a celebration commemorating the battle he had fought so bravely there fourteen years earlier. This was unprecedented: no presidential candidate had ever campaigned in person before, and in fact such an appearance would have been considered improper. But Jackson was a new kind of politician, a true man of the people. Besides, he insisted that his purpose for the visit was patriotism, not politics. The spectacle was unforgettable—Jackson entering New Orleans on a steamboat as the fog lifted, cannon fire ringing out from all sides, grand speeches, endless feasts, a kind of mass delirium taking over the city. One man said it was "like a dream. The world has never witnessed so glorious, so wonderful a celebration—never have gratitude and patriotism so happily united."

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  But that was far in the future. In the late fifteenth century, the people of Europe could not have foreseen the enormity of the change they had initiated. In the course of the next three hundred years, Europe would not only transform its society politically and economically, but also achieve an intellectual revolution. Scientific rationalism would become the order of the day, and would gradually oust the older habits of mind and heart. We shall look at the Great Western Transformation, as this period has been called, in more detail in Chapter 3. Before we can appreciate its full implications, however, we must first look at the way that people in the premodern era experienced the world. In the universities of Spain, students and teachers excitedly discussed the new ideas of the Italian Renaissance. The voyage of Columbus would have been impossible without such scientific discoveries as the magnetic compass or the latest insights in astronomy. By 1492, Western scientific rationalism was becoming spectacularly efficient. People were discovering more fully than ever before the potential of what the Greeks had called logos, which was always reaching out for something fresh. Thanks to modern science, Europeans had discovered a wholly new world and were achieving unprecedented control over the environment. But they had not yet dismissed mythos. Columbus was conversant with science, but he was still at home in the old mythological universe. He seems to have come from a family of converted Jews and to have retained an interest in the Kabbalah, the mystical tradition of Judaism, but he was a devout Christian, and wanted to win the world for Christ. He hoped that when he arrived in India, he would establish a Christian base there for the military conquest of Jerusalem.2 The people of Europe had started their journey to modernity, but they were not yet fully modern in our sense. For them, the myths of Christianity still gave meaning to their rational and scientific explorations.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Just as Shabbateanism had appealed to all social classes, the Bab was able to attract the masses with his messianism, the philosophically or esoterically inclined with his mystical theology, and the more secularly minded revolutionaries with his social doctrines. As in the earlier Jewish movement, there was an intuitive sense that the old world was passing away and that traditional sanctities would no longer apply. In June 1848, the Babi leaders held a mass meeting in Budasht, Khurasan. The Koran was formally abrogated, and the Shariah was to remain in place only until the Bab was acknowledged by the world. For the time being, the faithful must follow their own consciences and learn to distinguish good from evil by themselves, instead of relying on the ulema. They must feel free to reject the laws of the Shariah if they chose. The charismatic woman preacher Qurrat al-Ain removed her veil as a symbol of the end of female subjection and the end of the old Muslim era. All “impure” objects were henceforth to be regarded as “pure.” Truth was not a doctrine revealed all at once, in one moment of time. God’s decrees were gradually revealed to the masses through the elect. Like Shabbetai himself, the Babis reached toward a new religious pluralism: in the new order, all previously revealed religions would unite as one.66 Many of the Babis who attended the meeting at Budasht were appalled by this radical message, and fled in horror. Other devout Muslims attacked the heretics, and the meeting ended in disorder. But the leaders’ work had only just begun. They traveled separately back to Mazanderan, where the Babi leader Mullah Husain Bushrui (d. 1849) gathered two hundred men. He delivered a fiery speech: Babis must sacrifice their worldly possessions and take Imam Husain as their model. Only by martyrdom could they inaugurate the New Day, when the Bab would exalt the downtrodden and enrich the poor. Within a year, the Bab would conquer the world and unify all the religions. Bushrui proved to be a brilliant commander; his little army put the royal troops to flight, so that, we read in the court annals, they ran away “like a herd of sheep escaping from wolves.” The Babis raided, looted, plundered, killed, and burned. The religiously inclined believed that their uprising was more important than the Battle of Kerbala, while the poor, who may have joined the movement for more mundane reasons, were the best partisans of all. For the first time, they felt that they counted, and were treated, if not as equals, as valued co-workers.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  This was also an exciting and innovative time for Muslims; three new Islamic empires were founded during the early sixteenth century: the Ottoman empire in Asia Minor, Anatolia, Iraq, Syria, and North Africa; the Safavid empire in Iran; and the Moghul empire in the Indian subcontinent. Each reflected a different facet of Islamic spirituality. The Moghul empire represented the tolerant, universalist philosophical rationalism known as Falsafah; the Safavid shahs made Shiism, hitherto the faith of an elite minority, the religion of their state; and the Ottoman Turks, who remained fiercely loyal to Sunni Islam, created a polity based on the Shariah, sacred Muslim law. These three empires were a new departure. All three were early modern institutions, governed systematically and with bureaucratic and rational precision. In its early years, the Ottoman state was far more efficient and powerful than any kingdom in Europe. Under Suleiman the Magnificent (1520–66), it reached its apogee. Suleiman expanded westward, through Greece, the Balkans, and Hungary, and his advance into Europe was checked only by his failure to take Vienna in 1529. In Safavid Iran, the shahs built roads and caravansaries, rationalized the economy, and put the country in the forefront of international trade. All three empires enjoyed a cultural renewal on a par with the Italian Renaissance. The sixteenth century was the great period of Ottoman architecture, Safavid painting, and the Taj Mahal. And yet, while these were all modernizing societies, they did not implement radical change. They did not share the revolutionary ethos that would become characteristic of Western culture during the eighteenth century. Instead the three empires expressed what the American scholar Marshall G. S. Hodgson has called “the conservative spirit,” which was the hallmark of all premodern society, including that of Europe. 1 Indeed, the empires were the last great political expression of the conservative spirit and, since they were also the most advanced states of the early modern period, they can be said to represent its culmination. 2 Today, conservative society is in trouble. Either it has been effectively taken over by the modern Western ethos, or it is undergoing the difficult transition from the conservative to the modern spirit. Much of fundamentalism is a response to this painful transformation. It is, therefore, important to examine the conservative spirit at its peak in these Muslim empires, so that we can understand its appeal and strengths, as well as its inherent limitations. Until the West introduced a wholly new kind of civilization (based on a constant reinvestment of capital and technical improvement), which did not come into its own until the nineteenth century, all cultures depended economically upon a surplus of agricultural produce. This meant that there was a limit to the expansion and success of any agrarian-based society, since it would eventually outrun its resources and obligations. There was a limit to the amount of capital available for investment.

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  I wondered, then, why she had chosen Paul and Marya. Alaska found everyone’s secrets so fast that I suspected she’d done this before, but she couldn’t possibly have had advance knowledge of the secrets of Ruth and Margot Blowker, ninth-grade twin sisters who were new and seemed to socialize even less than I did. After crawling into their room, Alaska looked around for a moment, then walked to the bookshelf. She stared at it, then pulled out the King James Bible, and there—a purple bottle of Maui Wowie wine cooler. “How clever,” she said as she twisted off the cap. She drank it down in two long sips, and then proclaimed, “Maui WOWIE!” “They’ll know you were here!” I shouted. Her eyes widened. “Oh no, you’re right, Pudge!” she said. “Maybe they’ll go to the Eagle and tell him that someone stole their wine cooler!” She laughed and leaned out the window, throwing the empty bottle into the grass. And we found plenty of porn magazines haphazardly stuffed in between mattresses and box springs. It turns out that Hank Walsten did like something other than basketball and pot: he liked Juggs. But we didn’t find a movie until Room 32, occupied by a couple of guys from Mississippi named Joe and Marcus. They were in our religion class and sometimes sat with the Colonel and me at lunch, but I didn’t know them well. Alaska read the sticker on the top of the video. “The Bitches of Madison County. Well. Ain’t that just delightful.” We ran with it to the TV room, closed the blinds, locked the door, and watched the movie. It opened with a woman standing on a bridge with her legs spread while a guy knelt in front of her, giving her oral sex. No time for dialogue, I suppose. By the time they started doing it, Alaska commenced with her righteous indignation. “They just don’t make sex look fun for women. The girl is just an object. Look! Look at that!” I was already looking, needless to say. A woman crouched on her hands and knees while a guy knelt behind her. She kept saying “Give it to me” and moaning, and though her eyes, brown and blank, betrayed her lack of interest, I couldn’t help but take mental notes. Hands on her shoulders, I noted. Fast, but not too fast or it’s going to be over, fast. Keep your grunting to a minimum. As if reading my mind, she said, “God, Pudge. Never do it that hard. That would hurt. That looks like torture. And all she can do is just sit there and take it? This is not a man and a woman. It’s a penis and a vagina. What’s erotic about that?

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Europeans were evolving a new notion of truth. Truth was never absolute, since new discoveries could always replace the old; it had to be demonstrated objectively, and measured by its effectiveness in the practical world. The success of early modern science gave it an authority which was starting to be stronger than that of mythical truth, which met none of these criteria. This had already been apparent in the Advancement of Learning (1605), written by Francis Bacon (1561–1626), counselor to King James I of England. Bacon insisted that all truth, even the most sacred doctrines of religion, must be subjected to the stringent critical methods of empirical science. If they contradicted proven facts and the evidence of our senses, they must be cast aside. None of the great insights of the past could be permitted to impede our creation of a glorious new future for humanity. The inventions of science would end human misery, Bacon believed, and inaugurate here on earth the millennial kingdom foretold by the prophets. In Bacon’s writings we sense the excitement of the new age. So confident was he, that he could see no conflict between the Bible and science, and, years before the condemnation of Galileo, he demanded complete intellectual liberty for the men of science, whose work was far too important for the human race to be obstructed by simpleminded clergymen. The Advancement of Learning amounted to a declaration of independence on the part of scientific rationalism, which sought emancipation from myth and declared that it alone could give human beings access to truth. It was an important moment, marking the beginning of science as we know it in the modern West. Hitherto, scientific and rational exploration had always been conducted within a comprehensive mythology which had explained the meaning of these discoveries. The prevailing myth had always controlled these researches and put a brake on their application, as the limitations of conservative society demanded. But by the seventeenth century, European scientists were beginning to liberate themselves from these old constraints. There was no need for them any longer, since the factors that had held agrarian societies back were gradually being overcome. Bacon insisted that science alone was true. His view of science was, admittedly, very different from our own. For Bacon, scientific method consisted chiefly in gathering facts; he did not appreciate the importance of guesswork and hypothesis in scientific research. But Bacon’s definition of truth would be extremely influential, especially in the English-speaking countries.