Hope

Passages

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

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• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  Unlike push motivations, which require you to face your distress and be made uncomfortable, pull motivations promise potential rewards and benefits. Believable, enticing images of how your life can be more fulfilling are immensely helpful in keeping motivation alive even in the face of adversity. Maggie was willing to consider stepping outside the familiar framework of unfulfilled longing not simply because she feared a life of loneliness but also because she had experienced moments of actual intimacy and was beginning to believe she deserved more of it. Similarly, Ryan was not only pushed by shame about being a prisoner of his taboo impulses, he was also pulled by a genuine desire to feel closer to his girlfriend. ANTIMOTIVATIONSWhen you set out to change an entrenched pattern, sooner or later you will feel inclined to back away from the very changes you seek. Psychologists call this resistance. All kinds of doubts and fears, both conscious and unconscious, can contribute to resistance. What if you fail? What are the implications of success? Could tampering with your eroticism ruin it? Will friends, family members, or sexual partners encourage you, or might they be threatened by what you’re doing? If your sexuality changes will you still recognize yourself? These concerns, along with a host of others, are antimotivators because they prevent you from vigorously pursuing your goals. Antimotivators are as much a part of the change process as your goals and motivations. Because antimotivators are most likely to undermine change when they operate subconsciously, it’s smart to become as aware of them as possible. If you face your fears about change rather than suppress them you will be much better able to address what concerns you. Antimotivators contain crucial information about which courageous acts are called for—and when. YOUR MAP FOR CHANGESuccessful and fulfilling erotic changes involve all three: push motivators, pull motivators, and antimotivators. To boost your awareness, put them all together on one piece of paper so you can see them at a single glance. Write the headline GOALS, and then list your objectives as clearly as you can. Maggie’s Motivational Map Goals: • To be attracted to someone available for a relationship • To only love someone who loves me in return • To develop other turn-ons besides longing • To let myself accept love [image file=image_rsrc3FH.jpg] Next divide the area below your goals into three columns. Label the left column Push Motivators. As specifically as possible, list the reasons that you believe change is necessary. Focus on what concerns you about your eroticism—anything that causes pain or distress. Label the middle column Pull Motivators. Here spell out how you hope to benefit, either immediately or in the long run. Label the right column Antimotivators and list any fears and hesitations that might hold you back.

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

  The circle of concerns for other humans and, more recently, the concern for nonhuman species and for the planet reveal a growing recognition of the human plight and even an awareness of the particular conditions of life and environment. Some statistics also indicate a decline in some modalities of violence, although the trends may not be sustainable. In this scenario, the worst part of the barbaric human nature would have already been tamed, and cultures would eventually achieve effective control over barbarism and conflict, if only we give them time, a nice prospect indeed. Culturally, we would be too much of a work in progress, far from conforming, in the sociocultural space, to the homeostatic near perfection that has been achieved at the basic biological level over billions of years of evolution. Given that evolution needed so much time to optimize homeostatic operations, how could one expect, in just the modest thousands of years of our shared human condition, to have harmonized the homeostatic needs of so many and such diverse cultural groups? This scenario accommodates temporary setbacks but holds hope for some progress, in spite of the current crisis of liberal democracies. It is not the first time that dark and sunny scenarios of human nature are contrasted before our eyes. In the middle of the seventeenth century, the vision we traditionally identify with Thomas Hobbes saw humans as solitary, nasty, and brutish. One century later, the vision of humanity that we commonly attribute to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, on the contrary, saw humans as gentle, noble, and, as their journey commenced, uncorrupted. Although Rousseau eventually recognized that society corrupted the angelic purity of humans, neither vision captured the entire picture.14 Most humans can actually be brutish, savage, cunning, self-interested, noble, silly, innocent, and lovely. No one manages to be all of it at the same time, although some try. The sunny or dark visions of humanity are still intact in contemporary scholarship. The argument that our awareness of the dignity of human life has increased and that progress is possible, to which I referred earlier, is countered by the reality of periodic failures. This is the position of the philosopher John Gray, an unreformed pessimist, who believes that progress is an illusion, a seductive song invented by those who converted to Enlightenment myths.15 Enlightenments do have their dark, unilluminated parts, something that Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno recognized in the middle of the twentieth century.16 Nonetheless, one solid reason for hope in the middle of the current crisis is the fact that, to date, no educational project has been pursued consistently enough, long enough, and widely enough to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that it would not lead to the better human condition we yearn for.

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

  It is not the case that memories of bad moments are not stored and available. It is more a matter of how much they are allowed to play in the current mind. The detail is there, and excruciatingly painful feelings can certainly be produced from it. But perhaps the not so good memories do not gain strength with time in contrast to the good memories that replay better than on past recalls. It would be a case not of suppressing details of bad memories but of lingering less over them, thus diminishing their negativity. The upshot is a highly adaptive increase in well-being.30 The peak-end effect described by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky could contribute as well. We would be prone to creating strong memories for the more rewarding aspects of a past scene and obscure the rest. Memory is imperfect.31 Not everyone reports this sort of affectively positive reshaping of remembrances. Some people consider that their recollections are precisely as they should be, neither better nor worse. Predictably, the pessimists among us report a worsening. But all of this is difficult to measure and judge because the courses of our lives differ in good part for reasons that have to do with our affective styles. Why is it important to consider such phenomena? One of the reasons has to do with the anticipation of the future. What one hopes for and how one faces the life ahead depend on how the past has been lived, not only in objective, factually verifiable terms, but also in the experience or reconstruction of the objective data in one’s remembrances. Recollection is at the mercy of all that makes us unique individuals. The styles of our personalities in numerous aspects have to do with typical cognitive and affective modes, the balance of individual experiences in affective terms, cultural identities, achievements, luck. How and what we create culturally and how we react to cultural phenomena depend on the tricks of our imperfect memories as manipulated by feelings. 9CONSCIOUSNESSAbout ConsciousnessIn normal circumstances, when we are awake and alert, without any fuss or deliberation, the images that flow in the mind have a perspective—ours. We spontaneously recognize ourselves as the subjects of our mental experiences. The material in my mind is mine, and I automatically assume that the material in yours is yours. We each appreciate mental contents in a distinct perspective, mine or yours. If we are jointly looking at the same scene, we instantly recognize that we have different perspectives.

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

  As Condorcet describes the rad i ant future, Cette conscience de sa di g nite q ui appartient a l'homme libre, une education fondee sur une connaissance approfon d ie de notre constitution m orale, ne doivent-elles pas rendre communs a presque tous les hommes , ces principes d'une justice rigoureuse et pure, ces mouvements habituels d'une bienveillance active, eclairee, d'une sensibilite delicate et gener euse , dont la nature a place le germe dans nos coeurs, et qui n'attendent, pour se developper, q ue la douce influence des lumieres et de la liberte? Shouldn't that consciousness of dignity that belongs to the free ma n , th e education built on a deepened knowledge of our moral constitution , m ake these principles of a pure and rigourous justice , these habitual m ove me n ts of an a ctive benevolence, enlightened with a delicate and gen ero us sens ibilit y, th e ge rm of which natu re has plac ed in our hea rts , com m o n t o al most all me n; whic h pr inciple s, to be de ve loped, requ ir e only th e gen t l e influe nce of enl ig ht enmen t an d o f fr eed om ? 23 Radical Enlig htenment · 3 3 I B ut it is one thing to describ e human motivation in a condition of realized ha rm ony; quite another to attribute to people today a l o ve of mankind whic h would lead them to work for the good of humanity regardless of the cost to t h e mse l ves. Here was no benevolence bas ed on the recognition of convergent i n teres ts; rather the enlightened trail-blazer of the present most often k n owin gly sacrifices his own well-being to that of futur e generations, as he ri s ks th e ridicule of the ignorant mass e s and the persecution of priests an d r u l ers . But this kind of selfless benevolence w as a lso th ought to be the fruit of e nlig htenment, albeit rarely explicitly stated or clearly distinguished from the th esis of harm ony. Naturally this conviction didn't come so much from an observation of human affairs as it did from a sense of the human moral predicament, th e locus of moral sources. There obviously also entered into it some implicit au t obiographi cal reflections. The Aufklarer felt the goodness of their ow n moti vations, and felt thi s to be li nked with their rational insight.

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

  The result was the discoveries we continue making about universes within and around us and our extraordinary ability to accumulate knowledge in both internal memory and external records. Here the situation is different. We can reflect on the knowledge, think through it, manipulate it intelligently, and invent all sorts of responses to nature’s rules. On occasion, our knowledge, which includes, ironically, the discovery of life regulation rules that we cannot modify, lets us do something about the cards we have been dealt. Cultures and civilizations are the names we give to the cumulative results of these efforts. It has been so difficult to manage the gulf between the naturally imposed life regulation and the responses we invent that the human condition has often resembled a tragedy and, perhaps not often enough, a comedy. The ability to invent solutions is an immense privilege but prone to failure and quite costly. We can call this the burden of freedom or, more precisely, the burden of consciousness. 17 Had we not known of the condition—had we not subjectively felt it—we would not have cared. But once our subjectively driven care took charge of responding to our condition, we biased the process toward our understandable individual interests, which, left to themselves, include the circle of those nearest to us and barely extend to our cultural group. The move has undermined our efforts, at least in part, and actually disrupted homeostasis at different points of a global cultural system. But here is a possible place for remedy: controlling the relentless pursuit of our self-interests so that we make broader homeostasis efforts possible. Eastern philosophies have long considered this goal, and the Abrahamic religions have aimed at some curbing of selfish interests. Christianity has even advanced forgiveness and redemption and in the process emphasized compassion and gratitude. Can societies finally succeed at introducing, by secular or religious means, an intelligent and well- rewarded form of altruism such that it would replace the self-absorption that now reigns? What will it take for such efforts to succeed? 18 The particularity of the human condition, then, comes from this odd combination. On the one hand, life specifications that we never had a hand in designing—such as needs, risks, and the exuberant driving forces of pain, pleasure, desire, and reproductive urge—hail from ancient times and from nonhuman ancestors whose intellectual reach was nonexistent or limited and who could not comprehend to any substantial degree the situation that they were in. Their fate, and that of their species, was left to the fortunes of their biological endowment, notably to the genes that construed them and largely governed their behavior. Their fate was passed on to their offspring so as to construe subsequent generations—or not, and let their species disappear.

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

  Even if this materiali s t humanism turns out to be inconsistent, this still doesn't establish that some other position, say Sade' s , is right. But it does raise the question of whether and how this humanis m c an m a ke sense of the moral horizon it relies on, how it can g ive a sense to the universal value of ordinar y human fulfilment and to the requirem ent of be neficenc e; more specifically, can it conciliate wh a tever does make s en se o f this horizon with the reductive thrust of its attack on religion and me tap h ys ics? Materialists often think these questions are easy to answer, becaus e of th e co nfusion I mentioned above. They think that if we can show some ul t im a te harmony of interests, that in the best of societies, the fulfilment of each p as s e s through the fu lfi lment of all; or if we can show that humans ar e mo v e d b y s ympathy, that they take pleasure in e ach other' s well-being , the n t he problem is r es olved. But this is not at all the ca se. It may be that things would be wond erf u ll y h armonious in the p e rfectly engineered society, but wh y should I work fo r it s distant realization today, even at the cost of my life and we ll-being? Per h a p s Radical Enlightenment · 3 3 7 h umans are g enerally moved by sympathy , b ut what if right now, relative to these adversaries, I am not? The underlying claim on which these argument s c onfusedly rely is that they h ave somehow shown the moral superiority of wha t t hey describe. The harmonious society is not only ni c er for those lucky e nough to inhabit it (if e ver th e re are suc h ); it is an ideal, somethin g higher which commands th e allegiance of all of us. It is an object of strong e valuation. Similarly, symp athy is treated not just as a de facto motivation b ut as a strongly valued one: something y ou ought to feel, an im p ulse whose unrestricted forc e i n us i s part of a highe r way o f being. The mo ral argument r elies on the stronger claim.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  There would be a new exodus: once again, Jewish exiles would journey through the wilderness to their Promised Land. Instead of the anguished, wrenching visions of Ezekiel, Second Isaiah could see a glorious future, which he described in lyrical, psalmlike poetry. He spoke of magical events and a transformed creation. Unlike the Deuteronomists, who had scorned the old mythology, Second Isaiah relied upon a mythical tradition that had little connection with the Pentateuch. Instead of P’s orderly creation story, he revived the ancient tales of Yahweh, the divine warrior, slaying the sea dragon to bring order out of primordial chaos, 43 reinstating the violence that P had so carefully excluded from his cosmology. Yahweh, he announced joyfully, was about to repeat his cosmic victory over the sea by defeating the historical enemies of Israel. But these exuberant prophecies were punctuated by four extraordinary poems about a man of sorrows, who called himself Yahweh’s servant. 44 We have no idea who the servant was. Was he, perhaps, the exiled king of Judah? Or did he symbolize the whole community of deportees? Many scholars believe that these poems were not the work of Second Isaiah, and some have even suggested that the servant was the prophet himself, whose inflammatory oracles may have offended the Babylonian authorities. Others regard the servant as the archetypal exilic hero, who expressed a religious ideal that was deeply in tune with the ethos of the Axial Age. For some of the exiles, the suffering servant was their model—not the divine warrior. In the first poem, the servant announced that he had been chosen by Yahweh for a special mission. Filled with God’s own spirit, he was entrusted with the gigantic task of establishing justice throughout the world. But he would not achieve this by force of arms. There would be no battles and no aggressive self-assertion. The servant would conduct a nonviolent, compassionate campaign: He does not cry out or shout aloud or make his voice heard in the streets. He does not break the crushed reed, nor quench the wavering flame. 45 The servant had sometimes felt hopeless, but Lord Yahweh always came to his aid, so he could stand firm, set his face like flint, and remain untouched by insult and humiliation. He had never retaliated violently, but resolutely turned the other cheek. For my part I made no resistance, neither did I turn away. I offered my back to those who struck me, my cheeks to those who tore at my beard; I did not cover my face against insult and spittle. 46 God would judge and punish the servant’s enemies, who would simply melt away, disintegrating like a moth-ridden garment. The fourth song looked ahead to this final triumph. At present, the servant inspired only revulsion; he was “despised and rejected by men,” so disfigured that he seemed scarcely human. People turned their faces away in horror and disgust. But, Yahweh promised, he would eventually be “lifted up, exalted, rise to great heights.”

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

  Therein lies the tragedy, so well captured by Athenian theater twenty-five centuries ago, when the troubles that befell the characters of a play were caused not so much by their own decisions as by capricious forces external to them, godly, uncontrollable, and inevitable. Oedipus kills his father unknowingly and has no way of divining that Jocasta, his new wife, is actually his mother. He is made to carry out these several actions behaving as blindly as the blind man he eventually becomes. He is compelled. The condition was hardly different by the sixteenth century, when Shakespeare returned to this same tragic spirit, with great depth, in his treatment of malignant and ex machina emotions in Macbeth, Othello, Coriolanus, Hamlet, and Lear. Those tragedies were only gently offset by the elegiac bittersweetness of his Falstaff character in the Henry IV plays and in The Merry Wives of Windsor. With both regret and nostalgia, John Falstaff thinks of all the troubles and merriments he has felt in the flesh. By turns tragic and comic, he illustrates not just his condition but our own. It is intriguing that grand opera, which recuperated the settings of Greek tragedy by combining drama and music, returned, in the nineteenth century, to these same tragic themes and to the comedy that counters them. Verdi wrote remarkable versions of Macbeth and Othello and ended his career on an inspiring sunny note: an entire opera devoted to Shakespeare’s Falstaff that tellingly omits Falstaff’s sad undoing and ends instead in a joyous coda. There was not then, and there is not now, one single perspective and treatment of the human condition even when human beings live in the same part of the world and share a schematically comparable biography. Human differences reign.19 In theatrical terms, our overall situation has moved a notch, from tragedy to plain drama, with welcome comedic interludes. The balance between our own decisions and the forces they combat has clearly moved and in our favor. Still, we constantly pay for ills that we did not create or for committing wrongs that we never wished to commit. One glimmer of hope, a big difference between past pursuits and future attempts, resides with the vast knowledge of human nature that we now have available and the possibility of planning a more humanly intelligent strategy than in the past. This approach would regard the notion that reason should take charge as pure folly, a mere leftover from the worst excesses of rationalism, but it would also reject the idea that we should simply endorse the recommendations of emotions—be kind, compassionate, angry, or disgusted—without filtering them through knowledge and reason.20 It would foster a productive partnership of feelings and reason, emphasizing nourishing emotions and suppressing negative ones. Last, it would reject the notion of human minds as equivalent to artificial intelligence creations.

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

  Education, in the broadest sense of the term, is the obvious way forward. A long-term educational project aimed at creating healthy and socially productive environments needs to give prominence to ethical and civic behaviors and encourage classical moral virtues—honesty, kindness, empathy and compassion, gratitude, modesty. It should also address human values that transcend the management of life’s immediate needs. The circle of concerns for other humans and, more recently, the concern for nonhuman species and for the planet reveal a growing recognition of the human plight and even an awareness of the particular conditions of life and environment. Some statistics also indicate a decline in some modalities of violence, although the trends may not be sustainable. In this scenario, the worst part of the barbaric human nature would have already been tamed, and cultures would eventually achieve effective control over barbarism and conflict, if only we give them time, a nice prospect indeed. Culturally, we would be too much of a work in progress, far from conforming, in the sociocultural space, to the homeostatic near perfection that has been achieved at the basic biological level over billions of years of evolution. Given that evolution needed so much time to optimize homeostatic operations, how could one expect, in just the modest thousands of years of our shared human condition, to have harmonized the homeostatic needs of so many and such diverse cultural groups? This scenario accommodates temporary setbacks but holds hope for some progress, in spite of the current crisis of liberal democracies. It is not the first time that dark and sunny scenarios of human nature are contrasted before our eyes. In the middle of the seventeenth century, the vision we traditionally identify with Thomas Hobbes saw humans as solitary, nasty, and brutish. One century later, the vision of humanity that we commonly attribute to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, on the contrary, saw humans as gentle, noble, and, as their journey commenced, uncorrupted. Although Rousseau eventually recognized that society corrupted the angelic purity of humans, neither vision captured the entire picture. 14 Most humans can actually be brutish, savage, cunning, self-interested, noble, silly, innocent, and lovely. No one manages to be all of it at the same time, although some try. The sunny or dark visions of humanity are still intact in contemporary scholarship.

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

  I know all too well that she doesn’t think as badly of me as she did in the beginning. And that’s simply because I’m honest and tell people right to their faces what I think, even when it’s not very flattering. I want to be honest; I think it gets you further and also makes you feel better about yourself. Yesterday Mrs. van D. was talking about the rice we gave Mr. Kleiman. “All we do is give, give, give. But at a certain point I think that enough is enough. If he’d only take the trouble, Mr. Kleiman could scrounge up his own rice. Why should we give away all our supplies? We need them just as badly.” “No, Mrs. van Daan,” I replied. “I don’t agree with you. Mr. Kleiman may very well be able to get hold of a little rice, but he doesn’t like having to worry about it. It’s not our place to criticize the people who are helping us. We should give them whatever they need if we can possibly spare it. One less plate of rice a week won’t make that much difference; we can always eat beans.” Mrs. van D. didn’t see it my way, but she added that, even though she disagreed, she was willing to back down, and that was an entirely different matter. Well, I’ve said enough. Sometimes I know what my place is and sometimes I have my doubts, but I’ll eventually get where I want to be! I know I will! Especially now that I have help, since Peter helps me through many a rough patch and rainy day! I honestly don’t know how much he loves me and whether we’ll ever get as far as a kiss; in any case, I don’t want to force the issue! I told Father I often go see Peter and asked if he approved, and of course he did! It’s much easier now to tell Peter things I’d nor- mally keep to myself; for example, I told him I want to write later on, and if I can’t be a writer, to write in addition to my work. I don’t have much in the way of money or worldly possessions, I’m not beautiful, intelligent or clever, but I’m happy, and I intend to stay that way! I was born happy, I love people, I have a trusting nature, and I’d like everyone else to be happy too. Your devoted friend, Anne M. Frank An empty day, though clear and bright, Is just as dark as any night. (I wrote this a few weeks ago and it no longer holds true, but I included it because my poems are so few and far between.) MONDAY, MARCH 27, 1944 Dearest Kitty, At least one long chapter on our life in hiding should be about politics, but I’ve been avoiding the subject, since it interests me so little. Today, however, I’ll devote an entire letter to politics.

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

  Isn't there room for decision here? After all, even wha t happened before I was bo rn might on one reading be seen as part of the process of my becoming . Isn't birth itself an arbitrary point? There is perhap s a n easy an swer to this last q uestion. There clearly is a kind of continui ty running through my lifet ime th;:i.t doesn't extend befo re it. But the object or se ems to ha ve some point he re: don't we often want to speak of what we w e re as children or adol escents in terms like this: 'I was a differe nt pers on the n ' ? But it is clear th at this image doesn't have the import of a re al c ounte r - examp le to th e thesis I'm defend in g. And this b ecomes obvious wh e n we look at another aspect of our essent ial concern h e re. We want our lives t o have meaning, or weight, or substance, or to grow towards s ome fulnes s, or ho wever the concern is formulated that we have bee n discussing in thi s s ection. But this means our whole l ives. I f n ec e ssa ry, w e wan t th e future t o The Self in Moral Space • 5 I " r e d ee m " the past, to make it p a rt of a life sto ry which has sense or purpose, t o ta ke it up in a m eaningful uni ty . 35 A famous, perhaps for us modems a p a r a di gm , example of what this ca n mean is r ecounted by Proust in his A la re c h erc he du temps perdu. In the scene in the Guermant es's library, the n a r r ato r recovers the full meaning o f his past an d thu s res tores the time which wa s " l os t" in the two senses I men tioned above. The form erly irretrievabl e p a s t is r ec overed in its unity with th e life yet to live, and all the "wasted" tim e n o w h as a meaning, as the time of p reparation f or the work of the writer w ho w il l g iv e shape to thi s unity. 36 To re pudiate my childhood as unredeemable in this sense i s to accept a kin d of m utilation as a person; it is to fail to meet the full challenge involved in m akin g sense of m y life. This is t he sens e in wh ich it is not up for arbitr ary de ter minat i on wha t the tem poral l imits of my p ers onho od are.

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

  Let these errors be overcome, and they will act ben e fi cently. "Esp erons tout du progres des lumieres" ("Let us hope for e v erythi ng from the p rogress of enlightenment"), as Holbach writes in his Politi qu e naturelle. 2 1 The radical Aufklarer were often unclear just how strong a thesis this w as because the y confused it with another one which was a central part of their doctrine about human happiness. This was the view that there was a potential harmony of interests between hu m an beings. In a properly organized world, one where human happiness was best served, the felicity of each would co nsist with and even conduce to the felicity of all. Holbach's Nature affir ms this clearly in her call to man in the final chapter of the Systeme de la nature. Condorcet asks rhetorically: "L'interet mal entendu n'est-il pas la cause la p lus frequente des actions contraires au bien general?" (ls not our interest badly und e rstood the most frequent cause of action against the general good?") 22 It followed that in the perfect condition, everyone would understand an d act in full cognizance of this harmony, that each would seek happiness in what made for general happiness .

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  Now that you’ve looked at some of the most perplexing, persistent, and unpleasant dilemmas of erotic life, you may be wondering how they can ever be resolved. If you or someone you care about has struggled with a troublesome turn-on, you know firsthand that it’s useless merely to wish for change. What’s needed is a plan of action that mobilizes your innate capacities for healing and renewal. This chapter is devoted to such a plan. It is important to realize that change is intrinsic to the erotic adventure. For instance, as you discover new avenues to pleasure, your sexual repertoire naturally expands to accommodate them. Unfortunately, we must confront an unwelcome irony: the erotic patterns most in need of modification—the ones that create turmoil as well as excitation—are typically the most resistant to change. In other words, the more troublesome a turn-on, the tighter its grip. Common sense might lead you to expect that the pain of problematic sex would be a powerful motivator for change. And in a sense this is true. People whose sexuality has become a source of distress usually want to change. Yet the same conflicts the person hopes to resolve may also produce extraordinarily high levels of intensity. Consequently, those who suffer the most from their erotic patterns often feel the most compelled to repeat them. As a result of my work with hundreds of men and women who have successfully modified or expanded their turn-ons, I’ve identified seven pivotal steps that consistently lead to positive erotic change: Step 1. Clarify your goals and motivations. Step 2. Cultivate self-affirmation. Step 3. Navigate the gray zone. Step 4. Acknowledge and mourn your losses. Step 5. Come to your senses. Step 6. Risk the unfamiliar. Step 7. Integrate your discoveries. Steps 1 and 2 set the stage for change by helping you define what you’re trying to accomplish and how you expect to benefit. Steps 3 and 4 prepare you for two difficult challenges: feeling lost without a map as you leave the comfort of the familiar and coping with the grief that is a commonly ignored aspect of significant change. Steps 5 and 6 show you how to experiment with specific behaviors and use them as guides to your untapped potentials. Step 7 is concerned with making change endure. STEP 1:CLARIFY YOUR GOALS AND MOTIVATIONSSome of the most welcome changes occur spontaneously. Eroticism is constantly evolving as old turn-ons no longer satisfy and new possibilities for enjoyment appear as unexpected gifts. Under the best of conditions these changes are propelled by pleasure, without any need for conscious goal-setting.

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

  Reconciliation is i n the midst of strife and all things separated come together again. The veins separ ate and return in the heart and everything is on e un ified, eterna l glowing Life. 4 3 The expressivist philosophies of nature as a source tended to develop a t h eory of h istory whi c h saw it as resembling a spiral, from a primitive undifferentiated unity, to a conflictual division between reason and sensibil ity, human and human, to a third and higher reconciliation, in which the gains of the second period, reason and freedom, were fully retained. This structure has its roots v ery obviously in the Christian p icture of salvation history, from original Paradise, through a Fall, to ultimate Redemption. But it is connected more immediately to millenarist developments out of J ud aeo Christian thought, which were just then acquiring new political relevance . For in the late eighteenth century there is a third develo p ment which also owed som e thing to Rousseau and which introduced a polarization betWeen good and evil into Enlightenment thinking. That is what has been called modern political messianism.� I'm thinking of the s pirit which was in evidence, for instance, at the height of the fervour of the French Revolutio n the sense that a new epoch was dawning, reflected in th e adoption of a ne w calendar . Millenarism, as it is better called, has a long history in Western civi liz a tion. Its beginnings go back to the Middle Ages and the writings of Joachim of Fiore, who foretold that a third age w ould dawn, t he age of the Holy Ghost, succeeding the first two: that of the Father (t h e t ime of the Ol d Testa ment) and that of the son. I t w ould be an age of spi rituality, of a high e r fo rm of human life, in preparation for the consummat ion of all thin g s. A certain body of millenarist expectations , that is, a certai n set of n o t io n s o f what the last things would look like, bu ilt up i n the Middle Ages, and f ro m time t o time these were activated by sect s. The scenario usually includ ed a The Expressivist Turn • 387 b a ttle between the forces of light a nd the forces of darkness, between Christ a n d anti-Christ; after which there would be a reign of the just for a thousand y ears, before the final consummation.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  This was a startling innovation. P was not reviving old legislation that had fallen into disuse. The ceremonial laws, purity regulations, and dietary rules that had governed the lives of the priests who served in the temple had never been intended for the laity. 51 Now, P made an astonishing claim. Israel, whose national temple had been destroyed, was a nation of priests. All the people must live as though they were serving the divine presence in the temple, because God was still living in their midst. P’s legislation ritualized the whole of life, but he used these ancient temple laws to initiate a new ethical revolution, based on the experience of displacement. Even though the exiles were living in an impure land, P insisted that there was a profound link between exile and holiness. In the Holiness Code, God had told the Israelites: “You must be holy, because I, Yahweh your God, am holy.” 52 To be “holy” was to be “separate.” Yahweh was “other,” radically different from ordinary, profane reality. The law proposed by P crafted a holy lifestyle based on the principle of separation. The people must live apart from their Babylonian neighbors and keep the natural world at a distance. By imitating the otherness of God in every detail of their lives, they would be holy as Yahweh was holy and would be in the place where God was. Because exile was essentially a life of alienation, Babylonia was the perfect place to put this program into practice. In Leviticus, Yahweh issued detailed regulations about sacrifice, diet, and social, sexual, and cultic life. If Israel observed these laws, Yahweh promised, he would always live in their midst. God and Israel traveled together. If they chose to disregard his commandments, Yahweh would “walk with them” as a punitive force. 53 He would devastate their land, destroy their shrines and temples, and scatter them among the nations. This—P implied—had come to pass. The people of Israel had not lived lives of holiness, and that was why they were now in exile. But if they repented, Yahweh would remember them, even in the land of their enemies. “I will place my ‘Tabernacle’ [mishkan] in your midst and I myself will not despise you. I will walk about among you.” 54 Babylonia could be a new Eden, where God had walked with Adam in the cool of the evening. For P, a man of the Axial Age, holiness had a strong ethical component and was no longer a merely cultic matter. It involved absolute respect for the sacred “otherness” of every creature. In the law of freedom, 55 Yahweh insisted that nothing could be enslaved or owned, not even the land.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  If religion is to bring light to our broken world, we need, as Mencius suggested, to go in search of the lost heart, the spirit of compassion that lies at the core of all our traditions. Notes INTRODUCTION 1. Karl Jaspers, The Origin and Goal of History, trans. Michael Bullock (London, 1953), pp. 1–70. 2. Mircea Eliade, Myths, Dreams and Mysteries: The Encounter Between Contemporary Faiths and Archaic Realities, trans. Philip Mairet (London, 1960), pp. 172–78; Wilhelm Schmidt, The Origin of the Idea of God (New York, 1912). 3. Walter Burkert, Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth, trans. Peter Bing (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 1983), pp. 16–22; Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth (New York, 1988), pp. 72–74. 4. Eliade, Myths, Dreams and Mysteries, pp. 80–81; Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, or, Cosmos and History, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, 1959), pp. 17–20. 5. Eliade, Myth of the Eternal Return, pp. 1–34. 6. Huston Smith, The World’s Religions: Our Great Wisdom Traditions (San Francisco, 1991), p. 235. 7. Eliade, Myth of the Eternal Return, pp. 34–35. 8. Jaspers, Origin and Goal of History, p. 40. 1. THE AXIAL PEOPLES 1. Mary Boyce, Zoroastrians: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices, 2nd ed. (London and New York), p. 2; Peter Clark, Zoroastrians: An Introduction to an Ancient Faith (Brighton and Portland, Ore., 1998), p. 18. 2. Mircea Eliade, Patterns of Comparative Religion, trans. Rosemary Sheed (London, 1958), pp. 66–68. 3. Boyce, Zoroastrians, pp. 9–11. 4. Ibid., p. 8. 5. Yasht 48:5. 6. Boyce, Zoroastrians, pp. 11–12. 7. Thomas J. Hopkins, The Hindu Religious Tradition (Belmont, Calif., 1971), p. 14. 8. Gavin Flood, An Introduction to Hinduism (Cambridge and New York, 1996), p. 44; John Keay, India: A History (London, 2000), p. 32. 9. Boyce, Zoroastrians, pp. 12–15. 10. Eliade, Patterns of Comparative Religion, pp. 188–89; Norman Cohn, Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come: The Ancient Roots of Apocalyptic Faith (New Haven and London, 1993), pp. 94–95; Boyce, Zoroastrians, pp. xiv–xv, 19. 11. Rig Veda 4.42.5, in Ralph T. H. Griffith, trans., The Rig Veda (New York, 1992). 12. Cohn, Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come, p. 77; Boyce, Zoroastrians, p. xiii; Clark, Zoroastrians, p. 19. 13. Yasna 43. 14. Clark, Zoroastrians, pp. 4–6. 15. Yasna 19:16–18. Quotations from the Zoroastrian scriptures are taken from Mary Boyce, ed. and trans., Textual Sources for the Study of Zoroastrianism (Chicago, 1984). 16. Boyce, Zoroastrians, pp. 20–23; Cohn, Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come, p. 81. 17. Yasna 46:2, 11; 50:1. 18. Yasna 29:1–10. 19. Yasna 30. 20. Yasna 30:6. 21. Yasna 46:4. 22. Jamsheed K. Choksy, Purity and Pollution in Zoroastrianism: Triumph over Evil (Austin, 1989), pp. 1–5. 23. Boyce, Zoroastrians, p. 32. 24. Yasna 44:15; 51:9. 25. Yasna 43:3. 26. Yasna 29, 33. 27. Yasna 33. 28. Boyce, Zoroastrians, pp. 23–24. 29. Ibid., p. 30; Cohn, Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come, p. 78.

• From A Sexplanation (2021)

  What a relief. For so long, I didn't realize just how much of my relationship with my parents I was missing out on. I owe it to them and anyone who is a big part of my life to be more open, honest, and vulnerable. I owe it to myself because relationships are at stake. I made this film with the simple goal of dismantling generations of inherited shame so that I could achieve sexual Nirvana. I'm not there just quite yet, but I think this is just the tip of what's possible. We could create a different world. I invite you to come with me. [light clicks on] ["America the Beautiful" play] [Alex] Because I have a dream A wet dream. A fantasy. I have a fantasy that one day we'll strip away shame from sex. Unless, of course, shame motors your boat. That one day we'll embrace that sex isn't one-size-fits-all. 7.8 billion people means 7.8 billion distinct sexualities. We each have our own kinks, quirks, and desires. That one day we'll grow up learning how fun our bodies are instead of obsessing over if they're normal. I have a fantasy that one day parents will stop being afraid to teach their kids the words penis, testicles, vulva, and vagina. [kids] Yeah, wow, yay, wow! -That one day daughters will grow up owning their right to sexual pleasure, and learn that a huge source of that pleasure of lies in the clitoris. That one day we can talk about STIs like we talk about the common cold. It happens to the best of us. That one day you can suck, slurp, spread, spank, spit, swallow, strap on, lick, nibble, rim, ram, tickle, tease, tongue, finger, fist, whip, peg, blindfold, choke, slip in, gag on, submit, dominate, caress, make sweet, sweet love, get down, get some, and just express your sexuality freely with whom you want, when you want with nothing stopping you but permission, time, and energy. And most urgently, I have a fantasy that today we'll all go home, do Salt-N-Pepa right, and just talk about sex. [dramatic classical music] [water splashing] [funky instrumental music] Testing, we are Bloomington, Indiana. One, two, three, we're sweaty as fuck. Sweaty, sweaty... -Steamy. -Steamy sex documentary. [Cinematographer] And action. [laughing] Okay, one more time, one more time, one more time, that's good. [funky instrumental music] [people laughing] [Mike] Well, the most popular searches on the Pornhub gay site are straight first time, Black, straight friend, big Black Dick, straight guy's first time, straight seduced, straight, straight guy tricked, college roommates, Black daddy, bareback, daddy, and monster cock, twink, massage, and coach. [laughing] So there's a little bit of an interest in straight guys there- -How important was the sex to your bond? -I think it was important for him. -I think I needed to demonstrate how good I am. [laughing] which I passed the test. -He used a lot of lines on me.

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

  A few words, however, may be permitted about the logic of the question. The most that any argument can do for determinism is to make it a clear and seductive conception, which a man is foolish not to espouse, so long as he stands by the great scientific postulate that the world must be one unbroken fact, and that prediction of all things without exception must be ideally, even if not actually, possible. It is a moral postulate about the Universe, the postulate that what ought to be can be, and that bad acts cannot be fated, but that good ones must be possible in their place, which would lead one to espouse the contrary view. But when scientific and moral postulates war thus with each other and objective proof is not to be had, the only course is voluntary choice, for scepticism itself, if systematic, is also voluntary choice. If, meanwhile, the will be undetermined, it would seem only fitting that the belief in its indetermination should be voluntarily chosen from amongst other possible beliefs. Freedom's first deed should be to affirm itself. We ought never to hope for any other method of getting at the truth if indeterminism be a fact. Doubt of this particular truth will therefore probably be open to us to the end of time, and the utmost that a believer in free-will can ever do will be to show that the deterministic arguments are not coercive. That they are seductive, I am the last to deny; nor do I deny that effort may be needed to keep the faith in freedom, when they press upon it, upright in the mind.

• From A Sexplanation (2021)

  -How do you negotiate boundaries? How do you negotiate pleasure? How do you negotiate consent? -The first time you touch a condom should not be the day that you're using it for sex. It should be the day when you're like making it into a water balloon or putting it on your door knob and freaking out your sister. And you should be getting used to it, like get comfortable with it. That's the educational principle. Preload them with the information so that years from now when they need it, they're great at it. [Alex] But in America, comprehensive sex ed still meets a lot of resistance. -They should stay out of sex, that belongs to the family. -It is sickening, it is corrupt, it is graphic and moral offenses. -It's indoctrination, it is not education. [Protestors] Protect our kids! Protect our kids! [Alex] This resistance means that in 2020, only 17 states require sex education be medically accurate. Only 11 states plus D.C. require sex ed teach that queer people are normal, while seven states actually require teaching homosexuality is bad. And only 20 states plus D.C. require teaching about birth control compared to 31 states that require stressing abstinence or the importance of sex within marriage. The end result? People like me who feel so tortured about their sexuality they feel compelled to make a documentary about it. [Alex] But there are glimmers of hope. Even in Utah, the Mormon epicenter, organizations such as Planned Parenthood are stepping up to teach what their state won't. While you might know them as America's largest abortion provider, they do a lot more. -We do more to prevent abortion than probably anyone else in the state of Utah. We do over 100,000 birth control visits a year. We have education, which is how we give people the information and the skills to help people prevent abortion and have the families that want to have. To me, it's a basic human right that people understand how their bodies work. As a woman and as somebody who could experience a pregnancy, which is a major life health event, I feel strongly that the decisions about that are mine. And I feel strongly that basic education so that I can manage that the way I want to is essential to me being equal or being fully human. [Alex] To see their work in action, I went with Annabel to a session of the INclued program, a youth-led comprehensive sex ed course. They started by checking in about their weeks. Typical high school stuff. -Today I took a physics test, which I think I did well on, but who knows, it's physics. -So like drumming is going well. Homework is going well. -71 more days of school, 71 more of school, then I'm done and I'm out. [Alex] What didn't feel like high school...

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

  An Unresolved ClashTroubled but hopeful or troubled and hopeless, it is not possible to decide which of the two scenarios is most likely to pass. There are simply too many unknowns, and the ultimate consequences of digital communication, artificial intelligence, robotics, and cyber warfare hold an especially wild card. Science and technology can be used with great advantage to enhance our future—their potential remains extraordinary—or they can spell our doom. In the meantime, one’s preference for the first or second scenario has a lot to do with one’s sunny or dark disposition. The problem is that even one’s typical disposition tends to flicker between light and dark when it comes to so much trouble and uncertainty. Meanwhile, we can approach the problem with equanimity and conclude as follows. The human condition encompasses two worlds. One world is made up of the nature-given rules of life regulation, the strings of which are pulled by the invisible hands of pain and pleasure. We are not conscious of the rules or of their undergirding; we are only conscious of certain outcomes we call pain or pleasure. We had nothing to do with the making of the rules—nor, for that matter, with the existence of the powerful forces of pain and pleasure—and we cannot modify them any more than we can change the movements of the stars or prevent earthquakes. We also had nothing to do with the way natural selection has operated for eons to build the apparatus of affect that in good part governs our social and individual lives on the grounds of limiting pain and enhancing pleasure, largely at the individual level, with only partial consideration for other individuals, even for those who are part of the in-group. There is, however, another world. We could and did work around the conditions imposed on us by inventing cultural forms of life management to complement the basic variety. The result was the discoveries we continue making about universes within and around us and our extraordinary ability to accumulate knowledge in both internal memory and external records. Here the situation is different. We can reflect on the knowledge, think through it, manipulate it intelligently, and invent all sorts of responses to nature’s rules. On occasion, our knowledge, which includes, ironically, the discovery of life regulation rules that we cannot modify, lets us do something about the cards we have been dealt. Cultures and civilizations are the names we give to the cumulative results of these efforts.