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 My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  • • • I SPENT THAT FIRST WEEK in a soft twilight zone. I didn’t leave the apartment at all, not even for coffee. I kept a jar of macadamia nuts by the bed, ate a few whenever I rose to the surface, sucked a bottle of Poland Spring, gravitated to the toilet maybe once a day. I didn’t answer the phone— nobody but Reva ever called me anyway. She left me messages so long and breathless that they got cut off midsentence. Usually she called while she was on the StairMaster at her gym. One night, she came over unannounced. The doorman told her he thought I’d gone out of town. “I’ve been worried,” Reva said, barging in with a bottle of sparkling rosé. “Are you sick? Have you been eating? Did you take time off of work?” “I quit,” I lied. “I want to devote more time to my own interests.” “What interests? I didn’t know you had interests.” She sounded utterly betrayed. She stumbled a little on her heels. “Are you drunk?” “You really quit your job?” she asked, kicking her shoes off and flopping down on the armchair. “I’d rather eat shit than have to work for that cunt one more day,” I told her. “Didn’t you say she was married to a prince or something?” “Exactly,” I answered. “But that was just a rumor anyway.” “So you’re not sick?” “I’m resting.” I lay down on the sofa to demonstrate. “That makes sense,” Reva said, nodding compliantly, although I could tell she was suspicious. “Take some time off and think about your next move. Oprah says we women rush into decisions because we don’t have faith that something better will ever come along. And that’s how we get stuck in dissatisfying careers and marriages. Amen! ” “I’m not making a career move,” I started to explain, but I went no further. “I’m taking some time off. I’m going to sleep for a year.” “And how are you going to do that?” I pulled a vial of Ativan out from between the sofa cushions, unscrewed the cap, and fished out two pills. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Reva squirming. I chewed the pills up—simply to horrify her—swallowed and gagged, then stuffed the vial back between the cushions and lay down and closed my eyes. “Well, I’m glad you have a life plan. But to be honest,” Reva began, “I’m concerned about your health. You’ve lost at least three pounds since you started taking all those medications.” Reva was expert at guessing the weights of things and people. “What about the long term? Are you going to take pills for the rest of your life?” “I’m not thinking that far ahead. And I might not live that long.” I yawned. “Don’t say that,” Reva said. “Look at me. Please.”

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  Some readers might dismiss this sort of constructionist worldview as a stereotypically bleeding-heart liberal ivory tower academic viewpoint from the Land Where Everything Is Relative. In fact, this view cuts across traditional political lines. The idea that you’re molded by your culture is stereotypically liberal. At the same time, as we discussed in chapter 6, you are responsible in a broad sense for the concepts you have, which ultimately influence your behavior. Individual responsibility is a deeply conservative idea. You are also somewhat responsible to others, not only the less fortunate but also future generations, for how you influence their wiring. It matters how you treat other people. That is a fundamentally religious idea. The American Dream traditionally says, “If you work hard, anything is possible.” Construction agrees that you’re indeed the agent of your own destiny, but you are bounded by your surroundings. Your wiring, determined in part by your culture, influences your later options. I don’t know about you, but I find some comfort in a bit of uncertainty. It’s refreshing to question the concepts that have been given to us, and to be curious about which are physical and which are social. There is a kind of freedom in realizing that we categorize to create meaning, and therefore it is possible to change meaning by recategorizing. Uncertainty means that things can be other than they appear. This realization brings hope in difficult times and can prompt gratitude in good times. … Now it’s time for me to drink my own Kool-Aid. Prediction, interoception, categorization, and the roles I’ve described for your various brain networks are not objective facts. They are concepts invented by scientists to describe the physical activity within a brain. I claim these concepts are the best way to understand certain computations being performed by neurons. However, there are many other ways to read the brain’s wiring diagram (some of which wouldn’t call it a wiring diagram at all). The theory of constructed emotion maps to the brain more closely than do so-called psychological essences or mental organs. In the future, I wouldn’t be surprised to see more useful and functional concepts for the brain’s structure emerge. As Firestein observes in Ignorance, no fact is “safe from the next generation of scientists with the next generation of tools.”20 The history of science, however, has been a slow but steady march in the direction of construction. Physics, chemistry, and biology began with intuitive, essentialist theories, rooted in naive realism and certainty. We progressed beyond these ideas because we noticed that the old observations held true only under certain conditions. So, we had to replace our concepts. A scientific revolution swaps out one social reality for another, just like a political revolution does with its new government and social order. Again and again in science, our new sets of concepts have led us away from essentialism toward variation, and from naive realism to construction.21

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  One of humanity’s major adaptive advantages—why we’ve flourished as a species—is that we live in social groups. This arrangement has allowed us to expand across the globe, creating livable habitats by feeding, clothing, and learning from each other in otherwise inhospitable physical conditions. We can therefore amass information across generations—stories, recipes, traditions, anything that we can describe—that helps each generation to shape the brain wiring of the next. This trove of intergenerational knowledge lets us actively shape the physical environment, rather than just adapt to it, and to create civilizations.19 Living in groups has some drawbacks, of course, particularly a major dilemma that every human must face: getting along versus getting ahead. Everyday concepts like “Anger” and “Gratitude” are critical tools for dealing with these two competing concerns. They are instruments of culture. They prescribe situation-specific actions, allow you to communicate, and influence the behaviors of others, all in the service of managing your body budget. Just because fear appears generation after generation in your culture does not prove that fear is coded into the human genome, nor that it was sculpted by natural selection in our hominin ancestors millions of years ago on the African savanna. These single-cause explanations discount the enormous power of collective intentionality (not to mention copious evidence from modern neuroscience). Evolution surely allowed humans to create culture, and part of that culture is a system of goal-based concepts to manage ourselves and each other. Our biology allows us to create goal-based concepts, but exactly which concepts may be a matter of cultural evolution.20 The human brain is a cultural artifact. We don’t load culture into a virgin brain like software loading into a computer; rather, culture helps to wire the brain. Brains then become carriers of culture, helping to create and perpetuate it. All humans who live in groups must solve common problems, so it’s not surprising to find some concepts that are similar across cultures. Most human societies, for example, have myths about supernatural beings: nymphs from ancient Greece, fairies from Celtic legends, leprechauns from Ireland, little people from Native American tales, Menehune from Native Hawaiian folklore, trolls from Scandinavia, the Aziza from Africa, the Agloolik from Inuit culture, the Mimis from Aboriginal Australia, the Shin from China, the Kami from Japan, and countless others. Tales of these magical creatures are an important part of human history and literature. They do not, however, mean that magical creatures actually exist or have ever existed in nature (no matter how much we wish we could attend Hogwarts). The category “Magical Creature” is constructed by human minds, and since it exists in so many different cultures, it probably serves some important function. In the same manner, “Fear” exists in many cultures (but not all, such as the !Kung people of the Kalahari Desert) by virtue of having important functions. As far as I know, no emotion concept is universal, but even if one were, universality itself does not automatically imply a perceiver-independent reality.21

• From Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture (2018)

  This anthology became something far different from what I originally intended. As I started receiving submissions, I was stunned by how much testimony writers offered. There were hundreds and hundreds of stories from people all along the gender spectrum, giving voice to how they have suffered, in one way or another, from sexual violence, or how they have been affected by intimate relationships with people who have experienced sexual violence. I realized that my original intentions for this anthology had to give way to what the book so clearly needed to be—a place for people to give voice to their experiences, a place for people to share how bad this all is, a place for people to identify the ways they have been marked by rape culture. As of this writing, something in this deeply fractured culture is, I hope, changing. More people are beginning to realize just how bad things really are. Harvey Weinstein has fallen from grace, named by a number of women, as a perpetrator of sexual violence. His crimes have been laid bare. His victims are, at least to some extent, vindicated. Women and men are coming forward and naming sexual harassers or worse in publishing, journalism, the tech world. Women and men are saying, “This is how bad it actually is.” For once, perpetrators of sexual violence are facing consequences. Powerful men are losing their jobs and their access to circumstances where they can exploit the vulnerable. This is a moment that will, hopefully, become a movement. These essays will, hopefully, contribute to that movement in a meaningful way. The voices shared here are voices that matter and demand to be heard. FragmentsAubrey HirschHE SAYS, “YOU SHOULDN’T WAVE THOSE AROUND LIKE that.” You’re in the campus dining hall with your friend James. You’ve just popped a rust-colored birth control pill out of its slot in the rubbery blue envelope. You say, “I wasn’t. I was just taking one.” He says, “You should take them in your room. By yourself. Privately.” “I have to take them with food,” you say, “or they make my stomach hurt.” It’s been that way since you were fifteen and first started taking them. That was years before you actually have sex and, even when you do, you are so afraid of getting pregnant accidentally that you don’t let a man come inside you until after you’re married. You take them because your period is a terrifying beast. The hormones gallop through your veins. You wake up in the middle of the night, twisting; your stomach lurches, your intestines heave. The pills help. You don’t like taking them every day, though. Even the smell of the blue rubber envelope makes you a little queasy when you, dutifully, pull them out of your purse at the same time every afternoon to sedate the beast inside.

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  Your brain issues a storm of predictions, simulates their consequences as if they were present, and checks and corrects those predictions against actual sensory input. Along the way, your interoceptive predictions produce your feelings of affect, influence every action that you perform, and determine which parts of the world you care about in the moment (your affective niche). Without interoception, you wouldn’t notice or care about your physical surroundings or anything else, and you’d be unlikely to survive for long. Interoception enables your brain to construct the environment in which you live. At the same time that your brain is modeling your world, the outside world helps to wire your brain. When you’re an infant, awash in sensory input, the outside world seeds your earliest concepts, as your brain hardwires itself to the realities of the physical world around you. That’s how babies’ brains become wired to recognize human faces. As your brain develops and you begin learning words, your brain hardwires itself to the social world, and you begin creating purely mental concepts like “Things That Can Protect You from Stinging Insects” and “Sadness.” These concepts from your culture appear to be in the outside world, but they are constructions of your conceptual system. In this view, culture is not some gauzy, amorphous vapor that surrounds you. It helped to wire your brain, and you behave in certain ways that wire the brains of the next generation. For example, if a culture dictates that people with certain skin colors are less worthwhile, this social reality has a physical effect on the group: they have lower salaries and their children have poorer nutrition and living conditions. These factors change the structure of their children’s brains for the worse, making school harder and increasing the odds that the children will earn lower salaries in the future. 1 Your constructions aren’t arbitrary—your brain (and the mind it cre ates) must keep in touch with the bits of reality that count in order to keep your body alive and healthy. Construction cannot make a solid wall unsolid (unless you have mutant superpowers), but you can redraw countries, redefine marriage, and decide who’s worthwhile and who isn’t. Your genes gave you a brain that can wire itself to its physical and social environment, and other members of your culture construct that environment with you. It takes more than one brain to create a mind. The theory of constructed emotion also leads to a whole new way of thinking about personal responsibility. Suppose you’re angry with your boss and lash out impulsively, slamming your fist on his desk and calling him an idiot. Where the classical view might attribute some blame to a hypothetical anger circuit, partially absolving you of responsibility, construction extends the notion of responsibility beyond the moment of harm.

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  These examples show that you have a special link between the physical and the mental. Each time you perform a physical act for your body budget, you’re also doing something mental with concepts. Every mental activity has a physical effect as well. You can put this connection to work for you, to master your emotions, enhance your resilience, become a better friend or parent or lover, and even change your conception of who you are. Change is not easy. Ask any therapist or Buddhist monk; they’ve trained for years to become aware of their experiences and control them. Even so, you can take small steps right now based on the theory of constructed emotion and the new view of human nature it implies. Some of the suggestions I propose in this chapter will sound familiar, like getting enough sleep, but with new scientific justification to motivate you. Other advice will probably be entirely new, like learning words from a foreign language, which you’ve probably never associated with emotional health. Not every suggestion will be right for you; some will fit your lifestyle better than others. But the effort can lead to greater well-being and success. Students with a richer emotion vocabulary do better in school. People with a balanced body budget are less likely to develop serious illnesses like diabetes and heart disease, and as they age, their mental abilities will stay sharper for longer. And life may become more meaningful and fulfilling. Can you snap your fingers and change your feelings at will, like changing your clothes? Not really. Even though you construct your emotional experiences, they can still bowl you over in the moment. However, you can take steps now to influence your future emotional experiences, to sculpt who you will be tomorrow. I don’t mean that in some vague, pseudo-spiritual, let’s-illuminate-your-cosmic-soul kind of way, but in a very real, predicting-brain way. Everything you’ve read so far about interoception, affect, body budgets, prediction, prediction error, concepts, and social reality has broad and deep practical implications for who you are and how you live your life. That’s our theme as we enter the final part of this book, which begins here with emotional well-being and then continues to health (chapter 10), the law (chapter 11), and non-human animals (chapter 12). For the remainder of the book, we’ll apply our new view of human nature, especially the porous boundary between the physical and the social, to architect a recipe for living. The major ingredients in that recipe are your body budget and your concepts. If you maintain a balanced body budget, you’ll feel better in general, so that’s where we’ll start. And if you develop a rich set of concepts, you’ll have a toolbox for a meaningful life. …

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  If prehistoric life was a perpetual struggle that ended in early death, if ours is a species motivated almost exclusively by self-interest, if war is an ancient, biologically embedded tendency, then one can soothingly argue, as Steven Pinker does, that things are getting better all the time—that, in his Panglossian view, “we are probably living in the most peaceful moment of our species’ time on Earth.” That would be encouraging news, indeed, which is what most audiences want to hear, after all. We all want to believe things are getting better, that our species is learning, growing, and prospering. Who refuses congratulations for having the good sense to be alive here and now? But just as “patriotism is the conviction that your country is superior to all others because you were born in it” (G. B. Shaw), the notion that we live in our species’ “most peaceful moment” is as intellectually baseless as it is emotionally comforting. Journalist Louis Menand noted how science can fulfill a conservative, essentially political function by providing “an explanation for the way things are that does not threaten the way things are.” “Why,” he asks rhetorically, “should someone feel unhappy or engage in anti-social behavior when that person is living in the freest and most prosperous nation on Earth? It can’t be the system!”23 What’s your problem? Everything’s just fine. Life’s great and getting better! Less war! Longer life! New and improved human existence! This Madison Avenue vision of the super-duper new and improved present is framed by an utterly fictional, blood-smeared Hobbesian past. Yet it’s marketed to the public as the “clear-eyed realist” position, and those who question its founding assumptions risk being dismissed as delusional romantics still grieving over the death of Janis Joplin and the demise of bell-bottoms. But that “realistic” argument is riddled with misunderstood data, mistaken interpretations, and misleading calculations. A dispassionate review of the relevant science clearly demonstrates that the tens of thousands of years before the advent of agriculture, while certainly not a time of uninterrupted utopian bliss, was for the most part characterized by robust health, peace between individuals and groups, low levels of chronic stress and high levels of overall satisfaction for most of our ancestors. Having made this argument, have we outed ourselves as card-carrying comrades in the Delusional Utopian Movement (DUM)? Is it Rousseauian fantasy to assert that prehistory was not an unending nightmare? That human nature leans no more toward violence, selfishness, and exploitation than toward peace, generosity, and cooperation? That most of our ancient ancestors probably experienced a sense of communal belonging few of us can imagine today? That human sexuality probably evolved and functioned as a social bonding device and a pleasurable way to avoid and neutralize conflict? Is it silly romanticism to point out that ancient humans who survived their first few years often lived as long as the richest and luckiest of us do today, even with our high-tech coronary stents, diabetes medication, and titanium hips?

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  According to E. O. Wilson, “all that we can surmise of humankind’s genetic history argues for a more liberal sexual morality, in which sexual practices are to be regarded first as bonding devices and only second as a means for procreation.”15 We couldn’t have said it better. But if human sexuality developed primarily as a bonding mechanism in interdependent bands where paternity certainty was a nonissue, then the standard narrative of human sexual evolution is toast. The anachronistic presumption that women have always bartered their sexual favors to individual men in return for help with child care, food, protection, and the rest of it collapses upon contact with the many societies where women feel no need to negotiate such deals. Rather than a plausible explanation for how we got to be the way we are, the standard narrative is exposed as contemporary moralistic bias packaged to look like science and then projected upon the distant screen of prehistory, rationalizing the present while obscuring the past. Yabba dabba doo. PART IIIThe Way We Weren’tA central theme in our argument is that human sexual behavior is a reflection of both evolved tendencies and social context. Thus, a sense of the day-to-day social world in which human sexual tendencies evolved is essential to understanding them. It’s hard to imagine the communal, cooperative social configurations we’ve described surviving long in the kind of world Hobbes envisioned, characterized by “bellum omnium contra omnes” (the war of all against all). But the false view of prehistoric human life summed up in Hobbes’s pithy dictum “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” is still almost universally accepted. Having established that prehistoric human life was highly social and decidedly not solitary, we now briefly address the other elements in Hobbes’s description in the following four chapters, before continuing with a more direct discussion of overtly sexual material. We hope readers primarily interested in sex will bear with us because what might at first seem a detour is in fact a shortcut to a clearer vision of the day-to-day lives of our ancestors, a vision that will help you make better sense of the material that follows, as well as of your own world. CHAPTER ELEVEN“The Wealth of Nature” (Poor?)The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms…has marked the upward surge of mankind. “GORDON GEKKO,” in the film Wall Street What constitutes misuse of the universe? This question can be answered in one word: greed…. Greed constitutes the most grievous wrong. LAURENTI MAGESA, African Religion: The Moral Traditions of Abundant Life Economics, “the dismal science,” was dismal right from the start.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  This rarely happens early on; there is so much to learn about a new person. But a midpoint may arrive when the target has begun to idealize and fantasize about you, only to discover that you are not what he or she thought. It is not a question of being seen too often, of being too available, as some imagine. In fact, if your targets see you too rarely, you give them nothing to feed on, and their attention may be caught by someone else; you have to occupy their mind. It is more a matter of being too consistent, too obvious, too human and real. Your tar- gets cannot idealize you if they know too much about you, if they start to see you as all too human. Not only must you maintain a degree of distance, but there must be something fantastical and bewitching about you, sparking all kinds of delightful possibilities in their mind. The possibility Eva held out was the possibility that she was what in Argentine culture was consid- ered the ideal woman—devoted, motherly, saintly—but there are any num- ber of poetic ideals you can try to embody. Chivalry, adventure, romance, and so on, are just as potent, and if you have a whiff of them about you, you can breathe enough poetry into the air to fill people's minds with fan- tasies and dreams. At all costs, you must embody something, even if it is roguery and evil. Anything to avoid the taint of familiarity and commonness. What I need is a woman who is something, anything; ei- ther very beautiful or very kind or in the last resort very wicked; very witty or very stupid, but something. —ALFRED DE MUSSET Keys to Seduction W e all have a self-image that is more flattering than the truth: we think of ourselves as more generous, selfless, honest, kindly, intelli- gent, or good-looking than in fact we are. It is extremely difficult for us to be honest with ourselves about our own limitations; we have a desperate need to idealize ourselves. As the writer Angela Carter remarks, we would rather align ourselves with angels than with the higher primates from which we are actually descended. would be to kiss her, to be kissed by her," and so on. . . . • 3. Hope. You observe her perfections, and it is at this moment that a woman really ought to surrender, for the utmost physical pleasure. Even the most reserved women blush to the whites of their eyes at this moment of hope. The passion is so strong, and the pleasure so sharp, that they betray themselves unmistakably. • 4. Love is born. To love is to enjoy seeing, touching, and sensing with all the senses, as closely as possible, a lovable object which loves in return. • 5.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  In any case, some people are too fragile to be cut off from their base of support. The great modern courtesan Pamela Harriman had a solution to this problem: she isolated her victims from their families, their former or present wives, and in place of those old connections she quickly set up new comforts for her lovers. She overwhelmed them with attention, attending to their every need. In the case of Averill Harriman, the billionaire who eventually mar- ried her, she literally established a new home for him, one that had no asso- ciations with the past and was full of the pleasures of the present. It is unwise to keep the seduced dangling in midair for too long, with nothing familiar or comforting in sight. Instead, replace the familiar things you have cut them off from with a new home, a new series of comforts. Phase Three The Precipice— Deepening the Effect Through Extreme Measures The goal in this phase is to make everything deeper—the effect you have on their mind, feelings of love and attachment, tension within your vic- tims. With your hooks deep into them, you can then push them back and forth, between hope and despair, until they weaken and snap. Show- ing how far you are willing to go for your victims, doing some noble or chivalrous deed (16: Prove yourself) will create a powerful jolt, spark an intensely positive reaction. Everyone has scars, repressed desires, and un- finished business from childhood. Bring these desires and wounds to the surface, make your victims feel they are getting what they never got as a child and you will penetrate deep into their psyche, stir uncontrollable emotions (17: Effect a regression). Now you can take your victims past their limits, getting them to act out their dark sides, adding a sense of danger to your seduction (18: Stir up the transgressive and taboo). You need to deepen the spell, and nothing will more confuse and enchant your victims than giving your seduction a spiritual veneer. It is not lust that motivates you, but destiny, divine thoughts and everything elevated (19: Use spiritual lures). The erotic lurks beneath the spiritual. Now your victims have been properly set up. By deliberately hurting them, instilling fears and anxieties, you will lead them to the edge of the precipice from which it will be easy to push and make them fall (20: Mix pleasure with pain). They feel great tension and are yearning for relief. Prove Yourself Most people want to be seduced. If they resist your efforts, it is proba- bly because you have not gone far enough to allay their doubts—about your motives, the depth of your feel- ings, and so on.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  Role playing is immensely pleasurable. Its appeal goes back to childhood, where we first learn the thrill of trying on different parts, imitating adults or figures out of fiction. As we get older and society fixes a role on us, a part of us yearns for the playful approach we once had, the masks we were able to wear. We still want to play that game, to act a different role in life. Indulge your targets in this wish by first making it clear that you are playing a role, then inviting them to join you in a shared fantasy. The more you set things up like a play or a piece of fiction, the better. Notice how Pauline began the seduction with a mysterious request that the officer reappear the next night; then a second woman led him into a magical series of rooms. Pauline herself delayed her entrance, and when she appeared, she did not mention his business with Napoleon, or anything remotely banal. She had an ethereal air about her; he was being invited to enter a fairy tale. The evening was real, but had an uncanny resemblance to an erotic dream. Casanova took role playing still further. He traveled with an enormous wardrobe and a trunk full of props, many of them gifts for his targets— fans, jewels, other accouterments. And some of the things he said and did were borrowed from novels he had read and stories he had heard. He enveloped women in a romantic atmosphere that was heightened yet quite real to their senses. Like Casanova, you must see the world as a kind of theater. Inject a certain lightness into the roles you are playing; try to create a sense of drama and illusion; confuse people with the slight unreality of words and gestures inspired by fiction; in daily life, be the consummate actor. Our culture reveres actors because of their freedom to play roles. It is something that all of us envy. For years, the Cardinal de Rohan had been afraid that he had somehow offended his queen, Marie Antoinette. She would not so much as look at him. Then, in 1784, the Comtesse de Lamotte-Valois suggested to him that 306 • The Art of Seduction the queen was prepared not only to change this situation but actually to befriend him. The queen, said Lamotte-Valois, would indicate this in her next formal reception—she would nod to him in a particular way.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  But this information isn’t campy if you don’t know who these “invisibles” are, and that their sentimental songs of love and romance were very corny, and backed by ludicrously fulsome string arrangements. Because Nabokov often uses a kind of shorthand to eviscerate Lo’s popular culture, younger readers now need to be prepped; they actually believe that early fifties’ pop music was “soft” rock-and-roll—as on the TV show Happy Days. Study guide: Your Hit Parade, a series of record collections begun in 1988 by Time-Life Music, which will eventually cover every year of the forties and fifties. The disc for 1951 includes Patti Page’s “Detour,” Guy Mitchell’s “My Heart Cries for You,” and Tony Bennett’s “Because of You” and “Cold, Cold Heart.” The latter, an apostrophe to a cruel mistress, could be called a debased Petrarchan sonnet—just the kind of song H.H. would scorn. Play some of these hits while reading Lolita—as ironic descant, say, to the important reunion scene, where H.H. says that one of her songs was throbbing on the radio as they talked. For an illustrated survey of teen culture, see Time-Life’s volume, This Fabulous Century: 1950–1960 (1970), especially for its facsimile pages from the sort of movie magazines that Lo and her pals consumed. The programmatic innocence that was proffered by these publications will come as a big surprise to younger readers, who expect scandal, and to aging scholars who have never before seen such stuff and only now can complete their education—really, if they want to understand the full reach of Lolita. “Patty,” an author’s error in the 1958 edition, has been changed to “Patti.” Starasil: an actual ointment. trochaic lilt: in prosody, a trochee is a foot of two syllables, the first stressed or half-stressed, and the second unstressed. Huncan Dines: the spoonerism hardly conceals Duncan Hines (1880–1959), author of such guidebooks as Adventures in Good Eating, Lodging for a Night, and Duncan Hines’ Food Odyssey. chère Dolorès: French; dear Dolores—an insulting translation for bilingual readers. comme ... gentille: French; as you know too well, my sweet one. rapist ... therapist: a slight variation of earlier wordplay; see psychotherapist ... rapist. In Ada, thinkers who speculate on the existence of Terra are called “terrapists” (p. 341). by Polonius: the talkative and complacent old man of Hamlet.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  In Hierarchy in the Forest, primatologist Christopher Boehm argues that egalitarianism is an eminently rational, even hierarchical political system, writing, “Individuals who otherwise would be subordinated are clever enough to form a large and united political coalition, and they do so for the express purpose of keeping the strong from dominating the weak.” According to Boehm, foragers are downright feline in refusing to follow orders, writing, “Nomadic foragers are universally—and all but obsessively—concerned with being free of the authority of others.”24 Prehistory must have been a frustrating time for megalomaniacs. “An individual endowed with the passion for control,” writes psychologist Erich Fromm, “would have been a social failure and without influence.”25 What if—thanks to the combined effects of very low population density, a highly omnivorous digestive system, our uniquely elevated social intelligence, institutionalized sharing of food, casually promiscuous sexuality leading to generalized child care, and group defense—human prehistory was in fact a time of relative peace and prosperity? If not a “Golden Age,” then at least a “Silver Age” (“Bronze Age” being taken)? Without falling into dreamy visions of paradise, can we—dare we—consider the possibility that our ancestors lived in a world where for most people, on most days, there was enough for everyone? By now, everyone knows “there’s no free lunch.” But what would it mean if our species evolved in a world where every lunch was free? How would our appreciation of prehistory (and consequently, of ourselves) change if we saw that our journey began in leisure and plenty, only veering into misery, scarcity, and ruthless competition a hundred centuries ago? Difficult as it may be for some to accept, skeletal evidence clearly shows that our ancestors didn’t experience widespread, chronic scarcity until the advent of agriculture. Chronic food shortages and scarcity-based economies are artifacts of social systems that arose with farming. In his introduction to Limited Wants, Unlimited Means, Gowdy points to the central irony: “Hunter-gatherers…spent their abundant leisure time eating, drinking, playing, socializing—in short, doing the very things we associate with affluence.” Despite no solid evidence to support it, the public hears little to dispute this apocalyptic vision of prehistory. The sense of human nature intrinsic to Western economic theory is mistaken. The notion that humans are driven only by self-interest is, in Gowdy’s words, “a microscopically small minority view among the tens of thousands of cultures that have existed since Homo sapiens emerged some 200,000 years ago.” For the vast majority of human generations that have ever lived, it would have been unthinkable to hoard food when those around you were hungry. “The hunter-gatherer,” writes Gowdy, “represents uneconomic man.”26

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  reached him, was a lazy and cowardly young man who was unlikely to cru- himself not simply as a sade against the English. Undaunted, she moved from village to village, ex- holy man but as a prophet plaining her mission to soldiers and asking them to escort her to Chinon. or even as a living god. On the strength of inspirations Young girls with religious visions were a dime a dozen at the time, and or revelations for which he there was nothing in Joan's appearance to inspire confidence; one soldier, claimed divine origin this however, Jean de Metz, was intrigued with her. What fascinated him was leader would decree for his followers a communal the detail of her visions: she would liberate the besieged town of Orléans, mission of vast dimensions have the king crowned at the cathedral in Reims, lead the army to Paris; and world-shaking she knew how she would be wounded, and where; the words she attributed importance. The conviction of having such a mission, to Saint Michael were quite unlike the language of a farm girl; and she was of being divinely appointed so calmly confident, she glowed with conviction. De Metz fell under her to carry out a prodigious spell. He swore allegiance and set out with her for Chinon. Soon others of- task, provided the fered assistance, too, and word reached Charles of the strange young girl on disoriented and the frustrated with new her way to meet him. bearings and new hope. It On the 350-mile road to Chinon, accompanied only by a handful of gave them not simply a soldiers, through a land infested with warring bands, Joan showed neither place in the world but a unique and resplendent fear nor hesitation. The journey took several months. When she finally ar- place. A fraternity of this rived, the Dauphin decided to meet the girl who had promised to restore kind felt itself an elite, set him to his throne, despite the advice of his counselors; but he was bored, infinitely apart from and above ordinary mortals, and wanted amusement, and decided to play a trick on her. She was to sharing also in his meet him in a hall packed with courtiers; to test her prophetic powers, he miraculous powers. disguised himself as one of these men, and dressed another man as the —NORMAN COHN, prince. Yet when Joan arrived, to the amazement of the crowd, she walked THE PURSUIT OF THE straight up to Charles and curtseyed: "The King of Heaven sends me to MILLENNIUM you with the message that you shall be the lieutenant of the King of Heaven, who is the king of France." In the talk that followed, Joan seemed to echo Charles's most private thoughts, while once again recounting in extraordinary detail the feats she would accomplish. Days later, this indecisive, flighty man declared himself convinced and gave her his blessing to lead a French army against the English.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  No. If you think about it, the neo-Hobbesian vision is far sunnier than ours. To have concluded, as we have, that our species has an innate capacity for love and generosity at least equal to our taste for destruction, for peaceful cooperation as much as coordinated attack, for an open, relaxed sexuality as much as for jealous, passion-smothering possessiveness…to see that both these worlds were open to us, but that around ten thousand years ago a few of our ancestors wandered off the path they’d been on forever into a garden of toil, disease, and conflict where our species has been trapped ever since…well, this is not exactly a rose-colored view of the overall trajectory of humankind. Who are the naïve romantics here, anyway? PART IVBodies in MotionLove’s mysteries in souls do grow, But yet the body is his book. JOHN DONNE (1572–1631) Everybody has a story to tell. So does every body, and the story told by the human body is rated XXX. Like any narrative of prehistory, ours rests on two types of evidence: circumstantial and material. We’ve already covered a good bit of the circumstantial evidence. As for more tangible material evidence, the song says, “What goes up must come down,” but unfortunately for archaeologists and those of us who rely on their findings, what goes down rarely comes back up. And even when it does, ancient social behavior is hard to see reflected in bits of bone, flint, and pottery—fragments that represent only a fraction of what once existed. At a conference not long ago, the subject of our research came up over breakfast. Upon hearing that we were investigating human sexual behavior in prehistory, the professor sitting across the table from us scoffed and asked (rhetorically), “So what do you do, close your eyes and dream?” While one should never scoff with a mouthful of scone, he had a point. As social behavior presumably doesn’t leave physical artifacts, any theorizing must amount to little but “dreaming.” Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould was an early scoffer at the notion of evolutionary psychology, asking, “How can we possibly know in detail what small bands of hunter-gatherers did in Africa two million years ago?”1 Richard Potts, director of the Smithsonian’s Human Origins Program, agrees, warning, “Many characteristics of early human behaviour are…difficult to reconstruct, as no appropriate material evidence is available. Mating patterns and language are obvious examples…[they] leave no traces in the fossil record.” But he then adds, as if under his breath, “Questions of social life…may be accessible from studies of ancient environments, or from certain aspects of anatomy and behaviour that leave material evidence.”2 Certain aspects of anatomy and behaviour that leave material evidence…. Can we glean reliable information about the contours of ancient social life—even sexual behavior—from present-day human anatomy? Yes we can.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Nonhuman primates offer intriguing evidence of the “soft power of peace”—and not just horny bonobos, either. Frans de Waal and Denise Johanowicz devised an experiment to see what would happen when two different macaque species were placed together for five months. Rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) are aggressive and violent, while stump-tails (Macaca arctoides) are known for their more chilled-out approach to life. The stump-tails, for example, make up after conflict by gripping each other’s hips, whereas reconciliations are rarely witnessed among rhesus monkeys. Once the two species were placed together, however, the scientists saw that the more peaceful, conciliatory behavior of the stump-tails dominated the more aggressive rhesus attitudes. Gradually, the rhesus monkeys relaxed. As de Waal recounts, “Juveniles of the two species played together, groomed together, and slept in large, mixed huddles. Most importantly, the rhesus monkeys developed peacemaking skills on a par with those of their more tolerant group mates.” Even when the experiment concluded, and the two species were once again housed only with their own kind, the rhesus monkeys were still three times more likely to reconcile after conflict and groom their rivals.22 A fluke? Neuroscientist/primatologist Robert Sapolsky has spent decades observing a group of baboons in Kenya, starting when he was a student in 1978. In the mid-1980s, a significant proportion of adult males in the group abruptly died of tuberculosis they’d picked up from infected food in a dump outside a tourist hotel. But the prized (albeit infected) dump food had been eaten only by the most belligerent baboons, who had driven away less aggressive males, females, or juveniles. Justice! With all the hard-ass males gone, the laid-back survivors were in charge. The defenseless troop was a treasure ready-made for pirates: a whole troop of females, sub-adults, and easily cowed males just waiting for some neighboring tough guys to waltz in and start raping and pillaging. Because male baboons leave their natal troop at adolescence, within a decade of the dump cataclysm, none of the original, atypically mellow males were still around. But, as Sapolsky reports, “the troop’s unique culture was being adopted by new males joining the troop.” In 2004, Sapolsky reported that two decades after the tuberculosis “tragedy,” the troop still showed higher-than-normal rates of males grooming and affiliating with females, an unusually relaxed dominance hierarchy, and physiological evidence of lower-than-normal anxiety levels among the normally stressed-out low-ranking males. Even more recently, Sapolsky told us that as of his most recent visit, in the summer of 2007, the troop’s unique culture appeared to be intact.23

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Perel is the rare therapist willing to publicly consider the possibility that heterosexual couples might find alternative arrangements that can work well for them—even if they find themselves outside the bounds of what mainstream society approves. She writes, “It’s been my experience that couples who negotiate sexual boundaries…are no less committed than those who keep the gates closed. In fact, it is their desire to make the relationship stronger that leads them to explore other models of long-term love.”18 There are an infinite number of ways to adapt a flexible and loving partnership to our ancient appetites. Despite what most mainstream therapists claim, for example, couples with “open marriages” generally rate their overall satisfaction (with both their relationship and with life in general) significantly higher than those in conventional marriages do.19 Polyamorists have found ways to incorporate additional relationships into their lives without lying to one another and destroying their primary partnership. Like many gay male couples, these people recognize that additional relationships need not be taken as indictments of anyone. Dossie Easton and Catherine Liszt, authors of The Ethical Slut, write, “It is cruel and insensitive to interpret an affair as a symptom of sickness in the relationship, as it leaves the ‘cheated-on’ partner—who may already be feeling insecure—to wonder what is wrong with him…. Many people have sex outside their primary relationships for reasons that have nothing to do with any inadequacy in their partner or in the relationship.”20 Despite centuries of religious and scientific propaganda, the basic illusions underpinning the supposed “naturalness” of the conventional nuclear family are clearly exhausted. This collapse has left many of us isolated and unfulfilled. Blind insistence and well-intentioned inquisitions have failed to turn the tide, and show no signs of future success. Rather than endless War Between the Sexes, or rigid adherence to a notion of the human family that was never true to begin with, we need to seek peace with the truths of human sexuality. Maybe this means improvising new familial configurations. Perhaps it will require more community assistance for single mothers and their children. Or maybe it just means we must learn to adjust our expectations concerning sexual fidelity. But this we know: vehement denial, inflexible religious or legislative dictate, and medieval stoning rituals in the desert have all proved powerless against our prehistoric predilections.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Even if we limit ourselves to the chimpanzee model, the dark self-assurance of modern-day neo-Hobbesian pessimists may be unfounded. Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, for example, might be a bit less certain in his gloomy assessment of human nature: “Be warned that if you wish, as I do, to build a society in which individuals cooperate generously and unselfishly towards a common good, you can expect little help from biological nature. Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish.”10 Maybe, but cooperation runs deep in our species too. Recent findings in comparative primate intelligence have led researchers Vanessa Woods and Brian Hare to wonder whether an impulse toward cooperation might actually be the key to our species-defining intelligence. They write, “Instead of getting a jump start with the most intelligent hominids surviving to produce the next generation, as is often suggested, it may have been the more sociable hominids—because they were better at solving problems together—who achieved a higher level of fitness and allowed selection to favor more sophisticated problem-solving over time.”11 Humans got smart, they hypothesize, because our ancestors learned to cooperate. Innately selfish or not, the effects of food provisioning and habitat depletion on both wild chimpanzees and human foragers suggest that Dawkins and others who argue that humans are innately aggressive, selfish beasts should be careful about citing these chimp data in support of their case. Human groups tend to respond to food surplus and storage with behavior like that observed in chimps: heightened hierarchical social organization, intergroup violence, territorial perimeter defense, and Machiavellian alliances. In other words, humans—like chimps—tend to fight when there’s something worth fighting over. But for most of prehistory, there was no food surplus to win or lose and no home base to defend. In Search of Primate Continuity Two elements women share with bonobos are that their ovulation is hidden from immediate detection and that they have sex throughout their cycle. But here the similarities end. Where are our genital swellings, and where is the sex at the drop of a hat? FRANS DE WAAL12 Sex was an expression of friendship: in Africa it was like holding hands…. It was friendly and fun. There was no coercion. It was offered willingly. PAUL THEROUX13 Whatever one concludes about chimp violence and its relevance to human nature, our other closest primate cousin, the bonobo, offers a fascinating counter-model. Just as the chimpanzee seems to embody the Hobbesian vision of human origins, the bonobo reflects the Rousseauian view. Although best known today as the proponent of the Noble Savage, Rousseau’s autobiography details a fascination with sexuality that suggests that he would have considered bonobos kindred souls had he known of them. De Waal sums up the difference between these two apes’ behavior by saying that “the chimpanzee resolves sexual issues with power; the bonobo resolves power issues with sex.”

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  In 1988, Roy Romer, then governor of Colorado, faced a feeding-frenzy of questions about his long-running extramarital affair that had become publicly known. Romer did what few public figures have dared. In the spirit of the Yucatán, he refused to accept the premise underlying the intrusive questions: that his extramarital relationship was a betrayal of his wife and family. Instead, he called an extraordinary press conference where he pointed out that his wife of forty-five years had known about and accepted the relationship all along. Romer confronted the tittering reporters with “life as it really happens.” “What is fidelity?” he asked the suddenly silent gaggle of reporters. “Fidelity is what kind of openness you have. What kind of trust you have, which is based on truth and openness. And so, in my own family, we’ve discussed that at some length and we’ve tried to arrive at an understanding of what our feelings are, what our needs are, and work it out with that kind of fidelity.”21 The Marriage of the Sun and the Moon In a sky swarming with uncountable stars, clouds endlessly flowing, and planets wandering, always and forever there has been just one moon and one sun. To our ancestors, these two mysterious bodies reflected the female and the male essences. From Iceland to Tierra del Fuego, people attributed the Sun’s constancy and power to his masculinity; the Moon’s changeability, unspeakable beauty, and monthly cycles were signs of her femininity. To human eyes turned toward the sky 100,000 years ago, they appeared identical in size, as they do to our eyes today. In a total solar eclipse, the disc of the moon fits so precisely over that of the sun that the naked eye can see solar flares leaping into space from behind. But while they appear precisely the same size to terrestrial observers, scientists long ago determined that the true diameter of the sun is about four hundred times that of the moon. Yet incredibly, the sun’s distance from Earth is roughly four hundred times that of the moon’s, thus bringing them into unlikely balance when viewed from the only planet with anyone around to notice.22 Some will say, “Interesting coincidence.” Others will wonder whether there isn’t an extraordinary message contained in this celestial convergence of difference and similarity, intimacy and distance, rhythmic constancy and cyclical change. Like our distant ancestors, we watch the eternal dance of our sun and our moon, looking for clues to the nature of man and woman, masculine and feminine here at home. [image file=image_rsrc68M.jpg] Luc Viatour/www.lucnix.be

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  Perhaps our core ingredients like interoception and concepts will one day be seen as too essentialist, as we discover something even more finely constructed going on behind the scenes. Our scientific story is still evolving, but that’s not surprising. Progress in science isn’t always about finding the answers; it’s about asking better questions. Today, those questions have forced a paradigm shift in the science of emotion, and more broadly in the science of mind and brain. In the coming years, I hope we’ll all see fewer and fewer news stories about brain blobs for emotion in people or rats or fruit flies, and more about how brains and bodies construct emotion. In the meantime, whenever you see an essentialism-steeped news story about emotion, if you even feel a twinge of doubt, then you’re playing a role in this scientific revolution. Like most important paradigm shifts in science, this one has the potential to transform our health, our laws, and who we are. To forge a new reality. If you’ve learned within these pages that you are an architect of your experience—and the experiences of those around you—then we’re building that new reality together. 3 The Myth of Universal Emotions T ake a look at the woman in figure 3-1 , who is screaming in terror. Most people who were born and raised in a Western culture can effortlessly see this emotion in her face, even with no other context in the photograph. Figure 3-1: Perceiving terror in a woman’s face Except . . . she isn’t feeling terror. This photograph actually shows Serena Williams immediately after she beat her sister Venus in the 2008 U.S. Open tennis finals. Turn to page 310 (appendix C) to see the full photograph. In context, the facial configuration takes on new meaning. 1 If Williams’s face subtly transformed before your eyes once you knew the context, you are not alone. This is a common experience. How did your brain accomplish this shift? The first emotion word I used, “terror,” caused your brain to simulate past facial configurations that you have seen of people feeling fear. You were almost certainly not aware of these simulations, but they shaped your perception of Williams’s face. When I explained the photo’s context—winning a crucial tennis match—your brain applied its conceptual knowledge of tennis and winning to simulate facial configurations that you’ve seen of people experiencing exultation. These simulations again influenced how you perceived Williams’s face. In each case, your emotion concepts helped you make meaning from the image. 2 In real life, we usually encounter faces in context, attached to bodies and associated with voices, smells, and other surrounding details. These details cue your brain to use particular concepts to simulate and construct your perception of emotion. That’s why, in the full photo of Serena Williams, you perceive triumph, not terror. In fact, you depend on emotion concepts each time you experience another person as emotional.