Humiliation

Passages

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

Page 32 of 38 · 20 per page

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  The arrogance of men will be humbled. Yahweh alone shall be exalted, On that day. Yes, that will be the day of Yahweh of armies Against all pride and arrogance, Against all that is great to bring it down.46 Yahweh was becoming not just the national god but the god of history. But this exaltation of Yahweh was also aggressive. He was behaving like a great power, which was forcibly bringing peace to the region by destroying the destructive weapons of his enemies: All over the world he puts an end to wars He breaks the bow, he snaps the spear, He gives shields to the flames.47 The other nations would be compelled to accept the kingship of Yahweh and to hammer their swords into plowshares, their spears into sickles.48 To achieve the final triumph, Ahaz should not engage in worldly politics, but put his faith in Yahweh alone. In the Zion cult, Jerusalem was a city of the “poor.” But poverty did not mean material deprivation. The obverse of “poor” was not “rich” but “proud.” As they climbed up Mount Zion to the temple, the people used to sing this psalm: Yahweh, my heart has no lofty ambitions, My eyes do not look too high. I am not concerned with great affairs Or marvels beyond my scope. Enough for me to keep my soul tranquil and quiet Like a child in its mother’s arms, as content as a child that has been weaned. Israel, rely on Yahweh, Now and for always!49 Now Isaiah told Ahaz that he should not depend on human strength, foreign alliances, or military superiority, but on Yahweh. It was idolatry to depend arrogantly upon mere human armies and fortifications. This reliance on Yahweh alone was a Judean version of the northern cultic movement to worship Yahweh exclusively, and Isaiah’s insistence on humility and surrender seems at first sight similar to the Axial spirituality of kenosis. Yet it also inflated the national ego of Judah at a perilous juncture of history. Isaiah’s revolutionary idea that Yahweh was not simply the patronal god of Israel, but could control the gods of other nations, was based upon a defiant patriotism. In many ways, Isaiah belonged to the old cultic world. He preached a violent, agonistic vision, which absorbed and endorsed the aggressive politics of the time. It was also an essentially magical theology, which encouraged people to believe that a divine potency made Jerusalem invincible. Reliance upon Yahweh alone would prove to be a very dangerous basis for foreign policy.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  This was a surprising decision. Athenians had no expertise in naval warfare; their strength lay in the hoplite army that was their pride and joy. They had no experience of shipbuilding. But the council agreed, navigational experts were brought in, and the Athenians began to build two hundred triremes and train a navy of forty thousand men.84 This involved a radical break with tradition. Previously only men who could afford to equip themselves had been allowed to join the hoplite army, but now all Athenian males, including noncitizens, were drafted into the fleet. Aristocrats, farmers, and thetes, men of the lower classes, sat on the same rowing bench and had to pull together. In the hoplite phalanx, Athenians fought face-to-face; they found it dishonorable to sit in the trireme with their backs to the enemy. Many must have resented Themistocles’ plan, especially when their first great triumph against the Persian army was on land. In 490, the Persian fleet sailed across the Aegean, conquered Naxos, sacked Eritrea, and landed on the plain of Marathon, some twenty-five miles north of Athens. Under the leadership of Militiades, the hoplite army of Athens set out to meet them, and against all the odds, inflicted a stunning defeat upon Persia.85 Marathon became the new Troy; its hoplites were revered as a modern race of heroes. Why depart from tradition, when the old ways had been so spectacularly successful? In 480, Xerxes, the new Persian king, sailed toward Athens with twelve hundred triremes and about one hundred thousand men.86 Even with the help of Sparta and the other Peloponnesian cities, the Athenian navy was greatly outnumbered. Some of the magistrates wanted to jettison the fleet, but Cimon, the son of Militiades, the hero of Marathon, ceremonially left his riding tackle on the Acropolis and set out for the port of Piraeus: Marathon was in the past. Before the Persians’ arrival, Themistocles evacuated the entire population of Athens, including women, children, and slaves, and sent them to the island of Salamis, across the Saronic Gulf.87 When the Persians arrived, they found an eerily empty city; they rushed through the streets, looting and pillaging, and burned the magnificent new temples on the Acropolis, while the Athenians sat miserably on Salamis, scarcely able to bear this humiliation. But Themistocles had set a deadly trap. After they had finished their rampage, the Persian navy sailed over to Salamis but could not fit all their ships into the narrow gulf. The triremes became gridlocked, jammed hopelessly together, and were unable to move. The Athenians could pick them off one by one. By evening the surviving Persian ships had fled, and Xerxes left Attica to put down an uprising at home.

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

  The king made the promise, and two bishops and several nobles, in his behalf, swore upon sacred relics that he would keep it. Hugo, being a monk, could not swear, but pledged his word before the all-seeing God. Hugo, the bishops, nobles, and the Countess Matilda and Adelheid signed the written agreement, which still exists. After these preliminaries, the inner gate was opened. The king, in the prime of life, the heir of many crowned monarchs, and a man of tall and noble presence, threw himself at the feet of the gray-haired pope, a man of low origin and of small and unimpressive stature, who by his word had disarmed an empire. He burst into tears, and cried "Spare me, holy father, spare me!" The company were moved to tears; even the iron pope showed signs of tender compassion. He heard the confession of Henry, raised him up, gave him absolution and his apostolic blessing, conducted him to the chapel, and sealed the reconciliation by the celebration of the sacrifice of the mass. Some chroniclers add the following incident, which has often been repeated, but is very improbable. Gregory, before partaking of the sacrament, called upon God to strike him dead if he were guilty of the crimes charged on him, and, after eating one-half of the consecrated wafer unharmed, he offered the other half to Henry, requesting him to submit to the same awful ordeal; but the king declined it, and referred the whole question to the decision of a general council.75 After mass, the pope entertained the king courteously at dinner and dismissed him with some fatherly warnings and counsels, and with his renewed apostolic blessing. Henry gained his object, but at the sacrifice of his royal dignity. He confessed by his act of humiliation that the pope had a right to depose a king and heir of the imperial crown, and to absolve subjects from the oath of allegiance. The head of the State acknowledged the temporal supremacy of the Church. Canossa marks the deepest humiliation of the State and the highest exaltation of the Church,—we mean the political papal Church of Rome, not the spiritual Church of Christ, who wore a crown of thorns in this world and who prayed on the cross for his murderers. Gregory acted on the occasion in the sole interest of the hierarchy. His own friends, as we learn from his official account to the Germans, deemed his conduct to be "tyrannical cruelty, rather than apostolic severity." He saw in Henry the embodiment of the secular power in opposition to the ecclesiastical power, and he achieved a signal triumph, but only for a short time. He overshot his mark, and was at last expelled from Rome by the very man against whom he had closed the gate.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  Some bishops opposed this vandalism, but not consistently. Because Roman law protected Jewish property, Theodosius ordered the bishop who had instigated the burning of the Callinicum synagogue to pay for its repair. But Ambrose (339–97), bishop of Milan, forced him to rescind this decree, since rebuilding the synagogue would be as humiliating to the true faith as Julian’s attempt to restore the Jewish temple.81 The Christianization of the empire was now, increasingly, equated with the destruction of these iconic buildings. In 391, after Theodosius had permitted Theophilus, bishop of Alexandria, to occupy the temple of Dionysius, the bishop pillaged all the temples in the city and paraded the looted treasure in an insulting display.82 In response, the pagans of Alexandria barricaded themselves into the magnificent temple of Serapis with some Christian hostages, whom they forced to reenact the trauma of Diocletian’s persecution: These they forced to offer sacrifice on the altars where fire was kindled; those who refused they put to death with new and refined tortures, fastening some to gibbets and breaking the legs of others and pitching them into the caverns which a careworn antiquity had built to receive the blood of sacrifices and the other impurities of the temple.83 When the pagan leader thought he heard monks singing in some distant part of the shrine, he knew they were doomed. In fact, the Serapaeum was destroyed by imperial soldiers acting on the bishop’s orders, but the monks who turned up afterward carrying relics of John the Baptist and squatted in the ruins became the symbols of this Christian triumph.84 It was reported that many pagans were so shocked by these events that they converted on the spot. The success of these attacks convinced Theodosius that the best way of achieving ideological consensus in the empire was to ban sacrificial worship and close down all the old shrines and temples. His son and successor, Arcadius (r. 395–408), expressed this policy succinctly: “When [the temples] are overthrown and obliterated, the material foundations for all superstition will have been done away with.”85 He urged local aristocracies throughout the empire to let their zealots loose on the temples to prove that the pagan gods could not even defend their own homes. As one modern historian notes: “Silencing, burning, and destruction were all forms of theological demonstration; and when the lesson was over, monks and bishops, generals and emperors had driven the enemy from the field.”86

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

  Many legends are told of him. The most famous is that Leo the Isaurian, enraged at his opposition to the iconoclastic edicts, sent to the caliph a letter addressed to himself which purported to have come from John, and was written in imitation of his hand and style, in which the latter proposed to the emperor to capture Damascus—a feat easily accomplished., the writer said, because of the insufficient guard of the city. Moreover, in the business he could count upon his support. The letter was of course a forgery, but so clever that when the caliph showed John the letter he acknowledged the similarity of the writing, while he denied the authorship. But the caliph in punishment of his (supposed) treachery had his right hand cut off, and, as was the custom, hung up in a public place. In answer to John’s request it was, however, given to him in the evening, ostensibly for burial. He then put the hand to the stump of his arm, prostrated himself before an image of the Virgin Mary in his private chapel, and prayed the Virgin to cause the parts to adhere. He fell asleep: in a vision the Virgin told him that his prayer had been granted, and he awoke to find it true. Only a scar remained to tell the story of his mutilation. The miracle of course convinced the caliph of the innocence of his servant, and he would fain have retained him in office, but John requested his absolute dismission.883 This story was manifestly invented to make out that the great defender of image-worship deserved a martyr’s crown.884 Other legends which have more of a basis of fact relate to his residence in the convent of St. Sabas. Here, it is said., he was enthusiastically received, but no one would at first undertake the instruction of so famous a scholar. At length an old monk undertook it, and subjected him to the most humiliating tests and vexatious restrictions, which he bore in a very saintly way. Thus he sent him once to Damascus to sell a load of convent-made baskets at double their real value, in order that his pride might be broken by the jeers and the violence of the rabble. He was at first insulted; but at last a man who had been formerly his servant, bought out of compassion the baskets at the exorbitant price, and the saint returned victorious over vanity and pride. He was also put to the most menial services. And, what must have been equally trying, he was forbidden to write prose or poetry. But these trials ended on a hint from the Virgin Mary who appeared one night to the old monk and told him that John was destined to play a great part in the church. He was accordingly allowed to follow the bent of his genius and put his immense learning at the service of religion.

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

  “Well,” I say, “it is and it isn’t.” I start telling her the rest, about how nobody would give me a peer review, and how supposedly everyone at my past jobs hates me, too—and then the door from the north wing of the building opens and there is my good friend Tracy, the peppy vice president of brand and buzz, striding across the lobby with a huge smile on her face. “Hey you!” she says, and waves, as if she’s super-duper happy to see me. “Hey!” I say, faking a smile. Maybe she figures I don’t know that she stabbed me in the back by refusing to comment for my peer review. Or maybe she does. Maybe she knew that Trotsky was going to tell me this, and she came out here specifically because she wanted to see the look on my face after I found that out. Could she really dislike me that much? Could she possibly be that nasty? Down in the atrium the kids are still laughing and whooping it up. They’re having a meeting! About marketing! This place is so cool! They’re having the time of their lives. I hurry to my desk and grab my jacket. I stuff my laptop into my backpack. My hands are shaking. Out in the lobby, I stare at the elevator doors, waiting for them to open. Finally they do, and I ride down to the ground floor and walk past the security guard, who gives me a lazy wave and says, “Good night.” Finally I’m outside, bundling my coat against the November air, hurrying to my car. It’s late afternoon, the daylight draining from the sky. When I get home I call the editorial director at Gawker and accept the job. Twenty-five [image "image" file=Image00003.jpg] Graduation DayT he next morning I stop by Trotsky’s desk and tell him I need to talk to him in private. We find an empty conference closet. Ironically it’s the one with the beanbag chairs where we used to have our biweekly one-on-ones and shoot the shit about the morons we were working with. I tell Trotsky that I’ve been offered a new job, and that I’ve accepted it. It’s Thursday, November 20. I won’t start until January, but I am giving him six weeks of notice. Next week is Thanksgiving, and then there are three weeks when everyone will be working before the Christmas break. I’d like to remain at HubSpot through the end of December. That will give me time to get the new podcast up and running smoothly. I’ll manage a smooth handoff to whichever person will be running it after I leave. Trotsky acts surprised. “Why are you leaving?” he says. “Are you serious?” “I thought things were going well,” he says. “Well, that performance review yesterday didn’t go very well. I got pretty bad scores.” “I didn’t think the scores were so bad,” he says, and he really, sincerely seems to mean this.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  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.” The people who had watched his degradation would be speechless with astonishment, but they would eventually realize that he had suffered for them: “Ours were the sufferings he bore, ours the sorrows he carried. . . . He was punished for our faults, crushed for our sins.” By his courageous, serene acceptance of pain, he had brought them peace and healing.47 It was a remarkable vision of suffering. In their hour of triumph, the servant reminded Israel that pain was an ever-present reality, but his kenosis led to exaltation and ekstasis. His benevolence was universal, reaching out from his immediate circle to include the entire world—to the distant islands and the remotest peoples. It was not enough “to restore the tribes of Jacob,” Yahweh told him; he was to be “the light of the nations, so that my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth.”48

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  This new Sikhism was passionately opposed to secularism: Sikhs must have political power in order to enforce this conformity. A tradition that once had been open to all had been invaded by fear of the “other,” represented by a host of enemies—Hindus, heretics, modernizers, secularists, and any form of political dominance. 106 There was a similar distortion of the Muslim tradition. The British abolition of the Moghul Empire had been a traumatic watershed, summarily demoting a people who hitherto had seemed virtual masters of the globe. For the first time, they were being ruled by hostile infidels in one of the core cultures of the civilized world. Given the symbolic importance of the ummah’s well-being, this was not simply a political anxiety but one that touched the spiritual recesses of their being. Some Muslims would therefore cultivate a history of grievance. We have previously seen that the experience of humiliation can damage a tradition and become a catalyst for violence. Segments of the Hindu population, who had been subjected to Muslim rule for seven hundred years, had their own smoldering resentment of Moghul imperialism, so Muslims suddenly felt extremely vulnerable, especially since the British blamed them for the Mutiny of 1857. 107 Many were afraid that Islam would disappear from the subcontinent and that Muslims would entirely lose their identity. Their first impulse was to withdraw from the mainstream and cling to the glories of the distant past. In 1867 in Deoband, near Delhi, a cadre of ulema began to issue detailed fatwas that governed every single aspect of life to help Muslims live authentically under foreign rule. Over time the Deobandis established a network of madrassas throughout the subcontinent that promoted a form of Islam that was as reductive in its own way as the Arya Samaj. They too attempted a return to “fundamentals”—the pristine Islam of the Prophet and the rashidun—and vehemently decried such later developments as the Shiah. Islam had for centuries displayed a remarkable ability to assimilate other cultural traditions, but their colonial humiliation caused the Deobandis to retreat from the West in rather the same way as Ibn Taymiyyah had recoiled from Mongol civilization. Deobandi Islam refused to countenance itjihad (“independent reasoning”) and argued for an overly strict and literal interpretation of the Shariah. The Deobandis were socially progressive in their rejection of the caste system and their determination to educate the poorest Muslims, but they were virulently opposed to any innovation—adamant, for instance, in their condemnation of the compulsory education of women. In the early days, Deobandis were not violent, but they would later become more militant. They would have a drastic effect on subcontinental Islam, which had traditionally leaned toward the more inclusive spiritualities of Sufism and Falsafah, both of which the Deobandis now utterly condemned. During the twentieth century they would gain considerable influence in the Muslim world and would rank in importance with the prestigious al-Azha Madrassa in Cairo.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  Sullivan alerted his readers to the use of the word Crusade, “an explicitly religious term,” and pointed out that “bin Laden’s beef is with American troops defiling the land of Saudi Arabia, ‘the land of the Two Holy Mosques’ in Mecca and Medina.”58 The words Crusade and holy mosques were enough to persuade Sullivan that this really was a religious war, whereupon he felt free to embark on a paean to the Western liberal tradition. Way back in the seventeenth century, the West had understood how dangerous it was to mix religion and politics, Sullivan reasoned, but the Muslim world, alas, had yet to learn this important lesson. Yet Sullivan failed to discuss or even dwell upon the two highly specific and clearly political aspects of American foreign policy mentioned by Bin Laden in the quoted extract: its interference in the internal affairs of Saudi Arabia and its support for the despotic Saudi regime.59 Even the “explicitly religious” terms—Crusade and holy mosques—in fact had political and economic connotations. Since the early twentieth century, the Arabic al-salibiyyah (“crusade”) has become an explicitly political term, applied routinely to colonialism and Western imperialism.60 The deployment of American troops in Saudi Arabia was not only a violation of sacred space but also a humiliating demonstration of the kingdom’s dependence on the United States and of America’s domination of the region. The American troops involved the kingdom in expensive arms deals; its Saudi base gave the United States easy access to Saudi oil and had enabled the U.S. military to launch air strikes against Sunni Muslims during the Gulf War.61

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  Qutb formulated these ideas in his book Milestones, which was smuggled out of prison and read avidly. He was a learned man, but Milestones is not the work of an official Islamic authority; rather, it is the outcry of a man who has been pushed too far. Qutb’s program distorted Islamic history, since it made no mention of Muhammad’s nonviolent policy at Hudaybiyya, the turning point of the conflict with Mecca. Humiliation, foreign occupation, and secularizing aggression had created an Islamic history of grievance. Qutb now had a paranoid vision of the past, seeing only a relentless succession of jahili enemies—pagans, Jews, Christians, Crusaders, Mongols, Communists, capitalists, colonialists, and Zionists—intent on the destruction of Islam.57 Executed in 1966, he did not live long enough to work out the practical implications of his program. Yet unlike some of his later followers, he seems to have realized that Muslims would have to undergo a long spiritual, social, and political preparation before they were ready for armed struggle. After his death, however, the political situation in the Middle East deteriorated, and the increasing violence and consequent alienation meant that Qutb’s work would resonate with the disaffected youth, especially those Brothers who had been likewise hardened in Egyptian jails and felt that there was no time for such a ripening process. When they were released in the early 1970s, they would bring Qutb’s ideas into mainstream society and try to implement them practically. [image file=image_rsrcDZA.jpg] After the Six-Day War between Israel and its Arab neighbors in June 1967, the region experienced a religious revival not only in the Muslim countries but also in Israel. Zionism, we have seen, had begun as a defiantly secular movement, and the military campaigns of the Jewish state had had no religious content; their violent suppression of the Palestinian people had been the result of their secular nationalism rather than a religious imperative. Before the war, as they listened to Nasser vowing to throw them all into the sea, many Israelis had been convinced that yet another attempt would be made to exterminate them. They responded with lightning speed, achieving a spectacular victory in which they took the Golan Heights from Syria, the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, and the West Bank and the Old City of Jerusalem from Jordan.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  Once again, some Christians responded to the state that had suddenly turned against them with the defiant gesture of martyrdom. Most of the martyrs who died during these two years were either killed by pagan mobs or put to death by local officials for their provocative attacks on pagan religion.58 As Jews began work on their new temple and pagans gleefully refurbished their shrines, conflict throughout the empire centered on iconic buildings. Ever since Constantine, Christians had become accustomed to seeing the decline of Judaism as the essential concomitant to the triumph of the Church. Now as they watched the purposeful activity of the Jewish workmen on the temple site in Jerusalem, they felt as if the fabric of their own faith had been undermined. At Merum in Phrygia, there was a more ominous development. While the local pagan temple was being repaired and the statues of the gods polished, three Christians, “unable to endure the indignity put upon their religion and impelled by a fervent zeal for virtue, rushed by night into the temple and broke the images in pieces.” This amounted to a suicide attack on a building that seemed to epitomize their new humiliation. Even though the governor urged them to repent, they refused, “declaring their readiness to undergo any sufferings, rather than pollute themselves by sacrificing.” Consequently, they were tortured and roasted to death on a gridiron.59 A new spate of martyr stories appeared, even more sensational than the original Acta. In this aggressive form of martyrdom, the martyrs were no longer the innocent victims of imperial violence: their battles now took the form of a symbolic—and sometimes suicidal—assault upon the enemies of the faith. Like some modern religious extremists, Christians felt that they had suffered a sudden loss of power and prestige—all the more acute in their case because the memory of their days as a despised minority were so recent.60 Christians courted martyrdom by smashing the pagan gods’ effigies, disrupting rituals and defacing the temples that symbolized their degradation, and loudly praising those who had defied Julian’s “tyranny.” When Julian was killed in a military expedition against Persia and Jovian, a Christian, was proclaimed emperor in his place, it seemed like a divine deliverance. But Julian’s reign, which had so rudely shattered the Christians’ newfound security and entitlement, had created a polarized religious climate and, at least among the lower classes, had exacerbated hostility between Christians and pagans. “Never again!” would be the Christian watchword as they contemplated renewed attacks on the pagan establishment in the coming years.61 State repression creates a history of grievance that often radicalizes a religious tradition and can even push an originally irenic vision into a campaign of violence.

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

  In simple confidence Coelestin gave his ear to this counsellor and to that, and yielded easily to all applicants for favors. His complaisancy to Charles is seen in his appointment of cardinals. Out of twelve whom he created, seven were Frenchmen, and three Neapolitans. It would seem as if he fell into despair at the self-seeking and worldliness of the papal court, and he exclaimed, "O God, while I rule over other men’s souls, I am losing the salvation of my own." He was clearly not equal to the duties of the tiara. In vain did the Neapolitans seek by processions to dissuade him from resigning. Clement I. had abjured his office, as had also Gregory VI. though at the mandate of an, emperor. Peter issued a bull declaring it to be the pope’s right to abdicate. His own abdication he placed on the ground "of his humbleness, the quest of a better life and an easy conscience, on account of his frailty of body and want of knowledge, the badness of men, and a desire to return to the quietness of his former state." The real reason for his resigning is obscure. The story went that the ambitious Cardinal Gaëtani, soon to become Coelestin’s successor, was responsible for it. He played upon the hermit’s credulity by speaking through a reed, inserted through the wall of the hermit’s chamber, and declared it to be heaven’s will that his reign should come to an end.292 As the Italians say, the story, if not true, was well invented, si non è vero è ben trovato. In abandoning the papacy the departing pontiff forfeited all freedom of movement. He attempted to flee across the Adriatic, but in vain. He was kept in confinement by Boniface VIII. in the castle of Fumone, near Anagni, until his death, May 19, 1296. What a world-wide contrast the simplicity of the hermit’s reign presents to the violent assertion and ambitious designs of Boniface, the first pope of a new period! Coelestin’s sixth centenary was observed by pious admirers in Italy.293 Opinions have differed about him. Petrarch praised his humility. Dante, with relentless severity held him up as an example of moral cowardice, the one who made the great renunciation. "Behold! that abject one appeared in view Who, mean of soul, the great refusal made."294 Vidi e cenobbi la ombra di colui Che fece per viltate il gran rifuto. A new era for the papacy was at hand.

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

  I set her up with a sales guy, who gives her a demo, and after she’s seen enough I take her for a spin around the offices. I show her my sad little desk in the telemarketing room, which is a bit of a step down from the office I had in New York, which had a view out over Central Park. I show her the nap room and the shower rooms and the groovy kitchen with the candy wall and the little spot on the second floor where they keep the musical instruments for impromptu jam sessions. I’ve heard that Halloween would be crazy, but even after six months at the company I am not prepared for what we’re encountering. Everyone but me has come to work in a costume. All over the place, packs of actual adults are racing around, whooping and shrieking, posing for selfies. They’re dressed up like Smurfs and witches, sexy pirates, sexy Snow Whites, naughty devils, characters from Harry Potter. They’re all trying really hard to show everyone how much fun they are having at this totally rad company with all these totally cool people. But it’s not cool. It’s sad. And weird. “I must say,” Rose says, “I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a company where people come to work in costumes on Halloween.” She does not seem to mean this in a good way. “Well,” I say, “we dare to be different.” I bring her to the content factory, the room where the blog team works and where I used to work before I was banished. I introduce her around. Three women have come to work dressed as the mean girls in the movie Mean Girls. The HubSpot mean girls seem not to realize that in the movie the mean girls are the butt of the joke. Our mean girls seem to believe that the mean girls were the heroes. “We even made a burn book,” Fatima tells me. “Look, you’re in it!” Sure enough, they really have printed out an actual burn book, which in the movie is a book where the mean girls make fun of people they don’t like or consider to be losers. Fatima flips to my page. “You see?” she says. Indeed, there I am. They have created a page about me, with a photo of me looking old and stupid. There are words, too. I don’t read them. I walk Rose outside and put her in a cab to the airport. “You have to get out of here,” she says. “This place will destroy your soul.” “I know. I figure I’ll put in a year and then I’ll—” “No.” She cuts me off. “Right away. Right now. Today. Get out.” She closes her door. The cab zooms off. She never becomes a HubSpot customer.

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

  The council at Worms was attended by few bishops, and proved a failure. A council in Mainz, June 29, turned out no better, and Henry found it necessary to negotiate. Saxony was lost; prelates and nobles deserted him. A diet at Tribur, an imperial castle near Mainz, held Oct. 16, 1076, demanded that he should submit to the pope, seek absolution from him within twelve months from the date of excommunication, at the risk of forfeiting his crown. He should then appear at a diet to be held at Augsburg on Feb. 2, 1077, under the presidency of the pope. Meanwhile he was to abide at Spires in strict privacy, in the sole company of his wife, the bishop of Verdun, and a few servants chosen by the nobles. The legates of Gregory were treated with marked respect, and gave absolution to the excommunicated bishops, including Siegfried of Mainz, who submitted to the pope. Henry spent two dreary months in seclusion at Spires, shut out from the services of the Church and the affairs of the State. At last he made up his mind to seek absolution, as the only means of saving his crown. There was no time to be lost; only a few weeks remained till the Diet of Augsburg, which would decide his fate. § 16. Canossa. 1077. The winter of 1076–1077 was one of the coldest and longest within the memory of men—the Rhine being frozen to a solid mass from November till April—and one of the most memorable in history—being marked by an event of typical significance. The humiliation of the head of the German Empire at the feet of the bishop of Rome at Canossa means the subjection of the State to the Church and the triumph of the Hildebrandian policy. A few days before Christmas, Henry IV. left Spires on a journey across the Alps as a penitent, seeking absolution from the pope. He was accompanied by his wife with her infant son Conrad (born August, 1071) and one faithful servant. Bertha, daughter of the margrave Odo of Turin and Adelheid of Susa, was betrothed to Henry in 1055 at Zürich, and married to him, July 13, 1066. She was young, beautiful, virtuous, and amiable; but he preferred to live with mistresses; and three years after the marriage he sought a divorce, with the aid of the unprincipled archbishop Siegfried of Mainz. The pope very properly refused his consent. The king gave up his wicked intention, and became attached to Bertha. She was born to love and to suffer, and accompanied him as a comforting angel through the bitter calamities of his life.

• From Cultish (2021)

  We’re the chance to be an entrepreneur, a business owner, a #bossbabe. We’re not a scam—we’re the American Dream.” And as far as the courts are concerned, these sentiments are just true enough to believe there’s nothing cultish about them at all. * * * Hey girl. I hate that I have to do this. But I just got word from the top, and unfortunately we’re going to have to let you go. When you first joined my team, I was so excited about your potential. But despite all the time and effort we put into growing you, it doesn’t seem like you really wanted it. Some people aren’t the right fit for this opportunity, and trust me, as your upline, that’s harder for me than it is for you. I’m going to have to remove you from the Facebook group and deactivate your account. I guess you weren’t a boss babe after all. x Part 5 This Hour Is Going to Change Your Life . . . and Make You LOOK AWESOME i. I’m vigorously power marching in place, like a toy soldier. It feels dopey, and I want to half-ass it, but I told myself I’d either do this with everything I’ve got or not at all. Rolling my forearms and fists in front of me with as much gusto as my muscles will allow, I’m squeezing my eyes shut while repeating the phrase “I am powerful beyond measure.” My parents are on either side of me, staggered slightly so there’s enough room, performing the same move and joining me in the affirmation: “I am powerful beyond measure.” “Embody it, awaken it!” cries our glowing leader, Patricia Moreno, projecting equal parts tenderness and ferocity. She calls this move WILLPOWER. A few eight-counts later, we’re punching the air in front of us, twisting our torsos with each hook. This move is called STRONG. “It’s the reminder to stop talking about what you can’t do, and call up your strength,” Moreno narrates. “YOU decide that TODAY you are strong enough to make any change you want to make. Say, ‘I am stronger than I seem.’” Still punching and twisting, we repeat: “I am stronger than I seem.” “Beautiful! Feel like a warrior!” croons Moreno. Two more movements complete our four-step routine: The next one is called BRAVE.

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

  The blog girls, smirking, say they don’t know what happened to my stuff. I go to the telemarketing center and wander around. There, on a desk against a wall, piled in a sad heap, I find my belongings: my laptop, my monitor, my books, pictures of my kids. Someone has just tossed my things into a cardboard box, carried them here, and plunked them on a desk. Ten Life in the Boiler Room Hi, is that Jeff?... Hey Jeff, this is Pete from HubSpot up in Boston. How’s the weather down there in Tampa?... I bet it is! Hey, I wish we’d get some of that sunshine up here, right?... So Jeff, I saw that you downloaded one of our e-books, so I thought I would follow up to see if I could answer any questions you might have... Right. Sure. Okay. Well when would be a good time?... Jeff, what’s your marketing plan this year? What are your goals? Have you thought about what you need to do to hit those goals?... Okay, sure. So when would be a good time for us to have a talk? Pete is a big ginger-haired guy who moonlights as a cheerleader for the Boston Celtics. Loud Pete, I call him. He stands ten feet away from me, wearing a headset and reciting variations of that script, again and again, all day long, in a booming voice. He laughs, he roars, he cracks himself up. He asks questions, gets hung up on, dials again. All. Day. Long. There are dozens more like him in this room. This is the telemarketing center, and it reminds me of the boiler-room operations you see in the movies, with people arranged in rows, some standing, some sitting, packed in close to each other, barking into headsets. Imagine Glengarry Glen Ross, but instead of four sales guys there are a hundred, and they are all in their early twenties, all talking at once, all saying the same things, over and over again. To be sure, the telemarketers at HubSpot are not selling penny stocks or fake real estate. They are selling a real product. I don’t see anything fraudulent or illegal in what they are doing. It’s just tacky and low- tech. At HubSpot these people are called business development representatives, or BDRs. They wear shorts and T-shirts, with baseball hats on backward, and drink beer at their desks. Officially, HubSpot’s products are supposed to be stamping out cold-calling, just like we’re supposed to be stamping out spam. Our sales pitch is that if you buy our software you won’t need to hire an army of outbound sales reps who spend their days blindly calling people, because our software will generate inbound leads and bring the customers to you. Yet here we are, operating an old-fashioned call center, with a bunch of low- paid kids calling thousands of people, day after day. HubSpot doesn’t keep this room a secret, but the company doesn’t talk about it much, either.

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

  “I need you to apologize to Spinner.” Ever since the Facebook incident, Spinner has been giving me the silent treatment. If I walk past her desk and say hello, she will look away and not respond. If someone sets a meeting and I’m on the list, Spinner refuses to attend. “You have to make things right with her,” Trotsky says. He tells me he can broker a deal where I will send Spinner a meeting request via Google Calendar, and she will accept my request, as long as she knows that the purpose of the meeting is for me to apologize. “I don’t have any problem with Spinner,” I say. “Great,” he says. “So just apologize to her.” “Apologize for what? I never said anything about her. I could understand if Halligan wanted an apology, but why Spinner?” Oddly enough, Halligan does not seem angry at me. I’ve run into him in the hallway, and we traded hellos as if nothing happened. Trotsky says I need to learn how PR people see the world. “Spinner just got her boss profiled in the New York Times . That’s a big deal for a company like this. It’s probably the biggest story that Spinner has ever worked on. Then you ruined it. You came in and peed all over her shoes.” In the world I come from, there’s no way that someone in editorial would grovel before someone from PR. Apologizing to the PR person who set up the interview is like apologizing to Halligan’s administrative assistant. Is Halligan’s admin angry, too? Does she need an apology? “How about the Uber driver who picked up Halligan at LaGuardia and drove him to the Times building? Is he disappointed? He drove all the way out there, and all the way back, and then I ruined everything. Should I call him up and apologize to him too?” Trotsky sighs. “Look,” he says. “I get it. But trust me. You should apologize. It’s the smart thing to do.” Fair enough. Trotsky is my new boss. I want to make him happy. I want to show that I’m a team player. If he tells me to do this, I’ll do it. If he thinks this is the smart move for me, then I’ll trust his judgment. He’s spent years working in companies like this. He knows more about office politics than I ever will. “Fine,” I say. “I’ll get on her calendar.” If groveling has to be done, I will at least put some effort into it. As soon as everyone gets back from the holiday break, in January, I go online, order a dozen gourmet brownies, and have them delivered to Spinner, with a note that says, “Can we be friends again please? If you want to yell at me for a while first, I understand. I’m married, and used to it.” She loves it.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  The massacre was revenge for the murder of fifty-nine Jews in Hebron on August 24, 1929. Goldstein died in the attack and is revered by the Israeli far right as a martyr. His action would inspire the first wave of Muslim suicide bombing in Israel and Palestine. A collective memory of humiliation and imperial domination has also inspired a desire for a national character of strength in India. 64 When they look back in history, Hindus are divided. Some see a paradise of coexistence and a culture in which Hindu and Muslim traditions combine. But Hindu nationalists see the period of Muslim rule as a clash of civilizations, in which a militant Islam forced its culture on the oppressed Hindu majority. 65 The structural violence of empire is always resented by subject peoples and can persist long after the imperialists have left. Founded in the early 1980s, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the “ Indian National Party,” an affiliate of RSS ( Hedgewar’s nationalist religious party), feeds on this bitterness and enhances it. It campaigned for a militarily strong India, a nuclear arsenal (whose warheads are named after Hindu gods), and national distinctiveness. At first, however, it made no headway in the polls, but its fortunes changed d ramatically in 1989, when the issue of the Babri mosque once again hit the headlines. 66 In India as in Israel, sacred geography has become emblematic of the nation’s disgrace. Here too, the spectacle of a Muslim shrine atop a ruined temple aroused huge passions, because it so graphically symbolized the Hindu collective memory of Islamic imperial dominance. In February 1989 activists resolved to build a new temple to Ram on the site of the mosque and collected donations from the poorer castes throughout India; in the smallest villages bricks for the new shrine were cast and consecrated. Not surprisingly, tensions flared between Muslims and Hindus in the north, and Rajiv Gandhi, who had tried to mediate, lost the election. The BJP, however, had made large gains at the polls, and the following year its president, L. K. Advani, began a rath yatra (“chariot pilgrimage”), a thirty-day journey from the west coast to Ayodhya, that was to culminate in the rebuilding of the Rama temple. His Toyota van was decorated to resemble Arjuna’s chariot in the last battle of the Mahabharata and was cheered by fervent crowds lining the route. 67 The pilgrimage began, significantly, at Somnath, where, legend has it, Sultan Mahmud of the Central Asian kingdom of Ghazni had slaughtered thousands of Hindus way back in the eleventh century, razing Shiva’s ancient temple to the ground and plundering its treasure.

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

  I admire the way he berates me without raising his voice and in fact takes the opposite approach and speaks more softly than usual, in a lower register, sometimes adopting the paternal tone of a teacher admonishing a student. He’ll wait until no one is around and then will pull up a chair, lean close, and explain to me that I’m really trying his patience with my behavior. Why did I ask him that question during that meeting? Was I trying to embarrass him in front of the others? He really wishes I would shape up and stop being so aggressive and hostile. Another of his tactics is to tell me that someone else in our department is furious with me and that he has fielded yet another complaint about me. Oddly enough, when I apologize to those people, they have no idea what I’m talking about. One person I’ve allegedly offended is Roberta, Cranium’s administrative assistant. Trotsky says she’s boiling mad because she booked a hotel room for me during the Inbound conference and I never used it, which wasted money and deprived someone else of a room. I can’t imagine why the company would book me a hotel room in Boston, since I live here. But I tell Roberta that I’m really sorry that she booked me a room and I didn’t use it. She looks at me as if I’m nuts. “It’s no big deal,” she says. “Nobody gave it a second thought.” I tell her I’ve heard she is really upset. “That’s ridiculous,” she says. The same goes for Monica and Eileen, the women who handle logistics for the conference. Supposedly they were so angry with me that I could never repair the breach, no matter how many times I apologized. This, too, turns out to be complete bullshit. “Neither of us was upset with you,” Monica will tell me, months after I leave HubSpot. I tell her I was told that she was furious with me. “That,” she says, “is complete news to me.” A public relations guy in Boston writes to me and says Trotsky has been getting into vehement arguments on Facebook, posting angry screeds and ad hominem attacks on people. “Is this guy really your boss?” the PR guy asks, having noticed that Trotsky works at HubSpot, where I also work. “How do you tolerate him? He seems to have a psycho streak in him. He comments on posts in a manner that I would classify as almost nuts. He comes off as insufferable. A first-class douchebag.” I’ve never had an abusive boss before. I’ve worked for a few colorful characters, including an editor at Forbes whom I once called a “fucking asshole” and who laughed and told me that this was why he loved working with me. I always found a way to get along with my colleagues. No one in my adult life, at work or elsewhere, has ever spoken to me the way Trotsky does.

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

  It will be separate from the blog. It will have its own website, with beautiful illustrations and photographs, and feature-length articles. This is the exact idea that I pitched to Wingman when I first joined, and which he rejected. It’s the idea that I then took to Halligan and Dharmesh, and which they approved, but which Cranium refused to put into effect. Trotsky knows that I pitched this idea. He knows the whole story. Now he has just taken my idea and made it his own. But there’s more: “Some of you know we’ve been talking to Sandra Bale,” he says. “She gave a talk at Inbound, and everybody loved her.” Sandra Bale runs a blog for a venture capital firm in San Francisco. She’s thirty years old and briefly worked at the Wall Street Journal before going into public relations. “We’re not sure we can get her, but we’re pitching her really hard,” Trotsky says. “If she takes the job, we’re going to put her in charge of the new publication and have her build it for us. She’s a rock star. It would be a huge deal if we can get her.” Meanwhile, I will be the podcast secretary. What the hell? After the meeting, in private, I remind Trotsky that the idea he is proposing, the project he wants to hire Sandra to run, is the exact idea that I pitched months ago. Trotsky nods. He seems to be mulling this over. “I’ll tell you what,” he says. “If Sandra comes on board, and if she needs any help, I will definitely want you to work with her.” At this point the message could not be more clear. Trotsky is doing everything short of hiring a skywriter to scrawl GET OUT, DAN in the airspace above HubSpot headquarters. I will be happy to oblige him. I’m making some progress in my job hunt. But I don’t want to leave until I’ve found a new position. I’m the sole breadwinner in our household, and we depend on HubSpot’s health insurance. From this point on, however, I find it pretty much impossible to take HubSpot seriously. One day I come back from lunch to find that Keytar Bear is performing in a conference room near my office. Keytar Bear is a busker who performs in Boston subway stations, wearing a bear costume and playing an instrument that blends a guitar and a keyboard. He’s here because it’s Tracy’s birthday—she’s the vice president of brand and buzz—and the people in her department thought it would be fun to have Keytar Bear serenade them while they eat birthday cake. They invite me in, so I stay and have a piece of cake and take a bunch of photos of them. At Halloween I do the same thing, roping people in for photographs, snapping away as they strike crazy poses and act like they’re the shit.