Pride

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 45 of 174 · 20 per page

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

  century conservative Evangelicals were too cowed by the fiasco of Prohibition to try to impose their social values on the rest of the nation by political means. They largely left Federal politics to liberal Protestants, plus a growing number of elite Catholics. As Washington DC’s hilltop Episcopal cathedral, which called itself ‘National’, steadily rose from its scaffolding to dominate northward views of the city, its cool and scholarly English Gothic represented the low- temperature, well-mannered religion of the white neighbourhoods in the Federal capital, in a way that Europeans would understand. Meanwhile, Evangelicals waited. They listened to their wireless sets in their small towns, their unfashionable suburbs, their remote farms, even in the barn milking, and they took comfort from the packaging of old-time religion, syndicated and delivered by a host of local radio stations, which had profited from the example set by Aimee Semple McPherson. The Evangelicals’ hour would come, in a more literal historical sense than their Scofield Reference Bibles told them.98 As the tectonic plates of American religion shifted, so around the world innumerable offshoots of enthusiastic Protestantisms found their own life and style. By no means all observed the Pentecostal shibboleth of speaking in tongues, though they were certainly charismatic in their own fashion. Africa bred a host of prophets who owed something, if only at a remove, to William Wade Harris (see pp. 887–8). A major spur to their message was the great influenza epidemic which swept the world in 1918, proving as destructive of human life as the First World War, and in Africa almost as destructive to the reputation of the West: the much-vaunted Western medicine seemed helpless in face of it. So two characteristics of the new prophets were first that they left European-led Churches which had fostered their faith, and second that they offered their own style of healing. In West Africa their Churches were commonly known by the Yoruba word for ‘owners of prayer’: Aladura. Prophet- led they might be, but one of their most effective founders, the Nigerian Josiah Olulowo Ositelu, brought from his rather High Church Anglican background a proper respect for hierarchy, which quickly ran to twelve categories of male officer, from Primate down to Male Cross Holders (women could bear iron rods or crosses with the Primate’s permission). Aladura were proud of their new beginning, proclaiming in their constitution ‘that Ethiopia or Africa shall raise up her own hands unto the Great Jehovah-God under the Spiritual Guide and lead her own indigenous sons’.99 That pride in an ‘Ethiopian’ faith, something truly African, runs through the crowded assembly of prophets across the continent. They could bring African solutions to African problems. That proud boast was a great contrast with the generation of political leaders who were to take over when European colonies in

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

  finance. Pius IX had on principled grounds refused any monetary compensation for the Papal States and its tax revenues from the Italian government, and the only way of filling the gap was by soliciting financial support from devout Catholics – what had been known in medieval Europe as ‘Peter’s Pence’. At first the appeal for funds had been associated with the futile military effort to defend the pope’s remaining territories, but this purpose became irrelevant after Italian unification in 1870. The net was cast worldwide, and the Vatican started taking a much more detailed interest in congregations far away.31 This was a shift as fraught with significance as that other great financial change in the Church’s medieval past, the financing of parish priests by tithes (see p. 369).The papacy was looking to every last Catholic man, woman and child for help in carrying out its task, and in return it delved much deeper into the everyday lives of the faithful. One liturgical change engineered by Pope Pius X had a huge effect on Catholics and their experience of the Church. Over the centuries there had been a seesaw of arguments as to how frequently or infrequently the laity should receive the eucharistic elements at Mass. Pius X had no doubts that the more frequent reception, the better, and issued a barrage of instructions to that end. One of these had a powerful effect: in 1907 the Pope decreed that the minimum age for first communion should be lowered from twelve or fourteen to seven. Around that ‘first communion’ there rapidly grew a new Catholic folk culture, a public celebration of family life in the parish church, centred on an array of proud infants dressed in innocent splendour. One might say that the modern vision of Catholic family bliss which the Church still so assiduously promotes dates from that order of 1907.32 The fact that financial appeals across the oceans succeeded in keeping the papacy afloat after its nineteenth-century losses of territorial revenue was an indication of the Church’s overall optimism and growth. For the Catholic Church was now undergoing one of the greatest expansions in its history, especially in Africa. Whereas the nineteenth century had been the great age of Protestant mission, Catholic missions were now outstripping at least European-run Protestant initiatives. In 1910 there were more or less equal numbers of European or American Catholics and Protestants in African missions, but recruitment of Protestant missionaries from Britain was beginning to fall away – just at the time that the Irish Catholic Church, previously remarkably inward- looking, was beginning to produce great numbers of clergy and nuns prepared for mission abroad, to add to a growing stream of Catholics from mainland Europe.33 Benedict XV (Pope 1914–22) and his successor, Pius XI (Pope 1922– 39), were both keenly interested in world mission. Benedict, conscious of the political impotence revealed in his peace initiatives during the war, was further

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  It was in the skies, he thought, that the fight against the Soviets would be decided; technology would determine how high and how fast. He began training in a Lockheed F-104 Starfighter, flying at 1,600 miles per hour, more than twice the speed of sound. Much of what he did at Edwards was experimental and untested, making it dangerous in ways one couldn’t train for, and in ways that he never discussed with Susan. Borman graduated first in his class academically and second in flying and won the award for best overall student at Edwards. (He would have been first in flying but for a momentary failure to raise a landing gear, a slipup that would bother him for years.) He then signed on to establish a new program at Edwards, the Aerospace Research Pilot Graduate course, designed to prepare future astronauts to fly. He and four other top pilot-engineers would create a curriculum, making sure it best positioned a man for selection by NASA. It did not escape his notice that as an instructor, NASA might consider him to be among the best candidates of them all. In March 1961, Borman came to a crossroads. NASA was looking to bring on a second group of astronauts and asked top Navy and Air Force pilots to apply. If he had any interest in going into space, now was the time to strike. Borman didn’t thrill to the idea of riding on rockets or exploring the cosmos or even stepping on the Moon. The instant celebrity conferred on astronauts seemed a distraction to him. And yet only NASA could deliver him onto a new battlefield, where technology and futuristic flying machines could help determine whether democracy or Communism prevailed. With the Cold War growing hotter every day, he could think of no more important place to do his part than on the frontier of space. He talked to Susan. He told her he had a chance to help America, and to make history, but it would require undertaking a new life and unknown risks. Susan answered as she always had: They were a team and she would support him. A short time later, he submitted his application to NASA, joining more than two hundred other highly qualified hopefuls. He endured exams—physical and psychological—and several rounds of cuts as NASA trimmed its list of finalists to about eighty, then to thirty-two. Finally, in the fall of 1962—eighteen months after he first put his name in the hat—Borman became one of the agency’s nine new astronauts, selected from America’s best to go where mankind had only dreamed of going. —NASA introduced its second group of astronauts to the public at the University of Houston on September 17, 1962. Soon to be dubbed the New Nine by the press, they included James Lovell and Neil Armstrong. All nine had been test pilots and had studied aeronautical engineering. All were married and had children.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  the word “Defense” to its title and be renamed DARPA.) In September 1958, Eisenhower signed into law the National Defense Education Act, which provided billions of dollars for the education of young Americans in science and related subjects. And in October, he opened a space agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, known as NASA, which took on the eight thousand workers and $100 million budget of its predecessor agency, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). Many of its employees were young scientists, engineers, and visionaries. In December 1958, just about a year after Sputnik had launched, NASA announced Project Mercury, a program designed to put a human being into orbit around Earth and return him and the spacecraft safely. Seven brave men were chosen for the task from a pool of military test pilots. They would be known as astronauts—“star sailors”—and would explore the oceans of space. — America elected John Fitzgerald Kennedy president in November 1960. He’d accused Republicans of being weak on defense and Communism, and Eisenhower of allowing the United States to fall behind in production of intercontinental ballistic missiles—a so-called missile gap. According to the nation’s new president, America could not afford to be second to the Russians in anything. On April 12, 1961, less than three months after Kennedy’s inauguration, tracking stations controlled by American intelligence picked up the flight of a Soviet spaceship and detected something startling inside. Minutes later, the Soviet government announced that they’d put the first man into space—whom they called a cosmonaut, or “universe sailor.” And he’d already made a complete orbit around Earth. For the first time, a man had broken the bonds of his home planet. Yet as the twenty-seven-year-old cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin whirled around the globe, few knew the extent to which the Soviets had rushed the mission, the myriad risks they’d taken, or the critical tests they’d skipped. Near the 108-minute flight’s end, after reentering the atmosphere, Gagarin’s spaceship began spinning uncontrollably and plummeted

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

  complete outside with its proudly displayed bust of the great nineteenth-century liberal hero and liberator José Martí. President Castro was as much heir to the nineteenth century’s anticlerical liberalism as he was to Marx.14 Yet in 1864 ‘liberalism’ had a different and less negative sound for Catholics elsewhere. Even in France, tormented by the rift between those venerating and those execrating the Revolution, several influential bishops were privately appalled at the Syllabus’s potential effects. One of their number not ashamed of joining the word ‘liberal’ to ‘Catholic’, Félix Dupanloup, Bishop of Orléans, wrote a best-selling pamphlet defending the Syllabus by the backhanded method of explaining away its intemperate propositions.15 Likewise in the British Empire, Catholicism owed its opportunities for expansion to liberal principles. The precedent came in the historic decision of the British Crown in 1774 to secure its newly won Canadian dominions by allying with the Catholic elite of New France. This effectively prevented French Canadian Catholics from abetting France’s aid to the Protestant revolutionaries of the United States. Their decision was vindicated by the anticlerical horrors perpetrated by French revolutionaries a decade later – indeed, the Catholic Church in Quebec became well aware that it enjoyed much less interference under the British than from the previous royal French government.16 Then Britain and Ireland witnessed a gradual dismantling of public disabilities for Catholics (not yet completed in the early twenty-first century, with a repeal of the legislation of 1701 forbidding Catholics to succeed to the British throne still pending). Without such new freedoms, the authorities in Rome could not have launched a comprehensive reform of the startlingly pre-Tridentine and lay-dominated Catholic Church in Ireland, to bring it into line with the well-regulated devotional revolution in the rest of Catholic Europe.17 Not only Catholics subject to the British Crown benefited from the rearrangement of the modern world. In the Protestant republic which was the United States of America, Enlightenment was the benevolent force in separating Church and State, allowing the Catholic hierarchy complete institutional freedom and the chance to exercise pastoral care for a growing flood of Catholic immigrants, protected by the Constitution in the face of widespread Protestant popular hostility (which was nevertheless often paradoxically couched in the language of liberalism and resistance to Catholic priestcraft). In Lutheran northern Europe, the new constitutional arrangements for state boundaries which so favoured Protestant monarchies were mitigated by a liberal idea of Parität – fair play between Catholics and Protestants – which was especially important in the former Holy Roman Empire in protecting Catholic subjects against their newly acquired Protestant princes.18 In the southern Netherlands, a revolution of

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  State Department, where they held a press conference. Before opening the floor to questions, a NASA spokesman announced that Borman had been named deputy director of Flight Crew Operations, an administrative position that would ultimately involve advising the White House on NASA affairs. One reporter asked: “Was there any moment during the mission in which you were a little bit scared or frightened?” “I was scared or frightened during a lot of the phases of the mission,” Anders said. “But I think that fear is a normal human reaction and one that is not detrimental to the flight as long as you keep it under control.” Another reporter asked, directly, when America would land on the Moon. “This summer,” Borman said. “Can you be more precise?” the reporter asked. “Apollo 11,” Borman said. What Borman didn’t say was that he, Lovell, and Anders might have been the crew for Apollo 11—if only Borman had wanted it. Deke Slayton, who assigned crews, thought that the Apollo 8 astronauts were best positioned to train for the first Moon landing, since they’d already made a lunar orbit flight. But given Borman’s decision that Apollo 8 would be his last trip in space, Slayton didn’t need to further consider Borman and his crew. In the end, Slayton decided to stay with the planned rotation, with Neil Armstrong as commander of Apollo 11. The day after the press conference, the astronauts were honored with a ticker tape parade in New York City, an appearance at the United Nations, and a party at the Waldorf Astoria with Mayor Lindsay and Governor Rockefeller. Celebrations and parades followed that week in Newark, Miami (at the Super Bowl), Houston, and Chicago, where more than a million people turned out. During the festivities, the astronauts never forgot that there was a war going on in Vietnam in which their friends and colleagues continued to risk their lives and die for the United States. To Borman, Lovell, and Anders, countless men were doing more for their country in Vietnam, and elsewhere, than the astronauts had done by flying Apollo 8, men that no one would ever know about, brothers the crew of Apollo 8 tried to remember every day.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  Cheers also erupted in the astronauts’ homes. Marilyn Lovell felt proud of her husband—his voice had been the first one broadcast from the Moon. To Valerie Anders, Lovell’s simple statement—“Burn complete”—sounded like an ebullient “We’re still here!” Susan Borman was happy that her sons were happy, but she felt no sense of relief. She’d seen this movie a thousand times in her head, and it always ended the same way. — Sixteen minutes after appearing on the lunar near side, Apollo 8 passed over the Sea of Fertility, an expanse roughly the size of France, visible with the naked eye to observers on Earth as one of the prominent dark patches on the Moon’s eastern limb. “What does the ol’ Moon look like from sixty miles?” Carr asked the astronauts. Lovell took the question. For the first time, man was about to hear man describe the Moon, not as a distant observer, but as an eyewitness. “Okay, Houston,” Lovell said. “The Moon is essentially gray, no color; looks like plaster of Paris, sort of a grayish beach sand. We can see quite a bit of detail. The Sea of Fertility doesn’t stand out as well here as it does back on Earth. There’s not as much contrast between that and the surrounding craters.” He paused for a moment, taking in more of the expanse beneath him. “The craters are all rounded off. There’s quite a few of them, some of them are newer. Many of them look like, especially the round ones, look like [they were] hit by meteorites or projectiles of some sort. Langrenus is quite a huge crater; it’s got a central cone to it. The walls of the crater are terraced, about six or seven different terraces on the way down.” A few minutes later, the spacecraft passed over one of the sites NASA had identified as a potential landing area for future missions. “It’s very easy to spot,” Lovell said. “You can see the entire rims of the craters from here with, of course, the white crescent on the far side where the Sun is shining on it.” A few seconds later, Borman jumped in. He still couldn’t believe the accuracy with which planners had calculated the flight.

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

  did not. He staged a coup d’état in 1799, and successive plebiscites, only partially rigged, gave overwhelming majorities to his assumption first of the Republican title of First Consul and then of Emperor of the French. Right up to the final collapse of his extraordinary conquests in 1813–14, Napoleon continued to enjoy widespread support throughout France. An astute politician as well as a brilliant general, Napoleon attached great importance to religion – not because he cared about it personally, but because he saw that other people cared about it a great deal. The Republic had made a gross error in attacking the Church. Now, if he was to unite France, he would have to come to an understanding with this institution which so controlled human emotions. He would benefit not only in France but throughout the large areas of Catholic Europe that came to be under French rule. If Napoleon was to clinch an agreement to cover all these territories, he would have to approach the Pope. Accordingly, in 1801, he and Pope Pius VII reached an agreement or Concordat, the model for many similar deals between the papacy and a variety of governments throughout the world during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Napoleon said that its negotiation was the most difficult task of his life.79 This Concordat was important not simply for its extensive reorganization of the French Church in partnership with the State, but for its effect on the pope’s position. The marginalization of the pope begun by ‘Enlightened Despots’ had seemed to be complete when revolutionary French armies arrested Pius VI and watched him die in French exile in 1799. Now the new pope was negotiating terms for the whole French Church, once so proud of its independence. The new structure of appointments and hierarchy among the clergy gave the pope much more power, a move which many lower clergy welcomed since it was likely to curb the powers of their immediate superiors the bishops. The Pope’s new position was most effectively symbolized when in 1804 he agreed to be present at the coronation ceremony for Napoleon as Emperor in Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris: a curious reconciliation of the traditional Church with the new people’s State, as Napoleon placed on his own head the crown which the people’s armies had won for him. Nor was the Pope’s usefulness over then: Napoleon prevailed on his new ally to discover a new saint of the Church, an ancient Roman martyr called with providential coincidence Napoleon, whose feast day on the Emperor’s birthday, 15 August, usefully fell on that popular holy day of the Church, the Feast of the Assumption of Our Lady (see Plate 39). Even after the Emperor’s fall, the Feast of St Napoleon remained a rallying point for Bonapartists throughout the nineteenth century, a sore annoyance to those French Catholics who detested the Emperor’s memory and wanted to concentrate on celebrating God’s Mother.80

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  toward Earth. He managed to eject and parachute down, unharmed but almost two hundred miles off course. He landed in a field near the tiny village of Smelovka, east of the Volga River in southern Russia, where he was discovered by a woman and a little girl. The girl ran away, startled by the sight of this alien being who had dropped from the sky, but Gagarin waved his arms and called out, “I’m one of yours, a Soviet, don’t be afraid.” He struggled to walk in his space suit but managed to reach the girl and reveal an incredible truth—he had just come from outer space. In 1945, the Soviet Union had lain in ruins. Now, sixteen years later, it had put the first man into orbit around Earth. Gagarin was given a parade in Red Square, an event as big as or bigger than the one held to celebrate the end of World War II. People cried in the streets and hung pictures of the cosmonaut in their homes. — Gagarin’s flight dealt an even bigger blow to the United States than did Sputnik. “We are behind,” Kennedy admitted at a press conference. Soviet propaganda rained down from Moscow extolling the virtues of Communism and the superiority of Soviet science and technology, and it was hard to argue with any of it—the Soviets continued to do everything first, and biggest, in space. And that meant that no matter what Khrushchev claimed about wanting peace, the Soviets were building their advantage in war. Kennedy needed to strike back. He asked his vice president, Lyndon Johnson, to find a long-term challenge that NASA might undertake, one that would allow sufficient time for the space agency to catch up to the Soviets, but one that was so difficult, and so spectacular, it could put America ahead in space for good. Kennedy needed something epic, and he needed to announce it soon. Just days after Gagarin returned from his trip, a group of about fifteen hundred Cuban exiles trained and armed by the Central Intelligence Agency launched a failed invasion of Soviet-backed socialist Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. Kennedy, who’d approved the mission and then withdrawn his support, was devastated by the failure, knowing the damage it would cause to his reputation and that of the United States. “All my life I’ve known better than to depend on the experts,” he told Theodore Sorensen,

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  “Forget the TV cameras,” Borman said. “It’s a distraction.” “No way,” Kraft said. “This is history, Frank. This belongs to the American people.” “We’re here to do a job,” Borman said. “That’s part of the job,” Kraft answered. Borman saw no yielding in Kraft’s eyes. The cameras would stay. Borman still objected that the work plan was too crowded, and Kraft didn’t deny it. There was a lot to do, maybe too much, but six days on a moonshot was an eyeblink, given the risks and expenditures required to get there, so they damn well had to get the most out of it. Anything less and none of them would be doing his job. That made sense to Borman. And with that, the plan was complete. The men checked their watches. It was five P.M. In just four hours, they’d designed a mission that would send the first human beings away from their home planet, have them orbit the Moon, then return home. In a year that was shaping up to be among the most fractious in the nation’s history, in which its citizens were rippling with anger and its institutions were no longer trusted, something sublime had occurred in this office. Shaking hands, Kraft and Borman had the same thought: This was a great afternoon. This was America at her best. The two men left the building together. As Borman walked past the other astronauts’ Corvettes and climbed into his 1955 Ford pickup, Kraft could only admire him. Even during this technical meeting, Borman had been true to form: direct, principled, and bullshit-free, unwilling to look past minor details or compromise around edges. To many, including Kraft, he seemed the ideal astronaut to command the riskiest flight NASA might ever undertake. To those who knew him best, it seemed Borman had arrived at a crossroads, not just in his career but in his life. Chapter Five

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  On paper, the move might have seemed crazy. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 signaled the coming end of the Cold War, defense contractors began to suffer, their wares no longer in name-your-price demand. General Dynamics seemed even worse off than its competitors; having amassed huge debt, it looked headed for bankruptcy. But Anders saw possibility in darkened clouds. On becoming CEO, he instituted many of the principles he’d seen Welch use at GE. Among other moves, he sold off any part of the business in which General Dynamics couldn’t be a market leader. He worked hard to change the corporate culture and become efficient, replacing most executives and many personnel, getting rid of waste endemic to the industry, and focusing on shareholder return. He even pitched in as a test pilot, flying the firm’s F-16 fighter jets—until he sold off that part of the business, too. The company’s fortunes turned around fast. Billions of dollars flowed in, enough so that Warren Buffett purchased 16 percent of the company’s stock—then gave Anders proxy to vote his shares. By the end of Anders’s three-year term as CEO, he was a darling of Wall Street and, by many accounts, had saved General Dynamics. “After orbiting the Moon,” one industry analyst said, “mundane business problems did not faze him.” Anders stayed on at General Dynamics for another year as chairman of the board, then retired from the company a wealthy man in May 1994. Soon after, he and Valerie fell in love with the natural beauty of Washington State, where they bought a house on the water and established the Anders Foundation, a philanthropic organization devoted to supporting education and the environment. All the while, Anders kept flying. He’d already purchased a De Havilland Beaver airplane restored by his friend and former commander, Frank Borman, but what he truly envied was Borman’s P-51 Mustang single-seat fighter-bomber, a workhorse from World War II and the Korean War. “If you ever find another, let me know,” he told Borman. Not long after, Anders found himself flying over Borman’s home in New Mexico. He flipped open his cellphone and called to say hello. “Hey, Anders,” Borman said, “I found a Mustang for you—get your ass down here!” The two men drove to inspect the plane.

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

  The Union was an amalgam of British colonies and two former republics dominated by ‘Afrikaner’ descendants of colonists from the Netherlands. Afrikaners were proud of more than two centuries of struggle to establish themselves in a wilderness, buoyed up by a militant Reformed Protestantism which told them that God had delivered them this land, and determined to resist any extension of power to non-whites, whether African or Asian. Indeed, as the twentieth century wore on, the Afrikaners turned their military defeat by the British in the second Boer War (1899–1902) into a gradual rebuilding of Afrikaner ascendancy, removing what political rights had existed for non-whites in some parts of the new Union. Most British settlers, and successive British governments anxious to avoid confrontation, connived at the process, which culminated in the victory of an Afrikaner Nationalist party in the 1948 all-white general election. In the intervening years, Africans had quit white-initiated Churches on a massive scale to lead their own Christian lives; the segregation of races widened inexorably. After the Nationalist victory, successive governments, with cabinets stuffed with Dutch Reformed pastors and elders, turned this de facto situation into a system with its own crazy and cruel logic, known by the Afrikaans word apartheid, separateness. This was often glossed by the South African government as ‘separate development’. The separation of blacks, whites, Asians and ‘Coloureds’ was small-mindedly real; the development entirely one- sided.29 At the heart of apartheid was a great act of theft from the Churches: the entire mass-education system which they had built up from primary level to higher education, a beacon for Africa that had benefited students from as far away as Uganda. From 1953 all this was delivered into the hands of the government and became an instrument to hold black Africans back rather than advance them. The Roman Catholic Church resisted the confiscation the longest, but it too was eventually defeated by the effort of financing its independent schools.30 Around the world, as the cruelty and arbitrariness of apartheid became apparent, a chorus of protest went up. From Western governments it was muted, because South Africa had a strategic importance in the ‘Cold War’ against Communism which had been in operation from the late 1940s (a card played to the full by the Nationalist government, which talked much of Communism as the enemy of Christian civilization). The Soviet government did indeed use the struggle against apartheid to further its own interests, but on the Western side the bulk of opposition had to come from the Churches. They alone among the coalition of activists could effectively draw on their international fellowship to keep open overseas links for South Africans and help the beleaguered liberationist political party which Christians dominated, the African National Congress.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  their rearview mirrors, the astronauts could see throngs of people waving goodbye until they’d pulled out onto the Houston roads and there was only black night behind them. None of the men said much about his trip as he drove home. They just said how happy they were to be back, that all had gone as perfectly as could be imagined, and that they felt lucky. None of them was inclined to philosophize about the trip—not yet, anyway. Over the years, these men had become expert at coming home from missions, forgetting about the risks they’d just undertaken, getting on with their day. No other kind of men could have climbed into such unproven flying machines. These were the kind of men NASA had always wanted. When Borman, Lovell, and Anders opened their front doors, they found Christmas trees still glowing and presents waiting for them, and they knew that this was just how their homes had looked on Christmas Eve when they had been 240,000 miles away at the Moon, and they knew that this was how their homes would have looked no matter how long it might have taken them to return. The next morning, as the Bormans sat down for breakfast at the kitchen table, Frank asked the boys about football and hunting, and demanded to know why dog food had been left in the bowl while he was gone. As for Edwin’s broken thumb—by the look on their dad’s face, they knew there had better be a good explanation for that. When the family opened presents, Susan found a new dress Frank had bought for her before he’d left for the Moon. He’d always loved shopping with her, and knew her style and size. In the days that followed, it seemed the world talked only about Apollo 8. A New York Times editorial called it “the most fantastic voyage of all times.” The Washington Evening Star announced that “Man’s horizon now reaches to infinity.” The Los Angeles Times said the mission “boggles the mind.” And Time magazine rushed to change its iconic Man of the Year cover from THE DISSENTER to ASTRONAUTS ANDERS, BORMAN, AND LOVELL. Even the Soviet Union could not hide its admiration. Apollo 8, the nation said, “goes beyond the limits of a national achievement and marks a stage in the development of the universal culture of Earthmen.” In a congratulatory note, several Soviet cosmonauts lauded their counterparts

• From Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

  Decision Under Risk,” a theory of choice that is by some counts more influential than our work on judgment, and is one of the foundations of behavioral economics. Until geographical separation made it too difficult to go on, Amos and I enjoyed the extraordinary good fortune of a shared mind that was superior to our individual minds and of a relationship that made our work fun as well as productive. Our collaboration on judgment and decision making was the reason for the Nobel Prize that I received in 2002, which Amos would have shared had he not died, aged fifty-nine, in 1996. Where We Are Now This book is not intended as an exposition of the early research that Amos and I conducted together, a task that has been ably carried out by many authors over the years. My main aim here is to present a view of how the mind works that draws on recent developments in cognitive and social psychology. One of the more important developments is that we now understand the marvels as well as the flaws of intuitive thought. Amos and I did not address accurate intuitions beyond the casual statement that judgment heuristics “are quite useful, but sometimes lead to severe and systematic errors.” We focused on biases, both because we found them interesting in their own right and because they provided evidence for the heuristics of judgment. We did not ask ourselves whether all intuitive judgments under uncertainty are produced by the heuristics we studied; it is now clear that they are not. In particular, the accurate intuitions of experts are better explained by the effects of prolonged practice than by heuristics. We can now draw a richer and more balanced picture, in which skill and heuristics are alternative sources of intuitive judgments and choices. The psychologist Gary Klein tells the story of a team of firefighters that entered a house in which the kitchen was on fire. Soon after they started hosing down the kitchen, the commander heard himself shout, “Let’s get out of here!” without realizing why. The floor collapsed almost immediately after the firefighters escaped. Only after the fact did the commander realize that the fire had been unusually quiet and that his ears had been unusually hot. Together, these impressions prompted what he called a “sixth sense of danger.” He had no idea what was wrong, but he knew something was wrong. It turned out that the heart of the fire had not been in the kitchen but in the basement beneath where the men had stood. We have all heard such stories of expert intuition: the chess master who

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  All this must be carefully orchestrated. Punctuate your calmness with surprises; rise to a climax; keep things short and terse. The only thing that cannot be faked is self-confidence, the key component to charisma since the days of Moses. Should the camera lights betray your insecurity, all the tricks in the world will not put your charisma back together again. Symbol: The Lamp. Invisible to the eye, a current flowing through a wire in a glass vessel generates a heat that turns into candescence. All we see is the glow. In the prevailing darkness, the Lamp lights the way. Dangers On a pleasant May day in 1794, the citizens of Paris gathered in a park for the Festival of the Supreme Being. The focus of their attention was Maximilien de Robespierre, head of the Committee of Public Safety, and the man who had thought up the festival in the first place. The idea was simple: to combat atheism, "to recognize the existence of a Supreme Being and the Immortality of the Soul as the guiding forces of the universe." It was Robespierre's day of triumph. Standing before the masses in his sky-blue suit and white stockings, he initiated the festivities. The crowd adored him; after all, he had safeguarded the purposes of the French Revolution through the intense politicking that had followed it. The year before, he had initiated the Reign of Terror, which cleansed the revolution of its enemies by sending them to the guillotine. He had also helped guide the country through a war against the Austrians and the Prussians. What made crowds, and particularly women, love him was his incorruptible virtue (he lived very modestly), his refusal to compromise, the passion for the revolution that was evident in everything he did, and the romantic language of his speeches, which could not fail to inspire. He was a god. The day was beautiful and augured a great future for the revolution. Two months later, on July 26, Robespierre delivered a speech that he The Charismatic • 117 thought would ensure his place in history, for he intended to hint at the end of the Terror and a new era for France. Rumor also had it that he was to call for a last handful of people to be sent to the guillotine, a final group that threatened the safety of the revolution. Mounting the rostrum to address the country's governing convention, Robespierre wore the same clothes he had worn on the day of the festival. The speech was long, almost three hours, and included an impassioned description of the values and virtues he had helped protect. There was also talk of conspiracies, treach-ery, unnamed enemies.

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

  Alongside such inspiring examples is an official Church whose relish in its renewed place of honour in Russian life is not altogether to its advantage. By 1997 a law ‘On freedom of conscience and religious association’ contradicted the assertion of a secular state in the 1993 constitution of the Russian Federation; it now recognized ‘the special contribution of Orthodoxy to the history of Russia and to the establishment and development of Russia’s spirituality and culture’. It would have been difficult for churchmen not to appreciate the sudden outpouring of money on new and restored churches throughout Russia, symbolized by the vast sums spent with the backing of the flamboyant mayor of Moscow, Iurii Luzhkov, on rebuilding Moscow’s demolished landmark Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, the film of whose dynamiting by Stalin remains one of the iconic images of Soviet attacks on religion. It is noticeable that another Orthodox Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, explicitly reminiscent in its design of the Moscow Cathedral, has newly risen in the Russian Baltic detached territory of Kaliningrad, the city so thoroughly transformed from the Teutonic Knights’ former East Prussian stronghold of Königsberg after 1945. Kaliningrad’s Orthodox Cathedral is designed to be a dominant structure in the city centre, outdoing the ancient Lutheran cathedral recently restored from wartime ruins: it is a significant statement of political architecture.81 One could adduce national parallels in another Orthodox-dominated state: in the multi-ethnic Transylvanian villages of Romania, every community in the first decade of the twenty-first century seemed to have a Romanian Orthodox church shrouded in scaffolding, as an enlargement or a lavish new build, alongside the older parish churches of the other ethnic communities. In theology and social statements, the Moscow Patriarchate has likewise followed a conservative line. It did eventually rein in one of the most confrontational of its bishops, Nikon of Ekaterinburg, who on two occasions in 1994 and 1998 organized the burning of books by Orthodox writers of whose questioning spirit he did not approve. A range of charges from the diocese, some more lurid than these, earned Nikon deprivation and relocation to the Monastery of the Caves in Pskov.82 Among the authors thus singled out as enemies of Nikon’s version of Orthodoxy had been the last priest to die mysteriously in the era of Soviet rule, as late as 1990, Aleksandr Men. This theologian, of Jewish descent and ecumenical spirit, had paralleled some of the explorations of Orthodoxy made by Orthodox theologians in exile after 1917. One of the mistakes made by the Bolsheviks in the early years of the Revolution had been to allow some of the most interesting and creative theologians of the late tsarist Church to leave Russia unchal-lenged.83 Out of this community of exiles had come theologians who sought to make sense of their experience of the West

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

  while remaining faithful to a dynamic version of Orthodox tradition. Two of the most prominent names, Alexander Schmemann and John Meyendorff, who both taught in North America, were among the authors whose books were thrown on the bonfires in Ekaterinburg. A similar spirit of conservative and anti-Western nationalism has continued in the Serbian Orthodox Church. When the state which became the kingdom of Yugoslavia was established out of the torso of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918, its monarchy was that of prewar Serbia, and the Serbs were the largest ethnic group. The Orthodox Church remained central to Serb identity, while playing host to some of the more conservative elements of the Russian Orthodox Church in exile – principally those exiles who found it more congenial to come here than to be tainted by the heretical and secularist West.84 An amalgam developed in the interwar years combining national pride, the reality of a history of Serb struggle for survival and a powerful myth adapting the Christian theme of suffering to describe that struggle. It has been christened ‘Saint-Savaism’ (Svetosavlje) after the iconic princely religious leader of the thirteenth century (see p. 479), and it was a cult much encouraged by members of the Orthodox Theology Faculty of the University of Belgrade, reinforced by exiled Russian academics.85 Given the powerful fund of goodwill towards Serbia built up in the West through the alliance in the First World War, this ideology need not necessarily have become anti-Western, but a significant influence moving it in that direction was that of the Serb theologian and hagiographer Justin Popović, whose interwar studies in Oxford’s Theology Faculty had not ended happily, when his doctorate on Dostoevskii was failed after the examiners’ criticisms of its resolute hostility to Western Christianity.86 A man of great personal charm whose intellectual consistency led him to suffer disfavour and official isolation for decades in Communist Yugoslavia, Popović was a major force in the spiritual formation of various monks in the next generation. They then became leaders of the Serbian Church at a crucial time in the 1990s when the Yugoslav Federation began to disintegrate. At this moment, it was easy for unscrupulous demagogic politicians quitting Communism and seeking a new framework for power to draw on the more poisonous elements in the Serb past: the bitter memories of recent Serbian sufferings at the hands of Pavelić’s Croatian (and Catholic) quasi-Fascists, an extremely selective reading of past Serb relations with the Ottoman Empire, and the influence of a bloodthirsty and best-selling epic poem by a nineteenth- century Orthodox Prince-Archbishop of Montenegro, The Mountain Wreath, which glories in a supposed seventeenth-century massacre of the Muslims of Montenegro.87 Symbolic of the alliance between the emerging post-Communist

• From Scandalous Liaisons (2007)

  As the door to the parlor closed, the two intertwined figures on the settee separated, and one sat up. “Fascinating,” Amanda murmured, as she straightened her bodice. Magnus, Duke of Glasser, brushed aside her dark hair to nuzzle her neck. “Not as fascinating as what I have right here,” he murmured wickedly. “Glass, for heaven’s sake. Don’t you realize we’ve just met our future daughter-in-law?” She brushed his roving hands away. The duke heaved a long-suffering sigh and sat up beside her. “We didn’t meet anyone. We eavesdropped. And it sounded like the chit has her claws in Fontaine. Why would she want Charles?” “Charles?” She rolled her eyes. “For heaven’s sake, Glass, pay attention. I’m talking about Lucien.” “Lucien?” he queried, obviously confused. “She’s an earl’s daughter. And from the sound of it, she’s well on her way to being a marchioness. What would she want with Lucien?” “What woman wouldn’t want Lucien? He’s the spitting image of you, handsome devil that you are.” She smiled seductively. “And didn’t you hear Lady Julienne defend him? There’s something afoot there. She likes him.” “Lots of women like Lucien,” Magnus pointed out with a good dollop of fatherly pride. “Doesn’t mean he wants to marry them. Who knows if he’s even met the gel before?” Amanda attempted to restore some order to her hair. “Trust me, darling. A woman knows these things. Lady Julienne took a personal offense to Montrose’s comments. I can assure you, they’ve met. You’ll see I’m right.” She squealed as she was tackled back onto the settee. “I’ve got something to show you,” the duke growled. “Right here.” “You look awful.” Lucien scowled as he paced the empty hazard room of Remington’s. “To hell with you, too, Marchant.” His man-of-affairs laughed. “It’s unusually early for you to be here.” “You’re here,” Lucien retorted. “I’m always here at this time.” Marchant sighed at Lucien’s skeptical glance. “You truly have no idea what you pay me for, do you?” Lucien paused in his pacing and glared. “I’m certain I don’t pay you to harass and insult me, so be on your way.” “I have something to discuss with you, Lucien.” “Not now. I’m not in the mood.” “It is precisely your present mood that necessitates my speaking with you.” “Bloody hell and damnation!” Lucien leaned against a hazard table and crossed his arms, his head throbbing viciously. “Out with it then. And make haste.” “I gave you some bad advice the other day.” Lucien arched a brow. “Not something you want to tell me, Harold. One of the things I pay you for is your advice. If it’s not worth hearing, I may sack you.” “The employee in me is quaking in his boots,” Marchant said wryly. “But as your friend, I must continue regardless.” Lucien closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. God help him. “I don’t think you should allow Lady Julienne to marry any of the men on that list I compiled.”

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  All this must be carefully orchestrated. Punctuate your calmness with surprises; rise to a climax; keep things short and terse. The only thing that cannot be faked is self-confidence, the key component to charisma since the days of Moses. Should the camera lights betray your insecurity, all the tricks in the world will not put your charisma back together again. Symbol: The Lamp. Invisible to the eye, a current flowing through a wire in a glass vessel generates a heat that turns into candescence. All we see is the glow. In the prevailing darkness, the Lamp lights the way. Dangers On a pleasant May day in 1794, the citizens of Paris gathered in a park for the Festival of the Supreme Being. The focus of their attention was Maximilien de Robespierre, head of the Committee of Public Safety, and the man who had thought up the festival in the first place. The idea was simple: to combat atheism, "to recognize the existence of a Supreme Being and the Immortality of the Soul as the guiding forces of the universe." It was Robespierre's day of triumph. Standing before the masses in his sky-blue suit and white stockings, he initiated the festivities. The crowd adored him; after all, he had safeguarded the purposes of the French Revolution through the intense politicking that had followed it. The year before, he had initiated the Reign of Terror, which cleansed the revolution of its enemies by sending them to the guillotine. He had also helped guide the country through a war against the Austrians and the Prussians. What made crowds, and particularly women, love him was his incorruptible virtue (he lived very modestly), his refusal to compromise, the passion for the revolution that was evident in everything he did, and the romantic language of his speeches, which could not fail to inspire. He was a god. The day was beautiful and augured a great future for the revolution. Two months later, on July 26, Robespierre delivered a speech that he The Charismatic • 117 thought would ensure his place in history, for he intended to hint at the end of the Terror and a new era for France. Rumor also had it that he was to call for a last handful of people to be sent to the guillotine, a final group that threatened the safety of the revolution. Mounting the rostrum to address the country's governing convention, Robespierre wore the same clothes he had worn on the day of the festival. The speech was long, almost three hours, and included an impassioned description of the values and virtues he had helped protect. There was also talk of conspiracies, treach-ery, unnamed enemies.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  her as a gallant prince, falling to one knee, taking her hand, and kissing it, application of a little warmth, so that it will take saying, "I plight my troth to the kindest of mistresses." Disraeli pledged that any shape you please. In his work now was to realize Victoria's dreams. He praised her qualities so the same way, by being fulsomely that she blushed; yet strangely enough, she did not find him polite and friendly, you can make people pliable and comical or offensive, but came out of the encounter smiling. Perhaps she obliging, even though they should give this strange man a chance, she thought, and she waited to see are apt to be crabbed and what he would do next. malevolent. Hence Victoria soon began receiving reports from Disraeli—on parliamentary politeness is to human nature what warmth is to debates, policy issues, and so forth—that were unlike anything other minis-wax. ters had written. Addressing her as the "Faery Queen," and giving the — A R T H U R SCHOPENHAUER, monarchy's various enemies all kinds of villainous code names, he filled his COUNSELS AND MAXIMS, notes with gossip. In a note about a new cabinet member, Disraeli wrote, TRANSLATED BY T. BAILEY SAUNDERS "He is more than six feet four inches in stature; like St. Peter's at Rome no one is at first aware of his dimensions. But he has the sagacity of the ele-phant as well as its form." The minister's blithe, informal spirit bordered on Never explain. Never disrespect, but the queen was enchanted. She read his reports voraciously, complain. and almost without her realizing it, her interest in politics was rekindled. — B E N J A M I N DISRAELI At the start of their relationship, Disraeli sent the queen all of his novels as a gift. She in return presented him with the one book she had written, Journal of Our Life in the Highlands. From then on he would toss out in his letters and conversations with her the phrase, "We authors." The queen would beam with pride. She would overhear him praising her to others— her ideas, common sense, and feminine instincts, he said, made her the equal of Elizabeth I. He rarely disagreed with her. At meetings with other ministers, he would suddenly turn and ask her for advice. In 1875, when Disraeli managed to finagle the purchase of the Suez Canal from the debt-ridden khedive of Egypt, he presented his accomplishment to the queen as if it were a realization of her own ideas about expanding the British Empire. She did not realize the cause, but her confidence was growing by leaps and bounds.