Shame

Passages

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

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• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  This statement raises difficult and disturbing questions about how Darwin’s evolutionary ideas were interpreted within British colonial thinking and practice concerning the role of ‘favoured races’ in Australia and New Zealand. Wallace concluded his lecture with some significant reflections on where accepting ‘natural selection’ as a biological and cultural metanarrative pointed, including his suggestion that ‘it must inevitably follow that the higher – the more intellectual and moral – must displace the lower and more degraded races.’9 Wallace’s lecture creates the impression that there is scientific justification for the historical inevitability of the triumph of intellectually and morally superior Europeans over ‘mentally undeveloped populations’ or ‘savages,’10 thus improving the human condition. Darwin himself entertained similar ideas. In a letter of 1862 to Charles Kingsley – to which the Darwin Correspondence Project wisely attaches a ‘Content Warning’ on account of the unsettling views it expressed – Darwin concurs with Kingsley’s remarks (which appear to have been widespread in educated British circles of this period) that in 500 years ‘the Anglo-saxon race will have spread & exterminated whole nations; & in consequence how much the Human race, viewed as a unit, will have risen in rank.’11 Most evolutionary biologists today would reject these historically specific interpretations and applications of Darwin’s evolutionary theory. It is, however, important to note the intellectual plausibility and cultural prominence of these interpretations in the 1860s and 1870s, and the perception that they created or encouraged – namely, that colonialism would lead to the improvement of the human race. Wallace’s specific (and demeaning) references to ‘the Tasmanian, Australian and New Zealander’ can hardly be overlooked. What can be learned from this? For Coyne, the integrity of the natural sciences is at stake; for others, there is a real problem arising from the abiding historical memory of the way in which science was deployed as a legitimating resource by British colonial administrators and educationalists to suppress indigenous beliefs and peoples in New Zealand (and elsewhere) in the late nineteenth century. Anyone concerned with the public understanding of science needs to confront the ways it has been exploited, abused and distorted in the service of political and social agendas. To indigenous populations, Darwinism turned out to be yet another aspect of the western colonial attempt to deny or eliminate ‘the knowledge and cultures of these populations, their memories and ancestral links and their manner of relating to others and to nature.’12 For these people, mātauranga Māori was identity-giving, essential to their future survival and flourishing, and part of their self-understanding as a distinct people group. It is not a ‘fixed’ form of detached knowledge, but is a form of embodied knowledge, understanding, wisdom and practices which is intergenerational, being expanded as it is passed on. Yet there are clear possibilities for dialogue with other approaches here – for example, in the emerging discipline of ‘ethnoastronomy’, which allows dialogue between the ancestral Polynesian astronomical knowledge systems and their western counterparts.13

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  You are not unique. You have failings, but so does everybody else. You also have talents and, like every other being on the planet, you deserve compassion, joy, and friendship. It is only in the context of a kinder attitude toward ourselves that we can consider the importance of transcending the ego. The religions often speak of putting the self to death; Buddhists believe that the self is an illusion and teach a doctrine of “no-self” ( anatta ). Modern neuroscientists would agree: they can find nothing in the intricate activity of the brain that they can pin down and call a “self” or a “soul.” But anatta is primarily a mythos calling Buddhists to action: we have to live as though the self did not exist, cutting through the self-obsession that causes so much pain. When the masters of the spiritual life ask us to transcend the ego, they want us to get beyond the grasping, frightened, angry self that often seeks to destroy others in order to ensure its own survival, prosperity, and success. This is indispensable to enlightenment. When the Dalai Lama called for a spiritual revolution on the eve of the third millennium, he explained that this did not mean embracing a particular religious creed. Rather, it would be based on a “radical reorientation away from our habitual preoccupation with self.” 9 This does not mean that we should recoil from ourselves with disgust, put ourselves down at every turn, and become hyperconscious of our faults. If we do this, there is a danger that we will simply become excessively self- conscious, mired in the insecure ego we are trying to transcend. The faith traditions agree that compassion is the most reliable way of putting the self in its proper place, because it requires us “all day and every day” to dethrone ourselves from the center of our world and put another there. As the Dalai Lama made plain, the reorientation away from self is essentially “a call to turn toward the wider community of beings with whom we are connected, and for conduct which recognizes others’ interests alongside our own.” 10 Compassion, he said, was impossible without self-restraint, because “we cannot be loving and compassionate unless at the same time we curb our own harmful impulses and desires.”

• From The Surprising Lives of Christian Saints (2023)

  13. Martín de Porres: Healer of Peru Martín was born into a diverse parish where nearly 40% of the children were illegitimate and biracial, like him. His mother was a servant in the household of Isabel Garcia Michel. We can assume that as a young child, he would have accompanied her about her tasks: cooking, cleaning, and perhaps watching the family’s children. Martín left no writings of his own, as he remained illiterate throughout his life. We know about him primarily through the testimony and hagiographies written by his many admirers in the decades after his death. These are problematic, of course, in the ways already discussed for other saints: They frame his life in terms of common saintly tropes. But they add an additional layer of complexity, viewing Martín through their prejudices about Afro-Peruvians’ social status, piety, and abilities. Lima was a remarkably integrated city, and young Martín would’ve been familiar with Spaniards, Creoles, Indians, and free and enslaved Afro-Peruvians. Despite this spatial integration, the ugly racism that accompanied European conquests and the exploitation of native and African labor pervaded Limeño society and Martín’s life. At one end of the social spectrum were the wealthy Spaniards, European elites who could freely access government positions, higher education, and a bevy of legal rights. At the other end were enslaved Africans and their descendants. Indians occupied a middle status—not enslaved, but not possessing full legal status and rights. Free biracial or mixed-race people, such as Martín and Juana, inhabited a fluid middle sphere—barred from many career paths and opportunities but extended comparatively more privileges and access by the Spaniards than their enslaved and free Black relatives. The racist concepts that permeated early modern colonial society also permeated religious language and ideas. The only positive Black models Martín may have heard promoted in public discourse were “exemplary” servants and slaves who were compliant, diligent, subservient, and pious. These undoubtedly shaped his sense of self and damaged his self-worth. Martín seems to have shown an early interest in a career as a healer, and his mother’s employer helped him get an apprenticeship with either an apothecary or barber. Even if his father had sponsored his education, however, Martín would have been barred from a career as a doctor. 97 13. Martín de Porres: Healer of Peru 98

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  Before that fall, I had never lived in our house alone, as its sole adult resident. Brandon and I had had big plans for the house, but we hadn’t had the money to see them through. He’d left without complaint. You know me, he said. I’ll have fun finding a new house someday. You know I like a project. I threw out his expired prescriptions and the ominous-looking earwax-removal kit he’d never used. I got tired of seeing the garden hose lolling next to the driveway like a diseased reptile, so I went to Fred Meyer and spent $29.99 on a plastic caddy on wheels. No one has so triumphantly coiled a hose. While I futzed, I listened to podcasts. In an episode of On Being, Krista Tippett mused with Franciscan friar Richard Rohr on the nature and necessity of suffering. It’s a simplistic metaphor, Father Rohr explains, but, “Picture three boxes: order, disorder, reorder. . . . If you read the great myths of the world and the great religions, that’s the normal path of transformation. What I always tell the folks is there’s no nonstop flight from order to reorder. . . . Yeah, that disorder is part of the deal.”35 This was around the time that the sewer backed up onto the old cherry-red carpet of the basement bathroom. The sewer pipes under the yard had eroded and split and would have to be replaced, at substantial cost. This work would not be covered by homeowners’ insurance. Because we still owned the house jointly, Brandon and I split the bill, both pillaging our savings. I cried a lot, made calls to a contractor acquaintance, and scoured Yelp reviews of sewer companies. Water mitigation, asbestos abatement, trenchless sewer replacement: I would learn to use these terms correctly in a sentence. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] I sat in bed one night and wrote a list of people who had been kind to me in the previous year. I wondered why they had. I wondered if I deserved it. I wondered what I did deserve, after what I had done. I had developed a feverish obsession with someone who was not my spouse; had ended my marriage of a decade, thereby stripping my child of a home with both her parents in it; and had meanwhile spent five months riding the chaotic sea of a relationship that sent me pitching with lust, self-loathing, and confusion, in that order, only to end it. I felt bruised and embarrassed, and unsure of how else I could have done it. At any given moment, I had acted the only way I knew to act. At any given moment, I knew only what I knew. The limits of my judgment, of my own good sense, humiliated me.

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

  The Discipline of the schools was severe. A good flogging was considered a wholesome means of educational advancement. It drove out the evil spirits of intellectual dulness and heaviness. Degere sub virga, to pass under the rod, was another expression for getting an education. At a later date, the ceremony of inducting a schoolmaster included the presentation of a rod and required him, at least in England, to show his prowess by flogging a boy publicly.1194 If the case of Guibert of Nogent was a typical one, then the process of getting an education was indeed a painful piece of physical experience. Guibert’s account of his experiences is the most elaborate description we have of mediaeval school life, and one of the most interesting pieces of schoolboys’ experience in literature.1195 The child, early sent to school by his widowed mother, was unmercifully beaten with fist and rod by his teacher, a man who had learned grammar in his advanced years. Though the teacher was an indifferent grammarian, Guibert testifies to the vigor of his moral purpose and the wholesome moral impression he made upon his pupils. The whipping came every day. But the child’s ardor for learning did not grow cold. On returning to his home one evening and loosening his shirt, his mother saw the welts and bruises on his shoulders, for he had been beaten black and blue that day;1196 she suggested, in indignation and pity, that her boy give up preparation for the priesthood, and offered to give him the equipment for the career of a knight. But Guibert, greatly excited, resented any such suggestion. At Cluny the pupils slept near the masters, and if they were obliged to get up at night, it was not till they had the permission of a master. If they committed any offence in singing the Psalms or other songs, in going to bed, or in any other way, they were punished in their shirts, by the prior or other master, with switches prepared beforehand.1197 But there were not wanting teachers who protested against this method. Anselm urged the way of affection and confidence and urged that a skilful artificer never fashioned his image out of gold plate by blows alone. With wise and gentle hand he pressed it into shape. Ceaseless beating only brutalizes. To an abbot who said "day and night we do not cease to chastise the children confided to our care and yet they grow worse and worse," Anselm replied: "Indeed! And when they are grown up, what will they become? Stupid dolts. A fine education that, which makes brutes of men!... If you were to plant a tree in your garden and were to enclose it on all sides, so that it could not extend its branches, what would you find when, at the end of several years, you set it free from its bounds? A tree whose branches were bent and scraggy, and would it not be your fault for having so unreasonably confined it?"1198

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  wo days later Anna Gordon sent for her daughter. Stephen found her sitting quite still in that vast drawing-room of hers, which as always smelt faintly of orris-root, beeswax and violets. Her thin, white hands were folded in her lap, closely folded over a couple of letters; and it seemed to Stephen that all of a sudden she saw in her mother a very old woman—a very old woman with terrible eyes, pitiless, hard and deeply accusing, so that she could but shrink from their gaze, since they were the eyes of her mother. Anna said: ‘Lock the door, then come and stand here.’ In absolute silence Stephen obeyed her. Thus it was that those two confronted each other, flesh of flesh, blood of blood, they confronted each other across the wide gulf set between them. Then Anna handed her daughter a letter: ‘Read this,’ she said briefly. And Stephen read: DEAR LADY ANNA, With deep repugnance I take up my pen, for certain things won’t bear thinking about, much less being written. But I feel that I owe you some explanation of my reasons for having come to the decision that I cannot permit your daughter to enter my house again, or my wife to visit Morton. I enclose a copy of your daughter’s letter to my wife, which I feel is sufficiently clear to make it unnecessary for me to write further, except to add that my wife is returning the two costly presents given her by Miss Gordon. I remain, Yours very truly, RALPH CROSSBY. Stephen stood as though turned to stone for a moment, not so much as a muscle twitched; then she handed the letter back to her mother without speaking, and in silence Anna received it. ‘Stephen—when you know what I’ve done, forgive me.’ The childish scrawl seemed suddenly on fire, it seemed to scorch Stephen’s fingers as she touched it in her pocket—so this was what Angela had done. In a blinding flash the girl saw it all; the miserable weakness, the fear of betrayal, the terror of Ralph and of what he would do should he learn of that guilty night with Roger. Oh, but Angela might have spared her this, this last wound to her loyal and faithful devotion; this last insult to all that was best and most sacred in her love—Angela had feared betrayal at the hands of the creature who loved her! But now her mother was speaking again: ‘And this—read this and tell me if you wrote it, or if that man’s lying.’ And Stephen must read her own misery jibing at her from those pages in Ralph Crossby’s stiff and clerical handwriting. She looked up: ‘Yes, Mother, I wrote it.’

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  THE THIRD STEP Compassion for Yourself The late rabbi Albert Friedlander once impressed upon me the importance of the biblical commandment “Love your neighbor as yourself.” 1 I had always concentrated on the first part of that injunction, but Albert taught me that if you cannot love yourself, you cannot love other people either. He had grown up in Nazi Germany, and as a child was bewildered and distressed by the vicious anti-Semitic propaganda that assailed him on all sides. One night, when he was about eight years old, he deliberately lay awake and made a list of all his good qualities. He told himself firmly that he was not what the Nazis said, that he had talents and special gifts of heart and mind, which he enumerated to himself one by one. Finally, he vowed that if he survived, he would use those qualities to build a better world. This was an extraordinary insight for a child in such circumstances. Albert was one of the kindest people I have ever met; he was almost pathologically gentle and must have brought help and counsel to thousands. But he always said that he could have done no good at all unless he had learned, at that terrible moment of history, to love himself. We have seen that compassion is essential to humanity. We have a biological need to be cared for and to care for others. Yet it is not easy to love ourselves. In our target-driven, capitalist Western societies, we are more inclined to castigate ourselves for our shortcomings and become inordinately cast down by any failure to achieve our objectives and potential. It is a terrible irony that while many in the world are suffering from malnourishment and starvation, in the West an alarming number of women—and, increasingly, men—are afflicted with eating disorders that spring from a complex amalgam of self-hatred, fear, feelings of failure, inadequacy, helplessness, and yearning for control. 2 But this self-dissatisfaction is not confined to the West. In countries that were colonized by Europeans during the late nineteenth century, for example, people often internalized the colonialists’ negative assessment of themselves. Muhammad Abdu (1849–1905), who would become Grand Mufti of Egypt, described the corrosive sense of inferiority that had crept into the lives of the colonized: It is an age which has formed a bond between ourselves and the civilized nations, making us aware of their excellent conditions ... and our mediocre situation: thus revealing their wealth and our poverty, their pride and our degradation, their strength and our weakness, their triumphs and our defects. 3 Colonialism did not end when the colonialists returned home. On both sides, old attitudes have often persisted; the inferiority engendered in some sectors of the former colonies has festered and may lie at the root of some of our current political problems. The Golden Rule requires self-knowledge; it asks that we use our own feelings as a guide to our behavior with others.

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  Brandon had been on some dates. He’d kissed someone. I knew he loved me and I loved him, and I wanted him to have a good time. But he was more conflicted, caught up in how odd it felt to be with someone else. We’d told a handful of friends about our open relationship, but we both fretted about being seen. The restaurant industry is small and close-knit: Where could we go in this town without running into someone? I wished I felt proud, maybe even indignant—this is normal, what’s the fuss, etc.—but mostly I felt sheepish. Taking a stab at transparency, we told the manager at Delancey what we were up to, in case she heard whispers. A couple of weeks later, having fielded a torrent of gossip, she advised us to tell the entire staff. In a surreal scene, we assembled our employees in the Delancey dining room and, after outlining a new policy on paid leave, I formally announced our open marriage. We’d tried to convince ourselves that our marriage was strong enough, loving enough, flexible enough to accommodate the stretch we asked of it. Something about me had changed, but people are always changing, aren’t they? Just look at Brandon: when we met, he was going to be a music professor, and now he was a chef with three restaurants. We’d changed. So what? What we were doing was natural, no more ill-considered than monogamy. But it almost never felt that way. Most days I wanted to puke. I watched Brandon try not to worry as I set off to see Nora. We were terrified. He could admit it before I could, because I was busy falling in love. I remember sitting next to him on the sofa in our living room, the sofa where I’d made out with Nora. He’d come home for lunch, and we had a date to talk. Outside the window the sky was clear and unflinching, the color of a blue raspberry popsicle. I think I’m falling in love with her, I said. The refrigerator motor gurgled. I didn’t mean to, I added. I know that doesn’t help, but it’s true. He was silent. A couch spring squeaked. I wanted to see what his face looked like, but I was afraid to turn my head. It doesn’t have to change anything, I said, not sure if I believed it. We’d always been ourselves, hadn’t we? We’d been like this for a long time. We were discrete bodies, separate stars, but from the right vantage point, we’d aligned. We were a shape that made sense. We’d made a home for ourselves next to each other. But we’d never stood still, not really. We were always gliding, gradually, steadily, on our own trajectories.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  After that, there had been some jostling and struggling. He would later recall that he might have reacted badly, responding with some additional moves of his own, possibly a kick or two here and there and maybe a few blows, before he was wrestled to the ground and beaten and kicked by headset-wearing security goons who were most definitely not in the spirit of the season as they frog- marched him to the door and shoved him onto the freight elevator. That he vomited on himself at some point was without dispute, as the evidence was now spread across his red and white coat and wide black belt. As career moves go, thought Rob, sagging inexorably to the floor as the freight elevator began its descent, this had not been a good night. "Dude! Wake up!" came the voice. Rob opened his eye, the one that did open (the other had swollen shut after contact with an elbow), and saw Paul and Michelle, looking down at him. "What the fuck happened to you, bro?" The two grabbed him under his arms and managed to haul him to his feet before half dragging him to the street. "Rob!" said Michelle. "For Chrissakes. Wipe your mouth! You're drooling!" It was snowing hard outside, the large flakes burning cold when they landed on his skin. They were big and fat and slow-moving and they were everywhere, swirling and drifting slowly around him, collecting in heaps as the plows made their first forays down the streets and the shop owners cleared their sidewalks. The black plastic boots had no traction at all. Rob's feet slipped out from under him again and again, finally forcing Paul and Michelle to sit him up as best they could in the service entrance of a clothing store. As he slipped into unconsciousness again, Rob heard the distorted tones of "Jingle Bells" playing from a damaged speaker and glimpsed an unhappy-looking Pakistani, also in a Santa suit, handing out flyers for the clothing store's Christmas sale at the corner. The two locked eyes in a brief second, a shared moment of misery. "So, genius," said Paul. "What now?" Michelle had never in her life been an optimist. Her faith in her fellow man had generally, up to this point, extended only to what she could see with her own eyes. Given inadequate scrutiny and half a chance she'd found, after years in professional kitchens, and more than enough unhappy relationships with men, that people will inevitably disappoint you.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  While atheism is the lack of belief in any god, anti-theism means actively seeking out the worst aspects of faith in God and portraying them as representative of all religion. Anti-theism seeks to shame and embarrass people away from religion, browbeating them about the stupidity of belief in a bellicose god. 2 There now seems to have been a shift in the cultural mood, however, partly in reaction against this unnecessary dehumanisation of religious believers. The feminist atheist blogger Ashley Miller distanced herself from her more dismissive colleagues who suggested that ‘people who are religious aren’t worthwhile and are certainly too stupid to be respected’. Atheism had become, in her view, tribal . 3 ‘We dehumanize people who disagree with us instead of arguing about ideas.’ Looking back on the meteoric rise of the New Atheism, the New Zealand blogger and cultural critic Giovanni Tiso wondered how ‘such a transparently flawed intellectual project’ managed to hold sway ‘for so long among so many?’ 4 For a while, this view seemed to represent the future, only to end up relegated to the long list of discarded pseudo-certainties that didn’t make the final cut. It is an idea whose time is gone. Yet perhaps a deeper, if less obvious, shift was taking place at the intellectual level – the growing realisation within reflective atheist circles that the great eighteenth-century Age of Reason must now be seen to have failed in its quest to provide meaningful universal truths. There was also some discomfort arising from how the rhetoric of ideas was being policed and manipulated before our very eyes and with no higher standard of proof. While many remain sceptical of Nietzsche’s view that there are ‘no facts but only interpretations’, there is a suspicion that many of the alleged ‘certainties’ of our age are simply influential opinions which have become benchmarks of cultural acceptability today, but may well be abandoned in the future. In her scathing assessment of the credulity of western culture in the closing years of the twentieth century, the novelist Doris Lessing denounced the ‘great over-simplifiers’ who imprison us in facile and shallow accounts of the world, ridiculing those who suggest things might be more complicated (and interesting) than they believe. For Lessing, recent developments within western culture represent a series of ‘boilings up of emotion, of wild partisan passion’, that everyone knows will one day be seen as ‘ridiculous and even shameful’ – but which nobody seemed able or willing to challenge at the time. 5 This book argues for a recalibration of the notion of ‘belief’, and a more nuanced understanding of the positive role this plays in the lives of individuals and communities. I shall explore why certain unevidenced beliefs are much more acceptable than others.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  ‘I recall that I once failed to show a proper respect for the Holy Sabbath, by making one of my servants sweep the house after nones on a Saturday.’ ‘Oh!’ said the friar. ‘This, my son, is a trifling matter.’ ‘No, father,’ said Ser Ciappelletto, ‘you must not call it trifling, for the Sabbath has to be greatly honoured, seeing that this was the day on which our Lord rose from the dead.’ Then the friar said: ‘Have you done anything else?’ ‘Yes, sir,’ replied Ser Ciappelletto, ‘for I once, without thinking what I was doing, spat in the house of God.’ The friar began to smile, and said: ‘My son, this is not a thing to worry about. We members of religious orders spit there continually.’ ‘That is very wicked of you,’ said Ser Ciappelletto, ‘for nothing should be kept more clean than the holy temple in which sacrifice is offered up to God.’ In brief, he told the friar many things of this sort, and finally he began to sigh, and then to wail loudly, as he was well able to do whenever he pleased. ‘My son,’ said the holy friar. ‘What is the matter?’ ‘Oh alas, sir,’ replied Ser Ciappelletto, ‘I have one sin left to which I have never confessed, so great is my shame in having to reveal it; and whenever I remember it, I cry as you see me doing now, and feel quite certain that God will never have mercy on me for this terrible sin.’ ‘Come now, my son,’ said the holy friar, ‘what are you saying? If all the sins that were ever committed by the whole of mankind, together with those that men will yet commit till the end of the world, were concentrated in one single man, and he was as truly repentant and contrite as I see you to be, God is so benign and merciful that He would freely remit them on their being confessed to Him; and therefore you may safely reveal it.’ Then Ser Ciappelletto said, still weeping loudly: ‘Alas, father, my sin is too great, and I can scarcely believe that God will ever forgive me for it, unless you intercede with your prayers.’ To which the friar replied: ‘You may safely reveal it, for I promise that I will pray to God on your behalf.’ Ser Ciappelletto went on weeping, without saying anything, and the friar kept encouraging him to speak. But after Ser Ciappelletto, by weeping in this manner, had kept the friar for a very long time on tenterhooks, he heaved a great sigh, and said: ‘Father, since you promise that you will pray to God for me, I will tell you. You are to know then that once, when I was a little boy, I cursed my mother.’ And having said this, he began to weep loudly all over again. ‘There now, my son,’ said the friar, ‘does this seem so great a sin to you?

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

  122 Early modern philosophers, such as Hobbes, had called for a strong state to restrain the violence of Europe, which, they believed, had been solely inspired by “religion.” Yet in France, the nation had been evoked to mobilize all citizens for war, and Fichte now encouraged Germans to fight French imperialism for the sake of the Fatherland. The state had been devised to contain violence, but the nation was now being used to release it. If we can define the sacred as something for which one is prepared to die, the nation had certainly become an embodiment of the divine, a supreme value. Hence national mythology would encourage cohesion, solidarity, and loyalty within the confines of the nation. But it had yet to develop the “concern for everybody” that had been such an important ideal in many of the spiritual traditions associated with religion. The national mythos would not encourage citizens to extend their sympathy to the ends of the earth, to love the stranger in their midst, be loyal even to their enemies, to wish happiness for all beings, and to become aware of the world’s pain. True, this universal empathy had rarely affected the violence of the warrior aristocracy, but it had at least offered an alternative and a continuing challenge. Now that religion was being privatized, there was no “international” ethos to counter the growing structural and military violence to which weaker nations were increasingly subjected. Secular nationalism seemed to regard the foreigner as fair game for exploitation and mass slaughter, especially if he belonged to a different ethnic group. In America, the colonies and later the states had lacked the manpower to maintain productivity, so by 1800 between ten and fifteen million African slaves had been forcibly transported to North America. 123 They were subdued brutally: slaves were repeatedly reminded of their racial inferiority, their families were broken up, and they were subjected to hard labor, flogging, and mutilation. None of this seemed to bother the Founders, who had so proudly asserted that “all men are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.” Those who would object did so by invoking not Enlightenment principles but Christian morals. In the northern states, Christian abolitionists condemned slavery as a blot on the nation, and in 1860 president-elect Abraham Lincoln (1809–65) announced that he would prohibit it in any newly conquered territory. Almost at once South Carolina seceded from the Union, and it was clear that other Southern states would follow.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  Perhaps the Enlightenment’s tendency to think of reasoning as a form of impersonal rationalist mechanical calculus led to a disregard for the moral qualities of thinkers. A growing realisation that thinkers are human beings, subject to and limited by the many fallibilities of human nature, has led to a reconsideration of this viewpoint. Recent scholarship has explored the importance of what is now known as ‘character epistemology’, characterised by certain ‘epistemic virtues’ and ‘epistemic vices’. The important point is that the knower, or the seeker after knowledge, should be an epistemically moral person. For Linda Zagzebski, a philosophical pioneer in this field, such ‘epistemic virtues’ would include intellectual humility, diligence and open-mindedness. 24 Although traditional Aristotelian character ethics tended to focus on individual agents as the primary embodiments of virtues and vices, more recent studies of human character have drawn attention to the importance of collective epistemic virtues and vices. 25 Groups and communities can be seen as acting as epistemic agents, with their own distinct virtues and vices. One of the latter is ‘epistemic arrogance’, the tendency of an individual or community to believe that their self-declared intellectual or social superiority entitles them to have privileged status in the public arena and exclude or marginalise others. 26 Individual thinkers or communities of beliefs have often been deliberately excluded or treated as inferior or insignificant in mainstream discourse – an act of discrimination and repression that is increasingly discussed in terms of ‘epistemic injustice.’ 27 This practice continues to this day, both in the forms of denigrating certain epistemic groups, or privileging others. Certain groups of people have historically been discounted or marginalised as the bearers or interpreters of truth – particularly women and people of colour. Many religious traditions, for example, clearly treat women as having lesser status as witnesses to truth, teachers, or exemplars. 28 A growing awareness of the historical use of the Bible to perpetuate and justify racism and abusive male dominance has led to a closer reading of this text to understand how these interpretations arose in the first place, and might be challenged in the second. Yet while religious communities are certainly guilty of some forms of discrimination, they are also discriminated against, particularly in the epistemic domain – think, for example, of the imperious dismissal of religious believers as evil, stupid or mentally ill by some rationalist writers. Yet this epistemic arrogance is not specifically linked with a criticism of religion. It is now widely encountered within western culture, with the potential to increase its fragmentation and polarisation.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  How ‘Religion’ became a False Universal It is well known that the concept of ‘religion’ varies from one historical and cultural context to another. Some historical examples highlight the problems in assuming that the term ‘religion’ is an unproblematically valid universal category. Pre-Columbian Mesoamerican inscriptions do not contain any words that can plausibly be translated as ‘religion’. 10 Yet following the Spanish colonisation of this region, the Spanish term religión seems to have been used by early modern ethnographers working in seventeenth-century Mesoamerica as a self-evidently appropriate term to refer to a variety of indigenous cultural practices, which were then assimilated into this western cultural phenomenon. A European template was thus imposed on indigenous Mesoamerican ways of thinking. 11 A century later, Britain established a commercial base in India, which eventually led to the colonisation of the region. Once more, western observers, noting certain Indian cultural beliefs and practices that did not easily fit into existing categories (such as ‘philosophy’), designated these as forms of ‘religion’, and created the English term ‘Hinduism’ to enfold the variegated phenomena they witnessed in the Indian religious landscape. 12 Many have argued that the very idea of Hinduism was a construct of the colonial enterprise, ‘fabricated in the service of foreign interests, whether by European Orientalists or the British colonial regime.’ 13 Others have argued that colonialism gave a new significance to indigenous Indian religions as a means of preserving Indian cultural identity during the colonial period, thus encouraging the idea that Hinduism was a multi-dimensional unitary faith. To this day, Hindu scholars regularly (and rightly) complain that a group of Asian cultural beliefs and practices are still being assimilated to European categories. The same pattern can be seen in the western construction of ‘Confucianism’ as a religion, when it is better seen as a philosophy of life than as a religion . 14 Yet again, an indigenous cultural movement was forced into the preconceived ethnocentric framework of a colonial power, which misrepresents its historical particularities (above all, its own understanding and experience of the nature and social function of ‘religion’) as normative and universal. The universal concept of ‘religion’ is ultimately an outdated remnant of a colonial past, and needs to be recalibrated and rehabilitated, if not set aside as unhelpful and unreliable. Defining Religion: The Problem of Platonism It is often assumed that the recognition of a supernatural realm or transcendent dimension to life (such as belief in God) is a distinct characteristic of religion, and that the term ‘religious’ can be applied to anyone holding such a view. In conversation with Gary Wolf (the journalist who introduced the phrase ‘New Atheism’ in 2006), Richard Dawkins identified the key issue with religious believers as ‘supernaturalism’ – belief in something that lies beyond the empirical world. Yet Dawkins’ use of the word ‘supernatural’ is puzzling.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  16. In this mid-twelfth-century Psalter written in St Albans Abbey probably for Christina of Markyate herself, Christina poses with Christ in an historiated initial – poised for a sainthood that she never achieved. As a girl, Christina invented for herself ceremonies to express her marriage to the Church, but, later, her family married her off against her will, under pressure from Ranulf Flambard, Bishop of Durham, who had himself shown a less than episcopal interest in her. She eventually ran away from her husband (a protégé of the Bishop) and entered spiritual living arrangements with successive celibates, one of whom was the formidable figure of Abbot Geoffrey de Gorron of St Albans. Out of the huge resources of one of England’s wealthiest Benedictine abbeys, Geoffrey lavished gifts on Christina which included founding a whole nunnery for her at Markyate, over which she presided as prioress (plus male hermit companions). Evidently possessed of considerable sexual or emotional charisma, she sparked deep divisions between admirers and scandalized detractors in the Abbey. Abbot Geoffrey’s death broke her power at St Albans; under the more discreet leadership of Geoffrey’s nephew Abbot Robert, the Abbey began to recover. His successor wrote Christina out of St Albans’ history and fostered a new cultic enthusiasm for an ancient and safely male companion of the Abbey’s martyr-saint Alban, Amphibalus by name and probably fictional by nature. A syneisactic prioress had failed to make it through to sainthood. [46] The general official change of mood in the twelfth century about marriage is patent, with much more concern to make sure that the sexual activity now assumed to be a normal part of marriage was directly concerned with conception. By the fourteenth century, confessional practice in England was including questions to make sure that couples were not making efforts to impede conception during marital sex. [47] More than that, the medieval Western Church embarked on a policy (widening in scope into the period of the Reformation and beyond) of dissolving marriages that had not been sexually consummated – at least when the parties wished that to happen. Cases of spiritual marriage continued to be found in the medieval Latin West; but by effectively making marriage dependent on sexual consummation, the Church hierarchy swung the balance decisively back towards sex in the old debate as to whether sexual intercourse or assent was the essence of marriage. The teaching of the Roman Catholic Church on marriage has made this explicit right down to modern times, with consequences that we will follow (below, Chapter 19). [48] The new emphasis on the centrality of marital and procreational sex naturally gave a new currency to Paul’s theological insistence on the marital debt of husband and wife in 1 Corinthians 7, which has so often proved an embarrassment to Christian societies with other social priorities. It is not a coincidence that the majority of canon lawyers in the medieval Western Church from Gratian onwards championed the Pauline marital debt within marriage. Just as in the time of Augustine and Jerome, such emphases left untidy questions about the status of the Virgin Mary’s marriage to Joseph, as they always must, but canon lawyers were doing their best to be faithful to the Pauline principle in the face of opposition both from landed nobility and many of their theological colleagues. [49]

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  that women had a greater moral seriousness than men because of their constant consciousness of death in childbirth. [128] Right or not, Mather was expressing a radical turnaround in the ancient Christian stereotype of women as naturally more disordered than men and more open to Satan’s temptations. Back in England, the Oxford don Richard Allestree anticipated Mather’s remarks by observing in 1673 that, amid his devotional publishing (he was the anonymous author of the wildly successful Whole Duty of Man ), he considered that women had hearkened to his message far more than men, and that ‘the reputation of Religion is more kept up by women than men’. Like Astell a few decades later, Allestree regretted Protestantism’s rejection of the ‘angelical’ state of celibacy – as a result some suspected that, behind the anonymity of his prolific works, a female author was concealed. [129] By the seventeenth century, even Counter-Reformation clergy began to look past the misogynistic clichés of the past and notice that women were easier to teach than men – and might even shame men into behaving better. [130] As women appeared to show themselves more devout than their menfolk (and, gratifyingly to ministers and priests, often more appreciative of the clergy’s toil), centuries of disparaging theological comments based on medical discussion of humours and a continuous spectrum of gender began to look less convincing. So, in quiet ways, a radical reconstruction of the relationship of the sexes was unfolding, although in the process it opened up a more precise divide between male and female identity. The joint story of Reformation and Counter-Reformation embraces successful female subversions of patriarchy and discreet adaptations of public ideals to reality. It is a dialogue between theology and circumstance: sometimes Christian theory transformed situations, while sometimes theologians found ways of dealing with and explaining situations in danger of escaping their control. At the end of it, around 1700, Western Christianity was becoming a worldwide religion in both its confessional forms, thanks to the expansion of colonial empires. It was discovering how disconcertingly different other long-successful societies might be throughout the world. Christianity was also about to find itself much less able to set agendas in matters of sexuality, gender and marriage. Part Five NEW STORIES

• From Naked Lunch (1959)

  "Use this please. Just yell when you're ready." There was a jar of K.Y. on a glass shelf. Carl felt ashamed as if his mother had laid out a handkerchief for him. Some coy little message stitched on like: "If I was a cunt we could open a dry goods store." Ignoring the K.Y., he ejaculated into the jar, a cold brutal fuck of the nurse standing her up against a glass brick wall. "Old Glass Cunt," he sneered, and saw a cunt full of colored glass splinters under the Northern Lights. He washed his penis and buttoned up his pants. Something was watching his every thought and movement with cold, sneering hate, the shifting of his testes, the contractions of his rectum. He was in a room filled with green light. There was a stained wood double bed, a black wardrobe with full length mirror. Carl could not see his face. Someone was sitting in a black hotel chair. He was wearing a stiff bosomed white shirt and a dirty paper tie. The face swollen, skul-less, eyes like burning pus. "Something wrong?" said the nurse indifferently. She was holding a glass of water out to him. She watched him drink with aloof contempt. She turned and picked up the jar with obvious distaste. The nurse turned to him: "Are you waiting for something special?" she snapped. Carl had never been spoken to like that in his adult life. "Why no...." "You can go then," she turned back to the jar. With a little exclamation of disgust she wiped a gob of semen off her hand. Carl crossed the room and stood at the door. "Do I have another appointment?' She looked at him in disapproving surprise: "You'll be notified of course." She stood in the doorway of the cubicle and watched him walk through the outer office and open the door. He turned and attempted a jaunty wave. The nurse did not move or change her expression. As he walked down the stairs the broken, false grin burned his face with shame. A homosexual tourist looked at him and raised a knowing eyebrow. "Some- thing wrong ?" Carl ran into a park and found an empty bench beside a bronze faun with cymbals. "Let your hair down, chicken. You'll feel better." The tourist was leaning over him, his camera swinging in Carl's face like a great dangling tit. "Fuck off you!" Carl saw something ignoble and hideous reflected back in the queen's spayed animal brown eyes. "Oh! I wouldn't be calling any names if I were you, chicken. You're hooked too. I saw you coming out of The Institute." 'What do you mean by that?" Carl demanded. "Oh nothing. Nothing at all." "Well, Carl," the doctor began smiling and keeping his eyes on a level with Carl's mouth.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  Catholic priests faced a new reality of celibacy, leaving many struggling to cope with the emotional consequences in their own lives. Some took out their frustrations and anguish on vulnerable young people. Piarist expansion of schools for the poor offered the opportunities – far more than ever before. Power over the young was there for clergy to misuse, filling emotional chasms. In the background was the ongoing din of the Reformation struggle between Catholics and Protestants. Catholic layfolk were being taught anew to revere priests as a caste apart, marked out by celibacy; when some clergy misused this special status, Catholic Church authorities naturally felt defensive under Protestant attacks. They had little sense of their own structural problem, and no developed procedure to deal with it. So the poisonous silence of unintended consequences persisted through embarrassment and shame, but also for lack of any right analysis. It was easy to blame just a few bad apples, and so it has long remained. COMMON CONCERNS : THE REFORMATION OF

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  [45] In this almost Victorian atmosphere, with public suspicion of obscure groupings like Christians easily turning to indignant fantasies about their licentiousness, when Christians defended their devotional practice and common life in literary ‘apologies’, many found it tempting to stress sexual renunciation, a theme of austerity that would appeal to many strands of Graeco-Roman philosophy. It was equally natural, though a little contradictory, to emphasize respectability and conformity to the norms of a society based on a male construction of family, and to make attack a form of defence by criticizing the immorality and promiscuity of Graeco-Roman society. Yet such defence was never a simple task, because even as the Church constructed its notion of Christian marriage, the enterprise was complicated by the obstinate persistence of other thoughts in its tangled inheritance from the past, in which both celibacy and a new place for women contended with the demands of family. It is to those complexities that we now turn. 7 Virgins, Celibates, Ascetics ( c .100– c .300) The writer of the Pastoral Epistles had told the women of his Church that their salvation came from childbearing. During the second century CE , Christianity experienced a powerful reaction against this thought, as both women and men sought salvation by a flight not just from general sexual activity, but even from Christian marriage: this was the beginning of the Christian monastic life. Increasingly, theological commentators were unmarried clerics even if they were not monks, and they praised marriage’s virtues with a certain condescension, or worse. Indeed, over the next thousand years, from the second to the twelfth century, Christians wrote a very great deal more about celibacy than marriage. The two themes have stayed uncomfortably entwined right down to the present day, and so we must scrutinize developments in the second century with some care. MONASTICISM : AN UNEXPECTED

• From Naked Lunch (1959)

  This I take as a sign I can hit the one useable vein in my left arm, (The movements of tying up are such that you normally tie up the arm with which you reach for the cord.) The needle slides in easily on the edge of a callous. I feel around. Suddenly a thin column of blood shoots up into the syringe, for a moment sharp and solid as a red cord. The body knows what veins you can hit and conveys this knowledge in the spontaneous movements you make preparing to take a shot.... Sometimes the needle points like a dowser's wand. Sometime I must wait for the message, but when it comes I always hit blood. A red orchid bloomed at the bottom of the dropper. He hesitated for a full second, then pressed the bulb, watching the liquid rush into the vein as if sucked by the silent thirst of his blood. There was an iridescent, thin coat of blood left in the dropper, and the white paper collar was soaked through with blood like a bandage. He reached over and filled the dropper with water. As he squirted the water out, the shot hit him in the stomach, a soft sweet blow. Look down at my filthy trousers, haven't been changed in months.... The days glide by strung on a syringe with a long thread of blood.... I am forgetting sex and all sharp pleasures of the body -- a grey, junk-bound ghost. The Spanish boys call me El Hombre Invisible -- the Invisible Man.... Twenty push ups every morning. Use of junk removes fat, leaves muscle more or less intact. The addict seems to need less tissue....Would it be possible to isolate the fat-removing molecule of junk? More and more static at the Drug Store, mutterings of control like a telephone off the hook... Spent all day until 8 P.M. to score for two boxes of Eukodol.... Running out of veins and out of money. Keep going on the nod. Last night I woke up with someone squeezing my hand. It was my other hand.... Fall asleep reading and the words take on code significance.... Obsessed with codes.... Man contracts a series of diseases which spell out a code message.... Take a shot in front of D.L. Probing for a vein in my dirty bare foot.... Junkies have no shame.... They are impervious to the repugnance of others. It is doubtful if shame can exist in the absence of sexual libido.... The junky's shame disappears with his non-sexual sociability which is also dependent on libido.... The addict regards his body impersonally as an instrument to absorb the medium in which he lives, evaluates his tissue with the cold hands of a horse trader. "No use trying to hit there." Dead fish eyes flick over a ravaged vein.