This chapter examines Herodotus’ fulsome praise of Scythia, arguing that Scythia serves as an explicitly political model of human flourishing. Herodotus’ treatment of Scythia emphasizes that it achieves freedom without domination. This underscores both the importance Herodotus grants freedom and the great difficulty of avoiding cyclical violence, the stark dichotomy between ruling and ruled that drives the endless acquisition of empire. I thus contextualize Herodotus’ signal praise of Scythia by exploring the role of violence and vengeance in the ecosystem of strife he depicts much of life as bound up in. But as much as Herodotus highlights how rare and important this achievement is, his treatment of Scythia also emphasizes its great costs. His Scythian subsection thus shows his nonideal model of human flourishing, how it captures the vices and virtues of any particular political model. This pairs it with his treatment of Athenian freedom.

In Chapter 8, the ease of weaponizing technology is discussed, using the example of machine learning and general AI. The examination applies the lens of technological determinism to the growth of public–private efforts to develop AI that can harm and kill humans. Examples are provided of promising litigation in the US that would allow for attaching civil and criminal liability to human actors responsible for the conduct of AI.

One of the defining episodes of postwar US–Japanese relations was the so-called Girard incident, in which specialist third-class William Girard shot and killed Sakai Naka, a Japanese woman who was picking up shell casings on a US firing range in January 1957. The shooting sparked a diplomatic crisis that shook the US–Japan alliance, leading many historians to situate the incident in the history of the two nations’ diplomatic relations after World War II. This chapter attempts to resituate the incident, in part, by showing that it was only one of at least 200 instances in which US sentries and soldiers fired on Japanese civilians from the start of the Allied Occupation through the beginning of the 1960s.

Chapter 4 explores how the epics represent combat and its consequences. It discusses divine and human agents of war, battle strategies, and the material culture of fighting, from armor to weapons. It then turns to violence, trauma, and the memory of war, showing how Homeric poetry captures both the immediacy of battle and the longer psychological aftermath.

Chapter 4 analyzes primeval stories of how the earth is polluted by inter-species violence, starting with the Cain-Abel story in Genesis 4 and continuing to Lamech, semi-divine warriors, and a violence of “all flesh” that causes a global flood (Gen 6:1-13). The domesticator-like God depicted in these stories turns out to be implicated in the violence in them, and – in the wake of the flood – this God character ends up endorsing human killing of animals for food.

When the Reformation first emerged in France in the 1520s, Francis I decided to deal with it by prosecuting Protestants as heretics in the parlements’ courts. This policy proved wholly inadequate in stopping the growth of Protestantism, even though it was continued by his son, Henry II. When Henry died in 1559, and then his son, Francis II, in 1560, Catherine de Medici sought to find some form of religious coexistence, as Protestants had grown to maybe 1.8 million in a population of 18 million. The result was the Edict of January.

This chapter proposes to show that reading Martin Amis’s representation of women in his London Trilogy today raises a number of issues related to the elusive nature of the author’s voice and values in the text. In Money and London Fields in particular, the violence women are submitted to by the male narrators and characters, even though partaking of the satire Amis brushes upon British society in the 1980s, tends to systematically portray women as victims. However, it must not be forgotten that Amis also introduces a number of female figures of relative empowerment in his novels, whose various forms of agency (murderees, authors, femmes fatales) are worth pointing out. The question as to the reality of this agency has to be raised, however, in the context of the general economy of the simulacrum which Amis’s novels denounce and promote. If Amis’s carnivalesque satires leave nothing unscathed and celebrate the death of all great narratives, how can the feminist narrative be applied to them? It seems that Amis’s own beliefs in the powers and of language and language games provide a key to beginning to answer this question.

Explores the scope and context of enslavers’ regimentation of communal food practices among adults. Addresses the complexities of quantifying different cooking and eating regimes and considers food cultures on special occasions. Emphasizes the everyday rather than the unusual, although people often remembered annual feasts because these events played an important part in enslavers systems of “rewards and punishments.” Explores the idealized tracts of enslavers to illuminate the ways in which they felt the food of enslaved adults should be regimented. Considers how the realities of that experience as recalled by those formerly enslaved sharpen the dichotomy between these two perspectives, even as the broad parameters of food regimentation and the role of quarters’ cooks remain broadly the same. Elaborates upon quarters’ cooks who additionally catered for enslavers, including occasionally enslaved men, and upon white women’s self-serving involvement in collective eating regimes. Finally, the chapter examines some of the horrific ways in which enslavers used food as a tool of punishment, a means of heightening enslavers’ power and control, and ultimately their profits.

This impassioned address in early 1976 is a call to Lebanon’s intellectuals, academics and moral leaders to awaken and act in response to the country’s worsening crisis at the beginning of the long civil war. It criticizes the inaction and withdrawal of Lebanon’s thinkers and visionaries as the nation suffers under deep political, economic and social distress. Musa Sadr urges these leaders to rise from complacency, stop their retreat into private or foreign safe havens and fulfill their responsibilities to the homeland.

Lebanon is portrayed as a unique, divinely endowed nation, rich in history and human potential, yet torn by division, corruption and despair. The text warns against sectarianism, political factionalism and superficial reforms, which only deepen fear and dysfunction. It calls instead for a radical, unified vision to rebuild Lebanon on principles of equality, justice and shared citizenship.

A new Lebanon must emerge – one that embraces diversity, champions the Palestinian cause, utilizes its natural and human resources wisely and reclaims its role as a center for interfaith dialogue and civilizational harmony. The address ends by urging the nation’s moral and intellectual stewards to develop and implement a comprehensive plan to heal divisions, bring in the marginalized and restore dignity, hope and purpose to all Lebanese.

Hatred can be understood as a persistent affective disposition that is based on an experienced grievance and injustice and aims at revenge against its originator, in extreme cases at the destruction of the enemy. The special dynamics and radicality of hatred result from the retention of affect, which is caused by the perceived own weakness or powerlessness of the hater. It is precisely this retention that allows hatred to grow and accumulate in the latency phase until it can finally turn into acute destructive actions. This individual dynamic is found in potentiated form in the hatred of groups, which can be traced back to social and political experiences of grievance. The chapter examines the phenomenology of hatred and the resulting form of individual and collective destructiveness on the basis of literary examples, psychological disorders, and societal phenomena.