How Long the Lonely Road

On Thursday, June 12, it was my pleasure to present a lecture titled “What Do Destructive Cults, Violent Religious Extremism, Far Right Militias & Conspiracy Theories Have In Common?” at a TEDxYouth event organized by some wonderful students at my school. The basic conceit was to apply classic concepts in the typology of religion developed by Rodney Stark and William Bainbridge to several groups that have gained traction by exploiting modern feelings of isolation and powerlessness. “Everywhere under Heaven is in great disarray,” says the Zhuangzi, a third century BCE book of Taoist wisdom—“the whole world tends to see only one aspect and think that they ahve grasped the whole of it.” O tempora o mores  is hardly a fresh complaint in the long record of social unrest, nor is violent extremism a new response. But the groups that take advantage of this all too human tendency to seek simple, self-affirming answers can and must be avoided. The solutions offered by these movements are...

With the death of CouchSurfing to the pandemic and the equally poisonous influence of unfettered capitalism, the community I relied on to find good company and a quiet corner to sleep while on the road has fractured between several new services. The principal three are listed below. BeWelcome.org , a non-profit based in France, branched off from the now-defunct Hospitality Club in 2007. Of the claimants to the CouchSurfing throne, it has the largest community. TrustRoots.org  is a smaller nonprofit based in the UK. Couchers.org  is the most direct sequel to CouchSurfing and, while still in an ongoing "beta," has a lot of promise. There are several other options available to the aspiring nomad. World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms  (WWOOFing) WorkAway Facebook Groups NomadList , a social network for the deracinated who work remotely

‘My dear Bilbo! Something is the matter with you! You are not the hobbit that you were.’ —J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit Hello. It's been a while. It may be strange to hear from a travel blogger years after the last flight, but this is an addendum I feel must be put to print. This is a declaration of war, and this is an apologia. I think I'd better start from the top. I spent the decade from 2009 to 2019 traveling and teaching in Europe and Asia. This experience shaped both my choice to become an educator and my understanding of the privileges and inequities associated with my constellated identity. My membership in a dominant social group—White, male, Christian, cisgender, heterosexual, healthy, able, and middle-class—to a large extent facilitated and structured this wanderjahr , and I have often mistaken for intrepidity and assertiveness the underlying racially-ordered assumption that I will be understood, respected, safe, found attractive, and given access. This assumption is...

“No man is an island entire of himself,” wrote the English poet John Donne. Not only individuals but even island nations emerge in history and arrive at an understanding of their own identity through a conversation and exchange that must include other places and other people. That national histories are often represented as autochthonous, sealed off and unmixed with any external elements, is not only a missed opportunity but an error that has led to violence, exclusion, and massacre. Japan has many ways of discussing its own uniqueness. Philosophers of the Heian court contrasted Yamato-damashii (“Japanese spirit”) with the values and qualities of other nations on the periphery of Tang China. The complicated word kokutai (“national body”), meaning both the sovereign state and the national essence of its people, centered political discourse in the wake of the 1868 revolution, acquired a mystical power through its association with the Emperor and the imperial cult, and became a germ for...

“There she lies,” says the hero, David Quixano, looking out over New York harbor, “the great Melting Pot—listen! Can’t you hear the roaring and the bubbling? There gapes her mouth—the harbour where a thousand mammoth feeders come from the ends of the world to pour in their human freight. Ah, what a stirring and a seething! Celt and Latin, Slav and Teuton, Greek and Syrian, black and yellow, Jew and Gentile, . . . the palm and the pine, the pole and the equator, the crescent and the cross—how the great Alchemist melts and fuses them with his purging flame! Here shall they all unite to build the Republic of Man and the Kingdom of God. Ah, Vera, what is the glory of Rome and Jerusalem where all nations and races come to worship and look back, compared with the glory of America, where all races and nations come to labour and look forward!” Israel Zangwill, whose parents were refugees, described the almost unbelievable optimism of the immigrant. His play The Melting Pot was a runaway...

Touring the South Caucasus, you’re likely to see what appear to be European Union flags on official buildings, particularly in town centers. This is the flag of the Council of Europe: a less exclusive group than the EU, but one for which membership does designate “European-ness”. There is a certain pride in this: In 1999, the year Georgia joined, the prominent politician Zurab Zhvania famously declared “I am Georgian, therefore I am European.” Joining the “European family” entails mutual cooperation with regard to culture, economics, and security, but does it really settle the debate? Not really. The people of modern-day Turkey, Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan feel caught between Asia and Europe, not quite at home in the cultural centers of the East or the West, and demonstrating in themselves a marvelous dialectic between the two. This is the historic role of the regions called Anatolia and the Transcaucasus. The Turkish Republic was one of the first countries to join the ...