Category Archives: Rationalism

Welcome to Elements of Story, a biweekly column about narrative tropes, what they mean, and why they just wont go away.

For the inaugural installment of Elements of Story, and just in time for Valentines day, Im going to dissect an archetype that has been causing a stir and setting hearts aflutter for centuries: the Byronic hero.

Definitions of the Byronic hero vary by source, but the basic gist is that hes an arrogant yet emotionally sensitive rebel who rages against societal norms, is usually haunted by a dark and mysterious past, and has been a staple of romantic storylines for hundreds of years. You could literally write a book about the history of the Byronic Heroindeed, multiple people already haveso for the sake of concision and also my continued sanity, were going to investigate the Byronic hero through the specific example of one of his most recent appearances: Kylo Ren (Adam Driver).

Ever since The Force Awakens first premiered, Darth Vaders grandson and #1 fan has been a point of contention within the Star Wars fandom, particularly with regards to his dynamic with protagonist Rey (Daisy Ridley). While things have calmed down somewhat following the underwhelming finale that was The Rise of Skywalker, if you want to start a fight online about a galaxy far, far away, mention Reylo and see what happens.

One of the most genuinely befuddling things about the discourse surrounding Reylo is the frequently held opinion that its allure is anyway inexplicable or unforeseeable. Similarly, the common, lazy narrative that its popularity can be explained away as Adam Drivers thirst-club projecting their desire onto the Star Wars universe reeks of ignorance. Whether borne of conscious intent or sheer coincidence, Kylo Ren is a villain who also fits a centuries-old romantic archetype like a glove in ways that are hinted towards in The Force Awakens and laid increasingly bare in each subsequent installment. That some viewers picked up on the Byronic subtext early while others did not simply speaks to the variance in media consumption habits and tastes between audience members. If youre familiar with an archetype, youre going to spot its likeness, and view said likeness through the lens of the implications baked in with that lineage. If youre not, you wont.

So, who is this Byronic Hero guy, anyway? Well, the tl;dr version is that hes basically Satan and his origins predate Lord Byron by at least a few hundred years.

In truth, the Byronic Hero is so old that tracing his origins gets quite speculative. Theres not a singular definitive answer so much as a collection of theories. To give a relatively cohesive explanation of who this guy is and how he got here without writing a novel, Im going to things down into two key questions:

To address the first question, lets start by talking about the Devil. Im not going to say that John Milton was the first storyteller to make Satan cool, but he sure did make such a characterization mainstream with Paradise Lost. The most beautiful of Gods angels, Lucifer chafes at Gods omnipotence, convinces a number of his brethren to join him in a rebellion that ultimately fails, is banished to Hell and eternally damned, but stubbornly stands by his choices because, better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven. Miltons Satan was, to use modern parlance, a beautiful trash firea handsome, passionate dreamer whose quick-tempered fervor proves self-destructive in spite of his considerable intellect. He is, in other words, smart enough to know that his hubris will be his downfall, but too in thrall to his passions for that knowledge to save himself from such a fate. He is a tragic hero as defined by Aristotle, an inherently sympathetic figure not as much in spite of his flaws as because of them.

Lets stop for a second so I can convince you Kylo Ren fits this pattern, in case you arent convinced already. With his journey from Ben too much Vader in him Solo to Kylo Ren, his rejection of his heritage and violent rebellion against Luke Skywalker, he follows the same basic trajectory of Miltons Lucifer. And as far as personality is concerned, Ben didnt gel well with the there is no passion Jedi code, and unlike Anakin Skywalker, it didnt even take the development of a particular relationship for things to reach a breaking point.

Now, as far as how Satan became a romantic figure, we need to make a stopover with the Romantics because the journey from Romantic to romantic is really just semantics. Romanticism was a prominent intellectual and artistic movement in Western culture that took place in the late 18th and 19th centuries and encompassed everything from literature and painting to architecture and music. It emphasized emotion, spontaneity, irrationality, and the individual with a particular focus on subjectivity, and is generally regarded as a reactionary movementa rebuttal against the rationalism that defined the Enlightenment.

Romantics loved Miltons Satan. My favorite hero, Miltons Satan, Robert Burns gushed, lauding Satans intrepid, unyielding independence, desperate daring, and noble defiance of hardship. That Byron, one of his contemporaries, would channel his admiration for the same figure into a series of mercurial protagonists that would codify an archetype is hardly surprising. While crediting Byron with inventing the Byronic hero is a significant stretch considering the archetype is really just Satan rebranded, there is one key component of this character that Byron did add to the equation, and that is a particular kind of longing that a number of commentators have likened to homesickness. Love is homesickness, Sigmund Freud wrote in his seminal essay on the Uncanny. In terms of understanding the human mind, Freud is one small step above total quack, but as far as narrative theory is concerned he made some compelling arguments, this being one of them. As Deborah Lutz says in her essay Love as Homesickness: Longing for a Transcendental Home in Byron and the Dangerous Lover Narrative, the Byronic hero often[] is a criminal, an outlaw who is not only self-exiled, but actively, hatefully, works against society as a murderous pirate, yet also often feels, pains of remorse, not only for his crime but also for his self-inflicted homelessness. Kylo Ren, with his laments of Im being torn apart, and let the past die, kill it if you have to rhetoric interspersed with explosive bouts of self-loathing, could not be more emblematic of this facet of the Byronic hero if he tried.

All of this helps explain what makes this archetype emotionally engaging, but not how self-hating emotional clusterfuck became sexy. In order to get to the bottom of that, we actually need to go back quite a bit. In Western culture, sexuality, death, and evil have been birds of a feather since the nascence of Christianity, which took vague correlations between these concepts already present in several Greek mythological figures and ran with them. While the Devil is often depicted as a hideous beast, the concept that he might also take the form of a manspecifically, an attractive onedates back centuries (Lucifer was the prettiest, remember), and is apparent in a number of surviving records of witch trial confessions detailing demonic encounters. But taking on a handsome face is not the only attribute frequently bestowed upon Satan and his kin. As Toni Reed writes in her book Demon Lovers and their Victims in British Fiction, identifying Satan and other demons with sexuality, especially with huge phalluses, may well trace back to Greek mythology.

Thats right. Satan has serious BDE. Do with that information what you will.

Its worth noting that the Byronic hero is ultimately a beloved romantic fantasy not because it represents something many people want in real life, but precisely the opposite, much like how enjoying seeing the lions at the zoo doesnt mean you want one in your house. Hes a darkly tempting, narratively intriguing prospect that is enjoyable to experience vicariously through fiction, a Pandoras box that can be opened and then closed again without repercussion. Times and tastes change and the Byronic hero evolves to suit themdevil, tempestuous gentleman, wannabe Sithbut his defining characteristics and their guilty pleasure appeal are eternal.

Read more here:

How the Devil Became a Dreamboat: Exploring the Byronic Hero with Kylo Ren - Film School Rejects

(Mosaica Press, 2019), by Shmuel PhillipsReviewed by: Rabbi Reuven Chaim Klein

In this outstanding book, Shmuel Phillips examines various facets of Torah and Judaism from the so-called rationalist viewpoint. He puts that approach to Judaism in perspective by offering an uncensored presentation of Maimonides views without cherry-picking passages to match a certain preconceived notion of what Jewish rationalism ought to be. In doing so, Phillips offers a fair and open-minded analysis of Maimonidean thought.

Many critics of mainstream contemporary Judaism have misappropriated rationalism to support their own whims. As Rabbi Micha Berger so eloquently put it, The mind is a wonderful organ for justifying decisions the heart already reached. In his work, Shmuel Phillips shows that rationalism does not necessarily entail rejecting traditional Judaism and actually dovetails nicely with it. He demonstrates how even Maimonidesthe hero of so-called Rational Judaismdid not endorse free-standing rationalism, but rather a rationalism grounded in certain immutable truths, which the mature scholar can only absorb through rigorous character development and the study of both the Written and Oral Torah.

This heavy book (both in terms of its physical weight and the weighty nature of its discussions) calmly provides the reader with a rationalist view of the Torahs attitude to such sensitive topics as homosexuality, polygamy, rape, eshet yefat toar(comfort women in war zones), and gender roles.. He tackles raging controversial topics like slavery and genocide (i.e. wiping out Amalek) in the Torah, and the ubiquitous questions of objective morality and how to reconcile Torah and Science. Phillips also gives logical and rational justifications for such occurrences as halachic loopholes, ritual law, anti-Semitism, miracles, and prophecy.

Phillips takes on Biblical criticism by citing such scholars as Prof. Joshua Berman who explain away linguisticand even thematicsimilarities between the Bible and other ancient writings by invoking the notion that the Torah writes in the way that people spoke and could be most easily understood and internalized by its original audience. While following this approach, Phillips convincingly argues that this approach is entirely in line with Maimonidean thought. In doing so, Phillips tone remains authoritative and non-apologetic, and his arguments are conservative, yet cogent. Phillips invokes Rav Hirsch to quell the concerns of Bible Critics by characterizing the Written Torah as written in a sort of code that can only be deciphered through the Oral Torah. This, of course, accounts for all sorts of stylistic and thematic inconsistencies and redundancies.

Phillips also expounds on the Torahs Universalist message by following Rav Hirsch in characterizing the struggle between Noahs three sons as an allusion to the fight between unbridled violence (Ham), the culture of aesthetics (Japheth), and spiritual enlightenment through Godliness and morality (Shem). The ramifications of this three-way conflict continue to reverberate throughout the world as it stands as the basis for the contemporary clash of cultures.

This book also broaches the topic of how to view Aggadic Midrashim. More Kabbalistically-inclined authorities tend to take theseaggadotat face value and understand them as the intended meaning of the texts which they interpret. However, rationalists in the mold of Ibn Ezra, Maimonides, andto some extentRadak beg to differ. They maintain that the tradition ofaggadotought to be treated separately from the texts upon which they nominally expound, and said texts should only be understood in their simplest, literal sense. While some have understood that the rationalistsreject aggadot, Phillips demonstrates that they simply compartmentalizeaggadotand create a clear barrier between the Written Torah and the Oral Torah, without rejecting the latter. Moreover, Phillips demonstrates that even some of the Kabbalists, like Maharal and possibly Rashi, maintain that while all exegeses are connected to the Torahs text (which must contain the totality of all truths), they can sometimes be interpreted as referring to the spiritual dynamics which underpin the plain meaning.

Each chapter takes the reader on a masterfully-written journey through the rationalistic perspective on a different topic. Truth is, you can probably write an entire book for each chapter, but given the framework, this exceptional work does an excellent job at concisely treating each issue with much erudition.

Phillips has a knack for turning a phrase in a way that clarifies complex ideas in just a few words. His skilled use of subtle humor and witty alliteration make the subtitles in each chapter almost as fun as reading the content itself. He is clearly a talented writer who has the ability to write up complicated philosophical/theological arguments in an easy-to-read English, without sacrificing accuracy or complexity.

This reviewer respectfully disagrees with Rabbi Dr. Lord Jonathan Sacks approbation which characterizes Philips book as providing a remarkable new philosophical approach to Torah and Jewish faith In this reviewers opinion, Phillips has offered the reader nothing new other than an unbiased presentation of the theosophies of Rambam, R. Yehuda HaLevi, Rav Hirsch, and R. Meir Simcha of Dvinskessentially allowing the timeless words of these great luminaries to speak for themselves. Phillip does update the presentation of those philosophies in order to express them in more contemporary terms, but he is certainly not offering anything radically new. He essentially presents the ideas behind the rationalist stream of traditional Judaism in a sophisticated and contemporary way, and for this alone he deserves to be commended.

Rabbi Reuven Chaim Klein is the author of the book God versus Gods: Judaism in the Age of Idolatry and of the book Lashon HaKodesh: History, Holiness, & Hebrew. He is a member of the RCA, and currently serves as an editor for the VeromemanuFoundations new edition of Machberes Menachem. He resides in Beitar Illit, Israel and can be reached via email at[emailprotected].

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Judaism Reclaimed: Philosophy and Theology in the Torah - The Jewish Voice

Were living in an age where public trust in the media is at an all-time low. Just 21% of Americans say they have a lot of trust in the information from national news organizations.

In my community, its probably much lower. Routinely, Orthodox and haredi Jews are forced to read news reports about us that have very little correlation to reality. A perfect example of this happened this past Tuesday, when Attorney General William P. Barr visited Borough Park for a meeting with Orthodox Jewish community leaders. It was a small meeting, just a minyan sitting around a table in a tiny room, discussing the issues. It was just Attorney General Barr, the Orthodox stakeholders, a handful of DOJ staff and several members of the media (the Forward was not among them).

I was there too. So I can tell you that the story I read about in the media was not the one that transpired in that room.

If you read most of the reporting about the event, you would think what took place was a politics-driven conversation dominated by New Yorks recent bail reform law and the Orthodox Jews and Trump Administration representatives devoted to crushing it. Part of this is about the fact that Barrs office has announced it will be bringing federal charges against Tiffany Harris, a woman who was arrested for targeting and slapping multiple Orthodox women, who was released without bail thanks to the new law. But mostly, its about the fact that when it comes to the Orthodox, we just cant get a fair hearing in the media.

Take The New York Times story, which was a perfect example of this misreporting: The Times framed the entire visit through the lens of bail reform, with a headline proclaiming Barr was inserting himself into the bail reform fray.

And yet, in their very own story which was entirely about bail reform even they had to concede that Mr. Barr did not specifically mention bail reform during the meeting.

That was certainly true. Not a single person in the room even brought up bail reform, and for good reason: The federal charges against Harris were not about that. They were, to quote Barr, about lowering the level of tolerance for violence against the Jewish community by using the federal government to plant its flag and show zero tolerance.

The Times, however, was not alone. Over at JTA, Ben Sales, who was in the room during the meeting, filed a brief with an opening paragraph representing Barr as blaming the rise of anti-Semitism on what he called mutant progressivism. Of course, Barr never said that. The actual words which Sales ended up correcting after being called out on Twitter were words anyone with any familiarity with the subject matter would have recognized, were militant progressivism.

Barrs point, which was well taken, was that militant progressivism embodies a drive to reorganize society based on rationalism and animated with a passion you usually expect among religious people, casting those who oppose them as not just wrong but evil. That, Barr said, is part of the cause of the hatreds and the antipathy toward traditional communities such as the Orthodox. It has seeped into our politics, and is a cause of toxic tribalism as well as the anti-Semitism some communities are now struggling with.

It was an intelligent reading of a situation we are struggling desperately to understand and contain. How ironic that it was mutated by the words of the liberal media.

But that was not the only misrepresentation in that exchange alone. If you read the news reports, Barr reportedly attempted to push back on the idea that President Donald Trump bore any of the blame for the national rise in anti-Semitism, a notion raised by one of the participants.

This, too, did not happen. What one participant, while bemoaning the extra difficulties he sees in our polarized moment when attempting to engage in inter-community relations, did say was that he sees so many people [who] are eager to blame, frankly, the president on the change of tone in the country but I think that those people have to look into themselves to see, what am I doing to tone down the conversation?

Hardly the same thing.

The distressing thing here is that I only know all of this because I was in the room when all of this occurred. If I had not been there, I would likely have also trusted the false narrative which was being concocted by the media.

Am I really to believe things are different when Im not in the room?

So why does this keep happening to my community? People tend to lean back on things they recognize, on things that are familiar to them, and reporters are no different. Especially when reporting about Hasidic Jews, reporters are prone to misrepresent, build connections where none exists, hear things which never happened, and make incorrect assumptions all because of what fits the frame for the story they recognize and are most comfortable telling.

Even if it isnt the story that happened.

But the job of the media is to tell the story that happened even if it isnt easy for them to tell it. And the reason so many people distrust them now is that theyve been failing miserably at doing this.

Eli Steinberg lives in New Jersey with his wife and five children. They are not responsible for his opinions, which he has been putting into words over the last decade, and which have been published across Jewish and general media. You can tweet the hottest of your takes at him @HaMeturgeman.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Forward.

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How can we trust the media when they lie about our community? - Forward

Abu Hamid Muhammad Al-Ghazali in one of his famous works Al-Iqtisad Fil Ittiqad elucidated at length the role of systematic theology in Islamic scholasticism. He maintained that theologians were responsible for responding to religious innovations, combatting the insidious heresies, and presenting the creedal formulations of Islam in a philosophic idiom. To this end, Ghazali himself contributed his masterpiece Tahafa-tul-Falasafa. An expert of Ghazali, Frank Griffel in his book Ghazalis Philosophical Theology held that the Tahafat of Ghazali was a work of systematic theology couched in a philosophical idiom with an aim to defend the creedal formulation(s) of Islam.

Three centurieslater, Ibn-e-Khaldun in his famous Muqaddimah argued that theology as an independent stream of thought had outlived its utility. He held that philosophical reasoning and illuminative epistemologyhad replaced the role of theology in developing rational Islamic discourse. In agreement with the assessment of Ibn-e-Khaldun, Halverson in his book Theology and Creed in Sunni Islam proceeded further and held that theology as a creative discipline had already died by 12th century and was replaced by a series of doctrinaire creedal formulations. Did Islamic speculative theology cease to continue as a thriving intellectual force by 12th century?

The answer to this intriguing question lies in the origins of theology as an independent strand of rigorous scholarship. Muslim scholars after their encounter with the Hellenic philosophical literature, Judeo-Christian religious corpus, and the Iranian gnostic illumination felt the urge to explain their religious rituals, norms, and doctrines in a scholarly language in line with the contemporary systems of epistemology. Their attempt at elucidating the religious doctrinal system of Islam in an idiom of contemporary epistemologies led to a wide range of disagreements and paved the way for the crystallization of guilds. These guilds came into being and transformed into different independent schools by late 9th century. The emergence of theology as a stream of organized scholarly tradition can be attributed to the intellectually vibrant environment of intellectual exchange between Islam and other civilizations.

These schools or guilds of theology based their argumentative reasoning on different epistemologies. On the far right were the Hanbalites. They held that the only source of Truth was the repository of the scriptural text and the Prophetic normative practice. Closer to them were the Asharites and the Maturidites. They maintained that reason could also be invoked in the formulation of religious discourse. Even though the Quran and normative practice of the Prophet were the main sources for the guidance, the exercise of reason could only be granted as an accessory toolkit. Reason was always subservient to the tradition, according to them. On the far left were the Mutazilites. Contrary to the Hanbalites, Asharites, and Maturidites, Mutazilites postulated that the sole exercise of reason was enough for the systemization of religious doctrinal system. They held that only reason as an epistemological tool could be used in order to ascertain the validity of the Truth.

The Mutazilites laid down the foundations of rationalism in Islam, according to Abdul Karem Soroush. Central to their intellectual outlook was the exercise of reason. They maintained that tradition should be interpreted against the yardstick of rational tools. The Mutazilites eclectically summoned into use the Greek syllogism, Alexandrian sapiential disciplines, and Syriac noetic rationalism to demonstrate that a fortified Islamic edifice of rational sciences could be erected on the foundations of rationalism. The school of Mutazilites was rooted firmly in the rational grounds and was committed to the cause of rational interpretation of Islam. Islam was a rational religion with its own sense of philosophy and world-view, according to the school of Mutazilites.

Unfortunately, the school of Mutazilites lost its constituency and ceased to exist by 11th century. Even worse, the Asharites and Maturidites lost their earlier rigor and absorbed the illuminative gnosticism. Philosophy as a creative strand of intellectual inquiry soon after Ibn-e-Tufayl and Ibn-e-Rushd had already died out. Islamic theology after 12th century expressed itself either in traditionalist idiom by producing formulaic tracts on creed or in theosophic treatises geared towards spiritual illumination, Dr Fazlur Rehman reflected in his work Islam and Modernity.

In sum, Islamic theology was a rigorous exercise of reason and intellect for three centuries in the writings of Mutazilites. This particular form of theology rooted firmly in reason and sapiential systems of knowledge was characterized as speculative theology for it explored new intellectual horizons. On the contrary, the theology that came into being after the 12th century was called dialectical theology for it was nothing but a regurgitation of creeds, doctrines, and theosophic disclosures articulated in unoriginal tracts either for the defense of religion or for spiritual illumination.

This dialectical theology dominated the intellectual landscape of Islamic scholasticism for more than five centuries. Even scholars as eminent as Ibn-e- Taymiyah, Ibn-e-Qayyim, Shatibi, and Ibn-e-Khaldun were the exponents of dialectical theology. The great Iranian scholars like Mir Fendereski, Mulla Sadra, and Baqir al-Majlisi were also of the same opinion. The first scholar to have revived reason in Islamic theology was Shah Wali-ullah in the 18th century. His magnum opus The Conclusive Argument from God was the first liberal attempt at erecting the edifice of Islamic theology on rationalist grounds, Charles Kurzman argued in Liberal Islam. Sir Syed Ahmad Khan continued in the footsteps of Shah Wali-ullah and granted more room for the exercise of reason.

But it was the Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam by Allama Muhammad Iqbal that gave a definitive shape to Modern Islamic Speculative Theology. Iqbal in this classic work employed the epistemology of reason to elucidate the rationale of Islamic principles. Like the Mutazilites of medieval times, Iqbal used the modern philosophical reasoning of the West to construct a modernist interpretation of Islam. The intuitive theosophy, normative traditionalism, and gnostic illumination were subservient to reason, according to Iqbalian interpretive system of thought.

Bringing into use his innovative model(s) of reasoning, Iqbal reinterpreted the classic concepts of Ijtihad, Ijma, ahya, and Islah with an aim to invest them with modern notions of progression, continuity, and authenticity. This analytic framework, reminiscent of Mutazilite school, established a firm foundation for the school of rationalism as an epistemological source to revive and thrive. Reason, in this reconceptualization of theology and formulation of scholasticism, is not only a source, but the main source of exploratory endeavours. Hence, Iqbal in his quest for the rediscovery of innovative models of reasoning transformed the dialectical theology bereft of any creative impulse into speculative theology that was once the telltale feature of classic Islamic theology in its heydays.

In philosophical parlance, this speculative theology is a modern manifestation of medieval Mutazilism. Is Iqbal the founder of Neo-mutazilism in Islam? On perusing the Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, one gets convinced that the emergence of Neo-Mutazilism is attributable to the intellectual oeuvre of Allama Muhammad Iqbal.

*Rehan Khan is a prospective candidate for the Ph.D. program at NYU.

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Islamic Speculative Theology: From Classic To Modern OpEd - Eurasia Review

Exegesis, the critical interpretation of scripture, is not an Islamic tradition, and for Orthodox Muslims like Shaheen, the Quran is the uncreated, eternal, inviolate word of God. Nasr, meanwhile, was the author of books titled Critique of Islamic Discourse and Rationalism in Exegesis: A Study of the Problem of Metaphor in the Writing of the Mutazilah.

The socially timid, bespectacled scholar was a freethinker who challenged the orthodox tradition in Islam and argued that the Quran had to be understood both metaphorically and in its historical context. He was a man of his time, eager to help his fellow Muslims apply the teachings of the Quran to the modern world. To do that, he believed that the human dimension of the Quran needs to be reconsidered. So although the Quran was indeed the word of God, Nasrs argument was that it had been revealed to the prophet Muhammad through the use of a language, a local dialect even, rooted in a specific context: the Arabic language of the Arabian Peninsula of the seventh century. If the word of God had not been embodied in human language, how could anyone understand it?

Nasr was not starting from scratch: he was building on a great inheritance that went back to the eighth century. His masters thesis had been about the Mutazilah, the rationalist Islamic movement drawing on Greek philosophy that had first stirred a big debate between reason and dogma barely two hundred years after the founding of Islam.

The Mutazilah first emerged in the eighth century, in Basra, in todays southern Iraq. They believed that while Gods speech was uncreated and revealed to the prophet, the writing of the Quran was an earthly phenomenon: words, ink, paper. Furthermore, the writing had happened well after the revelation and the death of the prophet. The Mutazilah applied reason to the study of the holy book and believed in free will. Their movement reflected the times they were living in the Abbasid era was the golden age of Islam, the time of science and philosophy, of Abu Nuwass libertine poetry about love and wine, the thousand and one days and nights of Scheherazade, and the Abbasid caliph Haroun al Rashid. Baghdads famed library, the House of Wisdom, became the repository of world knowledge, overflowing with original and translated works. At the same time in Baghdad, also under the Abbasid caliphate, was Ahmad ibn Hanbal, founder of the Hanbali school of jurisprudence: resolutely orthodox, literalist, and opposed to the Mutazilah doctrine, which had become state doctrine. His opposition landed him in jail, and his following surged. Hanbalis believed Muslims had lost their way, and as the Abbasid caliphate weakened, the followers of Ibn Hanbal became more organized, leading the fight against rationalism and anything that could distract from the purest form of the original faith, including music. They set up in fact a kind of Sunni inquisition.

[ Return to the review of Black Wave. ]

As the four major schools of jurisprudence slowly crystallized, orthodoxy also settled in. Some Sunni religious leaders believed most major religious matters had been settled and began to restrict the gates of ijtihad, independent reasoning, to give precedence to emulation. Reading, understanding, and explaining the Quran would have to rely on the body of knowledge accumulated up until thenthe Mutazilah period was over. Hanbalism would later soar and spread to Persia and the area around Palestine, where Ibn Taymiyyah was one of its stars, before declining again during the Ottoman era, under the weight of its own rigidity and intolerance. Its geographical influence would slowly be reduced to the austere interior of the Arabian Peninsula, the arid plateau of Najd, home of the first Saudi kingdomwhere Muhammad ibn Abdelwahhab took it to another level.

See the article here:

Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Forty-Year Rivalry That Unraveled Culture, Religion, and Collective Memory in the Middle East, by Kim Ghattas:...

The United Kingdoms departure from the European Union is like a boat setting out to sea.

First, the rope is slung off the mooring. Next, the vessel manoeuvres through the harbour, its progress delayed by engine failure, a mutinous crew, and other boats getting in the way. The sky darkens. Is sailing still wise? The captain says yes and after a final tack, the boat rounds the breakwater, leaving safety behind and confronting the open ocean.

Why use a nautical metaphor for Brexit? Because the UK is an island, and sometimes geography can help explain politics.

The UK has always thought itself to be apart from Europe, despite its formal union over the past fifty years and its shared history for the last thousand. Its sense of difference of solipsism, even is wittily expressed in an apocryphal old newspaper headline: Fog in Channel: Continent cut off.

But why does the UK feel separate?

The limitations of any island are set by the sea, but the sea also presents possibilities. It washes through national mythology and, more prosaically, defines its economy. Britain is a trading nation, in which mercantile interests have often subordinated manufacturing. The French thinker Alexis de Tocqueville linked the sea to economic liberalism. After all, island nations have an interest in free exchange and open markets. (Abu Dhabi, the island emirate, has long been a trading hub too, with a character molded as much by saltwater as by sand). It is logical that free trade theory was first developed in Britain. Risk is the raison detre of the City of London.

The sea has also bred a peculiarly liberal political tradition in Britain. For much of history, Britain has had a bigger navy than army. Water, not land, underwrote its security. Britain hasnt been ransacked by a foreign force since the Norman conquest of 1066. Britains kings and queens have rarely kept large standing armies capable of imposing absolute domestic control. A state with these characteristics is usually likely to be less centralised and more plural than one whose troops menace its streets.

Economic and political liberalism are not uniquely British. But they are entrenched sensibilities, and they derive at least in part from the curious psychology of living on a small rock in a big ocean.

That same psychology translates into an intellectual tradition predicated on doubt. Unlike much of the earths landmass, the sea is contingent, fickle, unknowable. If you depend on the sea then, to a certain extent, you forfeit power and comprehension. The people on its shores must take the world with a pinch of salt.

Consider the "empiricism" of David Hume, Britains most luminous philosopher. Hume argued that we know for certain only that which we can ourselves see, hear or touch. Until the sun rises tomorrow, I cannot be sure that it will. If someone claims something that you cannot experience yourself, then you shouldnt necessarily believe them.

The general effect of this skeptical thinking is to weaken the basis for absolute authority. If nothing can be known for sure, and if knowledge is ultimately a matter of common sense or guesswork, then anyone asserting an absolutist vision whether of destiny, revolution, or progress is suspect.

For example, the French Revolution provoked revulsion in Britain. Edmund Burke, the Anglo-Irish polemicist and arch-critic of the revolution, wrote that the destruction of the "ancien regime" by fire and sword was dangerous not just because of its output in blood, but because it reflected an unjustified faith in universal principles.

Burkes view - that it is better to trust the independent thought of ordinary people than the fever-dreams of visionaries - was influential. Subsequent British thinkers, from John Stuart Mill to Isaiah Berlin, and from George Orwell to JG Ballard, have preached the perils of totalitarianism. Britain arguably has a heightened immunity to ideology and demagogues.

So how might this explain Brexit?

The European Union was conceived to establish permanent peace in Europe. It has a providential narrative and reflects a spirit of planning and design of grand, lasting solutions which on some level challenges Britains more piecemeal approach to social organisation. And it has been driven, among others, by France and Germany.

Unlike Britains sceptics and empiricists, the greatest French and German thinkers believe that reason can illuminate timeless truths. The rationalism of Descartes holds that logic alone can supply a full understanding of the universe. Germanys most outstanding figures Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche also, in different ways, sought perfect certainty: in metaphysics, history, law or morality. These thinkers offered systematic accounts of who man really is, deep down, and what he must do to become himself.

To some in Britain, the EU resembles this sort of enterprise and that is what makes it so troubling. The EUs pursuit of harmony is its original sin. On this analysis, Britain has a freewheeling personality, while the EU yearns after order. Britain cherishes open markets and minimal government, while the EU erects "dirigiste" institutions. Britain views man as fallible, the EU sees him as perfectible.

This perceived dichotomy is, of course, false.

First, for all its regulations, the chief purpose and effect of the EU is to enable trade. The EU is the worlds biggest single market and its precepts of free movement in people, goods and services are cosmopolitan by any standard.

Second, if the EU is supposed to represent a steady march towards utopia, then it is doing badly. Most steps towards greater integration are resisted or even reversed, and many members (including the UK) benefit from significant opt-outs. EU rules sometimes seem to be honoured more in the breach than in the observance.

Finally, Britain is not as much of a breezy outlier as it thinks. Other European states (notably the Netherlands and Denmark) have similar liberal traditions, while Britains own commitment to the doctrine of laissez-faire has never been entirely pure. Moreover, the discourse behind Brexit has sometimes displayed the very dogmatism which its votaries purport to oppose. The "us vs them" narrative is flawed.

But it is nonetheless unsurprising that the first country to decisively reject the EU is the UK, the rain-swept island off its north-west coast. Britains sense of difference, inspired by its specific place in the world, has led, eventually, to its departure from the European harbour.

The country must now embrace the future alone, charting its own course on the open ocean. How well it does remains to be seen. But one thing is clear: to succeed, Britain will need to catch a fair wind and reach deep into its seafaring soul.

Sam Williams is a writer in Abu Dhabi

Updated: January 30, 2020 07:05 PM

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Brexit: Britain slips its moorings - The National

Among the most dangerous arguments for racial profiling are the most rational. They are persuasive because they are by definition based on logic and statistics. The premise is that a stereotype is true, or more probably true than false, or at least more true of the group subjected to it than of other populations.

These utilitarian calculations can be about Chinese immigrant scientists who are alleged to be spies or African American youngsters who are alleged to be thugs. The same principles are at stake. The more successful we are eliminating old-school prejudice, the more it mutates into education-resistant forms. Instead of angry demagogues shouting obscenities to threaten violence, we now are confronted by calm academics displaying PowerPoint slides with percentages which are color coded literally and figuratively.

People who appear to be anything but extremists prefer these justifications for their attitudes. They even deny that they are bigots; they are merely reviewing evidence. Some use fancy terms, such as Bayesian inference, which is an important technique for revising predictions based on additional information, but which also can be abused like any other intellectual tool.

They assert openly that individuals of Chinese heritage have a propensity toward loyalty to the Chinese government, out of ethnic affinity, even if they are United States citizens. They add that the Chinese government is recruiting agents through such appeals. Thus, they insist, targeting Chinese Americans is appropriate. If one is guilty, others must be too.

Frank Wu

The problem is that we should believe what is rational and that leads us to suppose what is rational also is right. Yet there are many claims and public policies that are superficially reasonable yet morally wrong. That extends beyond discrimination. Philosophers have a term for it, the naturalistic fallacy, which consists of confusing descriptive claims about the world with normative claims about our ideals. People realize this: we would be appalled by an advocate for euthanizing children who are disabled, because cost-benefit analysis proves society would be better off economically. We can concede for the sake of discussion that the descriptive claim (disabled children cost more than they benefit, materially) is accurate, without concluding that the normative claim (they should be killed) follows.

Much that looks rational also is not. Thanks to confirmation bias, our tendency to exaggerate patterns to select the data conforming to our pre-existing assumptions, we discount warnings about risks.

Experiments, not to mention experience, demonstrates that the same behavior exhibited by whites and blacks is processed by observers very differently. The white youngster is acting up because they need treatment for attention deficit disorder, while the black kid is revealing tendencies toward future law breaking that should be punished preemptively, even if objectively their temper tantrums are identical. The suggestion that African Americans are biologically or culturally oriented toward criminality, because they happen to be overrepresented in the prison system, verges on comedy and arguably crosses the line except for its tragedy. It requires willful disregard of the causes of disparities, which include the self-fulfilling prophecy of racism.

Even if we were disinterested in civil rights and hostile to diversity, sophisticated empiricism would include collateral consequences. A thick description, to use the phrase of social scientists, of how the world works would incorporate the penalty to productivity caused by false positives. A person who wished only to maximize the gains generated by law enforcement investigations would account for the damage done by accusations which turn out to be erroneous if not malicious. That is not limited to the person who is affected, whose life may be ruined, and the community she belongs to, which suffers the cumulative losses, because others have invested in training that person who is cast aside without respect.

The crux of racial profiling is not improved with rationalism. At their heart, invidious stereotypes depend on using the identity of people (the classification of race or ethnicity) to deduce the actions of persons (espionage or theft). The Supreme Court, by and large, has come around. Legislation challenged for constitutionality must be rational. The judges err on the side of the government. Laws, however, that operate by dividing people according to a suspect classification such as race or ethnicity are said to trigger strict scrutiny. The judges demand an explanation.

Thanks to a movement for Black equality, which not only eliminated the formal, legal versions of bias but also created a consensus about informal, everyday norms, we continue our progress as a democracy. If we are fooled by bigots because they have lowered their voices and armed themselves with numbers, we will regress.

Frank H. Wu is the William L. Prosser Distinguished Professor at the University of California Hastings College of the Law and adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University.

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Beware the Racist Who Claims to Be Rational - Diverse: Issues in Higher Education

The Supreme Court of Israel yesterday resolved to its own satisfaction the complex question of what constitutes a Jew in Israeli law. But its verdict, reached by a 5-4 majority, promises to pose a series of cruel dilemmas for religious Jews, and carries the seeds of a major politico-religious storm both within the country and among Jews generally.

Sitting for the first time with nine of its 10 members, the court yesterday announced in Jerusalem that the children of Lieutenant-Commander Binyamin Shalit should be registered by the Ministry of the Interior as Jews, though their mother is a Scot of no declared religion. Under Rabbinical law Jewishness descends through the female line and, apart from conversion, it is not possible for the children of a non-Jewish woman to be considered Jews.

Thus for the first time, the law of the state differs from that of the Rabbinate in the most sensitive area of the Israeli consciousness. From time immemorial the Orthodox have maintained that there can be no separation of nationality and faith for the Jew. This tenet was observed by the Government when it refused to accept that Commander Shalits children could be shown on their identity cards as Jewish after their religion had been declared as none. The fact of a non-Jewish mother was held to be conclusive.

The problem was not entirely academic in that various rights and liabilities stem from the declaration of nationality Moslems, for example, may not serve in the Israel army the Commander held that a civil question was being determined on religious grounds.

Tradition From the time of the Palestine mandate there has been a tradition that each community in the country Jewish, Moslem, and Christian appointed a religious body to determine the law relating to personal status religion, marriage, divorce, and the like. This was maintained when the State of Israel was formed. Because of the circumstances of its foundation and the long history of the Diaspora it was probably inevitable that the influence of the strictly Orthodox Jews should be disproportionate.

The main impression to strike the visitor to Israel is the sometimes crazy mixture of fervent experimental socialism and rock-hard fundamentalist religion. I was once driving through an ultra modern housing estate when my car was stoned by outraged children who saw me breaking the rules of the Sabbath. They were not particularly contrite when they found I was not Jewish.

These Orthodox elements represent about 20 per cent of the population, and every Government since independence has had to rely on the religious parties to form part of the coalition. At present the New Religious Party holds three portfolios in the Cabinet, including the crucial Ministry of the Interior. There have been strong reports that Mrs Meir, the Prime Minister, has given undertakings to upset the courts ruling by new legislation.

Russian Jews? But the consequent debate seems likely to open some raw wounds. If the decision is repealed what will be the position of the Russian Jews? This community, two million strong, is of huge emotional significance in Israel.

But there has been a fair amount of intermarriage down the years and many Russian families who regard themselves as Jewish, and are certainly so treated by the Soviet Government, have non-Jewish mothers. Are they to return to the homeland and then find themselves disqualified as Jewish in the name of Judaism? And what about American Jews, whose funds largely support the State? They have intermarried too, and are not likely to be wildly happy at being told their children are beyond the pale.

The issue has always been there, of course, but it has been tidied away because of its embarrassments. More than one-third of the Jews in Germany who perished under the Nazis had married Gentiles but the Israelis accepted the reparations paid on their behalf and that of their children. No one could seriously argue that they should not have done, but that is the danger which the Orthodox Jews now find themselves in.

With one extreme Orthodox sect disputing even the right of the Jewish State to exist as a secular entity one should not, perhaps, look for too much rationalism in the debate. It strikes deep into the subconsciousness of a race which has been concerned for two millennia to maintain its identity against every assault. But one of its results may well be to disentangle Israel from some of the stifling religiosity which was the price of its foundation. And that, in turn, could even lead to some sort of advance in the whole political stalemate of the Middle East.

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Israel rules on what constitutes a Jew archive, 1970 - The Guardian

Key point: Perhaps World War III will come one daybut today is not that day.

Will Tehran and Washington let slip the dogs of war following last weeks aerial takedown of Qasem Soleimani, commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corpss IRGC) Quds Force? You could be forgiven for thinking so considering the hot takes that greeted the news of the drone strike outside Baghdad. For example, one prominent commentator, the Council on Foreign Relations Richard Haass, opined that the Middle East region (and possibly the world) will be the battlefield.

Color me skeptical. The apocalypse is not at hand.

Haass is right in the limited sense that irregular military operations now span the globe. Terrorists thirst to strike at far as well as near enemies in hopes of degrading their will to fight. They respect no national boundaries and never have. Frontiers are likewise murky in the cyber realm, to name another battleground with no defined battlefronts. The United States and Iran have waged cyber combat for a decade or more, dating to the Stuxnet worm attack on the Iranian nuclear complex in 2010.

The coming weeks and months may see irregular warfare prosecuted with newfound vigor through such familiar unconventional warmaking methods. Its doubtful Tehran would launch into conventional operations, stepping onto ground it knows America dominates. To launch full-scale military reprisals would justify full-scale U.S. military reprisals that, in all likelihood, would outstrip Irans in firepower and ferocity. The ayatollahs who oversee the Islamic Republic fret about coming up on the losing end of such a clash. As well they might, considering hard experience.

So the outlook is for more of the same. Thats a far cry from the more fevered prophecies of World War III aired since Soleimani went to his reward. To fathom Tehrans dilemma, lets ask a fellow who knew a thing or two about Persian ambitions. (The pre-Islamic Persian Empire, which bestrode the Middle East and menaced Europe, remains the lodestone of geopolitical successeven for Islamic Iran.)

The Athenian historian Thucydides chronicled the Peloponnesian War, a fifth-century-B.C. maelstrom that engulfed the Greek world. Persia was a major player in that contest. In fact, it helped decide the endgame when the Great King supplied Athens antagonist, Sparta, with the resources to build itself into a naval power capable of defeating the vaunted Athenian navy at sea. But Thucydides also meditates on human nature at many junctures in his history, deriving observations of universal scope. At one stage, for instance, he has Athenian ambassadors posit that three of the prime movers impelling human actions are fear, honor, and interest. The emissaries appear to speak for the father of history.

Fear, honor, interest. There are few better places to start puzzling out why individuals and societies do what they do and glimpse what we ought to do. How does Thucydides hypothesis apply to post-Soleimani antagonism between the United States and Iran? Well, the slaying of the Quds Force chieftain puts the ball squarely in the Islamic Republics court. The mullahs must reply to the strike in some fashion. To remain idle would be to make themselves look weak and ineffectual in the eyes of the region and of ordinary Iranians.

In fecklessness lies danger. Doubly so now, after protests convulsed parts of Iran last November. The ensuing crackdown cost hundreds of Iranians their livesand revealed how deeply resentments against the religious regime run. No autocrat relishes weakness, least of all an autocrat whose rule has come under duress from within. A show of power and steadfastness is necessary to cow domestic opponents.

But fear is an omnidirectional, multiple-domain thing for Iranian potentates. External threats abound. Iranians are keenly attuned to geographic encirclement, for instance. They view their country as the Middle Easts rightful heavyweight. Yet U.S. forces or their allies surround and constrain the Islamic Republic from all points of the compass with the partial exception of the northeastern quadrant, which encompasses the stans of Central Asia, and beyond them Russia.

Look at your map. The U.S. Navy commands the westerly maritime flank, backed up by the U.S. Air Force. Americas Gulf Arab allies ring the western shores of the Persian Gulf. U.S. forces remain in Iraq to the northwest, where Suleimani fell, and in Afghanistan to the east. Even Pakistan, to the southeast, is an American treaty ally, albeit an uneasy one. These are forbidding surroundings. Tendrils of U.S. influence curl all around the Islamic Republics borders. Breaking out seems like a natural impulse for Iranian diplomacy and military strategy.

And yet. However fervent about its geopolitical ambitions, the Iranian leadership will be loath to undertake measures beyond the intermittent bombings, support to militants elsewhere in the region, and ritual denunciations of the Great Satan that have been mainstays of Iranian foreign policy for forty years now. Iranian leaders comprehend the forces arrayed against them. A serious effort at a breakout will remain premature unless and until they consummate their bid for atomic weaponry. The ability to threaten nuclear devastation may embolden them to trybut that remains for the future.

Next, honor. Irregular warfare is indecisive in itself, but it can provide splashy returns on a modest investment of resources and effort. Having staked their political legitimacy on sticking it to the Great Satan and his Middle Eastern toadies, the ayatollahs must deliver regular incremental results. Direct attacks on U.S. forces make good clickbait; so do pictures showing IRGC light surface combatants tailing U.S. Navy task forces; so do attacks on vital economic infrastructure in U.S. allies such as Saudi Arabia. And headlines convey the image of a virile power on the move.

The honor motive, then, merges with fear. Iranians fear being denied the honor they consider their due as the natural hegemon of the Gulf region and the Islamic world.

And lastly, interest. Mischief-making must suffice for Iran until it can amass the material wherewithal to make itself a hegemon. Its fascinating that Thucydides lists material gain last among forces that animate human beings. After all, foreign-policy specialists list it first. Interest is quantifiable, and it seems to feed straight into calculations of cost, benefit, and risk. It makes statecraft seem rational!

Theres no way to know for sure after two millennia, but it seems likely the sage old Greek meant to deflate such excesses of rationalism. Namely, he regarded human nature as being about more than things we can count, like economic output or a large field army. For Thucydides cost/benefit arithmetic takes a back seat to not-strictly-rational passionssome of them dark, such as rage and spite, and others brightthat drive us all.

And indeed, for Iranians material interest constitutes the way to rejuvenate national honor while holding fear at bay. Breaking the economic blockade manifest in, say, the Trump administrations maximum pressure strategy would permit Tehran to revitalize the countrys moribund oil and gas sector. Renewed export trade would furnish wealth. Some could go into accoutrements of great power such as a high-tech navy and air force.

In turn Iranian leaders could back a more ambitious diplomacy with steel. They would enjoy the option of departing from their purely irregular, troublemaking ways and competing through more conventional methods. Or, more likely, they would harness irregular means as an adjunct to traditional strategic competition. Material gain, in short, not just satisfies economic needs and wants but amplifies martial might. In so doing it satisfies non-material cravings for renown and geopolitical say-so.

And the American side? Repeat this process. Refract U.S. policy and strategy through Thucydides prism of fear, honor, and interest, consider how Iranian and American motives may intersect and interact, and see what light that appraisal shines into the future. My take: perhaps World War III will come one daybut today is not that day.

James Holmes is J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College and the author of A Brief Guide to Maritime Strategy, out last month. The views voiced here are his alone. This article first appeared earlier this month.

Image: Flickr.

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Why America And Iran Won't Go To War Anytime Soon - The National Interest Online

It was early summer, and I was on the verge of turning 40. I found myself entertaining a recurring daydream of escaping from time. I would be hustling my son out the door to get him to school, or walking briskly to work on the day of a deadline, or castigating myself for being online when I should have been methodically and efficiently putting words on paper, and I would have this vision of myself as a character in a video game discovering a secret level. This vision was informed by the platform games I loved as a child Super Mario Bros, Sonic the Hedgehog and so on in which the character you controlled moved across the screen from left to right through a scrolling landscape, encountering obstacles and adversaries as you progressed to the end of the level. In this daydream, I would see myself pushing against a wall or lowering myself down the yawning mouth of a pipe, and thereby discovering this secret level, this hidden chamber where I could exist for a time outside of time, where the clock was not forever running down to zero.

My relationship with time had always been characterised by a certain baleful anxiety, but as I approached the start of the decade in which I would have no choice but to think of myself as middle-aged, this anxiety intensified. I was always in the middle of some calculation or quantification with respect to time, and such thoughts were always predicated on an understanding of it as a precious and limited resource. What time was it right now? How much time was left for me to do the thing I was doing, and when would I have to stop doing it to do the next thing?

This resource being as limited as it was, should I not be doing something better with it, something more urgent or interesting or authentic? At some point in my late 30s, I recognised the paradoxical source of this anxiety: that every single thing in life took much longer than I expected it to, except for life itself, which went much faster, and would be over before I knew where I was.

Much of this had to do with being a parent. Having two young children had radically altered my relationship with the days and hours of my life. Almost every moment was accounted for in a way that it had never been before. But it was also the sheer velocity of change, the state of growth and flux in which my children existed, and the constant small adjustments that were necessary to accommodate these changes. I would realise that my son no longer mispronounced a particular word in that adorable way he once had, or that his baby sister had stopped doing that thing of nodding very seriously and emphatically when she heard a song she liked that she was, in fact, no longer a baby at all and that those eras had now passed for good, along with countless others that would pass unnoticed and unremembered, and I would feel sad and remorseful about not having lived more fully in those moments, not having stopped or at least slowed the flow of time. And when I felt this way, I would succumb to the daydream of the video game, the secret level, the escape from time itself.

My son turned six around then, itself a significant milestone in that he was, for the first time, at an age I myself could dimly remember being. And with this new phase of parenthood, I began to think how strange it was, given how precious those early years now seemed to me, that I spent so little time thinking about my own childhood, the lost civilisation on which my adult self now stood. The motion of the video game unfurled rightward, and I had no choice but to follow its motion towards the future, towards the completion of the game itself.

And then one day, about a week and a half before I turned 40, I found myself alone in a forest in Devon, where I discovered this secret level of my daydreams.

Here is how I did it: I came to a clearing in a forest by a riverbank in Dartmoor national park, far enough from any trail that it seemed unlikely I would encounter anyone while I was there. I gathered some loose branches and stones and arranged them in a circle of about 10 metres in diameter, and then I walked into the circle and did not leave it until the same time the following day.

The short version of this story is that nothing happened in that time: that I did nothing and witnessed nothing, experienced only the passage of the hours and minutes, and the languid dynamics of my own boredom. The long version isnt exactly The Iliad, either, but in that version something could be said to have happened. Because by the time I walked out of that circle the following afternoon, Id had an entirely unexpected and intensely cathartic encounter with the passage of time, and with my own mortality.

This is a practice commonly referred to as a wilderness solo. The basic principle is that you go out into nature, the wilder and more remote the better, and confine yourself to one very small area for a set period a day, two days, three days, sometimes longer. During this period, you forego anything that might come between yourself and your own solitude. No phone. No books or other reading material. You dont build a fire, because building a fire is a way to keep yourself busy, watching the dance of its flames a primitive entertainment. Most participants choose not to bring food, because when you have got nothing to do for a day and a night, the prospect of eating a sandwich can easily become an all-encompassing preoccupation, undermining the entire project of unmediated communion with nature. After that period of immersion, you step outside of your circle, and you re-enter the world.

Until fairly recently, I was not a person who had a lot of time for nature. I wished it well in all its dealings, and was glad to take its side in any quarrel with the forces arrayed against it, but my regard for it was essentially abstract, and I would just as soon have left it to its own devices. Nature was something I encountered as scenery, an experience to be consumed before getting back in the car and continuing on my way. But about the middle of 2016, amid the endlessly unfurling horrors of that years news, I became increasingly preoccupied with how this darkening political reality seemed to foreshadow a near future defined by a permanent state of climate emergency. And these things felt connected in some way that resisted easy definition: the speed and efficiency with which technology was gutting democracy and alienating us from the reality of human suffering, and the increasing extremity of our estrangement from the natural world. I was thinking all the time about climate change, about the future my children would be forced to live in, about what we had done and were continuing to do to the world. But at some point it dawned on me that I didnt know the first thing about that world. What I knew was the great indoors in which I lived my life: the insides of buildings, the insides of books, the interlocking interiors of the internet and my own mind. When I talked about nature, I didnt know what I meant. In a way that was somehow both vague and urgent, I felt that it was time to go outside.

I came across an organisation called Way of Nature UK that arranged group wilderness retreats, and I signed up for a trip. This was how, in the spring of 2017, I ended up spending a week with a group of about 20 other people in a remote wilderness reserve called Alladale in the Scottish Highlands, towards the end of which everyone went off to various locations and did a solo. How did I feel about sitting by a river for 24 hours and doing absolutely nothing, aside from looking at grass and clouds and water and so on? I felt slightly intimidated. I felt uncomfortable. I felt, above all, reflexively cynical, in the way that I was reflexively cynical about pretty much anything that felt new-agey or hippyish or otherwise overly earnest to me. But over the course of that week, and in particular the 24 hours I spent alone by the river, that brittle carapace of cynicism began to give way. What affected me most deeply about that time alone in nature was the aspect of it I had initially been most daunted by. The experience of the solo is the experience of time itself, in its rawest and most unmediated form.

When I stepped into that ad-hoc ceremonial circle in Devon last summer, it had been over a year since I had performed the ritual, and I found myself craving the solitude and immersion it provided.

Andres Roberts, Way of Natures co-founder, picked me up that morning outside my hotel in Bristol, near where he lives. I had got to know him pretty well on the two previous trips I had done with him, and my new enthusiasm for spending time alone in nature had been informed by his quietly ecstatic way of talking about the wilderness. As we drove south along the M5 through intermittent downpours of rain, he spoke about his work, and the ideas underpinning it. If there was a single word that encapsulated the value he was trying to incubate, that word was slowness. There was an extraordinary transformative power, he insisted, in the practice of sitting and doing nothing, and thereby slowing your mind and body to a meditative rhythm in nature.

One of Robertss major themes was the idea that our particular civilisation, at our particular time, was unusual in not having as part of its cultural repertoire some ritual whereby during periods of change or upheaval people went out alone into nature. When he talked about the practice of the wilderness solo, he talked about it in such terms as a ritual whereby you stepped out of the flux of the world, in order to gain some perspective on the flux, and your place within it.

A word he used a lot in talking about his work, and in describing the experience and value of the nature solo, was re-enchantment. He was of the opinion that most people, most of the time, lived life in a state of disenchantment. What he wanted to do, above all, was to help people strip away the layers of hard rationalism that accrued around the adult mind, so that they could return to a more childlike engagement with the world. And in reaching this state, he said, this place of re-enchantment, we could come to see ourselves not as separate from and in control of nature, but as part of it.

It was harder than anticipated, finding a solo spot. We had settled on Dartmoor for its proximity to Bristol and its relatively humane weather outlook, but it was not a place with which Roberrts was particularly familiar. We followed at first a northward trail, planning to cross a footbridge into deeper forest on the far side of the river, but when we eventually found it, the gate to the footbridge was firmly padlocked.

Further along the trail we met a man out for a walk with his dog. Early 70s, bearded, wax jacketed, he wore the dogs lead draped athwart himself shoulder to hip in the manner of a mayoral sash. Roberts asked him whether there was a bridge we could cross further on. He shook his head and courteously informed us, in a Devonshire accent as soft and mulchy as the ground beneath our feet, that we were on land privately owned by one of his neighbours, and that the more densely forested territory across the river was private, too, and that we technically required a permit to walk this trail.

We turned and strolled back with him toward the road, and as he chatted to us about the cottage he and his wife had recently renovated, and their troubles with the local conservation society who disapproved of their alterations to the property, I was struck by how easily the concept of private land ownership could be made to feel absurd. It seemed perfectly rational in towns and cities, in housing estates and apartment buildings, for people to own their little portions of the world. But here, on the flourishing banks of a torrential river, the thought that this place was the sole property of some mere person that that person could own the deeds to a river bank or a forest seemed deeply and disorientingly counterintuitive, in a way that threatened to undermine the whole spirit of our enterprise. It felt impossible, as I put it to Roberts after we parted company with the man, to pursue the kind of immersive experience of a place we were after when you worried you might be trespassing.

Yes, he said. Although this is England. Literally half of the land in this country is owned by less than 1% of the population. A handful of aristocrats and corporations.

He reassured me, though, that we would find a suitable place for my solo, on commonly owned land where I wouldnt have to worry about some local squire coming along and telling me I had no business having an immersive experience with his privately owned nature.

We found another trail, running northward along the River Dart. Roberts lowered his voice to not much more than a whisper, eventually stopping talking altogether, and slowed his pace so that I was walking well ahead of him. I understood this deliberate minimisation of his own presence to mean that we had entered a kind of buffer zone between the outside world and the solo space. This was one of the great charms of how he worked; without his having seemed to do anything very specific, you were made to understand that some ritual was underway, that you were somehow in the midst of the sacred.

The point of being here is to be here. An hour or two into my time in the forest, I wrote these words in my notebook, and drew a box around them to emphasise their authority and self-sufficiency. And then I stopped writing words in my notebook altogether, because writing words is my work, and I was wary of taking an utilitarian approach to the solo. The point of being there, after all, was to be there. (The cynical reader might argue that the point of being there was to write about being there an argument the cynical writer will, on balance, concede, if only to avoid getting bogged down in the ontological complexities of the whole relationship between experiencing things and writing about them.)

And what did I do, while I was being there, in the forest, by the river? Nothing, more or less. The first half hour or so, there was a certain amount of housekeeping to attend to. I had to find exactly the right spot: not too damp; flat enough to pitch a tent once night began to fall; sheltered from the elements, but not so sheltered as to obscure the view of the river and the far bank. I had to mark out the circle, of course. I had to gather flat stones and sticks and bits of branches, and arrange them around a beech tree I had chosen as the central feature of my location. It could, I suppose, have been an oak tree, or an elm, or some other type of lofty deciduous of which I, being no Robert MacFarlane, had no prior knowledge.

But once all that was out of the way, I had to confront that fact of having nothing to do. In theory, I should have greeted this experience with open arms. I had, in fact, been looking forward to it for weeks to having no tasks to attend to, no places to go, no obligations to meet. Here I was with nothing to do but inhabit the spaciousness of every passing moment, to bathe at leisure in the pooled flow of time itself. In theory, it was the dream. In practice, if I could have taken out my phone and gone on Twitter I surely would have. (Thankfully, this possibility was foreclosed to me by the fact of having no mobile coverage. In any case, Id stowed my phone in my backpack in order to stop myself violating the spirit of the wilderness solo by spending the whole time looking through photos of my children, or opening up the New Yorker app and immersing myself not in nature, but in back issues of a magazine I never had the time to read, for reasons gestured at above.)

When youre actually in it, the reality of the solo is, at least at first, one of total boredom. I cannot stress enough how little there is to do when you have confined yourself to the inside of a small circle of stones and sticks in a forest. But it is an instructive kind of boredom, insofar as boredom is the raw and unmediated experience of time. It is considered best practice not to have a watch, and to turn off your phone and keep it somewhere in the bottom of a bag so as to avoid the temptation to constantly check how long youve been out and how long you have left. And as you become untethered from your accustomed orientation in time from always knowing what time it is, how long you have to do the thing youre doing, when you have to stop doing it to do the next thing you begin to glimpse a new perspective on the anxiety that arises from that orientation. Because this anxiety, which amounts to a sort of cost-benefit analysis of every passing moment, is a quintessentially modern predicament.

As weirdly counterintuitive as it feels to acknowledge, human beings are not naturally predisposed to think of life in terms of seconds and hours, of how they might be optimised. The development of mechanical clocks during the middle ages and, later, the advent of widespread precision timekeeping that facilitated the industrial revolution, fundamentally changed the way in which the human animal related to the world. Time became both an abstraction and a commodity, a raw material to be bought and sold, saved or squandered.

The mass adoption of this new conception of time, abstract and removed from the organic context of nature, was central to the rise of capitalism, and to the accelerating mechanisation of life. Beginning in the 14th century, as the American cultural critic Neil Postman put it, the clock made us into time-keepers, and then time-savers, and now time-servers. In the process, we have learned irreverence toward the sun and the seasons, for in a world made up of seconds and minutes, the authority of nature is superseded. To sit by a river for a day and a night is to experience the reinstatement, if only temporarily, of that authority.

What did I do, sitting in that forest? I drank a lot of water, because I had brought a lot of water, and drinking it was, if only in the most basic of senses, something to do. And because I drank a lot of water, I took a great many resulting pisses around the far side of the tree, and this too presented something to do, however minor. I would occasionally treat myself to a bit of a stand, or even a little stroll around my circle, but mostly I was content to sit propped against my backpack with my legs spread before me on the soft carpet of leaves. I spent a lot of time looking at those leaves: holding them up to the light, observing the delicate webbings, the desiccated veins, crumbling them slowly between my fingers. This, I admit, was only slightly more interesting than doing nothing at all.

The tree, in time, became a central object of my attention. I cant say how long I spent standing in front of its trunk, staring at its covering of bright green moss, its gnarled protuberances of bark, but it must have been at least an hour. The moss was leafy, and felt both delicate and spongily resilient beneath my hand, and the longer I stared at it, the more I came to feel that I was gazing downward from a great height at a forest, that the moss was a canopy of leaves and the bark the ground beneath. The surface of the tree was its own ecosystem, expansive and intricate, and when I looked closely enough I saw that there were tiny insects everywhere, spiders and other many-legged creatures, whom I imagined living out their days aware of no other world than that little vastness, that forest within a forest.

My own incapacity to give this tree a name seemed suddenly strange to me, and slightly sad. In the ordinary run of things, if I were curious enough about what kind of tree I was looking at, I would have just gone on Google, or downloaded one of those tree-recognising apps, but this option was not available to me. Then it occurred to me that there was something about the not knowing that was somehow right. Not having a human name to give the tree, a category in which to put it, made the tree more real and present to me than it otherwise would have, or so I allowed myself to believe.

At some point it came to my attention that I was no longer bored, and that I had not been bored for some time. This is not to say that I was in a state of high mental stimulation, but that the hours of inactivity had induced in me a kind of meditative stupor, whereby I was receptive to the information of the environment to the ceaseless clamour of the river, the chattering of the birds overhead, the urgent whisperings of the leaves in the breeze, the modulations of temperature and light but uninclined to think much about this information, or anything else. I had, I realised, become attuned to the frequencies of the forest. I had found the secret level.

This is a thing that has happened to me whenever I have been alone in nature for an extended period: there occurs, some hours in, a subtle but profound modulation in consciousness whereby I come to experience myself as part of the place I am in, as an organism among organisms. This is a state of mind in which I can watch a small spider crawl along my arm for many minutes, feeling a kind of sentimental fellowship with this busy, delicate creature, whom in the normal run of things I would not hesitate to brush off in irritation or disgust.

In these moments, I find myself thinking of the place itself as somehow conscious of my presence. To be alone in a forest, and to be thinking of the forest as somehow aware of you: I will acknowledge that this sounds like the very substance of nightmare, but, in fact, it is a strangely beautiful and quietly moving experience, and I think it must be what people mean when they talk about intuiting the presence of God.

The word that comes to mind is immanence a term I learned as a philosophy undergraduate and which I did not remotely understand until I began to have these experiences of being alone in nature. In his 1836 essay Nature, American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson identifies precisely this sublime phenomenon. The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister, he writes, is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them. Its a phenomenon that he views as both an apprehension of the divine and a return to the childs perception of the world. In the woods, he writes, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child.

I am struck now by how strongly these lines of Emerson these ideas of casting off years, of attaining the spirit of early childhood resonate with the strangest and most unsettling and, in the end, most wonderful aspect of my experience in the woods. While I was there, I didnt spend much time thinking about reaching 40, and whatever lay beyond. What I thought about was the distant past of my own childhood, which I spent in the countryside, in a house beside a small wood with a little stream running through it: a tamely arcadian surrounding which provided the setting for countless imagined adventures, battles and voyages. Something about sitting alone among the trees, looking at the river, put me in mind of that period of my life. The fact of having all this time now, and nothing to do with it; the slow process by which intense boredom had given way to a kind of absent-minded and playful immersion: these were things I associated with my own childhood. I remembered what Andres Roberts had said about re-enchantment, about time in nature as a means of returning to a more childlike engagement with the world.

And then for a long time I thought about my son, of how he existed in a thin space between reality and fantasy. I thought of how attached he was to his favourite toy, a small brown rabbit he carried everywhere with him, clutched in the crook of an arm, of how real and alive that rabbit was to him. This was in my mind because the previous evening, as I had unpacked at my hotel, I saw that my wife had slipped among my camping things a stuffed rabbit I myself had been deeply attached to when I was small. She had found it on a recent visit to my parents house, where it had been lying around for years in my childhood bedroom. That rabbit, with its floppy long limbs and its black button eyes and its faded blue dungarees, had been as real to me, as invested with surplus love, as my sons stuffed rabbit now was to him. I thought of how soon a year from now, or maybe less my sons rabbit would stop being real to him, how soon his world would lose the magic he himself had breathed into it.

And I thought with a pang of how I was always hurrying him to get dressed, to get out the door for school, to finish his dinner, to get ready for bed and of how heedlessly I was inflicting upon him my own anxious awareness of time as an oppressive force. How before he knew where he was, his own childhood would have receded into the past, and he too would be out of the secret level of childhood and into the laterally scrolling world of adulthood.

As the sun was going down in Dartmoor, I put up my tent and, in the dwindling light of the forest, rummaged in my backpack for my head-mounted torch. Inside the backpack, my hand encountered again the familiar softness of the stuffed rabbit. I held the toy a moment, smiled again at this touching and witty gesture of my wifes, and then decided to take a photo of it to send to her when I had mobile coverage the following day. I propped the rabbit against the outer lining of the tent and turned away to rummage again in my bag for my phone, and when I turned back I was overcome by a shock of recognition. I was seeing the rabbit not as I had seen it a moment before, as an intriguing relic of the submerged civilisation of my childhood, but as I had seen it as a small boy.

The rabbit was entirely alive to me in that moment. It was as though all the love I had invested in this object in those days was still contained within it, within him, and the experience of its sudden animation was overwhelming. I was looking at the rabbit, and the rabbit was looking at me, and it was seeing me, and I was both myself and the child I had once been. Whatever complex of emotions I was feeling was neither sentimental nor nostalgic in character, but powerfully existential. I felt simultaneously closer to myself as a child than I had in all the years of adulthood, and yet that sudden closeness came as an experience of loss, of immeasurable distance. It was as though time had folded in on itself, and the present was touching the past. There I was, as close to 40 as made no difference, alone in a forest on a moonless night and weeping with cathartic abandon at the sight of a threadbare stuffed animal. I was mourning my childhood, and the mourning felt long overdue.

I woke early, and lay still for a time listening to water dropping from the branches and leaves onto the outer layer of my tent. I had slept more soundly than I had expected, given the hard ground beneath me and the mummifying strictures of the sleeping bag. The absolute darkness and solitude had aroused neither loneliness nor unease. I had felt strangely at home with the sounds and silences of the forest at night.

Until very recently, the idea of spending a rainy morning alone in a forest would have been a profoundly unattractive one, but I found myself relishing the prospect of these last hours. The restlessness I had experienced the previous day, in that last stretch of the solo, was entirely absent now, the question of what to do with myself for several hours having come to seem nowhere near as pressing. The idea of such a question felt, in fact, somehow absurd. I went to the edge of my circle and sat down, and looked at the river.

You would have thought that Id have been more or less done with looking at the river by now, but in fact I was eager to get stuck into it again after the long night-time hours of not looking at the river. In terms of the diversions that were presently available to me, looking at the river was the hottest ticket in town. And so I sat there at the edge of my little circle on the riverbank and binge-watched the river. There is, it turns out, a lot going on at any one time in a river, especially if youve got nothing else to be looking at.

There were birds coming and going all the time, skimming low over the water and landing on the banks. There was the occasional ambiguous shape flitting on the periphery of my vision that may well have been some kind of leaping fish. I attended in particular to a bit of river directly in front of me where the water plunged low into a sort of miniature waterfall, immediately after which it appeared to run backward into itself, a phenomenon I couldnt begin to try to account for, but for which the most likely culprit seemed to be gravity. I stared at this spectacle for so long that a kind of optical illusion began to assert itself, whereby when I glanced up at the opposite bank, the long grass and drooping ferns seemed themselves to be engaged in sympathetic movements, swirling impossibly before my eyes. It could have been the effect of hours of meditative inactivity, or it could just have been hunger, but there was something mildly trippy about the experience.

Around noon, I heard a gently insistent bird call coming from a little way upriver. I turned toward it, and saw Roberts standing not far off with his back against a tree trunk, making an owl sound with his hands cupped to his mouth. I gathered my things, and we walked in silence out of the forest, him keeping several paces behind me. This seemed both entirely deliberate and entirely natural, and its effect was to preserve a measure of my solitude as I gradually emerged from the circle, out of the secret level and back into time.

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Splendid isolation: how I stopped time by sitting in a forest for 24 hours - The Guardian