Can the British Government Have it Both Ways?

The British government is currently pushing the idea that an infusion of state sponsored civic education amongst its young Muslim population will help to prevent acts of domestic terrorism in the future. The government funded program is hoped to transcend traditional Islamic education in the country. By and large religious instruction is taught in Mosques by conservative Imams hailing from the generally alienated Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities that are walled off from mainstream British society. In fact, many do not even speak English, let alone have a grasp of the issues that young British born Muslims face in terms of finding their way in what can be a hostile society. Critics charge that these traditional teachings tend to be literal interpretations of text that lack an interrogation of the deeper meanings associated with them and how they might relate to the experience of young Muslims in Britain. From literal and archaic notions of jihad, for example, it is argued that young Muslims may come to wrongly perceive that violence must be waged upon Western governments and those that support them. Further, and what is at the heart of the matter, these traditional teachings are criticized for saying little about how the Koran can be a guide to navigating the complexities of modern life. The West can be a confusing and alienating place for young people whose identity is being competed for by both Western values and cultural-religious tradition.

In this regard, we should applaud the effort to challenge what seems to be a form of conservative religious education that serves little purpose in helping young Muslims to find a balance between religion and life in Western society. Especially since religion is supposed to play the important role of acting as a touch stone for how to live a moral, valuable, and fulfilling life. Frequently young Muslims ask what the point is of having to remember verses and stories from religious text if there is no connection to how one should handle the challenges of daily living and modern realities. Not being able to find the kind of significant guidance from traditional elder Imams can be a catalyst for further alienation and a misconstrued interpretation of Islam.

Despite what seems to be a fine idea, there is still a sense of illegitimacy of such a program being pushed by the British government. How can they promote a program like this on the one hand and yet continue to fail at the decades old problem of assimilating these mostly South Asian Islamic communities into British society on the other? The failure of assimilation, coupled with a underlying prejudice among Britons, is the source of the alienation and frustration experienced by many young British Muslims. It also seems quite unlikely that the British state can continue as the U.S.’s number one ally in Iraq and the war on terror, which is perceived as the number one threat facing Islam and fuels the calls for jihad, yet seek to curb extremism at home through civic education alone. It seems as though the British government wants to have it both ways.

Eradicating Islamic political violence in Britain requires the government to come to terms with what is a crisis of prejudice and a failure of assimilation amongst its Muslim population. Coming to grips with these social realities and seeking to make change should be the task of the government; though not religious education. That task must be left to progressive and forward looking members of the Islamic community. Their charge is to demonstrate that the Koran can indeed speak to the realities faced by the British Muslim youth in meaningful ways.

Modest Mouse

If you havn't yet, you **must** see Modest Mouse when they come to your neck of the woods. I've listened to the band for a few years now and was able to catch about an hour of their show in Philly on Sunday night. I know I'm going to get squashed for this by their horde of dedicated indy rock fans, but I feel like they have almost a Greatful Dead vibe when playing live, especially since they sport two drummers (who are phenomenal). The icing on the cake, for me at least, is MM's new addition Johnny Marr of The Smiths fame. I remember dancing and just rocking out at the show and every once in a while glancing over to stage right and thinking, "fuck, that's Johnny Marr!" What a great summer of music for me. I saw Morrissey AND Johhny Marr! Probably the closest I'll get to a Smiths reunion ever...

2107: “You People Lived in Filth!” – A sort of book review of Bill McDonough and Michael Braungart’s Cradle to Cradle

One hundred years isn’t a long time. Yet, in the last one hundred years we can account for radical changes in the expectations that we - in the West at least - have concerning the standards of the food we eat and the conditions that we live in. We readily expect that our waste will neatly leave our homes, our malls, our schools, workplaces, and public spots en route to some place where it disappears from sight and smell forever. In fact, we rarely think about whether our waste ends up burnt, buried, or recycled, nor whether the food we dine on is thoroughly inspected and safe. We can think back to 1907 as a period in which there was nothing in the way of food safety standards (though a movement in that direction was initiated as a result of Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle, which was published that same year). Nor was there any notion of labor rights, environmental protection, and many of the sanitation procedures that we often take for granted nowadays.

Looking back through history ever further, to the crowded city streets of Paris, London, or Rome in the 17^th and 18^th century, reveals a more distasteful reality of how people lived. The blood of slaughtered animals, along with human excrement and other waste flowed through the sewers of these magnificent cities. “How did people live like this?” we might wonder. We shutter to think about living in such conditions, which allowed for the rapid spread of pestilence and sickness, not to mention unthinkable stench. While this may still be the experience of too many in the developing world, a signal of the progress and greatness of the modernized West has been our ability to escape the condition of living in our own waste.

Yet I’ve wondered recently how those living in 2107 will look upon the collective condition of the world as it stands today? Will they think that we live in filth? Despite the fact that we can split atoms, fly space crafts around the solar system, cure many illnesses, make electricity from the sun’s rays, and communicate with each other in a myriad of digital ways, I wonder if they will ask why we still chose to live in our waste? I think that they will find it extremely perplexing that a society as developed as ours, who has the self awareness and knowledge about the harm that we inflict on ourselves and for posterity - not to mention the multitude of living systems that we are embedded in - refused to develop a different course for humanity.

When I say that we live in filth I mean that we continue to choke on unsafe air from the cars we drive and the outdated and dangerous ways that we engage in mass industrialization. I mean that we continue to produce millions and millions of consumable products made from an array of unsafe chemicals that we know little about and which we simply burn or bury after we use them one or two times. I find it so perplexing that industry continues to spends so much time and energy developing products that will only be used for a small fraction of time by consumers, yet will spend hundreds of years in landfills (I’m thinking especially of the enormous amount of plastic packaging that most products come in, only to be discarded immediately).

We dump many of the items that we have no more use for into ever expanding landfills that are getting closer and closer to the places we live and the sources of water we eventually come to drink. We are, in effect, living in our own waste. We put zero amount of effort into thinking of ways to design the same products that we rely on daily so that they are not harmful for humans or the environments in which we live. Scratch that, we have the technology and the know how for making safer and better products, however we lack leaders (both political & business) with the will, courage, and vision to bring humanity into the next industrial revolution. The first industrial revolution centered on extracting resources from the Earth (with little thought of replacing them) and putting these resources through production processes that have amounted to harming both human and non-human life for many years to come. The next industrial revolution will be about reengineering the production of consumer goods so that the stuff we make is in accordance with our natural environment. It will be about plastics that are biodegradable and the eradication of materials that are not. It will be about more intelligent approaches to designing buildings, which will utilize natural light, wind patterns, and the surrounding ecosphere to produce happier places to work and live, and which no longer rely on burning fossil fuels for cooling, heating, and sanitation. It will be about re-conceptualizing how we design, plan, and imagine the cities that most of humanity has come to chose to live in.

I’m currently drinking a soda out of a plastic bottle made from polymers derived from petroleum. This bottle, which not only is derived from the most contested resource of our time (though clean water is quickly taking its place) will be intact for those living in 2107 to view and touch as an artifact of an era which may be known in the future as one of reckless disregard, ignorance, and waste. Even the popular notion of recycling many of the products that we use only serves to slow down the rate in which we are harming ourselves. Recycling for many products is really a process of downcycling – a term coined by Bill McDonough and Michael Braungart in their book Cradle to Cradle. The process of recycling a product essentially causes it to loose its quality each time it is put through the recycling process (assuming that individuals keep recycling each new plastic reincarnate). Even though I will recycle this bottle, and it will become another plastic product again, it will eventually have to be disregarded after going through a few recycles. Alas, we are really just slowing down the rate by which synthetics eventually reach our waste graveyards or incinerators. In addition, while it is thought to be a socially responsible activity, the process of recycling releases into the atmosphere dangerous toxins emitted by the burning of plastics during the recycling process.

What is radically different about the world from 1907, or 17^th century European cities, is that we fully understand the consequences of continuing down the path we are on. Furthermore, we have the knowledge and creative ideas of how to alter that path. What we lack, sadly, is the will to cause massive social change in how we consume and live. McDonough and Braungart’s text urges product designers, city planners, and architects to approach their designs with the future of humanity in mind. Interestingly, they are not saying that we need to save the planet, for the planet will still be here long after homo sapiens has expired. Their message is that we need to save ourselves from the harm we are inflicting on ourselves. Their cradle-to-cradle philosophy urges designers to make products that can easily be disassembled after their use and put back into the production cycle as something else. In this sense, products should have an immense shelf life, being able to become that same product again or easily transformed into some other consumer product. The idea is to rid ourselves of the current approach to production which is based on a cradle-to-grave approach: extract resources from the Earth to make consumer products which are then discarded (thrown away) into landfills or burnt up in incinerators, expelling unknown synthetic chemicals into the ecosphere which we rely on for life.

It’s time for us to recognize that the approach to mass production and living brought on by the industrial revolution is antiquated. If anything, it’s insulting that humanity has yet to update itself from what seems to be such an archaic paradigm of not only how we make things, but what are relationship ought to be with the multitude of living systems that we are embedded in. All other living species exist in an interdependent cyclical system in which their “wastes equals food” for some other set of beings. It’s high time that we apply this age old and ubiquitous principle to how we manufacture and produce all the things that we need to live as well.