Besides classes in citizenship itself, to fully incorporate citizenship as the fourth pillar of education it needs to be woven into many other classes as well. There are three overall methods of doing this. The first is by learning subjects and skills that make better and more informed citizens. The second is by actually injecting necessary citizenship ideas directly into other classes so that students learn two subjects simultaneously. The third is by having classes where citizenship skills are practically required and used to facilitate activities.
Subjects and skills that indirectly help citizenship involving slightly changing the emphasis and curriculum of several classes. English Literature classes in high school can include relevant classics that discuss citizenship values, such as the Faerie Queen. Other skills in English classes, like communications and journalism, also indirectly help citizens.
Computer courses will also be increasingly important in the lives of future citizens. Introducing students to newer forms of social interactions, such as the blogsphere or MySpace, are important new aspect of social networking. Advanced computer programming courses can do world building games like Civilization or Sim City, where large scale planning and organization of communities is vitally important.
Health classes also improve the lives of citizens in many ways. Preventative health care and nutrition can save individuals, insurance companies, and the government countless dollars. First Aid can be a lifesaving skill for fellow citizens. Birth control is a contentious issue, but a very important one for inter-human relationships.
The Mesa Public Schools social studies program has different classes for junior high grades that also can be reemphasized to advocate citizenship. Seventh grade Geography can also teach how to become a state, other countries conceptions of citizenship and government styles. Eighth grade American History can address the Founding fathers principal’s as well as historical works on citizenship like Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America.
Saturday, December 16, 2006
This should spark some controversy...
Here's what my assignment was:
Exam question #1:
Analyze the ideology of your least favorite in regard to the issue of gay and lesbian families
Because of my neutrality on this issue, I decided to explore and pick apart the conservative argument, because I know less about that one. So here it is:
Conservative Arguments Against Gay Families
Gay and lesbian families are a growing phenomenon in the United States. This alternative lifestyle to traditional heterosexual family units is a problem for a multitude of reasons. These difficult problems include legal concerns, cultural issues, and biological consequences that society must thoroughly consider before radically altering the primacy of traditional family structures.
The first arguments against promoting gay families are purely legalistic. Gay marriages are not legal in the vast majority of the United States. This simple fact creates inordinate problems for gay families. Adoption is more difficult than it is for married heterosexual couples. Rarely are both parents recognized as such on birth certificates when one conceives a child. When the biological parent dies the partner has no legal claim on the children, multiplying the trauma for everyone. This lack of legal recognition is a major argument against gay families.
The next arguments involve how gay families go against the culture and traditions of America. Gay parenting is not the usual type of family structure in the culture, with less than a million known households. Most denominations and religions in the US don’t recognize gay marriages or the families, and many strenuously object to this lifestyle on doctrinal grounds. Children of gay parents often experience shame as a result of their parents’ alternative lifestyle. Society also has a long tradition of gender based roles which become confused with same-sex parents and leads to unconventional understandings of gender roles by the kids. Also, there is statistical evidence that gay males are more likely than straights to seek sexual relations outside of their relationships, a cultural phenomenon that has verifiably negative affects for heterosexual couples. Obviously, there is a great deal of cultural resistance to gay families.
And then there are the biological arguments against gay families. Sex between gay males can have serious medical complications. Gay couples by themselves cannot conceive naturally, and need another adult of the opposite sex to create biological offspring. Because of these hurdles to reproduction, fewer children are likely to be born to gay families, decreasing the potential population. Some studies show that children suffer physically without the presence of both male and female parents, but whether this applies to gay parents needs to be explored. There are also statistics that show that homosexuals are more likely to be mentally stable than heterosexuals, and are more likely to be unfit for parenthood. These biological impediments work against the creation of gay families.
Lastly, gay parenting has some significant negative impacts on children. There are some significant concerns regarding pedophilia and gay parents, especially male couples. As they grow older, many feel the need to assert their heterosexuality by becoming more promiscuous. Adolescents are also more likely to explore their sexualities and become gay themselves. Children also face growing up without one of their biological parents (or both in the case of adoptions) and all the complications and feelings of abandonment that situation creates. More specifically, since most gay couples with children are lesbians, gay parenting contributes to the already growing problem of children growing up without their fathers.
The conservative arguments boil down to the fact that gay parenting goes against traditions. Homosexuals have many legal hurdles because of the long standing tradition of straight parenting. Cultural resistance originates from the tradition of having everyone live very similar lifestyles to minimize conflicts, which our current society is much more able to handle. The conservatives do have a point when it comes to the biological impossibility of same-sex couples conceiving on their own, but does not necessarily preclude most adults who prefer their own kind from raising children.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_parenting
http://www.religiouscoalitionformarriage.org/html/top_ten.php
Exam question #1:
Analyze the ideology of your least favorite in regard to the issue of gay and lesbian families
Because of my neutrality on this issue, I decided to explore and pick apart the conservative argument, because I know less about that one. So here it is:
Conservative Arguments Against Gay Families
Gay and lesbian families are a growing phenomenon in the United States. This alternative lifestyle to traditional heterosexual family units is a problem for a multitude of reasons. These difficult problems include legal concerns, cultural issues, and biological consequences that society must thoroughly consider before radically altering the primacy of traditional family structures.
The first arguments against promoting gay families are purely legalistic. Gay marriages are not legal in the vast majority of the United States. This simple fact creates inordinate problems for gay families. Adoption is more difficult than it is for married heterosexual couples. Rarely are both parents recognized as such on birth certificates when one conceives a child. When the biological parent dies the partner has no legal claim on the children, multiplying the trauma for everyone. This lack of legal recognition is a major argument against gay families.
The next arguments involve how gay families go against the culture and traditions of America. Gay parenting is not the usual type of family structure in the culture, with less than a million known households. Most denominations and religions in the US don’t recognize gay marriages or the families, and many strenuously object to this lifestyle on doctrinal grounds. Children of gay parents often experience shame as a result of their parents’ alternative lifestyle. Society also has a long tradition of gender based roles which become confused with same-sex parents and leads to unconventional understandings of gender roles by the kids. Also, there is statistical evidence that gay males are more likely than straights to seek sexual relations outside of their relationships, a cultural phenomenon that has verifiably negative affects for heterosexual couples. Obviously, there is a great deal of cultural resistance to gay families.
And then there are the biological arguments against gay families. Sex between gay males can have serious medical complications. Gay couples by themselves cannot conceive naturally, and need another adult of the opposite sex to create biological offspring. Because of these hurdles to reproduction, fewer children are likely to be born to gay families, decreasing the potential population. Some studies show that children suffer physically without the presence of both male and female parents, but whether this applies to gay parents needs to be explored. There are also statistics that show that homosexuals are more likely to be mentally stable than heterosexuals, and are more likely to be unfit for parenthood. These biological impediments work against the creation of gay families.
Lastly, gay parenting has some significant negative impacts on children. There are some significant concerns regarding pedophilia and gay parents, especially male couples. As they grow older, many feel the need to assert their heterosexuality by becoming more promiscuous. Adolescents are also more likely to explore their sexualities and become gay themselves. Children also face growing up without one of their biological parents (or both in the case of adoptions) and all the complications and feelings of abandonment that situation creates. More specifically, since most gay couples with children are lesbians, gay parenting contributes to the already growing problem of children growing up without their fathers.
The conservative arguments boil down to the fact that gay parenting goes against traditions. Homosexuals have many legal hurdles because of the long standing tradition of straight parenting. Cultural resistance originates from the tradition of having everyone live very similar lifestyles to minimize conflicts, which our current society is much more able to handle. The conservatives do have a point when it comes to the biological impossibility of same-sex couples conceiving on their own, but does not necessarily preclude most adults who prefer their own kind from raising children.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_parenting
http://www.religiouscoalitionformarriage.org/html/top_ten.php
Tuesday, December 05, 2006
Week Need
This paper sets out to examine and advocate change one of the most influential social structures in our society, so universal and fundamental hardly anyone even thinks about it anymore: the Calendar. More specifically, the number of days in a week. Currently, the number of days in a week is seven, a prime number difficult to divide. The concept of a seven day week is a hold over from the lunar calendar days, with about seven days between new and quarter and full moons. The modern form of the seven day week is split between five week-days and the two days of the weekends, and is easily the most important social structure in regards to scheduling the activities of life, from economics to socializing to education. The week has become a fixture of modern life, a bureaucratic monopoly unexamined by society that many historical sociologists would advocate the reform of.
Marx
The concept of time touches heavily on many themes in sociology. Marx would focus on how the owners of the means of production demand workers be at their job for a huge majority of the time, exploiting their labor during the weekday and distracting them with religion during the weekend. The idea of a five day work week where owners expect laborers to work a minimum of eight hours per day plus overtime is clearly surplus labor for which the owners are making a profit and the laborers didn’t actually need to do to earn their keep. The five day work week is an oppressive structure designed for maximum extraction of work so that laborers not only give more than they receive but also have no time to work for themselves. Or that the overworked and underpaid laborers are forced to take second jobs to make ends meet, and all the time out of the social structure of the week is squeezed out with barely enough time for sleep.
And then there are the weekends. Sunday, Saturday and Friday nights out of the seven day cycle are reserved for recreational activities and religion. Religion is the primary source for the idea of the week, so that every seven days people have a day of rest that they use to fulfill their religious duties. The owners of the means of production are more than willing to let workers have some time off for religion for several reasons. Having a repeated religious day every week is a constant distraction for the worker, focusing them on the rewards of the afterlife instead of the here and now. They are further distracted from forming class consciousness by the rampant consumerism of the economy, focusing on sports and video games and entertainment when they should really be organizing to overthrow the ownership society and the exploitive concept of the ‘week’.
Marx would challenge the very idea of having a structure like the weekday; instead he would advocate individuals working their own hours for their own benefits. He would want self-employed laborers to work as much or as little as they themselves needed, improving only their own lots in life. Weekends, with the distractions of religion and consumerism, would be also cast out, totally eliminating any need for the concept of a special seven day block of time between the patterns days and months. With the weekday/weekend dichotomy nullified and the 7 day period made arbitrary, true reform of the week structure can begin.
Weber
Weber would focus on the social reality of the weekday, how this arbitrary abstraction has become totally ingrained in modern civilization as a traditional source of power and ultimate bureaucratization, as well as promoting the Protestant work ethic by having most of the time devoted to work with religious days for rest. The concept of the week has a great deal of power. This power is legitimized by traditions going back centuries, but also by rational-legal means, expressed in countless legal documents and recognized by law. The week has become entrenched in bureaucracy, organized by formal rules and influencing nearly every aspect of the culture. This bureaucratic form of control is going to be nearly impossible to get rid of because of all these entanglements in all corners of life, despite being a completely man-made creation.
The concept of a week is the ultimate form of formal rationality because it is not based on any cycles in nature. The concept of years and days mirror the revolutions and rotations of the Earth, respectively, and are thus easily rationalized. The concept of a month is derived from the lunar cycles, although no longer accurately reflects them. But the week is an abstraction totally separate from these patterns, and its constant misalignment with these cycles in addition to the occasional presence of the leap-day leads to fourteen different calendar configurations and constant headaches. This is a clear indication of Weber’s iron cage, where a meaningless social structure has become totally engrained within a culture and is impossible to ignore or work around, and becomes nearly hardwired in human beings conceptions of time.
The protestant work ethic also has a great deal of influence on the idea of the week. Instead of working just enough to accomplish tasks and get by, work itself was idealized as a nearly pious duty, driving people to work far more than necessary. Success was a sign that people were predestined to be saved (especially if they went to church on Sundays) and the idea that people should be working a majority of the time supports the idea of having a short weekend, and probably encourages shortening it even more so people can get even more work done.
Weber would point out the difficulties in trying to reform the concept of the week, with the heavily entrenched bureaucracy reified in countless legal documents and every organization in the culture. But he would be in favor of reforming it because of the negative effects of having an unexamined and arbitrary structure having so dominating an influence on human life, and examination and reform are a way to escape the iron cage of bureaucratization.
Durkheim
Durkheim would focus on the idea of the week as a remnant of mechanical solidarity and also the societal sacredness of the weekend because of the complex abstract rituals based around it. The concept of the week is an old, sacred idea where each day is named after a deity. The idea of the week arose so that people could all perform rituals to their gods in a common pattern; in the modern context those rituals are performed on Sundays (for Christians) and Saturday (Sabbath). The sacredness of the weekend is also reinforced by the collective recreational activities western cultures perform on these days. Of course, having sacred weekends makes weekdays almost profane, and creates near indignation in the collective conscious when work intrudes on this special time.
The week as a pattern is obviously a throwback to the mechanical solidarity days, when people lived in low density environs and everyone needed to think and act along the same lines. And work as well; the fact that people generally wake up and go to work at about the same time five days a week is not a sign of organic solidarity. Advanced divisions of labor would definitely advocate an even numbered week, so that half the time one half of the laborers would be working, and the other half resting. Or more likely a 2 to 1 rotating schedule with six day weeks where people work 2/3rds of the time with constant overlap between shifts. Or any other arrangement of patterns besides the arbitrary 7 day week would be more organic and adaptable than the status quo.
Veblen
Veblen would focus on the leisure class mentality that has become built up around the weekdays (to earn $) and weekends (to show off $). The concept of people working more days than necessary for surplus income rather than necessity is indicative of the long work week. Self-esteem, class, and social status is driven as much by how much you can earn as how much you can spend. The weekends become a sign of status, because they are designated periods of non-working, scheduled leisure time that feeds into the idea of a conspicuously consuming leisure class. So not only is the week contributing to people working and earning more than they need, it is also contributing to people spending more than they earn. So this setup contributes in a very real manner to the idea of the consumer economy, with all the entanglements that implies.
The cultural lag of the concept of a day itself, with technology allowing round the clock work and worldwide communication, is in some serious need of reexamination. Markets are poised to buy, sell, and trade twenty four hours a day, because there is a world-wide demand for trade across every time zone. Technological advances like satellites and the internet have almost made local time obsolete, more so than even the concept of the week. To continue to uses this cultural belief when technology has made it obsolete is a prime example of cultural lag.
Cultural borrowing of the concept of the week goes back thousands of years in western civilization. With colonialism, the idea of the week has been borrowed and used by nearly every culture on earth, for the most part replacing previous short term patterns of days in favor of the Gregorian calendar. Most interestingly are the parallels between many, many cultures conceptions of the days of the week, hinting that this sort of borrowing has been going on for a long time.
Veblen would advise researching other cultures conception of the week, and borrowing one of those and adapting it to suit modern needs. He would probably advocate a shorter week, reducing time for both extraneous working and for leisurely weekends. This adaptation would face head-on the cultural lag behind modern economic and technological realities. The weekday/weekend split would also be closely reexamined because of its relation to overzealous consumerism, and steps taken to reduce harmful patterns.
Mannheim
Mannheim would acknowledge the week as a social constructed idea and that it is an ideology originating in the past and the capacity for intellectuals in a planned society to construct a more rational approach. He would be focused on the societal context of the week and how the Weltanschauung of the week is incredibly complicated, tied to most aspects of society. The ideology of the week is set in the distant past, with few justifications for keeping other than tradition and the difficulty in changing.
However, the reinterpretation of the week for modern and future needs can be classified under his terminology as utopian in nature. Week reform can be seen as part of his intellectually planed society, where concepts are meant to transcend present realities to bring about a better future.
Gramsci
Lastly, the universality of the concept of a seven day week is a striking example of hegemony in Gramsci’s terminology, not only because of the lack of challengers to this power structure, but every culture on earth as to deal with this dominant timeframe in one form or another.
This system of control, is propagated by the state primarily due to the education system, but also all the other government infrastructure, including the postal system. The dominance of the week in language is extremely important, as scheduling is often referred to by the name of the weekday so many weeks from now, instead of using exact numbers of days.
The ideology of the week goes unchallenged at every level of society, including the intellectual elites, who even while beginning to organize calendar reform ideology still cling to the idea of having a seven day week. The consciousness of the working class and the working class all follow this ideology of the week because they have been presented with no alternatives and the constant support by the media and civil society as a whole makes change virtually unthinkable.
Berger
Peter Berger contributions to sociology deal directly with the concept of the week. Most habits, when not daily, are performed on a weekly basis and dominate the behavior patterns of billions of people. These habits have come to give significant meaning to many days of the week, with Mondays being unpopular, Fridays as the gateway to the weekend, and so on. The structure of the week has come to dominate the consciousness of everyone with repeatable habits. Society has settled into an embedded routine of working on weekdays, and seeking entertainment on weekends. The weekend has become institutionalized into our culture, written into law and come to be expected as a natural course of events, absolutely reified. So much of our language has become embedded in the institution of the week that the pattern seems more natural than it is.
However, Berger shows how these institutionalized ideas can fade away as they become obsolete. Previous conceptions of the week have already dissolved into the background or been added to the already extensive framework of the week, as seen in the names of the days of the week. With the changing nature of time due to interconnected worldwide civilizations and the meaninglessness of earth timescales in space, the language of the week may eventually become archaic and the structure will diminish by itself.
Solutions
For the numerous reasons listed above, I propose changing the number of days in the week to six, by dropping Tuesday. We now have a week easily evenly divided in halves and thirds. With a six day week, we can have five weeks a month for a total of thirty days, a very normal length of time for a month, with minimal alterations to the current calendar required, and every day of the new week is uniformly the same with every other month, so that it may be ignored all together if so desired. However, we still have those pesky five and a quarter days in the year. Let’s have those days be extra floating holidays, outside the week formula and no body works on them or have that be the current nonproductive week between Christmas and New Years, or sprinkle them across the calendar year.
Now the whole point of this is efficiency and relaxation. Currently there are 52 weeks and 104 weekend days in the year. My idea would make 60 weeks and 120 weekends in the year, reducing the excess work of the population. Or to improve organic solidarity, we can also have jobs where people work 3 days on and 3 off, enabling the widened economic possibilities of regular three-day weekends and enabling someone else to work your exact position while you are gone, simultaneously increasing job output and quality of live. Even better, peoples weekends in whatever form can be staggered, enabling people on their time off to have access to the goods and services of those still working. The economic potentials are enormous!
No matter what solution is chosen, the power structure known as the week needs to be challenged and minimized as mindless bureaucratic structure. Its dominance in our lives affects in every aspect, from work to religion to medications. Fortunately, as the structure is tied into the concept of the day, as the importance of the day decreases due to the shift towards organic solidarity in the economic structure and the expansion of the human race exposes us to extraterrestrial rotational cycles, the concept of the week may fade away entirely, leaving humans with something akin to the Star Trek notion of the Stardate.
Works Cited
Lemert, Charles. Social Theory : The Multicultural and Classical Readings, 3rd
Edition. Westview Press, 2004
Ritzter, George and Goodman, Douglas J. Classical Sociological Theory, 4th
Edition. McGraw-Hill, 2004
Marx
The concept of time touches heavily on many themes in sociology. Marx would focus on how the owners of the means of production demand workers be at their job for a huge majority of the time, exploiting their labor during the weekday and distracting them with religion during the weekend. The idea of a five day work week where owners expect laborers to work a minimum of eight hours per day plus overtime is clearly surplus labor for which the owners are making a profit and the laborers didn’t actually need to do to earn their keep. The five day work week is an oppressive structure designed for maximum extraction of work so that laborers not only give more than they receive but also have no time to work for themselves. Or that the overworked and underpaid laborers are forced to take second jobs to make ends meet, and all the time out of the social structure of the week is squeezed out with barely enough time for sleep.
And then there are the weekends. Sunday, Saturday and Friday nights out of the seven day cycle are reserved for recreational activities and religion. Religion is the primary source for the idea of the week, so that every seven days people have a day of rest that they use to fulfill their religious duties. The owners of the means of production are more than willing to let workers have some time off for religion for several reasons. Having a repeated religious day every week is a constant distraction for the worker, focusing them on the rewards of the afterlife instead of the here and now. They are further distracted from forming class consciousness by the rampant consumerism of the economy, focusing on sports and video games and entertainment when they should really be organizing to overthrow the ownership society and the exploitive concept of the ‘week’.
Marx would challenge the very idea of having a structure like the weekday; instead he would advocate individuals working their own hours for their own benefits. He would want self-employed laborers to work as much or as little as they themselves needed, improving only their own lots in life. Weekends, with the distractions of religion and consumerism, would be also cast out, totally eliminating any need for the concept of a special seven day block of time between the patterns days and months. With the weekday/weekend dichotomy nullified and the 7 day period made arbitrary, true reform of the week structure can begin.
Weber
Weber would focus on the social reality of the weekday, how this arbitrary abstraction has become totally ingrained in modern civilization as a traditional source of power and ultimate bureaucratization, as well as promoting the Protestant work ethic by having most of the time devoted to work with religious days for rest. The concept of the week has a great deal of power. This power is legitimized by traditions going back centuries, but also by rational-legal means, expressed in countless legal documents and recognized by law. The week has become entrenched in bureaucracy, organized by formal rules and influencing nearly every aspect of the culture. This bureaucratic form of control is going to be nearly impossible to get rid of because of all these entanglements in all corners of life, despite being a completely man-made creation.
The concept of a week is the ultimate form of formal rationality because it is not based on any cycles in nature. The concept of years and days mirror the revolutions and rotations of the Earth, respectively, and are thus easily rationalized. The concept of a month is derived from the lunar cycles, although no longer accurately reflects them. But the week is an abstraction totally separate from these patterns, and its constant misalignment with these cycles in addition to the occasional presence of the leap-day leads to fourteen different calendar configurations and constant headaches. This is a clear indication of Weber’s iron cage, where a meaningless social structure has become totally engrained within a culture and is impossible to ignore or work around, and becomes nearly hardwired in human beings conceptions of time.
The protestant work ethic also has a great deal of influence on the idea of the week. Instead of working just enough to accomplish tasks and get by, work itself was idealized as a nearly pious duty, driving people to work far more than necessary. Success was a sign that people were predestined to be saved (especially if they went to church on Sundays) and the idea that people should be working a majority of the time supports the idea of having a short weekend, and probably encourages shortening it even more so people can get even more work done.
Weber would point out the difficulties in trying to reform the concept of the week, with the heavily entrenched bureaucracy reified in countless legal documents and every organization in the culture. But he would be in favor of reforming it because of the negative effects of having an unexamined and arbitrary structure having so dominating an influence on human life, and examination and reform are a way to escape the iron cage of bureaucratization.
Durkheim
Durkheim would focus on the idea of the week as a remnant of mechanical solidarity and also the societal sacredness of the weekend because of the complex abstract rituals based around it. The concept of the week is an old, sacred idea where each day is named after a deity. The idea of the week arose so that people could all perform rituals to their gods in a common pattern; in the modern context those rituals are performed on Sundays (for Christians) and Saturday (Sabbath). The sacredness of the weekend is also reinforced by the collective recreational activities western cultures perform on these days. Of course, having sacred weekends makes weekdays almost profane, and creates near indignation in the collective conscious when work intrudes on this special time.
The week as a pattern is obviously a throwback to the mechanical solidarity days, when people lived in low density environs and everyone needed to think and act along the same lines. And work as well; the fact that people generally wake up and go to work at about the same time five days a week is not a sign of organic solidarity. Advanced divisions of labor would definitely advocate an even numbered week, so that half the time one half of the laborers would be working, and the other half resting. Or more likely a 2 to 1 rotating schedule with six day weeks where people work 2/3rds of the time with constant overlap between shifts. Or any other arrangement of patterns besides the arbitrary 7 day week would be more organic and adaptable than the status quo.
Veblen
Veblen would focus on the leisure class mentality that has become built up around the weekdays (to earn $) and weekends (to show off $). The concept of people working more days than necessary for surplus income rather than necessity is indicative of the long work week. Self-esteem, class, and social status is driven as much by how much you can earn as how much you can spend. The weekends become a sign of status, because they are designated periods of non-working, scheduled leisure time that feeds into the idea of a conspicuously consuming leisure class. So not only is the week contributing to people working and earning more than they need, it is also contributing to people spending more than they earn. So this setup contributes in a very real manner to the idea of the consumer economy, with all the entanglements that implies.
The cultural lag of the concept of a day itself, with technology allowing round the clock work and worldwide communication, is in some serious need of reexamination. Markets are poised to buy, sell, and trade twenty four hours a day, because there is a world-wide demand for trade across every time zone. Technological advances like satellites and the internet have almost made local time obsolete, more so than even the concept of the week. To continue to uses this cultural belief when technology has made it obsolete is a prime example of cultural lag.
Cultural borrowing of the concept of the week goes back thousands of years in western civilization. With colonialism, the idea of the week has been borrowed and used by nearly every culture on earth, for the most part replacing previous short term patterns of days in favor of the Gregorian calendar. Most interestingly are the parallels between many, many cultures conceptions of the days of the week, hinting that this sort of borrowing has been going on for a long time.
Veblen would advise researching other cultures conception of the week, and borrowing one of those and adapting it to suit modern needs. He would probably advocate a shorter week, reducing time for both extraneous working and for leisurely weekends. This adaptation would face head-on the cultural lag behind modern economic and technological realities. The weekday/weekend split would also be closely reexamined because of its relation to overzealous consumerism, and steps taken to reduce harmful patterns.
Mannheim
Mannheim would acknowledge the week as a social constructed idea and that it is an ideology originating in the past and the capacity for intellectuals in a planned society to construct a more rational approach. He would be focused on the societal context of the week and how the Weltanschauung of the week is incredibly complicated, tied to most aspects of society. The ideology of the week is set in the distant past, with few justifications for keeping other than tradition and the difficulty in changing.
However, the reinterpretation of the week for modern and future needs can be classified under his terminology as utopian in nature. Week reform can be seen as part of his intellectually planed society, where concepts are meant to transcend present realities to bring about a better future.
Gramsci
Lastly, the universality of the concept of a seven day week is a striking example of hegemony in Gramsci’s terminology, not only because of the lack of challengers to this power structure, but every culture on earth as to deal with this dominant timeframe in one form or another.
This system of control, is propagated by the state primarily due to the education system, but also all the other government infrastructure, including the postal system. The dominance of the week in language is extremely important, as scheduling is often referred to by the name of the weekday so many weeks from now, instead of using exact numbers of days.
The ideology of the week goes unchallenged at every level of society, including the intellectual elites, who even while beginning to organize calendar reform ideology still cling to the idea of having a seven day week. The consciousness of the working class and the working class all follow this ideology of the week because they have been presented with no alternatives and the constant support by the media and civil society as a whole makes change virtually unthinkable.
Berger
Peter Berger contributions to sociology deal directly with the concept of the week. Most habits, when not daily, are performed on a weekly basis and dominate the behavior patterns of billions of people. These habits have come to give significant meaning to many days of the week, with Mondays being unpopular, Fridays as the gateway to the weekend, and so on. The structure of the week has come to dominate the consciousness of everyone with repeatable habits. Society has settled into an embedded routine of working on weekdays, and seeking entertainment on weekends. The weekend has become institutionalized into our culture, written into law and come to be expected as a natural course of events, absolutely reified. So much of our language has become embedded in the institution of the week that the pattern seems more natural than it is.
However, Berger shows how these institutionalized ideas can fade away as they become obsolete. Previous conceptions of the week have already dissolved into the background or been added to the already extensive framework of the week, as seen in the names of the days of the week. With the changing nature of time due to interconnected worldwide civilizations and the meaninglessness of earth timescales in space, the language of the week may eventually become archaic and the structure will diminish by itself.
Solutions
For the numerous reasons listed above, I propose changing the number of days in the week to six, by dropping Tuesday. We now have a week easily evenly divided in halves and thirds. With a six day week, we can have five weeks a month for a total of thirty days, a very normal length of time for a month, with minimal alterations to the current calendar required, and every day of the new week is uniformly the same with every other month, so that it may be ignored all together if so desired. However, we still have those pesky five and a quarter days in the year. Let’s have those days be extra floating holidays, outside the week formula and no body works on them or have that be the current nonproductive week between Christmas and New Years, or sprinkle them across the calendar year.
Now the whole point of this is efficiency and relaxation. Currently there are 52 weeks and 104 weekend days in the year. My idea would make 60 weeks and 120 weekends in the year, reducing the excess work of the population. Or to improve organic solidarity, we can also have jobs where people work 3 days on and 3 off, enabling the widened economic possibilities of regular three-day weekends and enabling someone else to work your exact position while you are gone, simultaneously increasing job output and quality of live. Even better, peoples weekends in whatever form can be staggered, enabling people on their time off to have access to the goods and services of those still working. The economic potentials are enormous!
No matter what solution is chosen, the power structure known as the week needs to be challenged and minimized as mindless bureaucratic structure. Its dominance in our lives affects in every aspect, from work to religion to medications. Fortunately, as the structure is tied into the concept of the day, as the importance of the day decreases due to the shift towards organic solidarity in the economic structure and the expansion of the human race exposes us to extraterrestrial rotational cycles, the concept of the week may fade away entirely, leaving humans with something akin to the Star Trek notion of the Stardate.
Works Cited
Lemert, Charles. Social Theory : The Multicultural and Classical Readings, 3rd
Edition. Westview Press, 2004
Ritzter, George and Goodman, Douglas J. Classical Sociological Theory, 4th
Edition. McGraw-Hill, 2004
Why Islam Needs Science Fiction
Science fiction is one of the most amazing genres in literature, mostly because all the rules of normal realty are open to manipulation and examination. This is the perfect setting for exploring a post-colonial Islamic identity, because of the very nature of the deep questions Muslims can ask themselves while presenting their unique viewpoints to the rest of the world. Nearly every aspect of SF poses deep questions about the modern Muslim identity, from time-travel to catastrophes, colonization of worlds to extraterrestrial aliens; this literary genre is required to chart the course for the next centuries.
Alternate Timelines
The first trope of science fiction that comes to mind is time-travel, with exploring the past, creating alternate versions of the present, and speculating about the future. The ethics of time travel are interesting enough in western fiction, but the implications of an Islamic authored story about visiting the time of Mohamed is so contentious and interesting that it begs to be told. This is also one of the means of achieving the post-colonialist goal of reclaiming ones history from the Europeans, by using time-traveling stories to the past to touch on some of the most important parts of western history (Old Testament, Jesus, etc) in a genre that may be read worldwide.
Alternate histories are some of the oldest sources of fiction, showing how history may have turned out differently with the slightest changes. Time-travel interventionist stories can explore what might have been if the Ottoman Empire had not lost WWI, and how the world would be different if the borders of the Middle East hadn’t been rewritten. Likewise the Mongol disaster would have been prevented if Genghis Kahn was slain as a boy, or the split between Shiite and Sunni might have been prevented if Ali had survived assassination. Alien invasions and other hypothetical science fiction elements in historical contexts are also enlightening, and reveal as much about the authors as they do about the subject matter. The possibilities are endless, and definitely worth exploring.
The greatest possibilities for Islamic authored science fiction involve the future, and the myriad of possibilities that civilization has not yet begun to consider. The easiest to envision are the extrapolations of the present into the future. If one of the goals of Islamic civilization is worldwide conversion, what happens when they achieve it? Then what? Or if technological trends continue, how does Islam keep up with contentious issues such as cloning, cross-breeding humans, virtual reality, interstellar travel, telepathy, and artificial life? What insight can they provide to the western world? There are several prophesies about the future, and exploring what might actually happen is one of the greatest strengths of science fiction.
Loss of Homelands
One of the most terrible and creative exercises in fiction is projecting what happens when homelands are lost. Could Islam survive the loss of Mecca and/or other important historical locations? How would the religion and identity change with the natural (through sea level rise) or artificial (thermonuclear) destruction of their great holy places?
More common to sci-fi and history is the loss of homeland to exile, as is Star Trek: Voyager and Battlestar Galactica. It would be very interesting to see how Islamic authors would handle a Lost in Space scenario or some other method of removing access to the homeworld. Destroying the Earth is also a common trope, and it would be very interesting to see how authors would tackle this radical idea, and how to survive with the consequences. For peace activists, this is the perfect means of mirroring the destruction of the temple and Diaspora of the Israelites.
Most extreme is exile to another dimension, an idea more commonly explored in fantasy novels. But removal to an environment where absolutely nothing is recognizable would be a fascinating read to explore the principals behind this great religion, and still be analogous to the changes of modern realities.
Off-World Colonies
Space colonization is a major theme of science fiction, and the one most analogous to post-colonial thought just by its very structure. Potential Muslim authors can recreate all sorts of contentious modern post-colonial issues using just such a method, including the occupation of Palestine using veiled analogies that Westerners, Israelites, and the international community as a whole would understand. A great example of how this might be done is in Dune by Frank Herbert, where nomadic tribes on a resource rich dessert world seek to rid their world of exploitive overseers.
Off-world colonization is also the ultimate form of self-determination and independence, where landless refugees claim their own homelands without interference from earth governments. Peoples like the Kurds can leave Earth and escape persecution, as African Americans did in Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles. Any nationalist author can use this technique to envision their own future nation with minimal controversy.
Leaving Earth also presents new problems for hypothetical future Muslims. It is somewhat humorous to surmise how one can kneel and pray in a zero-gravity environment. Also, direction of prayer is defiantly an issue in space, as the direction Mecca becomes indistinguishable from Earth, which itself gets lost on the sun’s glare, which eventually becomes lost in the galactic spiral, becoming little more than a vector. Issues of time are also important, because other worlds have different length days and years, challenges few western authors have attempted to address. Another issue is that of the Hajj or the pilgrimage to Mecca: would light-years of separation make this Pillar of Islam inconsequential, make those who still manage it much higher in status, or effectively prohibit off-world colonization? To say nothing of new Meccas…
Consciousness
Sci-fi also allows the most flexibility when tampering with the concept of the mind and consciousness. Of course, the exploration of the implications of artificial intelligence is paramount in regards to a post-colonial exploration of identity. The idea of combining theocratic guidelines for life with computer programming is rarely touched upon in sci-fi literature, but would be a tantalizing subject for Muslim authors to tackle. Also the idea for mind transference from one body to another is an old one, as is the idea of digital reincarnation, but both could present interesting takes if authors tackle these issues.
Gender Modification
Muslim feminists have a great opportunity to advance their cause using science fiction. The easiest means of doing this are to play with proportions, and have stories that wipe out most of the men or women. Fictionalized gender imbalances can play havoc in science fiction worlds, just as understudied imbalances do in the real world. Other methods of playing with sex and sexuality are featured in Samuel R. Delaney’s Trouble on Triton, where not only sexual orientations are reprogrammable, but sex changes are easily performed. Such a book would have scandalous repercussions if released in the Islamic world, where they are just starting to reexamine the traditional views of gender and sexuality.
And of course the use of sapient non-humans is the best opening for feminists to lay out their case for reexamining the current gender arrangement. The most intriguing means to do this is via stories like Octavia Butler’s Lilith’s Brood, where aliens with very different notions of sexuality not only disturb the surviving humans on a post-apocalyptic world, but also force changes to the very nature of interactions between the human sexes.
Aliens
It is the subject of aliens that are the most important reason Islam needs science fiction. For with aliens the most important and disturbing aspect of post-colonialism can be addressed: hybridity. Again, Lilith’s Brood addresses this issue head on half-human/half-alien hybrids that struggle to find their place in xenophobic human societies. Half-human aliens are excellent allegories for many middle-easterners, with identities split between something old and something new.
Hybridity can also be showcased when exploring the idea of aliens converting to Islam. This idea has very serious ramifications, especially if the religion is modified in the translation. The most disturbing idea, however, is the potential mixture of Islam with alien religions, especially when it begins to pull away humans. The analogy of course is the Baha’i and other faiths which combine Islamic and other elements in a new form, which are not tolerated very well in modern Islamic society.
Domination by aliens is also a great way for potential authors to write their own experiences in forms westerners will understand. Stories like H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds are prime examples of the colonization experience, and will do a great deal to spread understanding of the Middle Eastern experiences with Europeans. One prime example may be drawn form the experience of Iraqi’s long violent history with the U.K., highlighted especially well in Young’s Postcolonialism- A Very Short Introduction. However, more passive colonization like the overlords from Arthur C. Clark’s Childhood’s End might be a much more enlightening read, as the justifications of the resistance are very analogous to the modern world and much less understood by western audiences.
In summary, modern Muslims need science fiction to not only enlighten the world with their own points of view about postcolonial realties, but also to pave the way for the ethics and modalities of the future of Islamic civilizations. Science fiction will enable Islam to change from looking back and idealizing the past to looking ahead and working towards a brighter future and hopefully enable the breaking down the conceptions of the ‘other’ that they and the west have mutually built around the other, and unite as human beings against our galactic overlords and set out to conquer the universe together.
Alternate Timelines
The first trope of science fiction that comes to mind is time-travel, with exploring the past, creating alternate versions of the present, and speculating about the future. The ethics of time travel are interesting enough in western fiction, but the implications of an Islamic authored story about visiting the time of Mohamed is so contentious and interesting that it begs to be told. This is also one of the means of achieving the post-colonialist goal of reclaiming ones history from the Europeans, by using time-traveling stories to the past to touch on some of the most important parts of western history (Old Testament, Jesus, etc) in a genre that may be read worldwide.
Alternate histories are some of the oldest sources of fiction, showing how history may have turned out differently with the slightest changes. Time-travel interventionist stories can explore what might have been if the Ottoman Empire had not lost WWI, and how the world would be different if the borders of the Middle East hadn’t been rewritten. Likewise the Mongol disaster would have been prevented if Genghis Kahn was slain as a boy, or the split between Shiite and Sunni might have been prevented if Ali had survived assassination. Alien invasions and other hypothetical science fiction elements in historical contexts are also enlightening, and reveal as much about the authors as they do about the subject matter. The possibilities are endless, and definitely worth exploring.
The greatest possibilities for Islamic authored science fiction involve the future, and the myriad of possibilities that civilization has not yet begun to consider. The easiest to envision are the extrapolations of the present into the future. If one of the goals of Islamic civilization is worldwide conversion, what happens when they achieve it? Then what? Or if technological trends continue, how does Islam keep up with contentious issues such as cloning, cross-breeding humans, virtual reality, interstellar travel, telepathy, and artificial life? What insight can they provide to the western world? There are several prophesies about the future, and exploring what might actually happen is one of the greatest strengths of science fiction.
Loss of Homelands
One of the most terrible and creative exercises in fiction is projecting what happens when homelands are lost. Could Islam survive the loss of Mecca and/or other important historical locations? How would the religion and identity change with the natural (through sea level rise) or artificial (thermonuclear) destruction of their great holy places?
More common to sci-fi and history is the loss of homeland to exile, as is Star Trek: Voyager and Battlestar Galactica. It would be very interesting to see how Islamic authors would handle a Lost in Space scenario or some other method of removing access to the homeworld. Destroying the Earth is also a common trope, and it would be very interesting to see how authors would tackle this radical idea, and how to survive with the consequences. For peace activists, this is the perfect means of mirroring the destruction of the temple and Diaspora of the Israelites.
Most extreme is exile to another dimension, an idea more commonly explored in fantasy novels. But removal to an environment where absolutely nothing is recognizable would be a fascinating read to explore the principals behind this great religion, and still be analogous to the changes of modern realities.
Off-World Colonies
Space colonization is a major theme of science fiction, and the one most analogous to post-colonial thought just by its very structure. Potential Muslim authors can recreate all sorts of contentious modern post-colonial issues using just such a method, including the occupation of Palestine using veiled analogies that Westerners, Israelites, and the international community as a whole would understand. A great example of how this might be done is in Dune by Frank Herbert, where nomadic tribes on a resource rich dessert world seek to rid their world of exploitive overseers.
Off-world colonization is also the ultimate form of self-determination and independence, where landless refugees claim their own homelands without interference from earth governments. Peoples like the Kurds can leave Earth and escape persecution, as African Americans did in Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles. Any nationalist author can use this technique to envision their own future nation with minimal controversy.
Leaving Earth also presents new problems for hypothetical future Muslims. It is somewhat humorous to surmise how one can kneel and pray in a zero-gravity environment. Also, direction of prayer is defiantly an issue in space, as the direction Mecca becomes indistinguishable from Earth, which itself gets lost on the sun’s glare, which eventually becomes lost in the galactic spiral, becoming little more than a vector. Issues of time are also important, because other worlds have different length days and years, challenges few western authors have attempted to address. Another issue is that of the Hajj or the pilgrimage to Mecca: would light-years of separation make this Pillar of Islam inconsequential, make those who still manage it much higher in status, or effectively prohibit off-world colonization? To say nothing of new Meccas…
Consciousness
Sci-fi also allows the most flexibility when tampering with the concept of the mind and consciousness. Of course, the exploration of the implications of artificial intelligence is paramount in regards to a post-colonial exploration of identity. The idea of combining theocratic guidelines for life with computer programming is rarely touched upon in sci-fi literature, but would be a tantalizing subject for Muslim authors to tackle. Also the idea for mind transference from one body to another is an old one, as is the idea of digital reincarnation, but both could present interesting takes if authors tackle these issues.
Gender Modification
Muslim feminists have a great opportunity to advance their cause using science fiction. The easiest means of doing this are to play with proportions, and have stories that wipe out most of the men or women. Fictionalized gender imbalances can play havoc in science fiction worlds, just as understudied imbalances do in the real world. Other methods of playing with sex and sexuality are featured in Samuel R. Delaney’s Trouble on Triton, where not only sexual orientations are reprogrammable, but sex changes are easily performed. Such a book would have scandalous repercussions if released in the Islamic world, where they are just starting to reexamine the traditional views of gender and sexuality.
And of course the use of sapient non-humans is the best opening for feminists to lay out their case for reexamining the current gender arrangement. The most intriguing means to do this is via stories like Octavia Butler’s Lilith’s Brood, where aliens with very different notions of sexuality not only disturb the surviving humans on a post-apocalyptic world, but also force changes to the very nature of interactions between the human sexes.
Aliens
It is the subject of aliens that are the most important reason Islam needs science fiction. For with aliens the most important and disturbing aspect of post-colonialism can be addressed: hybridity. Again, Lilith’s Brood addresses this issue head on half-human/half-alien hybrids that struggle to find their place in xenophobic human societies. Half-human aliens are excellent allegories for many middle-easterners, with identities split between something old and something new.
Hybridity can also be showcased when exploring the idea of aliens converting to Islam. This idea has very serious ramifications, especially if the religion is modified in the translation. The most disturbing idea, however, is the potential mixture of Islam with alien religions, especially when it begins to pull away humans. The analogy of course is the Baha’i and other faiths which combine Islamic and other elements in a new form, which are not tolerated very well in modern Islamic society.
Domination by aliens is also a great way for potential authors to write their own experiences in forms westerners will understand. Stories like H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds are prime examples of the colonization experience, and will do a great deal to spread understanding of the Middle Eastern experiences with Europeans. One prime example may be drawn form the experience of Iraqi’s long violent history with the U.K., highlighted especially well in Young’s Postcolonialism- A Very Short Introduction. However, more passive colonization like the overlords from Arthur C. Clark’s Childhood’s End might be a much more enlightening read, as the justifications of the resistance are very analogous to the modern world and much less understood by western audiences.
In summary, modern Muslims need science fiction to not only enlighten the world with their own points of view about postcolonial realties, but also to pave the way for the ethics and modalities of the future of Islamic civilizations. Science fiction will enable Islam to change from looking back and idealizing the past to looking ahead and working towards a brighter future and hopefully enable the breaking down the conceptions of the ‘other’ that they and the west have mutually built around the other, and unite as human beings against our galactic overlords and set out to conquer the universe together.
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