I’ve been listing to Arcade Fire’s 2010 album The Suburbs on a continuous loop over the last few days while I read and re-read passages of Reza Aslan’s Beyond Fundamentalism: Confronting Religious Extremism in the Age of Globalization.

The book was chosen from a field of others to be the Common Reading text for the college where I work, which means that all of the students, faculty, and staff are encouraged to read it and attend events where the book is discussed, including a lecture by the author himself.

It’s an important book insofar as it describes, without over-simplifying, the ways in which globalization is informing and fueling what Aslan calls the “cosmic war” between Islam and Christianity.

“Cosmic War” is not a term that I’m comfortable with; it reminds me too much of “cosmic bowling,” a type of bowling in which the alley illuminated by black lights and the players roll white balls that, as you can imagine, glow like the velvet Led Zeppelin poster your older uncle or cousin had above his bed. But I digress…

Even before reading Aslan’s book two songs from Arcade Fire’s album have haunted me: Sprawl I (Flatland) and Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains), which appear back to back on the track list near the end of the album.

From Sprawl I:

Cops showing their lights
On the reflectors of our bikes
Said, do you kids know what time it is?
Well sir, it’s the first time I’ve felt like something is mine
Like I have something to give
The last defender of the sprawl
Said, well where do you kids live?
Well sir, if you only knew
What the answer is worth
Been searching every corner
Of the earth

And from Sprawl II:

They heard me singing and they told me to stop
Quit these pretentious things and just punch the clock
These days my life I feel it has no purpose
But late at night the feelings swim towards the surface
‘Cause on the surface the city lights shine
They’re calling at me: “Come and find your kind!”

It might seem shallow to see The Suburbs with its themes of disaffected youth being hassled by the police, suburban ennui for “authenticity” and sentimentality for “wasting time,” as being in dialogue with Aslan’s “cosmic warriors” but they actually share similar concerns.

Aslan claims that at the heart of the impulse for Muslims living in the West to join in Global Jihad are feelings of cultural alienation brought on by an “identity vacuum,” a concept summed up by Aslan in an interview with a professor at a German university who says, “There is no such thing as becoming German. You either are or you are not.”

The use of the theory of an “identity vacuum” to explain the radicalization of young Muslims in the West has been used over the last decade by many cultural commentators and organizations across the political spectrum.

Aslan, seemingly a liberal, secular humanist Muslim, shares use of the term with the likes of the neoconservative British think tank the Henry Jackson Society Project for Democratic Geopolitics, though their conclusions on how to address this problem differ greatly.

As someone who has come of age over two decades (’90s and the 00’s) defined as much by Middle Eastern military intervention as by domestic terrorism (the Unabomber, Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of the government building in Oklahoma City, and a spate of school shootings capped off by Columbine) I find it intriguing think about the concept of “identity vacuum” with regard to American youth.

In other words, are American youth susceptible to radicalization when they feel culturally or socially “homeless.”

The short answer is “yes.”

At least since the counter-cultural revolution of the 60s (but one could easily stretch back to the so-called Jazz Age) American youth have been asking: Who am I? Where do I belong? How can I live an authentic life?

Searching for answers youth generally, to put it euphemistically, engage in social and political activities that are at odds with mainstream beliefs. And, in response, cultural commentators, social scientists, religious leaders, and artists have tried to diagnose the source of these feelings, and prescribe correctives.

The correctives are often centered around the assertion or re-assertion of lost values, of changing attitudes toward religion and faith brought on by the influence of secular popular culture, especially rock and roll—the devil’s music—but also the sciences, especially the social sciences (think Kinsey).

Parents are critiqued for setting a bad example for their children through high rates of divorce, and failing to properly discipline their children (a whole cottage industry has sprung up around books telling you how to raise your children). Whatever the cause and prescription, the common message is that, anymore, America lacks a “center.”

Joan Didion writes at the beginning of “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” an essay chronicling the lives of young people living in the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco, the epicenter of the “hippie” movement:

“The center was not holding. It was a country of bankruptcy notices and public auction announcements and commonplace reports of casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes and vandals who misspelled the four-letter words they scrawled. It was a country where families routinely disappeared, trailing bad checks and repossession papers. Adolescents drifted from city to torn city, sloughing off both the past and the future as snakes shed their skins, children who were never taught and would never learn the games that held the society together.”

The essay goes on to follow a number of young people and adults that seem lost, rudderless, and casting about for a way of living and being that seems fulfilling.

Since the 60s many have proposed alternative “centers,” ranging from the full-scale societal changes and paradigm shifts (alternative forms of government, “New Age” and Eastern religions) to personal acts of asceticism and discipline (macrobiotic diets, vegetarianism and veganism, and yoga, which is enjoying huge popularity right now). But like fads, over time they come to be viewed with ironic disdain by the youth.

Perhaps this is just the lot of the youth: to feel neither securely of a place nor in a place, which seems especially true now in the digital age, and so to constantly cast about for a way of living that fills that which seems to be missing.

Tomorrow: Part 2