Jihad vs. McWorld

by Benjamin Barber

  Perhaps they are making a virtue of necessity. For where governments still try to regulate or censor or subsidize or intervene, their efforts are increasingly futile, because the market for entertainment and information has become so global, the technologies so impervious to local control, and the ideology of free trade so pervasive. In the United States, regulatory advocates like Vice President Gore have pushed for “universal service” on the new information superhighway, urging that the “schoolchild in Carthage, Tennessee” should “be able to plug into the Library of Congress and work at home at his own pace … regardless of [his] income.”10 Speaker Gingrich has even proposed ways of getting computers into the hands of the poor. Pretty thoughts, but about as unlikely as anything imaginable in the hostile climate of antigovernment sentiment and transnational markets that dominates our times.

  And so the original question reappears: in a world where the nation-state and its democratic institutions are being fractured and weakened by the divisive forces of Jihad at the same moment they are being rendered antiquated and superfluous by the integrating forces of McWorld, how is democracy to survive? Where on the vaunted information highway are the roads that will lead to justice or the pipes that will convey the vox populi? Now that they have dismantled the empire of despots and statist political ideologies, including democracy, how can communities defend their common goods against the empire of profits and cultural monopoly? Which democratic ideology can contend with the pretense to “choice” of “free” markets so that we can regain the power to choose public goods in common and thereby free ourselves from the inadvertent public consequences of all the private market choices that masquerade as the whole of freedom? Is deliberative public debate on such questions even possible where McWorld’s communication systems secret preferences that, without any discussion at all, modify public attitudes and precipitate private behaviors?

  It would be silly to suggest that conspiracy or some ruthless political ambitions are at work here. McWorld runs on automatic pilot: that is the whole point of the market. The influences it brings to bear are not mandated by the imperative to control, only by the imperative to sell. The ad absurdum logic of sales is one corporation that makes one product that satisfies every need: an athletic shoe equipped with a nutrition patch linked to sunglasses that inject Coca-Cola directly into the veins of the inner ear while flashing videos directly into wide-irised eyeballs. The political entailments of this logic are inadvertent: a kind of default totalitarianism without a totalistic government: everyone a subject, no one a ruler. Women and men governed by their appetites rather than by those lesser tyrants traditionally feared as “dictators” or “monolithic parties.”

  The very idea of the public has become so closely associated with nation-states that the idea of a global public potent enough to take on McWorld’s global privates seems inconceivable, especially given the further fracturing of local public entities by Jihad’s many neotribalisms. In the solipsistic virtual reality of cyberspace, commonality itself seems to be in jeopardy. How can there be common ground when the ground itself vanishes and women and men inhabit abstractions? There may be some new form of community developing among the myriad solitaries perched in front of their screens and connected only by their fingertips to the new virtual web defined by the Internet. But the politics of that “community” has yet to be invented, and it is hardly likely to be democratic. People on the Net do prattle on about the community, but when have they last spoken to a neighbor? If good fences make good neighbors, virtual neighbors make good fences—against real neighbors.

  In celebration of the potential commonality of America, Woody Guthrie once sang, less out of conviction than in burning hope, “This land is your land, this land is my land.” Whose land is Disneyland? Or Steven Spielberg’s “new country”? To whom ought McWorld to belong, and will they be able to wrest it away from the irresponsible and wholly random individuals or irresponsible and wholly monopolistic corporations that are its current proprietors? Poets less gifted than Guthrie have more recently proffered their own answer: “We are the world,” they sing. But whose world are we? Where is the “we” in McWorld? It acknowledges welters of me’s operating impulsively in an anonymous market, but it provides not a single clue to common identity or to the place of community in the market. No wonder the new tribes pummeling the nation-state see in McWorld only the destruction of everything that constitutes their common identity. Democracy seems to be the loser coming and going. Jihad has other virtues to pursue, McWorld’s priorities omit it altogether. Under these circumstances, can it find new expressions, new institutions, new attitudes, that will permit it to survive?

  These questions are, in a quite technical sense, questions of political theory and political science. They point toward the final section of our portrait of Jihad and McWorld by raising the question: is democracy possible under the conditions of either Jihad or McWorld? However, before they can be answered, we need to scrutinize what I have called the forces of Jihad with the same care we have spent on McWorld. For Jihad is the other challenge facing democracy in our third millennium and in the short run its peril to free institutions may be still greater.

  PART II

  The Old World of Jihad

  10

  Jihad vs. McWorld or

  Jihad via McWorld?

  HUMAN BEINGS are so psychologically needy, so dependent on community, so full of yearning for a blood brotherhood commercial consumption disallows, so inclined to a sisterhood that the requisites of personhood cannot tolerate, that McWorld has no choice but to service, even to package and market Jihad. We have seen how athletic shoe salesmanship revolves around selling American black subculture; how American Express treats global travel (a privilege of McWorld) as a safari to exotic cultures still somehow intact in spite of the visitations and depredations made possible by American Express; how McDonald’s “adapts” to foreign climes with wine in France and local beef in Russia even as it imposes a way of life that makes domestic wines and local beef irrelevant. McWorld cannot then do without Jihad: it needs cultural parochialism to feed its endless appetites. Yet neither can Jihad do without McWorld: for where would culture be without the commercial producers who market it and the information and communication systems that make it known? Modern Christian fundamentalists (no longer an oxymoron) can thus access Religion Forum on CompuServe Information Ser vice while Muslims can surf the Internet until they find Mas’ood Cajee’s Cybermuslim document. That is not a computer error: “Cybermuslim” is the title.1 Religion and culture alike need McWorld’s technologies and McWorld’s markets. Without them, they are unlikely to survive in the long run.

  Now to be sure, I have identified McWorld with crucial developments made possible by innovations in technology and communications that appear only toward the end of the twentieth century. In a way, however, McWorld is merely the natural culmination of a modernization process—some would call it Westernization—that has gone on since the Renaissance birth of modern science and its accompanying paradigm of knowledge construed as power. On inspection, there is little in McWorld that was not philosophically adumbrated by, if not the Renaissance, the Enlightenment: its trust in reason, its passion for liberty, and (not unrelated to that passion) its fascination with control, its image of the human mind as a tabula rasa to be written on and thus encoded by governing technical and educational elites, its confidence in the market, its skepticism about faith and habit, and its cosmopolitan disdain for parochial culture. Voltaire despised history, dismissing it as little more than a catalog of humankind’s errors and follies while Enlightenment psychology assumed a single universal human nature rooted in right reason and set down in the greater harmony of the chain of being. In Alexander Pope’s ripe imagery in his Essay on Man:

  All are but parts of one stupendous whole,

  Whose body, Nature is, and God the soul….

  Look round our World; behold the chain of Love

  Combining all below and all above.
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  See plastic Nature working to this end,

  The single atoms each to other tend …

  Nothing is foreign: Parts relate to whole;

  One all-extending all-preserving Soul

  Connects each being, greatest with the least;

  Made Beast in aid of Man, and Man of Beast;

  All serv’d, all serving! nothing stands alone;

  The chain holds on, and where it ends, unknown.

  McWorld’s advertent meretriciousness and its numbing commercialism along with the fabulous curiosities of virtuality that have problematized the very meaning of reality may seem novel. They raise questions of whether, for example, virtual communities organized around the Internet are political or public communities in any meaningful sense, and whether information networks improve or corrupt public access and civic capacity. But novelty or no, there is little in our postmodernity that would surprise modernity’s Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment champions like Pope, Voltaire, J. S. Mill, and Max Weber or, for that matter, that would cheer up its Cassandras like Rousseau and Nietzsche who had more than an inkling of how the Enlightenment would also write its own dark counterpoint. Allan Bloom was thus able to make the greater part of his complaint about our tarnished world today by rehearsing the spirited grievances of the ancients against their world then.2

  What I have called the forces of Jihad may seem then to be a throwback to premodern times: an attempt to recapture a world that existed prior to cosmopolitan capitalism and was defined by religious mysteries, hierarchical communities, spellbinding traditions, and historical torpor. As such, they may appear to be directly adversarial to the forces of McWorld. Yet Jihad stands not so much in stark opposition as in subtle counterpoint to McWorld and is itself a dialectical response to modernity whose features both reflect and reinforce the modern world’s virtues and vices—Jihad via McWorld rather than Jihad versus McWorld. The forces of Jihad are not only remembered and retrieved by the enemies of McWorld but imagined and contrived by its friends and proponents.

  Modernity precedes and thus sponsors and conditions its critics. And though those critics, on the way to combatting the modern, may try to resuscitate ancient usages and classical norms, such usages and norms—ethnicity, fundamentalist religion, nationalism, and culture for example—are themselves at least in part inventions of the agitated modern mind.3 Jihad is not only McWorld’s adversary, it is its child. The two are thus locked together in a kind of Freudian moment of the ongoing cultural struggle, neither willing to coexist with the other, neither complete without the other. Benedict Anderson gets it exactly right when he conceives of that driving engine of Jihad, the nation, as “an imagined political community.”4 Which brings us to the crucial question of nationalism, and its role in the struggle of Jihad versus McWorld.

  The Meaning(s) of Nationalism

  AMONG THE FORGES that animate modern Jihad, religion may be at once the most noble and the most toxic, but none is so prominent as nationalism, according to Walter Russell Mead and many others “the most powerful political force on earth today.”5 The trouble is, those who agree on nationalism’s potency do not agree on its meaning. There is old nationalism and new nationalism, good nationalism and bad nationalism, civic nationalism and ethnic nationalism, nationalism as the forge of great states and nationalism as their coffin, East European nationalism (arrayed against external empires [Turkish, Russian, Austrian]) and West European nationalism (arrayed against parochial forces inhibiting nation building), the nationalism of the liberal nation-state and the nationalism of ethnie: of parochial politics and tribalism.6

  As a moment in the antimodern life of Jihad, nationalism suggests narrowness, antagonism, and divisiveness and seems to exist in a primarily negative form—ethnic and cultural particularism that aims at busting up the nation-state and flinging aside multicultural wholes in the name of monocultural fragments. Free traders and One McWorlders use nationalism as a scathing pejorative denoting a fractious and anticosmopolitan tribalism, reeking of bloody fraternalism and equally toxic doses of the parochial and the primitive.

  Yet this is to distort what is in fact a far more dialectical conception of the nationalist idea in history. While it may seem to undermine integral states today, nationalism once helped fashion the states that forged the Enlightenment. As a consequence, it gained considerable momentum and a modernizing cachet of its own with the rationalistic (if often irrational) revolutions spawned by the Enlightenment in France, America, and Germany. The aspiration to a “liberal nationalism” that united the cosmopolitan ideals of liberty and equality with the communitarian ideals of fraternity and solidarity motivated the Jacobins and the American founders alike, and permitted peoples bound by culture and history nonetheless to fashion constitutions founded on rights and reason. The Greek revolt against Ottoman rule that drew Lord Byron to his epiphanic demise in 1824, for example, gained decisive support from English romantics and English liberals because national self-determination was perceived as the condition for the progress of liberty and liberty was understood to be nationalism’s noblest aspiration. No less a liberal than J. S. Mill had established what he saw as a necessary linkage between liberty and national identity, echoing Rousseau’s assertion that only an integral nation could sustain a republican constitution.7 Liberal and romantic nationalists from Herder to Mazzini subscribed at once to a religion of humanity deifying a single, cosmopolitan conception of human nature and a vigorous nationality: in Mazzini’s arching rhetoric “nationality is the role assigned by God to each people in the work of humanity.”8

  During a brief grace period (in the French Revolution and its aftermath) when patriotism meant love of fellow citizens no less than love of country (Rousseau), and la patrie referred to the democratic republic no less than to the nation, this splendid amalgam of individualist ideals and communitarian identity politics—a synthesis of the religion of humanity and the secular story of nations—appeared to make it possible for reason to set down roots and thereby secure legal personhood in a grounded identity of nationalist flesh and cultural blood. Particularism and cosmopolitanism were joined in a French ideology of progress and revolution, and the true cosmopolitan was, as Paul Hazard recognized, “someone who thought à la française.”9 This understanding of the nation made possible the creation of a constitutional state under the sovereignty of a “people” (Volk, gens, peuple, or nation)—the nation-state—which in turn offered the legal groundwork for democracy. To the extent our modern democratic institutions are tied to the idea of the nation-state, it has been a legacy of precisely this alliance between nationalism and liberalism.

  The marriage was, however, a peculiar one, a partnership defined from the outset by disequilibrium. And if, initially, history played along and the first half of the nineteenth century witnessed the stabilization of aspiring liberal nation-states in Canada and America (and in a certain manner France) as well as their rise in Italy and Prussia, by the end of the century liberalism and nationalism were becoming unstuck. Although the marriage was premised on the essential compatibility of freedom and parochial identity, in the cases of America, France, and Canada, pluralism was built into national identity, providing the indispensable glue. But in Italy, Germany, Greece, and the Balkans, it was not, and in time the marriage failed with particularly disastrous consequences. In Eric Hobsbawm’s description, toward the end of the nineteenth century, nationalism had “mutated from a concept associated with liberalism and the left, into a chauvinist, imperialist and xenophobic movement of the right… the radical right.”10

  The passing of liberal nationalism as a historical experiment was not the end of its career as social theory, however. The argument for the inclusionist liberal ideal of nationalism is made to this day by idealists who find in legal personhood too thin and abstract a basis for identity yet regard the actual record of historicist nationalism as too bloody and exclusionist to be made a basis for equal citizenship. Ortega y Gasset pointed out in the 1920s during a peri
od of empire busting and “nationalist” aspirations that preceded the balkanization of the East—a period not unlike our own—that nationalism, having won its integrating national victories, was bound to change its strategy: “In periods of consolidation,” Ortega observed, “nationalism has a positive value, and is a lofty standard. But in Europe everything is more than consolidated, and nationalism is nothing but a mania.”11 In our own well-consolidated era, while the new nationalism does seem to have become a kind of toxic mania for deconstructing states, there are still voices urging the inclusionist model. Yael Tamir thus believes that “the liberal tradition, with its respect for personal autonomy, reflection and choice, and the national tradition, with its emphasis on belonging, loyalty and solidarity, although generally seen as mutually exclusive, can indeed accommodate one another;” for, she is sure, history notwithstanding, “embeddedness and choice are not necessarily antithetical.”12

  Not perhaps necessarily: but in history all too frequently. The aspiration to dialectic has in this century more often than not been contradicted by the reality. Liberty and fraternity were brother constructs of the French revolution, but like Cain and Abel were born to strife. Embeddedness means, if not exactly subjugation to an extended communal identity, membership in entities that constrain choice. J. S. Mill to the contrary, sturdy old oaks don’t fly—as Edmund Burke might have reminded him; for Burke knew that “men are not tied together to one another by papers and seals. They are led to associate by resemblances, by conformities, by sympathies.”13 Rousseau to the contrary, butterflies cannot grow roots any more than contractually bound legal persons can nurture affection. As any naturalized citizen can attest, to choose one’s roots is not the same as being rooted by birth or blood. A voluntary membership may bring with it a special sense of appreciation—“I have become an American!”—but it cannot provide the sense of ascriptive identity that belongs to the native: “I am an American.” If “the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship” centered in a common language that permits the imagining of a common past, liberty and inclusiveness are at best likely to be contingent features of its landscape, and are at worst likely to be seen as inimical.14