Jihad vs. McWorld

by Benjamin Barber

  Modernity has enemies other than Islamic Holy War, then, some of them on McWorld’s own American home turf. At least since the 1730s, when America experienced its first “Great Awakening” in Protestant fundamentalism, this country has periodically felt the zeal of reactive religion. Mainstream Christian Coalition leaders today offer what is relatively speaking a moderate version of Jihad. Jerry Falwell, the president of the Moral Majority, thus sermonizes against a Supreme Court that has “raped the Constitution and raped the Christian faith and raped the churches” and implores followers to “fight against those radical minorities who are trying to remove God from our textbooks, Christ from our nation. We must never allow our children to forget that this is a Christian nation. We must take back what is rightfully ours.”18 Pat Buchanan tells the Republican National Convention in 1992 that the country faces a cultural war for its very survival and victorious Republicans following the 1994 elections accuse President Clinton of countercultural and un-American attitudes. Less conventional warriors such as Randall Terry, the antiabortion crusader, are far more blunt: “I want you to just let a wave of intolerance wash over you. I want you to let a wave of hatred wash over you. Yes, hate is good…. Our goal is a Christian nation. We have a biblical duty, we are called by God, to conquer this country.”19 These Christian soldiers bring to their ardent campaign against time and the modern world all the indignation, all the impatience with moral slackness, all the purifying hatred, of the zealots in Teheran and Cairo. They indulge McWorld only in order to use its high-tech communications to organize voters or its rock music to sugar-coat salvation lyrics. Groups like Gospel Gangstas and A.S.W.I.F.T. press drive-by shootings into the service of Jesus:

  In this scrap the Word of God’s my A-K

  Pointed at your Dome

  ’Cause my aim is straight, hey …

  You wanna be set free

  Then you gotta be saved

  Better do it now

  Move with the quickness

  Or else I’ll hit you with the

  Drive by Witness.20

  They may not be angels,21 these pious gospel cowboys, but they are not madmen either: they are winning local elections and helped win Congress for the Republicans in 1994, and they are continuing to push the Republican Party further and further rightward. They raised millions for Colonel Oliver North’s senatorial campaign in Virginia and nearly won. They are astute not merely in their political tactics but in their judgment on McWorld. There is much in McWorld that is sickening, much that outrages elementary justice and morals, much that demeans religion and religious belief, much that belittles both human beings and the larger spirit to which—if they are to feel human—they feel they must belong. The yearning of American suburbanites for the certainties of a literal New Testament are no less ingenuous than the yearning of Arabic martyrs for the certainties of a literal Qur’an. They both want to be born again so as to be born yesterday, born into a former epoch before Nietzsche tried to persuade us that God had died; they want martyrdom before Weber’s prophecy that rational men and bureaucratic governments will disenchant the world can come true. Some join fundamentalist collectives, others cultivate a pioneer solitude, going “off the grid” to combat the “new world order” they believe is endangering the antimodern values they cherish.22 They may break their heads against time itself, but time has not been a friend to either religion or morals in recent centuries. Even the pragmatists who are prepared to live with what history delivers may seek deliverance from the lives they are bequeathed.

  Moreover, there is a new breed of American pragmatist: a fearsome pragmatist of holy war who acts out the rage he has carefully cultured from seeds of deeply felt resentment. He may be a veteran but not necessarily, and he probably belongs not just to the National Rifle Association but to a hate group like the White Aryan Resistance or the Order or one of the rapidly spreading “militias” that are forming in nearly every state in America. He is fascinated by the destructive technology of McWorld—its assault weapons and explosives—even as he identifies McWorld’s globalism with the loss of his own American style “ancient” liberty. His anger reflects a kind of studied perversion of the civil religion. To him, the constitution means the second amendment (the right to bear arms), liberty means the law stops where his property begins (federal officers are agents of totalitarianism), and government is a demon “it” fronting for communists and the United Nations against which a defensive war must be organized and waged to prevent it from taking over the country. As befits the paranoid style, his heroes are driven loners like Robert Jay Matthews, a leader of the Order who back in 1984 murdered Denver talk show host Alan Berg and was himself killed in a subsequent firefight; Randy Weaver, a white supremacist whose wife and son were killed in a shootout with the authorities in 1992; David Koresh, the Davidian “martyr” whose immolation in Waco in the 1993 government raid has become a call to vengeance for thousands of McWorld castoffs; and Richard Wayne Snell, a self-styled Nazi who murdered a black Arkansas state trooper and was executed on April 19, 1995.

  April 19, 1995: that was the same day—exactly two years after the Waco tragedy—a handful of zealots “honoring” these predecessors blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City in what was the most costly terrorist episode in American history. The authorities immediately suspected Jihad. They were right, although mistakenly they thought Jihad meant foreign: Islamic or Arab or Iranian. But Jihad had come home to America in all its native ferocity. Home-grown, it stalks the heartland.

  If McWorld in its most elemental negative form is a kind of animal greed—one that is achieved by an aggressive and irresistible energy, Jihad in its most elemental negative form is a kind of animal fear propelled by anxiety in the face of uncertainty and relieved by self-sacrificing zealotry—an escape out of history.23 Because history has been a history of individuation, acquisitiveness, secularization, aggressiveness, atomization, and immoralism it becomes in the eyes of Jihad’s disciples the temporal chariot of wickedness, a carrier of corruption that, along with time itself, must be rejected. Moral preservationists, whether in America, Israel, Iran, or India, have no choice but to make war on the present to secure a future more like the past: depluralized, monocultured, unskepticized, reenchanted. Homogenous values by which women and men live orderly and simple lives were once nurtured under such conditions. Today, our lives have become pulp fiction and Pulp Fiction as novel, as movie, or as life promises no miracles. McWorld is meager fare for hungry moralists and shows only passing interest in the spirit. However outrageous the deeds associated with Jihad, the revolt the deeds manifest is reactive to changes that are themselves outrageous.

  This survey of the moral topography of Jihad suggests that McWorld—the spiritual poverty of markets—may bear a portion of the blame for the excesses of the holy war against the modern; and that Jihad as a form of negation reveals Jihad as a form of affirmation. Jihad tends the soul that McWorld abjures and strives for the moral well-being that McWorld, busy with the consumer choices it mistakes for freedom, disdains. Jihad thus goes to war with McWorld and, because each worries the other will obstruct and ultimately thwart the realization of its ends, the war between them becomes a holy war. The lines here are drawn not in sand but in stone. The language of hate is not easily subjected to compromise; the “other” as enemy cannot easily be turned into an interlocutor. But as McWorld is “other” to Jihad, so Jihad is “other” to McWorld. Reasoned communication between the two is problematic when for the partisans of Jihad both reason and communication appear as seductive instrumentalities of the devil, while for the partisans of McWorld both are seductive instrumentalities of consumerism. For all their dialectical interplay with respect to democracy, Jihad and McWorld are moral antinomies. There is no room in the mosque for Nintendo, no place on the Internet for Jesus—however rapidly “religious” channels are multiplying. Life cannot be both play and in earnest, cannot stand for the lesser gratification of a needy body and simultaneously for the greater g
lory of a selfless soul. Either the Qur’an speaks the Truth, or Truth is a television quiz show. History has given us Jihad as a counterpoint to McWorld and made them inextricable; but individuals cannot live in both domains at once and are compelled to choose. Sadly, it is not obvious that the choice, whatever it is, holds out much promise to democrats in search of a free civil society.

  Should would-be democrats take their chances then with McWorld, with which they have shared the road to modernity but that has shown so little interest in them? Or try to reach an accommodation with Jihad, whose high moral purpose serves democracy’s seriousness yet leaves but precious little space for its liberties? As it turns out, neither Jihad nor McWorld—and certainly not the quarrel between them—allows democracy much room.

  PART III

  Jihad vs. McWorld

  15

  Jihad and McWorld in the New

  World Disorder

  THE TALK AMONG quarreling nations is about a new world order, but the clash of Jihad and McWorld foments a new world disorder in which democracy is occluded. The nation-state certainly has not in and of itself guaranteed a democratic civil society, and is probably something less than an indispensable condition for the flourishing of free women and men. After all, democracies of one kind or another arose in small city-state polities—for which they seem ideally suited—before there were nation-states, as well as under empires that had swallowed up nation-states. However, in the last several hundred years, democratic and egalitarian institutions have for the most part been closely associated with integral nation-states, and citizenship (democracy’s sine qua non) has been an attribute of membership in such states. The twin assault on democratic citizenship from the fractious forces of Jihad and the spreading markets of McWorld in effect cuts the legs out from under democratic institutions. Whether or not they can secure new foundations either in the parochialism of ethnic identity (and its accompanying politics of resentment) or in the universalism of the profit motive (and its accompanying politics of commodities) is the crucial question.

  The bare bones answer, on which I hope presently to put some flesh, is simply this: neither Jihad nor McWorld promises a remotely democratic future. On the contrary, the consequences of the dialectical interaction between them suggest new and startling forms of inadvertent tyranny that range from an invisibly constraining consumerism to an all too palpable barbarism. The market’s invisible hand is attached to a manipulative arm that, unguided by a sovereign head, is left to the contingencies of spontaneous greed. Tyranny here is indirect, often even friendly. Alexis de Tocqueville first captured its character 160 years ago when he wrote: “Fetters and headsmen were the coarse instruments that tyranny formerly employed; but the civilization of our age has perfected despotism itself…. Monarchs had … materialized oppression; the democratic republics of the present day have rendered it as entirely an affair of the mind…. [T]he body is left free, and the soul is enslaved.”1 The ideology of choice seems to liberate the body (you can choose sixteen brands of toothpaste, eleven models of pickup truck, seven brands of running shoes) but fatally constricts the possibility of real freedom for the soul (you cannot choose not to choose, that is, you cannot choose to withdraw from the market or reject the demands of the body).

  McWorld’s markets surrender judgment and abjure common willing, leaving public goods to private interests and subordinating communities and their goods to individuals and their interests. The apparent widening of individual consumer choices actually shrinks the field of social choices and forces infrastructural changes no public community ever consciously either selects or rejects. For example, the American’s freedom to choose among scores of automobile brands was secured by sacrificing the liberty to choose between private and public transportation, and mandated a world in which strip malls, suburbs, high gas consumption, and traffic jams (to name just a few) became inevitable and omnipresent without ever having been the willed choice of some democratic decision-making body—or for that matter of individuals who liked driving automobiles and chose to buy one. This politics of commodity offers a superficial expansion of options within a determined frame in return for surrendering the right to determine the frame. It offers the feel of freedom while diminishing the range of options and the power to affect the larger world. Is this really liberty?

  Internationally, much the same thing is occurring. McWorld speaks the language of choice but severs the “freedom” to buy and sell from the right of women and men to choose in common their common goods or the social character of their shared world. The IMF and the World Bank promote markets but are interested only prudentially if at all in promoting democracy. Indeed, they have shown themselves willing to sacrifice civic equilibrium and social equality for purely economic goals like privatization and free trade. They impose on fragile new would-be democracies economic crash plans that, while they suit the investment strategies of their member nations (and, more important, their member banks), also guarantee popular resentment and generate a nostalgia for the old Communist safety nets. Neo-tribalism and Jihad are often the final beneficiaries. In the near run, agreements like GATT may seem to have a regulative impact since they place power in collectivities of nations—the new World Trade Organization created by GATT, for example—and impose an internationalist majoritarianism on individual nations. Although this compromises the capacity of individual states to regulate their own economies, it supposedly does so in the name of global distributive justice and transnational public goods.2 In the long run, however, as national sovereignty weakens, the new arrangements actually cede power to markets susceptible to no democratic supervision whatsoever and shrink the global possibilities for public choosing on behalf of fundamental social values.

  Jack Heinkman, president of the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union, has complained that the GATT agreement legitimizes the exploitation of up to 200 million children, while the insidious environmental consequences of the surrender of sovereignty have been widely denounced in Europe and in America.3 Further down the road, however, it is not increasingly less sovereign nations quarreling among themselves but multinational firms and their global markets that will dictate to America and other countries what is and is not possible: whether or not five-year-olds will work thirteen-hour shifts in Pakistan for 20 cents a day, whether or not scrubless on-the-cheap smokestacks in one Asian country will be allowed to undo the good work of conscientiously (and expensively) built facilities in another.4 Even responsible American firms like Levi Strauss and Company, which has developed voluntary “Global Sourcing Guidelines” for its overseas facilities, are driven by competition and profits to seek cheap labor markets, where exploitation is endemic and regulation mainly a public relations afterthought.5

  Jihad does little better. It identifies the self by contrasting it with an alien “other,” and makes politics an exercise in exclusion and resentment. It promotes community but usually at the expense of tolerance and mutuality and hence creates a world in which belonging is more important than empowerment and collective ends posited by charismatic leaders take the place of common grounds produced by democratic deliberation. Jihad speaks the language of self-determination, but severs collective independence from the active liberty of individual citizens. Bosnian Serbia buys a certain version of “self-determination” by forfeiting the liberties of its people.

  In Central Europe and Asia, the fall of the iron curtain opened myriad peoples at once both to Jihad and McWorld. The end of Marxism did not spell the end of history, but only the end of Soviet imperialism. In the ragged cohort of states of the ex-Communist empire, it has naturally opened some doors. For as a political practice, Marxism functioned to suppress the liberty in whose name its revolutions were conducted. But the end of Marxism also represented a victory for some of the Enlightenment’s more hollow values—materialism, solipsism, and radical individualism—over certain of its nobler aspirations: civic virtue, just community, social equality, and the lifting of the economic yoke from w
hat were once known as the laboring classes. These aspirations had arisen out of the Age of Reason’s faith in the emancipatory power of economics and the progressive democratic thrust of history; they had inspired social revolutions in France and later Germany and Russia, none of which proved notably successful. To the extent that the failure of Marxism’s revolutions (which began with the failure of Marxism’s parent revolution in Jacobin France) is a failure of the Enlightenment, the fiasco has tainted Enlightenment idealism and its faith in progress, leaving us today in a more cynical and selfish world where our aspirations have shrunk to match the diminutive scale of our petty greed and the foreshortened grasp of our visible consumer’s hand. The public faith of democracy sometimes seems to have been lost in the baggage thrown overboard when the public faith of socialism was jettisoned.6

  By democracy, I understand not just government by, for, and of the people, but government by, for, and of citizens. Citizenship is power’s political currency and is what gives democracy its civic solvency. Neither Jihad nor McWorld cares a fig about citizens. Thomas Friedman, in a version of the McWorld argument, has suggested that the fratricidal warriors facing one another in Ireland, South Africa, and the Middle East may have been lured from their intractable internecine struggles by the global marketplace, all of them “compelled to beat their swords into plowshares simultaneously by economic forces.”7 But peace is not democracy. McWorld’s denizens are consumers and clients whose freedom consists of the right to buy in markets they cannot control and whose identity is imposed on them by a consumerism they scarcely notice. Palestinians and Zulus and North Ireland Catholics will be freer to do business in and outside of their stabilized countries, but they will not necessarily be any freer.