Jihad vs. McWorld

by Benjamin Barber

  Such attitudes and behaviors are as much the product as the cause of McWorld’s strategies, and make understandable the alliance against McWorld’s global culture forged by Jihad’s warriors—an alliance that leads premodern tribalists and postmodern Puritans to make common cause. Are these aroused and zealous camp followers of Jihad then really so nutty in their censuring of materialism and their call for modes of living more commensurate with the needs of the human spirit? How different is their rhetoric from the more austere and secular argument advanced so fervently by Vaclav Havel, who has not permitted his reputation as an ironist to obscure his unselfconscious commitment to forging a strong connection between politics and service to others? Havel calls for an awareness of “the secret order of the cosmos” that makes “genuine conscience and genuine responsibility … explicable only as an expression of the silent assumption that we are observed ‘from above.’”11

  The complaint against McWorld represents impatience not just with its consumption-driven markets and its technocratic imperatives, but with its hollowness as a foundation for a meaningful moral existence. These absences translate into profound civic alienation that disconnects individuals from their communities and isolates them from nonmaterial sources of their being. Citizenship is not a cure for spiritual malaise but spiritual malaise is a roadblock to citizenship because it impairs the capacity to create the community institutions on which a civil society and a democratic culture must rest.

  As Robert Putnam has wisely suggested, “The norms and networks of civic engagement also powerfully affect the performance of representative government,” so that when people start bowling alone instead of together in leagues, even so pedestrian an activity as this may signal trouble for democracy.12 That is why Harry C. Boyte and other supporters of renewed citizenship have argued that we learn to be citizens not first in politics but in the “free spaces” of school, church, 4-H club, and YMCA.13 A culture of advertising, software, Hollywood movies, MTV, theme parks, and shopping malls hooped together by the virtual nexus of the information superhighway closes down free spaces. Such a culture is unquestionably in the process of forging a global something: but whatever it is, that something is not democracy. For democracy rests on civil society and citizenship, and while the new telecommunications technologies are not necessarily averse to either, they produce neither unless directed by citizens already living in and dedicated to a civil society.

  A Global Civil Society?

  AS A FRAMEWORK for democracy, the nation-state is twice impaired: the challenges of global McWorld and regional Jihad are not susceptible to its interventions; and the ideology of laissez-faire that accompanies McWorld and has become the mantra of its proponents within national government undermines whatever residual capacity it might have for action in the name of public good. Sovereignty is indeed in a twilight, condemned to a shadow world by government’s myriad postmodern detractors—ex-Communist and postindustrialist alike. In the post-Communist East, government is too closely associated with totalitarian despotism: to speak of citizens still evokes the language of comrades and faithful party hacks. In the democratic West, government remains too identified with bureaucracy, inefficiency, and a professional political class in whom peoples everywhere have lost confidence, if in part because they have lost confidence in themselves. Until we retrieve our public institutions and reclaim their powers as surrogates for our own, government and its communication technologies will be part of the alien world we confront—part of “it”—rather than a tool with which we can confront “it.” To make government our own is to recast our civic attitudes, which is possible only in a vibrant civil society where responsibilities and rights are joined together in a seamless web of community self-government.

  At the same time, democracy demands new post-nation-state institutions and new attitudes more attentive to the direct responsibility people bear for their liberties. To be sure, global government, above all democratic global government, remains a distant dream; but the kinds of global citizenship necessary to its cultivation are less remote. Citizenship is nurtured first of all in democratic civil society. A global citizenship demands a domain parallel to McWorld’s in which communities of cooperation do consciously and for the public good what markets currently do inadvertently on behalf of aggregated private interests. This is no easy task. More than sixty years ago, John Dewey had already suggested that the problem was to identify a democratic public. “Not that there is no public, no large body of persons having a common interest in the consequences of social transactions,” he wrote. “There is too much public, a public too diffused and scattered and too intricate in composition. And there are too many publics, for conjoint actions which have indirect, serious and enduring consequences are multitudinous beyond comparison.”14 How much more elusive than Dewey’s national “public” is a global “public”—not just a network of NGOs, but a civic nexus across all boundaries; not just groups like “Doctors without Frontiers” (Médecines sans frontières) but a world of citizens without frontiers?

  The creation of a public is the task of civil society. Only there are attitudes likely to emerge that favor democracy and counter the siren song of McWorld. Only there are communities possible that answer the human need for parochial interaction in ways that remain open to inclusion and to cosmopolitan civic sentiments. But how can civil society be constructed in an international arena? Those wishing to try—not just in Russia and Germany where patience and civic cunning are imperative, but in an America and Western Europe that have grown complacent about the civic domain—need both to recall the story of democracy’s founding, and at the same time to invent new institutions appropriate to novel global conditions. Old democrats often suffer from their civic longevity. They forget the lessons of their own history, forget how violent and disruptive democratization can be, how long it takes to construct a foundational free society before a democratic constitution can ever be raised up upon it. Like the cautious senator who cannot remember the risk-taking boy he once was, the modern democrat represses the memory of revolution and tumult in which he first reached his own uncertain majority, pretending that he was forever a prudent sage and that it did not take a prolonged and painful childhood to learn the arts of liberty (if they were learned at all).

  Specialists seem persuaded that to construct a new democracy, whether for Russia, Somalia, or for the whole planet, requires nothing more than the export of prefabricated constitutions and made-to-order parliamentary systems. Joshua Muravchik is a perfect exemplar whose problems begin with the very title of his new book: Exporting Democracy.15 Fed Ex the Federalist Papers to Belorussia; send a multiparty system to Nigeria by parcel post; E-mail the Chinese the Bill of Rights; ship the U.N. a civilian-controlled, all-volunteer, obedient but conscience-sensitive peacekeeping force from a country with a high tolerance for casualties and no interests of its own … and in the flash of a laser beam: democracy! For global government, do exactly the same thing, globally.

  Not quite. Democracies are built slowly, culture by culture, each with its own strengths and needs, over centuries, which is why the West Germans might have taken more care before expunging the novice civil institutions of the East German resistance movement like Neues Forum; and why the Russians might want to pay more attention to native institutions like the Russian mir (village commune) or soviet (council) and a little less to import Western institutions. For the lesson of Western democratic history is patience and self-reflection. Between Magna Carta’s first assertion of rights by the English king’s vassals and the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 that ushered in the era of parliamentary supremacy, stretched 450 long, war-filled years; and it would be 150 years more before Parliament became even nominally “democratic.” Switzerland’s proto-democratic federal system took its first steps in 1291 but acquired a fully democratic constitution only in 1848 (totally revised in 1874), more than five hundred years later. France initially experimented with aristocratic regional parliaments hundreds of years b
efore its revolution in 1789, and it required still another century for something resembling a workable democratic republic to come into being.

  In the 150 years between the foundings at Jamestown and Plymouth Rock and the founding of the United States of America in 1789, colonial Americans had a half-dozen generations of experience with royal charters, commonwealth government, town meetings, and a frontier wilderness society that sharpened their sense of autonomy and fashioned talents for self-government that would be indispensable to the working of the federal constitution. Moreover, it took the young democratic republic another seventy-five years and a bloody civil war to confront the issues of slavery and state sovereignty left unresolved by the 1789 constitution.16

  A people corrupted by tribalism and numbed by McWorld is no more ready to receive a prefabricated democratic constitution than a people emerging from a long history of despotism and tyranny. Nor can democracy be someone’s gift to the powerless. It must be seized by them because they refuse to live without liberty and they insist on justice for all. To prepare the ground for democracy today either in transitional societies or on a global scale is first to re-create citizens who will demand democracy: this means laying a foundation in civil society and civic culture. Democracy is not a universal prescription for some singularly remarkable form of government, it is an admonition to people to live in a certain fashion: responsibly, autonomously yet on common ground, in self-determining communities somehow still open to others, with tolerance and mutual respect yet a firm sense of their own values. When John Dewey called democracy a way of life—it is the idea of community life itself, he insisted—rather than a way of government, he called attention to its primacy as an associated mode of living in a civil society. A global democracy capable of countering the antidemocratic tendencies of Jihad and McWorld cannot be borrowed from some particular nation’s warehouse or copied from an abstract constitutional template. Citizenship, whether global or local, comes first.

  These lessons would not be so hard for the complacent denizens of McWorld and the angry brothers of Jihad if the idea of civil society had retained its currency among those who call themselves democrats today. But battered by history and squeezed between two equally elephantine state and private market sectors, civil society has fairly vanished both as theory and as democratic practice. Even in America, where the heritage of John Locke ought to have kept it supple, the idea of civil society has petrified and crumbled—its dry remains easily pushed aside in favor of a set of simple interlocking oppositions: the state versus the individual, government versus the private sector, public bureaucracy versus free markets, corrupt politicians versus angry voters. Politically alienated and consumption-weary people, equally uncomfortable with what they see as a rapacious and unsympathetic government and a fragmented and self-absorbed private sector, find themselves homeless. Neither the market nor the state bureaucracy seems to speak to them or serve them in their public identity. Although it is ultimately accountable to the people in their capacity as voters, the government is regarded by them as an almost foreign body: a threatening sphere of quasi-legitimate coercion managed by unresponsive representatives, professional politicians, and bureaucratic managers who have lost much of their authority as authentic voices for the public they supposedly represent. Voting, at best, is reduced to an act of spite or retribution against outlaws disguised as candidates.

  On the other hand, the private sector, representing commercial markets, and comprising private individuals and corporations, speaks for the public only inasmuch as it aggregates the desire of individuals and companies—private prejudices and special interests given a “public” status they do nothing to earn. The “public corporation” does nothing to deserve its legal sobriquet. It is private in everything but its name. Not only is the actual public left voiceless and homeless, but those in government who still try in good faith to receive counsel from the now-phantom public do not really know where to turn, since so-called public opinion polls canvass private prejudice and since special interests represent themselves and only themselves. In America and most other democracies, politicians who were once citizens temporarily holding office are metamorphosed by power into “professionals” out of touch with their constituencies, while citizens are reduced by their impotence to whining antagonists of the men and women they elect to office or to sulking clients of government services they consume without being willing to pay for. For peoples so cynical about their own democratic institutions to recommend democracy to cousins in transitional states or to conceive of a global democracy in the world beyond sovereign borders is problematic at best. For today’s half-baked citizens recommend democracy without trusting it: they abdicate their own majority powers in favor of term limits, constitutional amendments, and supermajorities. Likewise, they recommend markets without believing in them: without being persuaded for an instant that markets can secure citizenship or civic liberty or much of anything beyond the material goods that no longer satisfy their yearning spirits.

  To envision a democratic civic entity that empowers citizens to rule themselves is then necessarily to move beyond the two-celled model of government versus private sector we have come to rely on. Instead, invoking the traditional language of civil society, we need to begin to think about the domains people occupy as they go about their daily business as having at least three primary arenas, whether within tribal enclaves, nation-states, or a global society: the government and the private sector to be sure, but also the civil domain, civic space or what Eastern Europeans and Russians regularly referred to as civil society before they became “democratic” and were persuaded by their Western handlers that local participatory institutions were unsuited to democracy’s market ambitions.

  Civil society, or civic space, occupies the middle ground between government and the private sector. It is not where we vote and it is not where we buy and sell; it is where we talk with neighbors about a crossing guard, plan a benefit for our community school, discuss how our church or synagogue can shelter the homeless, or organize a summer softball league for our children. In this domain, we are “public” beings and share with government a sense of publicity and a regard for the general good and the commonweal; but unlike government, we make no claim to exercise a monopoly on legitimate coercion. Rather, we work here voluntarily and in this sense inhabit a “private” realm devoted to the cooperative (noncoercive) pursuit of public goods. This neighborly and cooperative domain of civil society shares with the private sector the gift of liberty: it is voluntary and is constituted by freely associated individuals and groups; but unlike the private sector, it aims at common ground and consensual (that is, integrative and collaborative) modes of action. Civil society is thus public without being coercive, voluntary without being privatized. It is in this domain that our traditional civic institutions such as foundations, schools, churches, public interest and other voluntary civic associations properly belong. The media too, where they take their public responsibilities seriously and subordinate their commercial needs to their civic obligations, are part of civil society.

  Unhappily, civil society has been eclipsed by government/market bipolarities and its mediating strengths have been eliminated in favor of the simplistic opposition of state and individual: the command economy versus the free market. This opposition has forced those wishing to occupy noncoercive civic space—whether in traditional democracies, new democracies, or the global civic domain—back into the private sector where they reappear, quite improperly, as “special interest” advocates supposedly unmarked by common concerns or public norms. We are compelled to be voters or consumers in all we do; if we wish to be citizens, if we want to participate in self-governance rather than just elect those who govern us, there is no place to turn.

  Throughout the nineteenth century, in Tocqueville’s America and afterwards, American society felt like civil society. Without trying to romanticize the social conditions of that decentralized period, we can see how they allowed liberty a more lo
cal and civic aspect, while a modest governmental sphere and an unassuming private sector were overshadowed by an extensive civic network tied together by schools, granges, churches, town halls, village greens, country stores, and voluntary associations of every imaginable sort. It was these “municipal” institutions that fired Tocqueville’s imagination. Government, especially at the federal level, was a modest affair (probably too modest for some of the tasks it needed to accomplish) because the constitution had left all powers not specifically delegated to it to the states and people. Markets were also modest affairs, regional in nature and dominated by other associations and affections.

  It was only when individuals who thought of themselves as citizens began to see themselves as consumers, and groups that were regarded as voluntary associations were supplanted by corporations legitimized as “legal persons,” that market forces began to encroach on and crush civil society from the private sector side. Once markets began to expand radically, government responded with an aggressive campaign on behalf of the public weal against the new monopolies, inadvertently crushing civil society from the state side. Squeezed between the warring realms of the two expanding monopolies, statist and corporate, civil society lost its preeminent place in American life. By the time of the two Roosevelts it had nearly vanished and its civic denizens had been compelled to find sanctuary under the feudal tutelage of either big government (their protectors and social servants) or the private sector, where schools, churches, unions, foundations, and other associations could assume the identity of corporations and aspire to be no more than special interest groups formed for the particularistic ends of their members. Whether those ends were, say, market profitability or environmental preservation, was irrelevant since by definition all private associations necessarily had private ends. Schools became interest groups for people with children (parents) rather than the forges of a free society; churches became confessional special interest groups pursuing separate agendas rather than sources of moral fiber for the larger society (as Tocqueville had thought they would be); voluntary associations became a variation on private lobbies rather than the free spaces where women and men practiced an apprenticeship of liberty.