Jihad vs. McWorld

by Benjamin Barber

  If the democratic option sounds improbable as a response to Jihad (it is!), think of the “realist” solutions currently being debated—peace and stabilization through foreign invasion, expulsion, partition, resettlement, United Nations Trusteeship, military intervention, or simple dismemberment. Will they contain the spreading global fires of Jihad? And if the democratic option sounds utopian as a response to the infotainment telesector with its infectious videology and its invisible electronic fingers curling around human minds and hearts wherever satellite transmissions can be received, think of the alternative: surrender to the markets and thus to the least noble aspirations of human civilization they so efficiently serve; and the shrinking of our vaunted liberty to Regis Debray’s wretched choice between “the local Ayatollah and Coca-Cola.”20

  In a nation at war, Abraham Lincoln saw in democracy a last and best hope. On our paradoxical planet today, with nations falling apart and coming together at the same moment for some of the very same reasons, and with cowering national governments and toothless international law hardly able to bark, let alone bite, democracy may now have become our first and only hope.

  Afterword

  A YEAR AFTER the publication of Jihad vs. McWorld, both Jihad and McWorld are alive and well. The ironies that tie them together—for Jihad needs McWorld as shadows do the sun—continue to deepen. India has just elected a Parliament dominated by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party. It also has its first Hindu nationalist Prime Minister in history (Atal Bihari Vajpayee) who, amidst fears of Hindi extremism, avows that his favorite movie is Walt Disney’s The Lion King. America’s anti-internationalist, corporation-baiting, Nafta-detesting right wing has made Patrick Buchanan, a former television pundit who has spent his entire life inside the Washington beltway establishment, its noisy antiestablishment candidate. Buchanan, in turn, like some mad apostate of the class that created him, decries the “myth of Economic Man (that) believes economics drives the world, politics is about economics, and money drives politics” and pledges his leadership on behalf of “conservatives of the heart”—seemingly launching a new American Jihad to conduct the latest skirmish in a cultural war he first promulgated in 1992.1

  President Rafsanjani of Iran is continuing to reach out to the West for renewed trade ties, but militants are setting cinemas on fire and assaulting women on bicycles to display their attachment to the culture in whose name he rules. The Olympics are coming to Atlanta, yet it is not the common Olympic spirit but common consumption that Olympic sponsors such as Budweiser appear to be selling. Budweiser’s tie-in commercial features a McWorldian Bud Blimp (a frog writ large?) that appears in a close encounter with a dozen different ethnic cultures whose distinctiveness is lost in the Blimp’s friendly intrusiveness.2

  Like the Bud Blimp, the signs of McWorld’s spreading empire are everywhere. Internet users can now participate in “cyber seders” (try http://www.emanuelnyc.org); Coke has successfully purchased the once civic-minded song “We Are the World,” on the way to “eliminating the very concept of a ‘domestic’ and ‘international’ Coca-Cola beverage business;”3 and Disney is founding “schools” and study “institutes” in Florida while building whole new towns like “Celebration” to promote its multiplying wares, soft and hard.4 Bill Gates, CEO of Microsoft, has begun to buy up the world of culture, having already purchased the electronic rights to the photographs of Ansel Adams, the art images of the Barnes Collection, and one intact Washington pundit (Michael Kinsley, erstwhile New Republic editor and Crossfire anchor) to inaugurate a new internet magazine called SLATE and give Gates’s internet business instant legitimacy.5

  It is then hardly surprising that when Klaus Schwab and Claude Smadja, respectively the founder and managing director of the Davos Forum—a preeminent global market think tank—turn to look in the mirror, they are startled by what they see and become inadvertent prophets of the struggle between McWorld and the zealous populist reaction to it:

  Economic globalization has entered a critical phase. A mounting backlash against its effects, especially in the industrial democracies, is threatening a very disruptive impact on economic activity and social stability in many countries. The mood in these democracies is one of helplessness and anxiety, which helps explain the rise of a new brand of populist politicians. This can easily turn into revolt.6

  Or, better, turn into Jihad’s deeply felt counterrevolution: recent elections in “transitional democracies” in the countries of the old Soviet bloc have brought back into office many old communists, often retooled as new nationalists. Democracy has been unsettled in these countries by the deep disillusion that has followed the conflation of markets and liberty, giving the words of Schwab and Smadja their resonance. The world continues then to fall apart and come together; and, however newsworthy the disintegrative forces may seem, the integrative forces still seem poised to overwhelm them. Hezbollah is no match for Wal-Mart.

  If my fundamental analysis of the dialectics that bind Jihad and McWorld together continues to be validated by current events, there are, nonetheless, issues raised by critics that merit some reply. Because I assail both Jihad and McWorld for their indifference (if not outright antipathy) to democracy, it might seem to some that I loathe them without qualification. In fact, I argue quite explicitly that next to their vices both have intrinsic advantages, even virtues. McWorld’s modernization has created a healthier, wealthier world in which at least the conditions for greater equality are present. I am neither a nostalgic dreamer after earlier Golden Ages nor a Luddite antagonist of technology and its improvements. Capitalism and the science from which it arises constitute a system of power and control that generates wealth and progress with unprecedented efficiency. It is not capitalism but unrestrained capitalism counterbalanced by no other system of values that endangers democracy. My criticism of McWorld is aimed at what may be called economic totalism. If the political totalism of the fascist and communist world once tried, at horrendous human costs, to subordinate all economic, social, and cultural activity to the demands of an overarching state, the economic totalism of unleashed market economics seems now to be trying (at costs yet to be fully reckoned) to subordinate politics, society, and culture to the demands of an overarching market. As once political totalism rationalized its dominion by reference to its supposed association with freedom—the government of the proletariat was to usher in a communist age of pure freedom—so today markets rationalize their dominion over every other sector of life by appealing to the supposedly manifold liberties of consumer choice.7

  But the lesson of modern pluralism that undergirds the concerns of this book is that humankind depends for its liberty on variety and difference. We are governed best when we live in several spheres, each with its own rules and benefits, none wholly dominated by another. The political domain is “sovereign” to be sure, but this means only that it regulates the many domains of a free plural society in a fashion that preserves their respective autonomies. The usurping dominion of McWorld has, however, shifted sovereignty to the domain of global corporations and the world markets they control, and has threatened the autonomy of civil society and its cultural and spiritual domains, as well as of politics. The alternative to McWorld I detail in Part III of this book is not a state-dominated society in place of a market-dominated society, but a many-sectored civil society in which the autonomy of each distinctive domain—the economic market included—is guaranteed by the sovereignty of the democratic state. Only a democratic polity has an interest in and the power to preserve the autonomy of the several realms. When other domains wrest sovereignty away from the state, whether they are religious or economic, the result is a kind of totalitarian coordination—in the Middle Ages it was theocratic; in this age of McWorld it is economistic.

  These considerations will suggest why the sallies of critics who cannot distinguish consumerism from democracy are so peculiarly off base.8 For them, consumer society in a market world is democracy, and those who assail McWorld a
re surreptitious elitists, however “democratic” their rhetoric. Like Edward Shills, who once tried to skewer Dwight MacDonald, Irving Howe, and Theodore Adorno as “aristocratic” twins of the likes of Wyndham Lewis and Ortega y Gasset because they too were intolerant of mass culture, so these new stalwarts of unbridled capitalism insist that a critic of McWorld’s consumerism, democracy incarnate, cannot by definition count himself a democrat. By whose definition?

  Admirers of Milton Friedman’s version of unrestrained capitalism would like us to think that markets are surrogates for democratic sovereignty because they permit us to “vote” with our dollars or D-Marks or yen.9 But economic choices are private, about individual needs and desires; whereas political choices are public, about the nature of public goods. As a consumer, one may buy a powerful car that can make 130 miles per hour, yet without contradiction the very same person may as a citizen vote for speed limits in the name of public safety and environmental preservation. The problem with Disney and McDonald’s is not aesthetics, and critics of mass taste such as Horkheimer and Adorno (and me) are concerned not to interfere with the expression of private taste or public judgment, but to prevent monopoly control over information, and to interdict that quiet, comfortable coercion through which television, advertising, and entertainment can constrict real liberty of choice. It is not too little faith in democratic man and woman but a great deal of faith in the power of the mind machines of McWorld’s software producers that leads me to suspect the “autonomy” of consumer choice. It is hard not to be skeptical when recalling the last line of Quiz Show, the film account of the game show scandals of the 1950s. Said a representative of the great plunderers of public trust in what at the time was an innocent television medium, “We’re not exactly hardened criminals here—we’re in show business!” Those who invest billions in advertising, promotion, packaging, and cultural warfare in the name of selling products that nobody can be said to “need” are hardly criminals either: but their kind of show business is directed precisely at liquidating anything that smacks remotely of consumer autonomy, let alone democratic liberty. Hucksterism and snake oil swindles are not what Jefferson had in mind when he envisioned an educated citizenry or a civic republic.

  The push toward concentration in the infotainment telesector that is rooted in this show business mentality, which is a primary focus of Part I of this book, has accelerated since it was published in the summer of 1996, almost at the same moment that the Disney company acquired ABC. In the year since, a half dozen new major mergers and acquisitions have further narrowed ownership in this vital sector.10 Combined with a telecommunications bill that further deregulates the industry and removes traditional barriers preventing mergers between carriers, broadcasters, and cable operators as well as between local and long distance companies, this move toward concentration has had a potentially devastating effect on the variety and liberty of civic communication. In the nineteenth century, the great monopolies in oil, steel, coal, and the railways were finally dismantled by vigorous government anti-trust regulation. But Michael Eisner is no Rockefeller and Bill Gates is no Vanderbilt and Steven Spielberg is no Carnegie. Eisner, Gates, and Spielberg are far more powerful, for theirs is power not over oil, steel, and railroads—mere muscles of our modern industrial bodies—but over pictures, information, and ideas—the very sinews of our postmodern soul.

  McWorld has virtues then, but they scarcely warrant permitting the market to become sovereign over politics, culture, and civil society. Jihad too has virtues which, I acknowledge, may be less than easily discernible in light of my harsh criticism of parochialism’s abuses. Nonetheless, as Robert Bellah and his colleagues demonstrate in their study of America’s yearning for community (Habits of the Heart), and as Michael Sandel shows with acute historical insight in his recent tribute to Democracy’s Discontents, the fractious, material forces of our time leave us seeking forms of communion and fraternity that ethnic, religious, and civic communities once gave us. The success of the Communitarian movement suggests how deep the yearning runs.

  Yet though there is a deep human need for community, and though democracy itself flourishes most richly when it is founded on the consensual will of tightly knit communities (city states and rural republics are its natural ground), the conditions of community present democrats with a conundrum. For the great dilemma of community is that those forms of communal association that yield the highest degree of intimacy, membership, solidarity, and fraternity are those rooted in strong communal ties of the sort that arise out of blood, narrow belief, and hierarchy: the demonization of outsiders. By the same token, democratic communities—community in its only safe form—become increasingly less fraternal, solidaristic, and satisfying as they become more open, egalitarian, and voluntary. “Democratic community” is thus something of an oxymoron. Defined rigidly, above all by reference to their enemies, communities can fasten people together into a body that no one can tear asunder. Defined with imaginative artifice by achieved values, common work, and chosen ends, communities remain open and egalitarian but are often more fragile. The hope of civil society, which is the hope of this book, is that the love of liberty and the imperatives of equality will lend to democratic communities the necessary centripetal impetus that less open communities have by nature.

  My discussion of Jihad—indeed the very use of the word in the title—has drawn other criticism as well. For although I made clear that I deployed Jihad as a generic term quite independently from its Islamic theological origins, and although I insisted that Islam has itself both democratic and nondemocratic manifestations and potentials, some readers felt the term singled out Islam and used it in pejorative ways to criticize non-Islamic phenomena. While extremist groups like Islamic Jihad have themselves associated the word with armed struggle against modernizing, secular infidels, I can appreciate that the great majority of devout Muslims who harbor no more sympathy for Islamic Jihad than devout Christians feel for the Ku Klux Klan or the Montana Militia might feel unfairly burdened by my title. I owe them an apology, and hope they will find their way past the book’s cover to the substantive reasoning that makes clear how little my argument has to do with Islam as a religion or with resistance to McWorld as the singular property of Muslims.

  I have much less sympathy for those who read only one or another section of the book and concluded, lazily, that I must be writing either about McWorld alone or Jihad alone. Some critics have simply lumped Jihad vs. McWorld in together with Pandemonium prophets like Robert D. Kaplan (The Ends of the Earth) and Samuel P. Huntington (“The Clash of Civilizations”), dismissing us all as Pandoric pessimists.11 But as must be clear to anyone who reads the book cover to cover, it is finally about neither Jihad nor McWorld but about democracy—and the dangers democracy faces in a world where the forces of commerce and the forces reacting to commerce are locked in struggle.

  No one grasped that more clearly or prophetically than President Bill Clinton, who has said: “Mr. Barber is arguing that democracy and the ability to hold people together … is being threatened today by the globalization of the economy … (and by) a world people think they cannot control.” Hence, it is “more important today for … democracy to work, for the basic values (of democracy) to work, to be made real in the lives of ordinary citizens.”12

  President Clinton understood what many critics overlooked: that the struggle between Jihad and McWorld, for the ordinary women and men caught between them, is a struggle to preserve democracy and to extend civil society. In this sense, the struggle for democracy is the real subject of Jihad vs. McWorld. My concern is not with capitalism but with civil society and what capitalism does to it, not with religion or ethnicity but with citizenship and how fundamentalist zealotry can undermine it. We need markets to generate productivity, work, and goods; and we need culture and religion to assure solidarity, identity, and social cohesion—and a sense of human spirit. But most of all, we need democratic institutions capable of preserving our liberty even in parochi
al communities; and capable of maintaining our equality and our precious differences even in capitalist markets. With mediating civic institutions firmly in place and democracy once again the sovereign preserver of our plural worlds, Jihad can yield to healthy forms of cultural difference and group identity while McWorld can take its rightful and delimited place as the economic engine of a world in which economics is only a single crucial dimension. With McWorld’s excesses under control, communities of blood and spirit will not have to make war on it and, beyond the homogenous theme parks of commerce, we may rediscover the free spaces in which it is possible to live not only as consumers but as citizens.

  June 1, 1996

  Piscataway Township

  APPENDIX A

  Justice-of-Energy-

  Distribution Index