Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [1]
Had I heeded these friendly critics more consistently, I would have certainly written a better book.
To my wife Leah and my daughter Nellie I owe an apology, though they have asked none of me. Without the labors of this project, I would have been better able to repay their indulgent tolerance. The guilt I feel arises not from complaint, but from how much too lovingly understanding they have been.
Contents
Acknowledgments
2001 Introduction
Introduction
PART I. THE NEW WORLD OF MCWORLD
1. The Old Economy and the Birth of a New McWorld
2. The Resource Imperative: The Passing of Autarky and the Fall of the West
3. The Industrial Sector and the Rise of the East
4. From Hard Goods to Soft Goods
5. From Soft Goods to Service
6. Hollyworld: McWorld’s Videology
7. Television and MTV: McWorld’s Noisy Soul
8. Teleliterature and the Theme Parking of McWorld
9. Who Owns McWorld? The Media Merger Frenzy
PART II. THE OLD WORLD OF JIHAD
10. Jihad vs. McWorld or Jihad via McWorld?
11. Jihad Within McWorld: The “Democracies”
12. China and the Not Necessarily Democratic Pacific Rim
13. Jihad Within McWorld: “Transitional Democracies”
14. Essential Jihad: Islam and Fundamentalism
PART III. JIHAD VS. MCWORLD
15. Jihad and McWorld in the New World Disorder
16. Wild Capitalism vs. Democracy
17. Capitalism vs. Democracy in Russia
18. The Colonization of East Germany by McWorld
19. Securing Global Democracy in the World of McWorld
Afterword
Appendix A. Justice-of-Energy-Distribution Index
Appendix B. Twenty-two Countries’ Top Ten Grossing Films,
1991
Notes
2001 Introduction
Terrorism’s Challenge to Democracy
ON SEPTEMBER 11, Jihad’s long war against McWorld culminated in a fearsomely unprecedented and altogether astonishing assault on the temple of free enterprise in New York City and the cathedral of American military might in Washington, D.C. In bringing down the twin towers of the World Trade Center and destroying a section of the Pentagon with diabolically contrived human bombs, Jihadic warriors reversed the momentum in the struggle between Jihad and McWorld, writing a new page in an ongoing story. Until that day, history’s seemingly ineluctable march into a complacent postmodernity had appeared to favor McWorld’s ultimate triumph—a historical victory for free-market institutions and McWorld’s assiduously commercialized and ambitiously secularist materialism. Today, the outcome of the confrontation between the future and the radical reaction to it seems far less certain. As the world enters a novel stage of shadowed warfare against an invisible enemy, the clash between Jihad and McWorld is again poignantly relevant in understanding why the modern response to terror cannot be exclusively military or tactical, but rather must entail a commitment to democracy and justice even when they are in tension with the commitment to cultural expansionism and global markets. The war against terrorism also will have to be a war for justice if it is to succeed, and not just in the sense in which President George W. Bush used the term in his address to Congress.
A week after the trauma of the first large-scale assault on the American homeland, more successful than even its scheming perpetrators could possibly have hoped for, the president joined the abruptly renewed combat with Jihadic terrorists by deploying the rhetoric of retributive justice: “We will bring the terrorists to justice,” he said gravely to a joint session of Congress, “or we will bring justice to the terrorists.” The language of justice was surely the appropriate context for the American response, but it will remain appropriate only if the compass of its meaning is extended from retributive to distributive justice.
The collision between the forces of disintegral tribalism and reactionary fundamentalism I have called Jihad (Islam is not the issue) and the forces of integrative modernization and aggressive economic and cultural globalization