Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [127]
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.
Not long after World War II, Victor Lebow recognized that “Our enormously productive economy … demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and selling of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption.”8 Today, as Alan Durning remarks, “the words ‘consumer’ and ‘person’ have become virtual synonyms. The world economy,” Durning concludes, “is currently organized to furnish I. I billion people with a consumer life-style long on things but short on time High consumption is a precondition to neither full employment nor the end of poverty.”9 It is this world that the consumers of Ireland and Palestine and South Africa are now free to join. But full employment and social justice, or a lifestyle that leaves time to enjoy the goods wealth and education produce, are the concerns of citizens, not consumers, and the release from Jihad will not automatically make them citizens. Until McWorld finds a way to nurture citizens as successfully as it nurtures buyers and sellers, such aims will be systematically neglected, whatever innovative transnational institutions are introduced. Not that citizenship flourishes under conditions of nationalist civil war or ethnic fratricide.
Jihad in fact has little more use for citizens than does McWorld. Its denizens are blood brothers and sisters defined by identities they also are not permitted to choose for themselves. It is possible to be both a sister and a producer, a brother and a consumer, but neither identity affords individuals any real sovereignty over their life plans, which are busily arranged for them by roots and blood on the one hand, or production and consumption on the other. Sovereignty is the provenance of citizenship. The sovereignty of democratic states, which gives politics a regulative function with respect to all other domains, is nothing other than the sovereignty of citizens who, in their civic capacity, make advertent common decisions that regulate the inadvertent consequences of their conduct as private individuals and consumers. In a future world where the only available identity is that of blood brother or solitary consumer, and where these two paltry dispositions engage in a battle for the human soul, democracy does not seem well placed to share in the victory, to whomsoever it is delivered. Neither the politics of commodity nor the politics of resentment promise real liberty; the mixture of the two that emerges from the dialectical interplay of Jihad versus McWorld—call it the commodification of resentment—promises only a new if subtle slavery.
Nonetheless, for all my skepticism about the dialectic of Jihad and McWorld, I do not think that democracy is impossible in an era after the eclipse of the nation-state.