Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [145]
It is of course finally exceedingly tricky to measure fairly the costs to Russia’s democracy, in the currencies of body or soul, of its precipitous entry into McWorld’s domain of capitalism and markets. Societies in rapid transition are always subject to stress, and seventy-five years of Bolshevism had left the Russian nation crippled in ways for which its people will pay a price for a long time to come, whatever successor system they manage to establish. Moreover, creating a democracy itself exacts costs and is often accompanied by violence, disorder, and a period of uncertainty, even chaos. It would thus be unfair to blame every current Russian malady on the economic travails of its transition to markets. Nonetheless, markets have proved themselves incapable in Russia of producing social adjustments to compensate for the hurtful public consequences of private market choices. This means the democratic outlook is much less promising than it might be. Skeptics who have witnessed the virtues of patience in forging democratic constitutions and understand the relationship between public authority and evolving liberty may wonder whether China will not succeed in realizing a genuinely democratic civil society before Russia does.
Certainly there is little to suggest that the abrupt transformation of Russia from a command economy into a radical market economy is itself doing much to nurture democracy. Civic attitudes corrupted by crime, complacency, and despair yield to what anthropologist David Lempert has suggested may be the emergence of a “cargo cult” mentality in the new Russia with “natives” looking over the ocean for exotic and godlike foreigners to bring them the magic spoils of Western markets and American pop culture.35 Lempert’s metaphor is extreme, perhaps even insulting, but the reemergence in Russia not just of organized religion but of what he describes as faith healers, television hypnotists, UFO cults, and media-driven political extremism in which the West is blamed for every old and new Russian sin suggests a deadly fatalism. One Russian sociologist has warned: “There are more completely passive people in this country than in the rest of the world put together. If they aren’t planning to kill themselves, it’s because they’re too passive to bother.”36
The sordid state of Russian society is not then just a matter of nationalist complaints or dispossessed apparatchik resentment, and the views of a Zhirinovsky or a conservative mystic Slavophile like Solzhenitsyn need not be taken as benchmarks. When Aleksandr G. Nevzorov, a thirty-six-year-old television personality from liberal St. Petersburg, cries, “Reform has meant nothing but bandits, beggars and blood, nothing to the pensioner living next to shops selling your imported food!” and is elected as a nationalist to the new parliament (in 1994), his remarks can perhaps be written off as election hyperbole and right-wing propaganda—though we may be a little surprised to see such hyperbole rewarded in the most bourgeois and pro-Western district in Russia.37 But even exiled dissidents friendly neither to the Soviet regime nor to radical nationalist critics of the present regime are anxious. Here is Nikolai Petradov, a radical economist under Gorbachev, who complained recently: “We need reform with a human face. If reforms stay as cruel to people as they have been, Zhirinovsky will waltz into the Kremlin.”38 Or listen to Edward Limonov, a dissenter in Paris known for his cosmopolitan views, who returned to Russia in 1992 to oppose Yeltsin:
I am a nationalist despite myself