Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [155]
Not so long ago, the prescient historian J. G. A. Pocock suggested that
[today we find] ourselves in a post-industrial and post-modern world in which more and more of us were consumers of information and fewer and fewer of us producers or possessors of anything, including our own identities. When a world of persons, actions, and things becomes a world of persons, actions, and linguistic or electronic constructs that have no authors, it clearly becomes easier for the things—grown much more powerful because they are no longer real—to multiply and take charge, controlling, and determining persons and actions that no longer control, determine or even produce them.6
The world Pocock describes is McWorld—what Neil Postman, another savvy critic of the tyranny of technology over its makers, calls technopoly. Technopoly suggests “the submission of all forms of cultural life to the sovereignty of technique and technology.”7 Postman is not a technological determinist and recognizes that technology can be both friend and enemy. But liberated from our common democratic choices and left to the market, we are more likely to confront the enemy than the friend. Which is perhaps why John Pocock thinks the key to living in the postindustrial, postmodern world is finding “means of affirming that we are citizens … that we are persons and associating with other persons to have voice and action in the making of our worlds.”8
Many who are skeptical of McWorld have assailed in particular its pervasive materialism. These include traditionalist advocates of the moral Jihad against the West’s consumer culture, like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn or his more militant Islamic brethren as well as some of Jihad’s harshest critics like Zbigniew Brzezinski, who has blamed the temptations of tribalism on the West’s “permissive cornucopia” that breeds materialist self-gratification and a “dominant cultural reality” defined by the “dynamic escalation of desire for sensual and material pleasure.”9 American kids from small towns in the farm belt with ears cocked to the siren song of urban shopping districts and suburban malls hundreds of miles away are no different than Russian veterans of communism succumbing to the insistent commercial jingles that come tumbling from their new Japanese TVs. “My dad won’t even let us get MTV,” complains a teen from Nebraska, whose friends “see the shopping mall as the great hangout of the rest of the nation, and they don’t have one.”10 So, the kid from Nebraska and the kid from Smolensk end up in L.A. or St. Petersburg where whatever distinct culture that may have attached to their youth is stripped away and replaced with the videology of a McWorld utterly indifferent to diversity or democracy.
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