Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [156]
As Robert Putnam has wisely suggested, “The norms and networks of civic engagement also powerfully affect the performance of representative government,” so that when people start bowling alone instead of together in leagues, even so pedestrian an activity as this may signal trouble for democracy.12 That is why Harry C. Boyte and other supporters of renewed citizenship have argued that we learn to be citizens not first in politics but in the “free spaces” of school, church, 4-H club, and YMCA.13 A culture of advertising, software, Hollywood movies, MTV, theme parks, and shopping malls hooped together by the virtual nexus of the information superhighway closes down free spaces. Such a culture is unquestionably in the process of forging a global something: but whatever it is, that something is not democracy. For democracy rests on civil society and citizenship, and while the new telecommunications technologies are not necessarily averse to either, they produce neither unless directed by citizens already living in and dedicated to a civil society.
A Global Civil Society?
AS A FRAMEWORK for democracy, the nation-state is twice impaired: the challenges of global McWorld and regional Jihad are not susceptible to its interventions; and the ideology of laissez-faire that accompanies McWorld and has become the mantra of its proponents within national government undermines whatever residual capacity it might have for action in the name of public good. Sovereignty is indeed in a twilight, condemned to a shadow world by government’s myriad postmodern detractors—ex-Communist and postindustrialist alike. In the post-Communist East, government is too closely associated with totalitarian despotism: to speak of citizens still evokes the language of comrades and faithful party hacks. In the democratic West, government remains too identified with bureaucracy, inefficiency, and a professional political class in whom peoples everywhere have lost confidence, if in part because they have lost confidence in themselves. Until we retrieve our public institutions and reclaim their powers as surrogates for our own, government and its communication technologies will be part of the alien world we confront—part of “it”—rather than a tool with which we can confront “it.” To make government our own is to recast our civic attitudes, which is possible only in a vibrant civil society where responsibilities and rights are joined together in a seamless web of community self-government.
At the same time, democracy demands new post-nation-state institutions and new attitudes more attentive to the direct responsibility people bear for their liberties. To be sure, global government, above all democratic global government, remains a distant dream; but the kinds of global citizenship necessary to its cultivation are less remote. Citizenship is nurtured first of all in democratic civil society. A global citizenship demands a domain parallel to McWorld’s in which communities of cooperation do consciously and for the public good what markets currently do inadvertently on behalf of aggregated private interests. This is no easy task. More than sixty years ago, John Dewey had already suggested that the problem was to identify a democratic public. “Not that there is no public, no large body of persons having a common interest in the consequences of social transactions,” he wrote. “There is too much public, a public too diffused and scattered and too intricate in composition. And there are too many