Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [162]
To re-create civil society on this prescription does not entail a novel civic architecture; rather, it means reconceptualizing and repositioning institutions already in place, or finding ways to re-create them in an international setting.18 In the United States, for example, this suggests turning again to schools, foundations, voluntary associations, churches and temples and mosques, community movements, and the media, as well as myriad other civil associations and removing them from the private sector, repositioning them instead in civil society. It suggests helping citizens to reclaim their rightful public voice and political legitimacy against those who would write them off as representing only hypocritical special interests. In Russia and other transitional societies it means supporting the new civic infrastructure and worrying more about getting people involved in local civic associations than about the outcome of elections or the vicissitudes of competing nationalist, socialist, capitalist, and reformist parties playing at parliamentary politics. For McWorld, it means seeking countervailing institutions not in international law and organization but in a new set of transnational civic associations that afford opportunities for nationally based civil societies to link up to one another and for individual citizens of different countries to cooperate across national boundaries in regional and global civil movements. Civil society needs a habitation; it must become a real place that offers the abstract idea of a public voice a palpable geography somewhere other than in the twin atlases of government and markets.
More than anything else, what has been lost in the clash of Jihad and McWorld has been the idea of the public as something more than a random collection of consumers or an aggregation of special political interests or a product of identity polititcs. The public voice turns out to be the voice of civil society, the voice of what we can call variously an American civic forum, a Russian civic forum, or a global civic forum—civil society’s own interactive representative assembly. We have noted that the democratic citizen must precede the democratization of government. It now becomes clear that civil society offers conditions for the creation of democratic citizens. A citizen is an individual who has acquired a public voice and understands himself to belong to a wider community, who sees herself as sharing goods with others. Publicity is the key to citizenship. The character of the public voice is thus essential in defining the citizen. For a public voice is not any old voice addressing the public. The divisive rant of talk radio or the staccato crossfire of pundit-TV are in fact perfect models of everything that public talk is not.
Much of what passes for journalism is in fact mere titillation or dressed-up gossip or polite prejudice. The media have abandoned civil society for the greater profits of the private sector, where their public responsibilities no longer hobble their taste for commercial success. How long a journey it can be for women and men nurtured in the private sector and used to identifying with one another only via a cash contract on the one hand, or in terms of Jihad’s blood fraternity on the other, to find their way to civil society and speak in its measured public voice, particularly if that voice must also have a transnational or international resonance. “Public” inflects “voice” in a remarkable fashion that turns out to hold the key to civil society and citizenship. A genuinely public voice—the voice of civil society—can empower those who speak far more