Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [166]
President Rafsanjani of Iran is continuing to reach out to the West for renewed trade ties, but militants are setting cinemas on fire and assaulting women on bicycles to display their attachment to the culture in whose name he rules. The Olympics are coming to Atlanta, yet it is not the common Olympic spirit but common consumption that Olympic sponsors such as Budweiser appear to be selling. Budweiser’s tie-in commercial features a McWorldian Bud Blimp (a frog writ large?) that appears in a close encounter with a dozen different ethnic cultures whose distinctiveness is lost in the Blimp’s friendly intrusiveness.2
Like the Bud Blimp, the signs of McWorld’s spreading empire are everywhere. Internet users can now participate in “cyber seders” (try http://www.emanuelnyc.org); Coke has successfully purchased the once civic-minded song “We Are the World,” on the way to “eliminating the very concept of a ‘domestic’ and ‘international’ Coca-Cola beverage business;”3 and Disney is founding “schools” and study “institutes” in Florida while building whole new towns like “Celebration” to promote its multiplying wares, soft and hard.4 Bill Gates, CEO of Microsoft, has begun to buy up the world of culture, having already purchased the electronic rights to the photographs of Ansel Adams, the art images of the Barnes Collection, and one intact Washington pundit (Michael Kinsley, erstwhile New Republic editor and Crossfire anchor) to inaugurate a new internet magazine called SLATE and give Gates’s internet business instant legitimacy.5
It is then hardly surprising that when Klaus Schwab and Claude Smadja, respectively the founder and managing director of the Davos Forum—a preeminent global market think tank—turn to look in the mirror, they are startled by what they see and become inadvertent prophets of the struggle between McWorld and the zealous populist reaction to it:
Economic globalization has entered a critical phase. A mounting backlash against its effects, especially in the industrial democracies, is threatening a very disruptive impact on economic activity and social stability in many countries. The mood in these democracies is one of helplessness and anxiety, which helps explain the rise of a new brand of populist politicians. This can easily turn into revolt.6
Or, better, turn into Jihad’s deeply felt counterrevolution: recent elections in “transitional democracies” in the countries of the old Soviet bloc have brought back into office many old communists, often retooled as new nationalists. Democracy has been unsettled in these countries by the deep disillusion that has followed the conflation of markets and liberty, giving the words of Schwab and Smadja their resonance. The world continues then to fall apart and come together; and, however newsworthy the disintegrative forces may seem, the integrative forces still seem poised to overwhelm them. Hezbollah is no match for Wal-Mart.
If my fundamental analysis of the dialectics that bind Jihad and McWorld together continues to be validated by current events, there are, nonetheless, issues raised by critics that merit some reply. Because I assail both Jihad and McWorld for their indifference (if not outright antipathy) to democracy, it might seem to some that I loathe them without qualification. In fact, I argue quite explicitly that next to their vices both have intrinsic advantages, even virtues. McWorld’s modernization has created a healthier, wealthier world in which at least the conditions for greater equality are present. I am neither a nostalgic dreamer after earlier Golden Ages nor a Luddite antagonist of technology and its improvements. Capitalism and the science from which it arises constitute a system of power and control that generates wealth and progress with unprecedented efficiency.