Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [169]
My discussion of Jihad—indeed the very use of the word in the title—has drawn other criticism as well. For although I made clear that I deployed Jihad as a generic term quite independently from its Islamic theological origins, and although I insisted that Islam has itself both democratic and nondemocratic manifestations and potentials, some readers felt the term singled out Islam and used it in pejorative ways to criticize non-Islamic phenomena. While extremist groups like Islamic Jihad have themselves associated the word with armed struggle against modernizing, secular infidels, I can appreciate that the great majority of devout Muslims who harbor no more sympathy for Islamic Jihad than devout Christians feel for the Ku Klux Klan or the Montana Militia might feel unfairly burdened by my title. I owe them an apology, and hope they will find their way past the book’s cover to the substantive reasoning that makes clear how little my argument has to do with Islam as a religion or with resistance to McWorld as the singular property of Muslims.
I have much less sympathy for those who read only one or another section of the book and concluded, lazily, that I must be writing either about McWorld alone or Jihad alone. Some critics have simply lumped Jihad vs. McWorld in together with Pandemonium prophets like Robert D. Kaplan (The Ends of the Earth) and Samuel P. Huntington (“The Clash of Civilizations”), dismissing us all as Pandoric pessimists.11 But as must be clear to anyone who reads the book cover to cover, it is finally about neither Jihad nor McWorld but about democracy—and the dangers democracy faces in a world where the forces of commerce and the forces reacting to commerce are locked in struggle.
No one grasped that more clearly or prophetically than President Bill Clinton, who has said: “Mr. Barber is arguing that democracy and the ability to hold people together … is being threatened today by the globalization of the economy … (and by) a world people think they cannot control.” Hence, it is “more important today for … democracy to work, for the basic values (of democracy) to work, to be made real in the lives of ordinary citizens.”12
President Clinton understood what many critics overlooked: that the struggle between Jihad and McWorld, for the ordinary women and men caught between them, is a struggle to preserve democracy and to extend civil society. In this sense, the struggle for democracy is the real subject of Jihad vs. McWorld. My concern is not with capitalism but with civil society and what capitalism does to it, not with religion or ethnicity but with citizenship and how fundamentalist zealotry can undermine it. We need markets to generate productivity, work, and goods; and we need culture and religion to assure solidarity, identity, and social cohesion—and a sense of human spirit. But most of all, we need democratic institutions capable of preserving our liberty even in parochial communities; and capable of maintaining our equality and our precious differences even in capitalist markets. With mediating civic institutions firmly in place and democracy once again the sovereign preserver of our plural worlds, Jihad can yield to healthy forms of cultural difference and group identity while McWorld can take its rightful and delimited place as the economic engine of a world in which economics is only a single crucial dimension. With McWorld’s excesses under control, communities of blood and spirit will not have to make war on it and, beyond the homogenous theme parks of commerce, we may rediscover the free spaces in which it is possible to live not only as consumers but as citizens.
June 1, 1996
Piscataway Township
APPENDIX A
Justice-of-Energy-
Distribution Index
It is not a central concern of this study’s examination of energy usage, but there is a radical injustice in patterns of production, distribution, and usage of energy resources that undermines the kinds of global