Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [171]
The story of the West is mixed. Although almost all of the Western democracies are fair with respect to GDP, there are significant differences among them, with France and Sweden ranked sixth and seventh, and the United States and Canada (though still “efficient” with a JEDI of less than 1) ranked 25th and 27th. Yet while France is extremely efficient, using less than half of what its GDP warrants, it still consumes twice what its population warrants. Spain is Europe’s energy saint, using just a tiny bit more energy than its population warrants (best among the Western nations at number 27) and less than half of what its GDP warrants (ranked eighth). Worldwide, Chad is saintly beyond all reason, proving perhaps only that poverty is the primary predicate of justice on these indices, where so many of the world’s poorest nations are compulsory practitioners of energy altruism.
Our indices suggest that Jihad tends to impair economic efficiency, lowering a nation’s ranking on the GDP scale, but that it also diminishes overall energy usage, improving the nation’s ranking on the population scale. The forces of McWorld increase energy usage, lowering the ranking on the population scale; but they can improve efficiency, increasing the ranking on the GDP scale. Finally, neither Jihad nor McWorld has any intrinsic interest in the fairness question and here, as in other domains, the poorest nations with neither energy reserves nor a productive economy do the worst. They are “good energy citizens” by default, because in the cruel competition of McWorld they are not citizens at all.
APPENDIX B
TWENTY-TWO COUNTRIES’ TOP TEN GROSSING FILMS, 1991
Notes
Introduction
1. Francis Fukuyama, in The End of History and the Last Man, (New York: Free Press, 1992), although he is far less pleased by his prognosis in his book than he seemed in the original National Interest essay that occasioned all the controversy; and Walter B. Wriston, Twilight of Sovereignty (New York: Scribner’s, 1992).
2. See Georgie Anne Geyer, “Our Disintegrating World: The Menace of Global Anarchy,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, Book of the Year, 1985 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), pp. 11-25. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Pandaemonium: Ethnicity in International Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Out of Control: Global Turmoil on the Eve of the Twenty-First Century (New York: Scribner’s, 1993). Also see Tony Judt, “The New Old Nationalisms,” The New York Review of Books, May 26, 1994, pp. 44–51.
3. Two recent books, the one by Zbigniew Brzezinski cited above about the “global turmoil” of ethnic nationalism (Jihad), the other by Kevin Kelly about computers and “the rise of neo-biological civilization [McWorld]” both carry the title “Out of Control.” See Brzezinski, Out of Control; and Kevin Kelly, Out of Control: The Rise of Neo-Biological Civilization (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1994). The metaphor is everywhere: for example, in Andrew Bard Schmookler’s The Illusion of Choice (Albany: State University of New York at Albany Press, 1993), Part III on runaway markets is also entitled “Out of Control.”
4. In its “new tack on technology,” writes New York Times reporter Edmund L. Andrews, the Clinton administration wants only to avoid doing anything “to spook investors with heavy-handed regulatory brow-beating,” hoping rather to reduce “the regulatory barriers that have prevented competition.” Edmund L. Andrews, “New Tack on Technology,” The New York Times, January 12, 1994, p. A 1. At the end of the 1994 congressional session, a Communications Bill that would have imposed some controls on the information superhighway expired quietly.
5. Rohatyn cited by Thomas L. Friedman, “When Money Talks, Governments Listen,” The New York Times, July 24, 1994, p. E 3.
6. Steiner writes that the new Eastern European democratic revolutions of recent years were not “inebriate with some abstract passion for freedom, for