Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [19]
Responding to McWorld, parochial forces defend and deny, reject and repel modernity wherever they find it. But they also absorb and assimilate, utilizing the native’s strategy against every colonizer to have crossed a border since the Romans came to Gaul. When the Hilton came to the Hills of Buda, a local architect grafted the new structure onto a thirteenth-century monastery. When the French restored the Champs Élysées to its former glory, they banished the arch from McDonald’s. When American music invaded the Caribbean, Orlando Patterson reminds us, the Caribbean reacted with enormous music production of its own, of which reggae is only one well-known example.19 Yet to think that indigenization and globalization are entirely coequal forces that put Jihad and McWorld on an equal footing is to vastly underestimate the force of the new planetary markets. The Budapest Hilton’s “monastery” houses a casino; Paris’s McDonald’s serves Big Macs and fries with or without the arch; reggae gets only a tiny percentage of MTV play time even in Latin markets. It’s no contest.
A pattern of feudal relations does, however, persist. And so we are returned to the metaphor of feudalism, that puzzling world of fragments knit together by the abstraction of Christianity. Today’s abstraction is the consumers’ market, no less universal for all its insistent materialist secularism. Following McDonald’s golden arch from country to country, the market traces a trajectory of dollars and bonds and ads and yen and stocks and currency transactions that reaches right around the globe. Grass’s observation works the other way around as well: disunited, pulled apart by Jihad, the world is more united than ever. And more interdependent as well.
The Smalling World of McWorld
EVEN THE MOST DEVELOPED, supposedly self-sufficient nations can no longer pretend to genuine sovereignty. That is the meaning of ecology, a term that marks the final obsolescence of all man-made boundaries. When it comes to acid rain or oil spills or depleted fisheries or tainted groundwater or fluorocarbon propellants or radiation leaks or toxic wastes or sexually transmitted diseases, national frontiers are simply irrelevant. Toxins don’t stop for customs inspections and microbes don’t carry passports. North America became a water and air free-trade zone long before NAFTA loosened up the market in goods.
The environmental tocsin has been sounded, loudly and often, and there is little to add here to the prodigious literature warning of a biospherical Armageddon. We have learned well enough how easily the German forests can be devastated by Swiss and Italians driving gas-guzzling roadsters fueled by leaded gas (the Europeans are far behind the Americans in controlling lead). We know that the planet can be asphyxiated by greenhouse gases because Brazilian farmers want to be part of the twentieth century and are burning down their tropical rain forests to clear a little land to plow, and because many Indonesians make a living out of converting their lush jungles into toothpicks for fastidious Japanese diners, upsetting the delicate oxygen balance and puncturing our global lungs.
Ecological interdependence is, however, reactive: a consequence of natural forces we cannot predict or fully control. But McWorld’s interdependence and the limits it places on sovereignty is more a matter of positive economic forces that have globalism as their conscious object. It is these economic and commercial