Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [3]
To be sure, democratizing globalism and rendering McWorld less homogenizing and trivializing to religion and its accompanying ethical and spiritual values will not appease the terrorists, who are scarcely students of globalization’s contractual insufficiencies. Jihadic warriors offer no quarter, whether they are the children of Islam, Christianity, or some blood tribalism, and they should be given none. I describe these warriors in Jihad vs. McWorld as people who detest modernity—the secular, scientific, rational, and commercial civilization created by the Enlightenment as it is defined by both its virtues (freedom, democracy, tolerance, and diversity) and its vices (inequality, hegemony, cultural imperialism, and materialism). What can these enemies of the modern do but seek to recover the dead past by annihilating the living present?
Terrorists, then, cannot themselves be the object of democratic struggle. They swim in a sea of tacit popular support and resentful acquiescence, however, and these waters—roiling with anger and resentment—prove buoyant to ideologies of violence and mayhem. Americans were themselves first enraged and then deeply puzzled by scenes from Islamic cities where ordinary men, women, and children who could hardly be counted as terrorists nonetheless manifested a kind of perverse jubilation in contemplating the wanton slaughter of American innocents. How could anyone cheer such acts? Yet an environment of despairing rage exists in too many places in the third world as well as in too many third-world neighborhoods of first-world cities, enabling terrorism by endowing it with a kind of quasilegitimacy it does not deserve. It is not terrorism itself but this facilitating environment against which the second-front battle is directed. Its constituents are not terrorists, for they are terrified by modernity and its costs and, consequently, vulnerable to ameliorative actions if those who embrace democracy find the will to take such actions. What they seek is justice, not vengeance. Their quarrel is not with modernity but with the aggressive neoliberal ideology that has been prosecuted in its name in pursuit of a global market society more conducive to profits for some than to justice for all. They are not even particularly anti-American; rather, they suspect that what Americans understand as prudent unilateralism is really a form of arrogant imperialism, that what Americans take to be a kind of cynical aloofness is really self-absorbed isolationism, and that what Americans think of as pragmatic alliances with tyrannical rulers in Islamic nations such as Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are really a betrayal of the democratic principles to which Americans claim to subscribe.
Hyperbolic commentators such as Samuel Huntington have described the current divide in the world as a global clash of civilizations, and warn of a cultural war between democracy and Islam, perhaps even between “the West and the rest.” But this is to ape the messianic rhetoric of Osama bin Laden, who has called for precisely such a war. The difference between bin Laden’s terrorists and the poverty-stricken third-world constituents he tries to call to arms, however, is the difference