Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [4]
The struggle of Jihad against McWorld is not a clash of civilizations but a dialectical expression of tensions built into a single global civilization as it emerges against a backdrop of traditional ethnic and religious divisions, many of which are actually created by McWorld and its infotainment industries and technological innovations. Imagine bin Laden without modern media: He would be an unknown desert rat. Imagine terrorism without its reliance on credit cards, global financial systems, modern technology, and the Internet: Terrorists would be reduced to throwing stones at local sheiks. It is the argument of this study that what we face is not a war between civilizations but a war within civilization, a struggle that expresses the ambivalence within each culture as it faces a global, networked, material future and wonders whether cultural and national autonomy can be retained, and the ambivalence within each individual juggling the obvious benefits of modernity with its equally obvious costs.
From Seattle and Prague to Stockholm and Genoa, street demonstrators have been protesting the costs of this globalization. Yet though President Chirac of France acknowledged after the dissident violence of Genoa months before the attacks in New York and Washington that a hundred thousand protesters do not take to the streets unless something is amiss, they have mostly been written off as anarchists or know-nothings. More media attention has been paid to their theatrics than to the deep problems those theatrics are intended to highlight. After September 11, some critics even tried to lump the antiglobalization protesters in with the terrorists, casting them as irresponsible destablizers of world order. But the protesters mostly are the children of McWorld, and their objections are not Jihadic but merely democratic. Their grievances concern not world order but world disorder, and if the young demonstrators are a little foolish in their politics, a little naive in their analyses, and a little short on viable solutions, they understand with a sophistication their leaders apparently lack that globalization’s current architecture breeds anarchy, nihilism, and violence. They know too that those in the third world who seem to welcome American suffering are at worst reluctant adversaries whose principal aim is to make clear that they too suffer from violence, even if it is less visible and destroys with greater stealth and over a longer period of time than the murderous schemes of the terrorists. They want not to belittle American suffering but to use its horrors to draw attention to their own. How many of these “enemies of McWorld,” given the chance, would prefer to enjoy modernity and its blessings if they were not so often the victims of modernity’s unevenly distributed costs? How many are really fanatic communists and how many are merely instinctive guardians of fairness who resent not capitalism’s productivity but only the claim that, in the absence of global regulation and the democratic rule of law, capitalism can serve them? It is finally hypocrisy rather than democracy that is the target of their rage.
Too often for those living in the second and third worlds to the south of the United States, Europe, and Japan, globalization looks like an imperious strategy of a predominantly American economic behemoth; too often what we understand as the market-driven opportunities to secure liberty and prosperity at home seems to them nothing but