Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [55]
There is an irony in the infotainment telesector’s primacy today. Of the three traditional economic sectors surveyed and the three service subsectors under review here, none has a greater global ideological and political impact on the nation-state and its democratic institutions. Yet none is less susceptible to national constraints or democratic regulatory public goods; none is more wedded to global market imperatives. Indeed, my prediction that Jihad will eventually (if not any time soon) be defeated by McWorld rests almost entirely on the long-term capacity of global information and global culture to overpower parochialism and to integrate or obliterate partial identities. If the choice is ultimately to be (as the French writer Debray has argued) “between the local ayatollah and Coca-cola”11—if “the satellite [TV dish] is exactly against the honorable Prophet, exactly against the Koran”12—the mullahs will lose, because against satellite television and videocassettes they have no long-term defense. Over the long haul, would you bet on Serbian nationalism or Paramount Pictures? Sheik Omar Abdul Rahman or Shaquille O’Neal? Islam or Disneyland? Can religion as a fundamentalist driving force survive its domestication and commodification and trivialization as something akin to a fun fiction? A consumer fairy tale? Religion can of course itself have recourse to television and the zealots of Jihad have not always eschewed modern technology. But the conundrum of televangelism usually resolves itself at the expense of religion: the medium here really is the message and its currency is measured by dollar donations rather than souls saved.
Finally, the new telecommunications and entertainment industries do not ignore or destroy but rather absorb and deconstruct and then reassemble the soul. In their hands, it becomes a more apt engine of consumption than the physically limited body. Thirst and hunger are too easily quenched: the yearnings of the soul know no limits at all. When the soul is enlisted on behalf of plastic—even protean—bodily wants, it can guarantee a market without bounds.13 If the ardent quest for blood community and eternal redemption can be redirected toward the search for satisfaction of an artificially agitated itch, Jihad itself can be commodified.
The remaining task in the extended working examination of McWorld’s global markets that makes up Part II is then to scrutinize the information subsector of the service economy. To confront this sector is to portray a certain American monocultural (or pop monocultural) hegemony. Some will want to deny that what we have here is really “culture” at all. When asked to characterize EuroDisney, Ariane Mnouchkine of Paris’s Théâtre du Soleil dismissed it as a “cultural Chernobyl.” But corrupt culture, commercial culture, even radioactive culture is still culture: that is to say, a pervasive set of common symbols and images that bind together and indeed may even constitute a community.
Others will insist global pop culture is not really American, not really a monoculture at all, that it has been internationalized thanks to English pop music, French high fashion, Italian style, Scandinavian minimalism, and Japanese technology; and of course they will be right. But if “international” means no more than a collection of Western Euro/Anglo/American images packaged and marketed in New York and committed to tape and celluloid in Memphis and Hollywood, “international” is just another way of saying global-American and thus monocultural after all.
Most important, the global culture speaks English—or, better, American.14 In McWorld’s terms, the queen’s English is little more today than a highfalutin dialect used by advertisers who want to reach affected upscale American consumers. American English has become the world’s primary transnational language in culture and the arts as well as in science, technology, commerce, transportation, and banking. The debate over whether America or Japan has seized global leadership is conducted in English. Music television