Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [63]
Many people, the great majority in developed countries, a minority climbing toward the majority in developing countries, spend far too much of their time each day in one of the commercial habitations of the new world being “imagineered” (as the Disney people like to say) in Hollywood and its satellites—in front of a TV screen or at a mall or in a movie theater or chewing on fast food while contemplating a promotion for a tie-in movie or buying some licensed piece of bric-a-brac; much more time than they spend in school, church, the library, a community service center, a political back room, a volunteer house, or a playing field. Yet only these latter environments elicit active and engaged public behavior and ask us to define ourselves as autonomous members of civic communities marked by culture or religion or other public values. As wordsmiths yield to imagineers, literate private readers and deliberative public citizens alike are made to feel like endangered species. Speaker Gingrich is working hard to get government off the back of the private sector, but who will get the private sector off the back of civil society?
McWorld calls on us to see ourselves as private and solitary, interacting primarily via commercial transactions where “me” displaces “we;” and it permits private corporations whose only interest is their revenue stream to define by default the public goods of the individuals and communities they serve. NAFTA—McWorld’s global strategy in its North American guise—serves American business as well as world markets and is unquestionably a policy geared to the future: but it does not and cannot serve American or global public interests such as full employment, the dignity of work, the creative civic use of forced leisure, environmental protection, social safety nets, and pension protection. McWorld’s advocates will argue that the “market” does “serve” individuals by empowering them to “choose” but the choice is always about which items to buy and consume, never about whether to buy and consume anything at all; or about the right to earn an income that makes consumption possible; or about how to regulate and contain consumption so that it does not swallow up other larger public goods that cannot be advanced in the absence of democratic public institutions. In McWorld’s global market, empowerment lies in the choice of toppings on a baked potato: the rest is passive consumption. When profit becomes the sole criterion by which we measure every good, every activity, every attitude, every cultural product, there is soon nothing but profit. In the empire of the market, the money hooligans are princes and largesse is king.
Films are central to market ideology. Watching them reveals a sameness pervading McWorld that seems as suffocating as the invisible “ether” that was once thought to have suffused the entire cosmos and to have given it the invisible infrastructure that made Newtonian physics plausible. Go into a Protestant church in a Swiss village, a mosque in Damascus, the cathedral at Reims, a Buddhist temple in Bangkok, and though in every case you are visiting a place of worship with a common aura of piety, you know from one pious site to the next you are in a distinctive culture. Then sit in a multiplex movie box—or, much the same thing, visit a spectator sports arena