Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [9]
Was America ever really a safe haven in the tainted streams of world history? Was it ever any more innocent than the children of every nation are innocent? Human nature is everywhere morally ambivalent, the better angels cooing into one ear, their demonic cousins crowing into the other. Americans know no evil, even when they do it. To others their claim to innocence is an assertion of hypocrisy—among the deadliest of sins for Muslims and others who watch America demonize others and exonerate itself.
Terrorism has brought the age of innocence, if there ever really was one, to a close. How could the myth of independence survive September 11? The Declaration of Independence, which announced a new coming, a new kind of society, has achieved its task of nation building. To build the new world that is now required calls for a new Declaration of Interdependence, a declaration recognizing the interdependence of a human race that can no longer survive in fragments—whether the pieces are called nations, tribes, peoples, or markets. There are no oceans wide enough to protect a nation from a tainted atmosphere or a spreading plague, no walls high enough to defend a people against a corrupt ideology or a vengeful prophet, no security strict enough to keep a determined martyr from his sacrificial rounds. Nor is any nation ever again likely to experience untroubled prosperity and plenty unless others are given the same opportunity. Suffering too has been democratized, and those most likely to experience it will find a way to compel those most remote from it to share the pain. If there cannot be equity of justice, there will be equity of injustice; if all cannot partake of plenty, impoverishment—both material and spiritual—will be the common lot. That is the hard lesson of interdependence, taught by terror’s unsmiling pedagogues.
To declare interdependence, then, is in a sense merely to acknowledge what is already a reality. It is to embrace willingly and constructively a fate terrorists would like to shove down our throats. Their message is: “Your sons want to live, ours are ready to die.” Our response must be this: “We will create a world in which the seductions of death hold no allure because the bounties of life are accessible to everyone.”
Such grand notions must start with the mundane, however. America is perhaps the most parochial empire that has ever existed, and Americans—though harbingers of McWorld’s global culture—are the least cosmopolitan and traveled of peoples who husband such expansive power. Is there another democratic legislature that has so many members without passports? There is certainly no democratic nation that pays a smaller percentage of its GNP for foreign aid (a third of what other democracies pay). And for a remarkably multicultural nation, how is it that the American image is so monocultural, its inhabitants so averse to the study of foreign languages? Such a nation, even if it cultivates the will to a constructive and benevolent interdependence, will have a difficult time meeting its demands. Military strategists complain America does not speak the languages of its enemies. In America’s universities, they no longer even teach the languages of its friends. Too many Ph.D. programs have given up language requirements, often allowing methods or statistics courses to take their place. Statistics may help us count the bodies, but it will do little to prevent the slaughter.
In the wake of two centuries of either isolationism or unilateralism, with only a few wartime pauses for coalition building and consultation, the United States is today inexperienced in the hard work of creative interdependence and international partnership. When America discerns problems in international treaties (the Kyoto Protocol, the land mine ban, the International Criminal Tribunal) and