Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [90]
It would be silly to suggest that conspiracy or some ruthless political ambitions are at work here. McWorld runs on automatic pilot: that is the whole point of the market. The influences it brings to bear are not mandated by the imperative to control, only by the imperative to sell. The ad absurdum logic of sales is one corporation that makes one product that satisfies every need: an athletic shoe equipped with a nutrition patch linked to sunglasses that inject Coca-Cola directly into the veins of the inner ear while flashing videos directly into wide-irised eyeballs. The political entailments of this logic are inadvertent: a kind of default totalitarianism without a totalistic government: everyone a subject, no one a ruler. Women and men governed by their appetites rather than by those lesser tyrants traditionally feared as “dictators” or “monolithic parties.”
The very idea of the public has become so closely associated with nation-states that the idea of a global public potent enough to take on McWorld’s global privates seems inconceivable, especially given the further fracturing of local public entities by Jihad’s many neotribalisms. In the solipsistic virtual reality of cyberspace, commonality itself seems to be in jeopardy. How can there be common ground when the ground itself vanishes and women and men inhabit abstractions? There may be some new form of community developing among the myriad solitaries perched in front of their screens and connected only by their fingertips to the new virtual web defined by the Internet. But the politics of that “community” has yet to be invented, and it is hardly likely to be democratic. People on the Net do prattle on about the community, but when have they last spoken to a neighbor? If good fences make good neighbors, virtual neighbors make good fences—against real neighbors.
In celebration of the potential commonality of America, Woody Guthrie once sang, less out of conviction than in burning hope, “This land is your land, this land is my land.” Whose land is Disneyland? Or Steven Spielberg’s “new country”? To whom ought McWorld to belong, and will they be able to wrest it away from the irresponsible and wholly random individuals or irresponsible and wholly monopolistic corporations that are its current proprietors? Poets less gifted than Guthrie have more recently proffered their own answer: “We are the world,” they sing. But whose world are we? Where is the “we” in McWorld? It acknowledges welters of me’s operating impulsively in an anonymous market, but it provides not a single clue to common identity or to the place of community in the market. No wonder the new tribes pummeling the nation-state see in McWorld only the destruction of everything that constitutes their common identity. Democracy seems to be the loser coming and going. Jihad has other virtues to pursue, McWorld’s priorities omit it altogether. Under these circumstances, can it find new expressions, new institutions, new attitudes, that will permit it to survive?
These questions are, in a quite technical sense, questions of political theory and political science. They point toward the final section of our portrait of Jihad and McWorld by raising the question: is democracy possible under the conditions of either Jihad or McWorld? However, before they can be answered, we need to scrutinize what I have called the forces of Jihad with the same care we have spent on McWorld. For Jihad is the other challenge facing democracy in our third millennium and in the short run its peril to free institutions may be still greater.
PART II
The Old World of Jihad
10
Jihad vs. McWorld or
Jihad via McWorld?
HUMAN BEINGS are so psychologically needy, so dependent on community, so full of yearning for a blood brotherhood commercial consumption disallows, so inclined to a sisterhood