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By Root 1482 0

that the requisites of personhood cannot tolerate, that McWorld has no choice but to service, even to package and market Jihad. We have seen how athletic shoe salesmanship revolves around selling American black subculture; how American Express treats global travel (a privilege of McWorld) as a safari to exotic cultures still somehow intact in spite of the visitations and depredations made possible by American Express; how McDonald’s “adapts” to foreign climes with wine in France and local beef in Russia even as it imposes a way of life that makes domestic wines and local beef irrelevant. McWorld cannot then do without Jihad: it needs cultural parochialism to feed its endless appetites. Yet neither can Jihad do without McWorld: for where would culture be without the commercial producers who market it and the information and communication systems that make it known? Modern Christian fundamentalists (no longer an oxymoron) can thus access Religion Forum on CompuServe Information Ser vice while Muslims can surf the Internet until they find Mas’ood Cajee’s Cybermuslim document. That is not a computer error: “Cybermuslim” is the title.1 Religion and culture alike need McWorld’s technologies and McWorld’s markets. Without them, they are unlikely to survive in the long run.

Now to be sure, I have identified McWorld with crucial developments made possible by innovations in technology and communications that appear only toward the end of the twentieth century. In a way, however, McWorld is merely the natural culmination of a modernization process—some would call it Westernization—that has gone on since the Renaissance birth of modern science and its accompanying paradigm of knowledge construed as power. On inspection, there is little in McWorld that was not philosophically adumbrated by, if not the Renaissance, the Enlightenment: its trust in reason, its passion for liberty, and (not unrelated to that passion) its fascination with control, its image of the human mind as a tabula rasa to be written on and thus encoded by governing technical and educational elites, its confidence in the market, its skepticism about faith and habit, and its cosmopolitan disdain for parochial culture. Voltaire despised history, dismissing it as little more than a catalog of humankind’s errors and follies while Enlightenment psychology assumed a single universal human nature rooted in right reason and set down in the greater harmony of the chain of being. In Alexander Pope’s ripe imagery in his Essay on Man:

All are but parts of one stupendous whole,

Whose body, Nature is, and God the soul….

Look round our World; behold the chain of Love

Combining all below and all above.

See plastic Nature working to this end,

The single atoms each to other tend …

Nothing is foreign: Parts relate to whole;

One all-extending all-preserving Soul

Connects each being, greatest with the least;

Made Beast in aid of Man, and Man of Beast;

All serv’d, all serving! nothing stands alone;

The chain holds on, and where it ends, unknown.

McWorld’s advertent meretriciousness and its numbing commercialism along with the fabulous curiosities of virtuality that have problematized the very meaning of reality may seem novel. They raise questions of whether, for example, virtual communities organized around the Internet are political or public communities in any meaningful sense, and whether information networks improve or corrupt public access and civic capacity. But novelty or no, there is little in our postmodernity that would surprise modernity’s Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment champions like Pope, Voltaire, J. S. Mill, and Max Weber or, for that matter, that would cheer up its Cassandras like Rousseau and Nietzsche who had more than an inkling of how the Enlightenment would also write its own dark counterpoint. Allan Bloom was thus able to make the greater part of his complaint about our tarnished world today by rehearsing the spirited grievances of the ancients against their world then.2

What I have called the forces of Jihad may seem then to be a throwback