Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [94]
Not perhaps necessarily: but in history all too frequently. The aspiration to dialectic has in this century more often than not been contradicted by the reality. Liberty and fraternity were brother constructs of the French revolution, but like Cain and Abel were born to strife. Embeddedness means, if not exactly subjugation to an extended communal identity, membership in entities that constrain choice. J. S. Mill to the contrary, sturdy old oaks don’t fly—as Edmund Burke might have reminded him; for Burke knew that “men are not tied together to one another by papers and seals. They are led to associate by resemblances, by conformities, by sympathies.”13 Rousseau to the contrary, butterflies cannot grow roots any more than contractually bound legal persons can nurture affection. As any naturalized citizen can attest, to choose one’s roots is not the same as being rooted by birth or blood. A voluntary membership may bring with it a special sense of appreciation—“I have become an American!”—but it cannot provide the sense of ascriptive identity that belongs to the native: “I am an American.” If “the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship” centered in a common language that permits the imagining of a common past, liberty and inclusiveness are at best likely to be contingent features of its landscape, and are at worst likely to be seen as inimical.14
In his seminal study in social anthropology Community and Society (Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft), the nineteenth-century sociologist Ferdinand Toennies concluded that the requisites of traditional blood and clan communities tended inevitably to yield to the requisites of voluntary and contractual societies in an evolution that pointed only forward; an evolution away from tradition, religion, and mystery toward contract, secularism, and rationality whose final destination could only be what Max Weber called the disenchantment of the world. The yearning for a reconstructed and remystified community was both fostered and contradicted by modern society’s cold rationalism, just as more recently Jihad has been both fostered and contradicted by McWorld’s postmodernity.
Indeed, by the end of the last century the experiment with liberal nationalism, though it perdured in France and America, had largely failed elsewhere, displaced by Ortega’s “mania” for fragmentation. Empire had made nationalism more rabid and parochially oppositional and capitalism had driven it away from liberal individuals—agents of the bourgeois market—toward blood brothers: heirs to imagined ancient clans. Modernity meant modernization, which meant the aggressive expansion of practical mentalities of rationalization, bureaucratization, and secularization. These conditions in turn not only disenchanted and demythologized the world, but increasingly created a psychology of being in which individual self determination and commercial consumption displaced community identity and group belonging. The consumer is perhaps modernity’s most notable achievement and the consumer is finally a solitary being. While Joel Kotkin—stretching metaphor to the breaking point—has pretended to find newfangled “tribes” in the peoples who run McWorld’s economic infrastructure (e.g., Jews, Japanese, Indians, Brits, and Americans [sic!]), buyers and sellers are not particularly well understood by being cast as blood-brother parochials.15
Many postmoderns have tried to reinvent community in the pallid face of contract relations. They all use history, but as Eric Hobsbawm noticed, “history is the raw material for nationalist or ethnic or fundamentalist ideologies, as poppies are the raw material for heroin-addiction,” and since “in the nature of things there is usually no entirely suitable past,” where necessary “it can always be invented.”16 Community too is often a contrivance of willed grievances, drawing on an invented past. “Most Hungarians,” Tony Judt suggests, “did not know that their nation had been born in AD 896 until late-nineteenth-century patriots told them so.”17 That version of multiculturalism