Jihad vs. McWorld (26 page)

The nations that have tried a modest dose of regulation in recent years are regarded as mercantilist bogeys, and find themselves under duress from free traders and market zealots to let go—in the ancient phrase,
laisser-faire
. There are few democratic governments around today, certainly not in America or England, that display
much taste for regulation or control in the name of the public weal. Governments have become the targets of alienated and disaffected clients and are not likely to be regarded as the instruments by which citizens can tame wild capitalism for some time. Markets have emerged triumphant from a war against the nation-state and the public interests they represent that has been waged at least since Adam Smith. Kenichi Ohmae of Japan, Herbert Henzler of West Germany, and Fred Gluck of the United States—three competitors in search of consensus—agreed back in 1990 on a “Declaration of Interdependence Toward the World in 2005.” Its paramount innovation was a call for the role of central governments to “change, so as to: allow individuals access to the best and cheapest goods and services from anywhere in the world; help corporations provide stable and rewarding jobs anywhere in the world regardless of the corporation’s national identity; coordinate activities with other governments to minimize conflicts arising from narrow interest; avoid abrupt changes in economic and social fundamentals.”
⁹
Abrupt changes like democratization? Narrow interest like national environmental or employment policies? The declaration calls on the nation-state to participate in its own liquidation. In many regions of the Western world, the state seems to be obliging, with the complicity of outraged women and men who clearly prefer their rights as clients and consumers to their responsibilities and freedoms as citizens.

Perhaps they are making a virtue of necessity. For where governments still try to regulate or censor or subsidize or intervene, their efforts are increasingly futile, because the market for entertainment and information has become so global, the technologies so impervious to local control, and the ideology of free trade so pervasive. In the United States, regulatory advocates like Vice President Gore have pushed for “universal service” on the new information superhighway, urging that the “schoolchild in Carthage, Tennessee” should “be able to plug into the Library of Congress and work at home at his own pace … regardless of [his] income.”
¹⁰
Speaker Gingrich has even proposed ways of getting computers into the hands of the poor. Pretty thoughts, but about as unlikely as anything imaginable in the hostile climate of antigovernment sentiment and transnational markets that dominates our times.

And so the original question reappears: in a world where the nation-state and its democratic institutions are being fractured and weakened by the divisive forces of Jihad at the same moment they are being rendered antiquated and superfluous by the integrating forces of McWorld, how is democracy to survive? Where on the vaunted information highway are the roads that will lead to justice or the pipes that will convey the vox populi? Now that they have dismantled the empire of despots and statist political ideologies, including democracy, how can communities defend their common goods against the empire of profits and cultural monopoly? Which democratic ideology can contend with the pretense to “choice” of “free” markets so that we can regain the power to choose public goods in common and thereby free ourselves from the inadvertent public consequences of all the private market choices that masquerade as the whole of freedom? Is deliberative public debate on such questions even possible where McWorld’s communication systems secret preferences that, without any discussion at all, modify public attitudes and precipitate private behaviors?

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.

H
UMAN 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 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.
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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:

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.
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What I have called the forces of Jihad may seem then to be a throwback to premodern times: an attempt to recapture a world that existed prior to cosmopolitan capitalism and was defined by religious mysteries, hierarchical communities, spellbinding traditions, and historical torpor. As such, they may appear to be directly adversarial to the forces of McWorld. Yet Jihad stands not so much in stark opposition as in subtle counterpoint to McWorld and is itself a dialectical response to modernity whose features both reflect and reinforce the modern world’s virtues and vices—Jihad
via
McWorld rather than Jihad
versus
McWorld. The forces of Jihad are not only remembered and retrieved by the enemies of McWorld but imagined and contrived by its friends and proponents.

Modernity precedes and thus sponsors and conditions its critics. And though those critics, on the way to combatting the modern, may try to resuscitate ancient usages and classical norms, such usages and norms—ethnicity, fundamentalist religion, nationalism, and culture for example—are themselves at least in part inventions of the agitated modern mind.
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Jihad is not only McWorld’s adversary, it is its child. The two are thus locked together in a kind of Freudian moment of the ongoing cultural struggle, neither willing to coexist with the other, neither complete without the other. Benedict Anderson gets it exactly right when he conceives of that driving engine of Jihad, the nation, as “an imagined political community.”
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Which
brings us to the crucial question of nationalism, and its role in the struggle of Jihad versus McWorld.