Jihad vs. McWorld (4 page)

The resulting global asymmetry, in which diminished states and augmented markets serve only private, economic interests, damages not only a well-functioning democratic civic order but a well-functioning international economic order as well. The continuing spread of the new globalization has only deepened the asymmetry between private vices and public goods. McWorld in tandem with the global market economy has globalized many of our vices and almost none of our virtues. We have globalized crime, the rogue weapons trade, and drugs; we have globalized prostitution and pornography, and the trade in women and children made possible by “porn tourism.” Indeed, the most egregious globalization has been of the exploitation and abuse of children in war, pornography, poverty, and sex tourism. Children have been soldiers and victims in the raging ethnic and religious wars; children are the majority of the global cohort that suffers poverty, disease, and starvation. Children are our terrorists-to-be because they are so obviously not our citizens-to-come. How can this starkly asymmetrical globalization, one that
entails such slow suffering, such deliberately paced violence, be anything other than fertile ground for recruiting terrorists? Indeed, it is terrorism itself along with its propaganda that has been most effectively globalized by the softening of sovereignty and the adjuration of democracy—sometimes (ironically) using the modern technologies of the World Wide Web and the worldwide media to promote ideologies hostile both to technology and to anything smacking of the worldwide or the modern. Following September 11, Osama bin Laden became a regular on CNN; the channels of McWorld transformed into conduits for an attack on it.

Privatized, marketized globalization lacks anything resembling a civic envelope. As a result, it cannot support the values and institutions associated with civic culture, religion, and the family. Nor can it enjoy their potentially softening, domesticating, and civilizing impact on raw market transactions. No wonder Pope John Paul said in his Apostolic Exhortation on the Mission of the Roman Catholic Church in the Americas: “If globalization is ruled merely by the laws of the market applied to suit the powerful, the consequences cannot but be negative.”
¹
Of course, one expects the pope to moralize in this fashion. More startling is a similar message from another, more powerful pope of the secular world, who wrote recently: “You hear talk about a new financial order, about an international bankruptcy law, about transparency, and more … but you don’t hear a word about people Two billion people live on less than two dollars a day…. We live in a world that gradually is getting worse and worse and worse. It is not hopeless, but we must do something about it now.” The moralist here is the hardheaded James Wolfensohn, president of the World Bank, who has begun to replace the bank’s traditional energy and industrialization projects, thought to favor the interests of foreign investors, with environmental and health projects aimed at the interests of the populations being directly served.
²

There are, of course, extant international institutions that might serve as building blocks for a global democratic box into which the economy could safely be put. The international financial institutions conceived at Bretton Woods after World War II to oversee the reconstruction of shattered European and Asian economies were intended originally to function as regulatory agencies to ensure peaceful, stable, and democratic redevelopment under the watchful eye of the
victorious Allied powers. Though the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (and later the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and the World Trade Organization, which grew out of GATT in 1995) were ostensibly forged as instruments of democratic sovereign nations designed to guide and regulate private-sector interests in the name of public sector reconstruction, over a period of time they became instruments of the very private-sector interests they were meant to channel and keep in check. Those who today call for their elimination in the name of transparency, accountability, and democracy might be surprised to learn that these norms were once regarded as among the postwar financial order’s primary objectives. Given the role modern institutions representing this order play as potential pieces in a global regulatory infrastructure, one way to begin the process of global democratization would be to redemocratize them and subordinate them to the will of democratic peoples.

Globalization does not occur in a vacuum, of course. Its corrosive impact on democratic governance and our inability to put to real democratic use international financial institutions that are nominally already at the service of democracy is augmented by a cognate ideology of privatization that is prevalent both on the international scene and within the countries whose economies are being globalized. McWorld is accompanied by this ideology of privatization—what Europeans often call neoliberalism and George Soros has labeled market fundamentalism (an appropriate implicit comparison to Jihadic fundamentalism)—that saps democracy by attacking government and its culture of public power. By arguing that markets can do everything government once did, and better, with more freedom for citizens, privatization within nation-states opens the way for a deregulation of markets that in turn facilitates the globalization and hence privatization of the economy. It softens up citizens to accept the decline of political institutions and tries to persuade them that they will be better off—more “free”—when their collective democratic voice is stilled, when they think of themselves not as public citizens but as private consumers. Consumers are poor substitutes for citizens, however, just as corporate CEOs are poor substitutes for democratic statesmen. It is telling that on the morning of September 12, 2001, America did not call Bill Gates or Michael Eisner to ask for assistance in dealing with terrorism. A privatized airport security system turned
out to be fallible because it was more attuned to costs than to safety. Long-neglected public institutions reacquired overnight their democratic legitimacy and their role as defenders of public goods.

Can this renewed legitimacy be employed on behalf of international institutions dedicated to public rather than private goods? If it can, new forms of civic interdependence can be quickly established.

The ideology of privatization has always confounded private and public modes of choosing. Consumer choice is always and necessarily private and personal choice. Private choices, autonomous or not, cannot affect public outcomes. Democratic governance is not just about choosing; rather, it is about public choosing, about dealing with the social consequences of private choices and behavior. In the global sector this is crucial, because only public and democratic decisions can establish social justice and equity. Private markets cannot, not because they are capitalist but because they are private. In the language of the great social contract theorist Jean-Jacques Rousseau, through participation in the general will, global citizens can regulate the private wills of global consumers and global corporations. They can tame Jihad and interdict terrorism even as they regulate markets and civilize their consequences.

It is both a noxious tribute to the power of privatization and a marker of our deep confusion about the difference between public and private goods in the new century that the question of “who should own the code of life” (as the headline of a recent
Newsweek
article had it)
³
is being asked. Currently, the inclination is to answer, “Private biotech companies”—a contradiction of everything we know about the public character of our species being. Under the rules of both democracy and morality, the code of life presumably belongs to some version of “us” rather than to some corporate “me.” There is something comically childish about adult scientists arguing over who owns the human genome as if it were a stray Pokémon card found on the playground, just one more commercial product in McWorld’s bag of tricks. If the genetic code of the species can be sold for profit, why shouldn’t women and children be sold for profit? And if there is no rational answer to this question, how can we defeat the cold logic of terror, which evinces the same righteous devotion to anarchy.

This critique points to the crucial difference between public and
private liberty, a difference that goes to the heart of Pope John Paul’s warning that “the human race is facing forms of slavery that are new and more subtle than those of the past, and for far too many people, freedom remains a word without meaning.” To think that shopping is what freedom means is to embrace the slavery against which the pope warns (though of course the pope is a thoroughly unmodern man, if not yet a Jihadic warrior).

There are many things government cannot do very well, but there are many others that
only
government can do, such as regulate and protect, and sometimes subsidize and redistribute—not because it does them particularly well, but because they are public things for which only we, the public, can be held accountable. These res publicae (literally, “public things”) include education, culture, incarceration, transportation, defense, health care, social justice, and, yes, the human genome. They include the war on terrorism. And they include the construction of a fair and equitable international order that offers every person and every group equal access and equal opportunity. Put simply, the struggle against Jihad (which some claim it to be a holy struggle against us) can succeed only if it is also a struggle on behalf of genuine transnational public goods against the private interests manifest in McWorld.

Capitalism is an extraordinarily productive system. There is no better way to organize human labor for productivity than mobilizing a billion private wills motivated by self-interest. Capitalism fails miserably at distribution and hence at safety and justice, however, which are necessarily the objects of our public institutions, motivated by the search for common ground and ways to overcome the conflicts and inequalities that arise out of private production. Domestically, most nation-states have struck the balance that is the meaning of democratic capitalism. Internationally, there is only a raging asymmetry that is the first and last cause of an anarchism in which terror flourishes and terrorists make their perverse arguments about death to young men and women who have lost hope in the possibilities of life.

This book depicts a war then between Jihad and McWorld that cannot be won. Only a struggle of democracy against not solely Jihad but also against McWorld can achieve a just victory for the planet. A just, diverse, democratic world will put commerce and consumerism back in their place and make space for civil society
religion; it will combat the terrors of Jihad not only by making war on it but by creating a world in which the practice of religion is as secure as the practice of consumption and the defense of cultural values is not in tension with the defense of liberty but part of how liberty is defined (the true meaning of multiculturalism). Terror feeds off the parasitic dialectics of Jihad and McWorld. In a democratic world order, there will be no need for militant Jihad because belief will have a significant place without the aid of self-serving warriors; and there will be no advantage to McWorld because cultural variety will confront it on every television station and at every mall the world over. When Jihad and McWorld have vanished as primary categories, terror may not wholly disappear (it is lodged in a small but impregnable crevice in the dark regions of the human soul), but we can hope it will become less relevant to the hopes and aspirations of women and men who will have learned to love life too much to confuse religion with the courtship of death.

¹
Pope John Paul’s Apostolic Exhortation, cited in the
New York Times
, January 24, 1999.

²
James D. Wolfensohn, cited by Jim Hoagland, “Richer and Poorer,”
Washington Post National Weekly Edition
, May 3, 1999, p. 5.

³
“The Code of Life,”
Newsweek
.

H
ISTORY IS NOT OVER
. Nor are we arrived in the wondrous land of techné promised by the futurologists. The collapse of state communism has not delivered people to a safe democratic haven, and the past, fratricide and civil discord perduring, still clouds the horizon just behind us. Those who look back see all of the horrors of the ancient slaughterbench reenacted in disintegral nations like Bosnia, Sri Lanka, Ossetia, and Rwanda and they declare that nothing has changed. Those who look forward prophesize commercial and technological interdependence—a virtual paradise made possible by spreading markets and global technology—and they proclaim that everything is or soon will be different. The rival observers seem to consult different almanacs drawn from the libraries of contrarian planets.

Yet anyone who reads the daily papers carefully, taking in the front page accounts of civil carnage as well as the business page stories on the mechanics of the information superhighway and the economics of communication mergers, anyone who turns deliberately to take in the whole 360-degree horizon, knows that our world and our lives
are caught between what William Butler Yeats called the two eternities of race and soul: that of race reflecting the tribal past, that of soul anticipating the cosmopolitan future. Our secular eternities are corrupted, however, race reduced to an insignia of resentment, and soul sized down to fit the demanding body by which it now measures its needs. Neither race nor soul offers us a future that is other than bleak, neither promises a polity that is remotely democratic.

The first scenario rooted in race holds out the grim prospect of a retribalization of large swaths of humankind by war and bloodshed: a threatened balkanization of nation-states in which culture is pitted against culture, people against people, tribe against tribe, a Jihad in the name of a hundred narrowly conceived faiths against every kind of interdependence, every kind of artificial social cooperation and mutuality: against technology, against pop culture, and against integrated markets; against modernity itself as well as the future in which modernity issues. The second paints that future in shimmering pastels, a busy portrait of onrushing economic, technological, and ecological forces that demand integration and uniformity and that mesmerize peoples everywhere with fast music, fast computers, and fast food—MTV, Macintosh, and McDonald’s—pressing nations into one homogenous global theme park, one McWorld tied together by communications, information, entertainment, and commerce. Caught between Babel and Disneyland, the planet is falling precipitously apart and coming reluctantly together at the very same moment.