Jihad vs. McWorld (43 page)

Nostalgia—renamed “ostalgia” (nostalgia for the East)—has made a provocative comeback in the eastern part of Germany, as is evident in Frank Georgi’s nutty plan for an East German theme park (“Ossipark”). Many East Germans are feeling a kind of nationalist sentimentality about local goods, however shoddy when compared to their western counterparts; 80 percent claim to prefer traditional products. Beverages from Communist times like Club Cola and “Beer from Here” are taking on the products of McWorld’s behemoths, their ads proclaiming, “Hurrah, I’m still alive. Club Cola: Our Cola!” Shops in the East are featuring German Democratic “East-made” cigarettes (F-6’s) that retain their earlier packaging and taste formulas.
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Ironically, however, F-6 is owned by Philip Morris, one of McWorld’s giants anxious to compensate for the declining American market in tobacco. In a marketing memo for F-6 permeated by the commodification of identity politics, Philip Morris executives remind their employees that the brand is “a piece of East German cultural history and constitutes a meaningful part of the formation of identity.”
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Even the “Jugendweihe” has made a comeback: this anticlerical rite of passage ceremony by which young Communist pioneers once celebrated their coming of age has been revived by popular demand. In the first half of 1994 over seventeen thousand fourteen-year-olds participated in the confirmation process. Against the trends elsewhere that permit Hollywood to drive local fare off the screens, East German movies like the 1973
Legend of Paul and Paula
are being shown again. Much of this revivalist mentality represents a reaction to perceived Western arrogance akin to the resentment typical of Jihad’s angry tribes. A market research firm warned that “the picture that
East Germans have of West Germans is so negative that the word disapproval really doesn’t describe it. Hatred would be more like it.”
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Is it really any surprise that in 1991 when the
Frankfurter Allgemeine
ran a now notorious survey asking which was the best form of government, while eight of ten West Germans answered democracy, only three of ten East Germans did so? A stunning 82 percent of the easterners said they regarded themselves as second-class citizens in their new democratic fatherland.

West German biases and aggressive commerce combine to undermine both dissident and traditional East German culture. In the summer of 1990, shortly after the elections and only six months after the collapse of the East German regime, reporters called to the little town of Kommlitz near Leipzig discovered a vast bibliobonfire. Ten million books had been torched, including volumes by such dissident authors as Christa Wolf, Stefan Heym, Hermann Kant, and Anna Seghers—not as an act of political repression but in a kind of instant and terminal remaindering of a stock of books that publishers did not wish to deal with. The old books were cheap and serious. The new are expensive and frivolous. New stores in the east carry more Stephen King than Stefan Heym, and prefer travel guides, tax advice, and language texts to classical authors. Books that could once be had for $4 now cost $30 (a month’s rent in the former East Germany).
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In place of the radical broadsides and political magazines published by samizdat writers, the new western-owned magazines avoid political subjects altogether. Lubos Beniak, the editor of
Mlady Svet
, a Czech weekly, describes changes that are common throughout central Europe: “People are sick of politics. They want to be entertained, they want snappy journalism, they even want trash.”
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Hungary’s most prestigious radical paper,
Reform
, with a circulation of over 400,000, was purchased by Rupert Murdoch in 1990. In 1992, its editor Peter Toke admitted: “It was exciting under the Communists, and it was easier because it was obvious what to attack. Since the revolution we’ve been in an identity crisis, and Mr. Murdoch is not happy at all.” New German editors are looking for “readable rock critics, witty headlines, good crossword puzzles … classified advertisements.”
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That should placate Mr. Murdoch.

The persistence of the East-West rift within Germany along with the costs privatization has imposed on the East, where official unemployment rates hover at 16 percent and the real rate is above 30 percent, is of grave concern. So are plummeting birth rates, even more precipitous than those of Russia. In eastern Germany between 1989 and 1993, the rate per thousand people fell 60 percent while mortality rates surged, leading demographer Nicholas Eberstadt to warn that the transition from a planned economy to a liberal market order entails “far-reaching, often traumatic adjustments.”
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Yet these grim statistics do not tell the whole story. Privatization will eventually improve industrial output, and markets will offer those who never had goods the chance to get them. Reunification will gradually impose a reality that resentment cannot resist. But what the German case suggests is exactly what the Russian case establishes: that McWorld’s markets, tied here to the West German political and economic leviathan, have not and probably cannot produce a democratic civil society; indeed, in East Germany, they helped destroy one in its infancy. McWorld is the problem, not the solution.

T
HE EVIDENCE FROM
Russia and Germany highlights the shortcomings of markets as vessels of democratization, but markets are only part of the story. McWorld has also brought with it technological innovations in the infotainment telesector that are less inimical to democracy. The old Baconian dictum that knowledge is power and that through science we can command the world, the belief that the improvement of men’s minds and the improvement of his lot are finally the very same thing, was at the heart of the Enlightenment’s conviction that reason embodied in science and technology could liberate the human race from prejudice, ignorance, and injustice—could eventually liberate all women and men and democratize their social institutions. Walter B. Wriston is only the latest of a host of Enlightenment-infused panglossian futurologists from Condorcet to Alvin Toffler who have composed odes to the emancipatory, democratic powers of the startling new technologies that drive McWorld and have transformed capitalism from a system that serves needs into a system that creates and manipulates them. In
The Twilight of
Sovereignty
, Wriston calls his final chapter “Power to the People.” Apparently believing his own mythology, he goes on to argue that “the information age is rapidly giving the power to the people …” speeding us along on “our journey toward more human freedom.”
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To be sure, technology’s mandarins are correct in seeing improved information and communication as indispensable to improving democracy. From the time of the Greeks, who believed Prometheus’s theft of fire from the Gods lit the way to human civilization (if also to tragedy), technical gadgets have been made to support democratization. In ancient Athens, small machines that randomized the selection of white and black balls were used for jury selection. During the Renaissance (as Bacon noticed), movable type, gunpowder, and the compass transformed society by democratizing literacy (when everyone could read, neither priests nor princes could maintain their monopoly over the sovereign word); by equalizing combat (the aristocratic knight’s armor was no longer a guarantee of domination over the common man, now that everyman had his musket); and by opening up a new world of exploration to all (navigation offered everyman an exit visa from indentured servitude and political persecution). In the fullness of time, long after Bacon was dead, radio and television and finally mass-produced computers offered an ongoing technically enhanced democratization of the Word that spread literacy and political knowledge and strengthened the competence and will of the well-established democratic electorates.

In the same tradition, the proposed information superhighway can potentially offer to every woman and man on the globe access to endless data banks and worldwide opinion exchange. Electronic bulletin boards can link like-minded individuals around their common interests and offer formats for community debates among those lacking common values. Video teleconference capabilities allow local town meetings to interact with similar meetings across a region, a nation, or the world, breaking down the parochialism of face-to-face interaction without sacrificing its personalism. Interactive television transforms a passive medium aimed at complacent consumers of entertainment and advertising into an active theater of social discourse and political feedback, opening up the possibility of universal multichoice-vote-at-home referenda. Satellite dishes the size of a
dinner plate put a global ear at the disposal of peoples imprisoned in the most despotic regimes, and have proved their worth in places like China and Iran where, despite an official government ban, they continue to spread—and as they do, to spread unfettered images to information-starved consumers.
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In combination, these technologies potentially enhance lateral communication among citizens, open access to information by all, and furnish citizens with communication links across distances that once precluded direct democracy or, indeed, interaction of any kind. If the scale of ancient democracy was bounded by the territory a man could cross on foot in a day on his way to the assembly, telecommunications at the speed of light turn the entire globe into a wired town of potential neighbors—McLuhan’s global village. Of course, if democracy is to be understood as deliberative and participatory activity on the part of responsible citizens, it must resist the innovative forms of demagoguery that accompany innovative technology. Home voting via interactive television could further privatize politics and replace deliberative debate in public with the unconsidered instant expression of private prejudices. Democracy calls not only for votes but for good reasons, not only for an opinion but for a rational argument on its behalf. Talk radio and scream television have already depreciated our political currency, and newer technologies are as likely to reinforce as to impede the trend if not subjected to the test of deliberative competence.

Futuristic idealism must then be treated with a certain skepticism. The history of science and technology is at best a history of ambivalence. In each of the instances explored here, we can speak only of potentiality, not of actuality. The double edge of technology’s sword has been well known to us at least since Mary Shelley first told the story of Dr. Frankenstein’s monster, and our technologies today possess potentialities as monstrous as any she imagined.

Telecommunications technology has the capability for strengthening civil society, but it also has a capacity for unprecedented surveillance and can be used to impede and manipulate as well as to access information. Left to the market, which is where McWorld leaves technology, monsters may end up with a free and mightily profitable reign. As we have already noticed, the market has no particular interest
in the civic possibilities of technology—unless they can generate a respectable profit (generally they cannot). When profitability is the primary object, technological innovation is likely to reinforce extant inequalities, making the resource-and-income-poor information-poor as well. Computer literacy has become as important as language literacy and numeracy in the job market, and is likely to be vital to civic literacy as well. The division of labor into symbolic analysis workers and more traditional durable goods and service sector workers has actually accelerated the growth of social inequality in America.

Robert Reich has drawn a disturbing American portrait in which privileged information/communication workers increasingly withdraw public support from the larger society. His grim analysis portrays them moving to insular suburbs and buying private recreational, schooling, security, and sanitation services for their own gated communities, which the public at large cannot afford. They are then positioned to refuse to pay taxes for the declining public services they no longer need. Their withdrawal (Reich labels it the politics of secession) leaves the poor poorer, the public sector broke, and society ever more riven by economic disparities.
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A similar pattern of “secession” by the new symbolic elites can be discerned on a global scale where elite nations secede from their global public responsibilities as fast as elite professionals secede from
their
public responsibilities within elite nations. The Third World becomes a series of urban ghettos within every First World society as well as a series of poor nation ghettos within international society. The “restructuring” of the global economy to meet the demands of the new age information/entertainment sector further reinforces the boundaries between the privileged and the rest.

Even when we set social and class issues aside, the market in technology can have untoward consequences. Technology can as easily become an instrument of repression as of liberation. Thoreau worried about how easily we become the “tools of our tools;” the new tools of the post-Gutenberg age of electronics confirm his fear. Interactive television is a powerful surveillance instrument: as consumers tell shopping networks what they want to buy and tell banks how to dispense their cash and tell pollsters what they think about abortion, those receiving the information gain access to an extensive catalog of
knowledge about the private habits, attitudes, and behaviors of consumers. This information may in turn be used to reshape those habits and attitudes in ways that favor producers and sellers massaging the marketplace. The current antiregulatory fever means that the new information banks being compiled from interaction and surveillance are subject neither to government scrutiny nor to limitation or control (such as a sunset provision that would periodically destroy all information). The Federal Communications Act of 1934 promised to “encourage the larger and more effective use of radio in the public interest,” but the multiplication of broadcast channels across the electronic spectrum has led the government to withdraw its regulatory presence.