Jihad vs. McWorld (48 page)

McWorld has virtues then, but they scarcely warrant permitting the market to become sovereign over politics, culture, and civil society. Jihad too has virtues which, I acknowledge, may be less than easily discernible in light of my harsh criticism of parochialism’s abuses. Nonetheless, as Robert Bellah and his colleagues demonstrate in their study of America’s yearning for community
(Habits of the Heart)
, and as Michael Sandel shows with acute historical insight in his recent tribute to
Democracy’s Discontents
, the fractious, material forces of our time leave us seeking forms of communion and fraternity that ethnic, religious, and civic communities once gave us. The success of the Communitarian movement suggests how deep the yearning runs.

Yet though there is a deep human need for community, and though democracy itself flourishes most richly when it is founded on the consensual will of tightly knit communities (city states and rural republics are its natural ground), the conditions of community present democrats with a conundrum. For the great dilemma of community is that those forms of communal association that yield the highest degree of intimacy, membership, solidarity, and fraternity are those rooted in strong communal ties of the sort that arise out of blood, narrow belief, and hierarchy: the demonization of outsiders. By the same token, democratic communities—community in its only safe form—become increasingly less fraternal, solidaristic, and satisfying as they become more open, egalitarian, and voluntary. “Democratic community” is thus something of an oxymoron. Defined rigidly, above all by reference to their enemies, communities can fasten people together into a body that no one can tear asunder. Defined with imaginative artifice by achieved values, common work, and chosen ends, communities remain open and egalitarian but are often more fragile. The hope of civil society, which is the hope of this book, is that the love of liberty and the imperatives of equality will lend to democratic communities the necessary centripetal impetus that less open communities have by nature.

My discussion of Jihad—indeed the very use of the word in the title—has drawn other criticism as well. For although I made clear that I deployed Jihad as a generic term quite independently from its Islamic theological origins, and although I insisted that Islam has itself both democratic and nondemocratic manifestations and potentials, some readers felt the term singled out Islam and used it in pejorative ways to criticize non-Islamic phenomena. While extremist groups like Islamic Jihad have themselves associated the word with armed struggle against modernizing, secular infidels, I can appreciate that the great majority of devout Muslims who harbor no more sympathy for Islamic Jihad than devout Christians feel for the Ku Klux Klan or the Montana Militia might feel unfairly burdened by my title. I owe them an apology, and hope they will find their way past the book’s cover to the substantive reasoning that makes clear how little my argument has to do with Islam as a religion or with resistance to McWorld as the singular property of Muslims.

I have much less sympathy for those who read only one or another section of the book and concluded, lazily, that I must be writing either about McWorld alone or Jihad alone. Some critics have simply lumped
Jihad vs. McWorld
in together with Pandemonium prophets like Robert D. Kaplan (The
Ends of the Earth)
and Samuel P. Huntington (“The Clash of Civilizations”), dismissing us all as Pandoric pessimists.
¹¹
But as must be clear to anyone who reads the book cover to cover, it is finally about neither Jihad nor McWorld but about democracy—and the dangers democracy faces in a world where the forces of commerce and the forces reacting to commerce are locked in struggle.

No one grasped that more clearly or prophetically than President Bill Clinton, who has said: “Mr. Barber is arguing that democracy and the ability to hold people together … is being threatened today by the globalization of the economy … (and by) a world people think they cannot control.” Hence, it is “more important today for … democracy to work, for the basic values (of democracy) to work, to be made real in the lives of ordinary citizens.”
¹²

President Clinton understood what many critics overlooked: that the struggle between Jihad and McWorld, for the ordinary women and men caught between them, is a struggle to preserve democracy and to extend civil society. In this sense, the struggle for democracy is
the real subject of
Jihad vs. McWorld
. My concern is not with capitalism but with civil society and what capitalism does to it, not with religion or ethnicity but with citizenship and how fundamentalist zealotry can undermine it. We need markets to generate productivity, work, and goods; and we need culture and religion to assure solidarity, identity, and social cohesion—and a sense of human spirit. But most of all, we need democratic institutions capable of preserving our liberty even in parochial communities; and capable of maintaining our equality and our precious differences even in capitalist markets. With mediating civic institutions firmly in place and democracy once again the sovereign preserver of our plural worlds, Jihad can yield to healthy forms of cultural difference and group identity while McWorld can take its rightful and delimited place as the economic engine of a world in which economics is only a single crucial dimension. With McWorld’s excesses under control, communities of blood and spirit will not have to make war on it and, beyond the homogenous theme parks of commerce, we may rediscover the free spaces in which it is possible to live not only as consumers but as citizens.

June 1, 1996             
Piscataway Township

It is not a central concern of this study’s examination of energy usage, but there is a radical injustice in patterns of production, distribution, and usage of energy resources that undermines the kinds of global integration toward which McWorld is supposed to tend. Using just two indices (based on statistics in
The Economist Book of Vital World Statistics: 1990
, New York: Times Books, 1990), we can see clearly the extent of this injustice among nations.

If we compare the amount of energy a nation uses as a percentage of world usage to that nation’s percentage of world population, we get a justice-of-energy-distribution index (JEDI-A) that, if greater than I, suggests injustice pure and simple (see
Table 1
. Energy Usage and Population). The forty-seven nations surveyed represent a cross section of First, Second, and Third World countries, some of which are producers and exporters, and some merely importers of fossil fuels.

If we compare the amount of energy a nation uses as a percentage of world usage to that nation’s percentage of world Gross Domestic Product, we get a justice-of-energy-distribution index (JEDI-B) that, if greater than I, suggests economic inefficiency that is also a form of injustice (see
Table 2
. Energy Usage and Gross Domestic Product). The standard here is not absolute justice; it asks only that if a nation consumes more than its fair share by population, it justify that usage by its economic productivity.

In a perfectly just world, a nation would consume a percentage of the globe’s energy equivalent to or less than its share of the world’s population and would require no more of the world’s energy to sustain its GDP than its proportionate share of global GDP. In an imperfectly just world, nations might consume more than their fair share as measured by population but would at least consume no more than their fair share as measured by GDP. But as the JEDI tables for population and for GDP indicate, most of the world’s developed nations and not a few of its less developed nations consume radically disproportionate quantities of energy as measured by population; and some also score badly on the efficiency rating and are hence doubly unjust. Saudi Arabia, despite its enormous reserves (or because of them?) uses more than three times its fair share as measured by population, and is inefficient to boot, using more than twice its fair share as measured by GDP. The United States and Canada are horrendously unjust in their usage by population (five times what they deserve and ranked 46th and 47th out of the 47 nations surveyed), but are at least efficient and thus fair in their usage as
measured by GDP. Likewise Japan consumes too much by population but is extremely efficient (ranking third) by GDP.

Among the seven nations that are unjust on both scales, the ex-Soviet Union (as it was constituted when these 1990 statistics were compiled), is the global energy villain, using three and a half times more energy than its population warranted and nearly seven times as much as its GDP warranted. Some of Russia’s former allies, like ex-Yugoslavia and Hungary, did little better, and overendowed Saudi Arabia and Kuwait were not far behind. South Africa and North Korea round out the group of seven that are both unjust and inefficient. Of course nations like ex-Yugoslavia and Russia that are today in transition would score better in 1995 than they did earlier, not because their efficiency has grown but because—as a result of anarchy, civil war, and rapid privatization (the twin evils of Jihad and McWorld being experienced simultaneously)—their GDPs have plummeted.

China is a nightmare waiting to happen on energy usage. At present, it uses far less than its population warrants; but its radical inefficiency of usage (46th of 47) suggests that as its GDP continues to grow at better than 14 percent a year and as it realizes its plan to make automobile manufacturing a key to its development, it will not only use a radically disproportionate percentage of the world’s energy, but may threaten to tap out global resources completely. Would that it might imitate Hong Kong, which uses only a third of what it deserves by the measure of its GDP, and uses an exactly fair share (one to one) by the measure of its population!

The story of the West is mixed. Although almost all of the Western democracies are fair with respect to GDP, there are significant differences among them, with France and Sweden ranked sixth and seventh, and the United States and Canada (though still “efficient” with a JEDI of less than 1) ranked 25th and 27th. Yet while France is extremely efficient, using less than half of what its GDP warrants, it still consumes twice what its population warrants. Spain is Europe’s energy saint, using just a tiny bit more energy than its population warrants (best among the Western nations at number 27) and less than half of what its GDP warrants (ranked eighth). Worldwide, Chad is saintly beyond all reason, proving perhaps only that poverty is the primary predicate of justice on these indices, where so many of the world’s poorest nations are compulsory practitioners of energy altruism.