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Jihad vs. McWorld is a groundbreaking work of enormous
importance -- an elegant and penetrating analysis of the fundamental conflict
of our times: consumerist capitalism versus religious and tribal fundamentalism.
Jihad vs. McWorld offers a lens through which to understand
the chaotic events of the post-Cold War world. Benjamin R. Barber argues that
if you look only at the business section of the daily newspaper, you would be
convinced that the world was increasingly united, that borders were increasingly
porous, that corporate mergers were steadily knitting the globe into a single
international market. But if you focus only on the front page, you would be convinced
of just the opposite: that the world was increasingly riven by fratricide, civil
war, and the breakup of nations. In this brilliant and
insightful book, Barber provides a single map that unites these two sides of the
same coin, and convincingly demonstrates that what capitalism and fundamentalism
have in common is a distaste for democracy. For both, in different ways, lay siege
to the nation-state itself -- heretofore the only guarantor of conditions that
have permitted democracy to flourish. Democracy, Barber suggests, may well fall
victim to a twin-pronged attack: by a global capitalism run rampant whose essential
driving force is nihilistic, at its root destructive of traditional values as
it seeks to maximize profit-taking at virtually any moral or religious or spiritual
cost; and by religious, tribal, and ethnic fanatics whose various creeds are stamped
by intolerance and a rage against the "other". Barber
gives us two scenarios, which he fleshes out in riveting detail. The first holds
out the grim prospect of a retribalization of large parts of humanity by war and
bloodshed, a threatened balkanization of nation-states in which culture is pitted
against culture -- a virtual 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 integrated markets; against
modernity itself. The second scenario paints the future
in shimmering pastels, a busy portrait of onrushing economic, technological, and
corporate forces that demand integration and uniformity and that mesmerize people
everywhere with fast music, fast computers, and fast food -- with MTV, Macintosh,
and McDonald's, pressing nations into one commercially homogenous theme park:
a veritable McWorld tied together by communications, information, entertainment,
and commerce. The paradox at the core of this bold book
is that the tendencies of both Jihad and McWorld are at work, both visible sometimes
in the same country at the same instant. Jihad pursues a bloody politics of identity,
while McWorld seeks a bloodless economics of profit. Belonging by default to McWorld,
everyone is compelled to enroll in Jihad. But no one is any longer a citizen.
And asks Barber, without citizens, how can there be democracy? Jihad
vs. McWorld is a startlingly fresh book -- a description of our present and,
possibly, our future. It is required reading for anyone seriously interested in
politics, culture, and business. Benjamin R. Barber
is the Whitman Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University and the director
of the Walt Whitman Center at Rutgers. He is the author of numerous books, including
An Aristocracy of Everyone and Strong Democracy. He writes regularly
for many publications, including Harper's, The New Republic, and
The Atlantic Monthly. |
