Paris is Burning by Fareed Zakaria

Jan 22, 1996
The New Republic
Paris is Burning
By Fareed Zakaria

"Jihad vs. McWorld: How the Planet is Both Falling Apart and Coming Together and What This Means for Democracy," by Benjamin R. Barber (Times Books, 381 pp., $25)

Lately, President Clinton seems to have done a good bit of reading. Early this fall he had a highly publicized confessional with Ben Wattenberg about the latter's book, Values Matter Most. And in September, at a meeting with religious leaders in the White House, he recommended another book to the ministers and the assembled press corps. He lavished praise on a "fascinating book by a man named Benjamin Barber," called Jihad vs. McWorld. Worried that he might have given offense to somebody, he quickly added that "it's not an anti-Muslim book, by the way. Islam is a beautiful religion with great values. "

Benjamin Barber is a professor of political philosophy at Rutgers University who has often written on big subjects. He is best known for his advocacy of "strong democracy." His book of that name, which appeared in 1984, was an argument for unmediated democratic politics. It advocated greater participation of all citizens in all aspects of social and political life; criticized communitarianism for its intolerance of individual choice and autonomy; and extolled civic education. But the book's animating purpose was an attack on America's distinctive political theory, liberal constitutionalism. As developed perhaps most importantly by James Madison, liberal constitutionalism seeks to tame the passions of direct democracy through various mediating mechanisms--delegated powers, deliberative representation, federal structures, and so on. For Barber, this was thinly veiled oligarchy. He rejected the very notion of mediation, dismissing--in the tradition of the American pragmatists John Dewey and Charles Pierce--all knowledge not grounded in experience. Again and again he quoted Rousseau's cry, "Once a people permits itself to be represented, it is no longer free."

Barber's new book could be read as a continuation of these themes. It, too, is deeply concerned about the fate of democracy. It, too, is littered with approving references to participation, civic education and (that most trendy Eden of all) civil society. It, too, quotes Rousseau often. On closer reading, however, Jihad vs. McWorld is a wholesale refutation, unacknowledged or unwitting, of Barber's longstanding public philosophy. The most interesting and original parts of the new book comprise, at heart, a diatribe against the effects of unchecked participation by the masses. More importantly, the book reflects a certain kind of unyielding leftism's final argument against the rise of liberal democratic capitalism. With political and economic critiques exhausted, what remains is an aesthetic case against capitalism, a strange exercise in the politics of taste.

The starting point of Barber's book is reasonable enough: the simultaneous rise of economic globalization and communal loyalties threaten the nation- state, from above and from below. Barber goes on to link the fate of the nation-state to the fate of democracy, which is his chief concern. "The modern nation-state has actually acted as a cultural integrator and has adapted well to pluralist ideas: civic ideologies and constitutional faiths around which their many clans and tribes can rally." If the state gets overwhelmed in its struggle with "Jihad" and "McWorld," Barber argues, our " post-industrial, postnational ...epoch is likely also to be terminally postdemocratic."

Thus the book has two villains, who are the infelicitous entities of its title. "Jihad" is a metaphor, referring here not simply to the Islamic idea of a holy war, but to "dogmatic and violent particularism of a kind known to Christians no less than Muslims, to Germans and Hindis sic as well as to Arabs." Barber does discuss Islam, but he betrays more prejudice than knowledge. He seems to equate Islam with the Arabs (as the quotation above implies), imputing that region's political dysfunctions to that religion. The reader of Barber's book would not know, for example, that the four largest Muslim populations in the world are all outside the Middle East--in Indonesia, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Islam is a monolith, according to Barber, and one that is intrinsically inhospitable to democracy and "nurtures conditions favorable to parochialism, antimodernism, exclusiveness, and hostility to others.'" I guess Clinton didn't get to this part of the book.

Barber is quite ambivalent about nationalism. (And it is odd that he discusses nationalism in the context of "Jihad".) He recognizes nationalism's historical role in giving people a sense of belonging and self-determination. He scorns people who "use nationalism as a scathing pejorative," thus distorting "a far more dialectical concept." Yet he himself uses a crude, xenophobic and inaccurate term to describe this complex phenomenon. What on earth does "Jihad" have to do with the mood that he discerns in Occitan France, Spanish Catalonia, French Canada and German Switzerland?

Mercifully, the discussion of "Jihad" is short: a mere fifty of the book's 300 pages. This is partly because bashing "Jihad" isn't complicated. It does not take long to convince people in the West today that communal militancy is bad and a danger for democracy. But the real reason for the brevity of Barber's analysis of "Jihad" is that he seems to have decided that it is not really the problem after all. "Jihad" is simply a frightened reaction to the onslaught of "McWorld." It "tends the soul that McWorld abjures and strives for the moral well-being that McWorld ... disdains." It becomes clear now that Barber's real enemy, his real obsession, is "McWorld."

Barber's discussion of "McWorld" is tough going. It is written in the breathless style of a futurologist, complete with invented words and obscure logic. Chapter four, for example, concludes: "This infotainment telesector is supported by hard goods, which in fact have soft entailments that help obliterate the hard/soft distinction itself." The book is studded with impressive-sounding, hollow lines such as this one: "The dynamics of the Jihad-McWorld linkage are deeply dialectical."

Barber makes several arguments in the sections on "McWorld," not all of them consistent. "McWorld" itself is, variously, the global market, multinational business, rampant consumerism and global pop culture. Barber sometimes speaks in the gloomy tones of the declinists, suggesting that America barely survived the cold war, and then only by taking on a crippling national debt. Other times he speaks of an America poised to dominate the world economically and culturally. In some places he argues that the globalization of economics has created a world of multi-national corporations that have no national character, but he also declares incessantly that " McWorld" is pervasively American--" international' is just another way of saying global American...." So what, exactly, is the problem: a weakening America in the midst of a nationless world, or American global hegemony?

The expansion of the global marketplace and its consequences is an important subject. It has spawned vigorous debates among political scientists and economists for decades. Which is to say, it is not as novel as Barber or some of the wide-eyed management consultants he cites think. The power of multi-nationals, for example, is not exactly a new phenomenon. India was colonized, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, not by a country but by a multinational corporation, the British East India Company, which wielded financial, political and military powers that no modern-day corporation could ever have. Imagine Coca-Cola with its own army, its own courts, its own laws.

Scholarly studies with careful collections of data abound on topics such as foreign direct investment, home country controls and outsourcing--all of which complicate the simple picture of nation-states in decline in the face of global markets. International financial markets function smoothly, for example, owing to an elaborate regulatory structure created and sustained by national governments; but Barber pays little attention to such matters, filling his pages instead with a blizzard of anecdotes taken from the pages of newspapers and magazines. Many of his assertions about the frightening power of "McWorld" and its relentless thrust across the globe are supported by the evidence of ... advertisements. Ralph Lauren's "Living Without Space" campaign to sell Safari perfume and Reebok's "Planet Reebok" theme are illustrations of how "advertising colonizes space." By this method, I suppose, the gooey 1980s song "We Are the World" is proof of a new imperialism, with Quincy Jones its mastermind. In fact, pop music does worry Barber. In a chapter on MTV called "McWorld's Noisy Soul" there is an ominous two-page world map, reminiscent of the geopolitical primers of yore, that shows most of the globe shaded in grey. It turns out that all these countries receive music television. Where is Samuel Huntington when you need him?

Amid the din, however, one note can be heard throughout Barber's discussion: a distaste for "McWorld" in all its manifestations. Barber clearly abhors McDonalds, the evil empire itself, with its day-glo arches, plastic decor, factory food and tacky advertising. And McDonalds is merely the symbol for all large, consumer-based multinationals such as Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Nike, Reebok and Disney. Barber's vision is the sophisticated urbanite's suburban nightmare: "McWorld is an entertainment shopping experience that brings together malls, multiplex movie theaters, theme parks, spectator sports arenas, fast-food chains (with their endless movie tie-ins), and television (with its burgeoning shopping networks) into a single vast enterprise...."

Barber hates the fact that the global consumer companies are destroying the delightful and quaint and individual cultures that one expects to see when one travels abroad. And the sinister new globalism has even hit France, the country he cherishes most. In the good old days, Barber lovingly recounts, " one ate nonpasteurised Brie and drank vin de Provence in cafes and brasseries that were archetypically French; one listened to Edith Piaf and Jacqueline Fran oise on French national radio stations and drove 2CV Citroens and Renault sedans without ever leaving French roadways.... An American in Paris crossed the waters to get away from TasteeFreez, White Castle and Chevrolet pickup trucks and once in France could be certain they would vanish...." It is a novel objection to imperialism that it is ruining tourism.

I like many of the things that Barber likes--neighborhood stores, bistros, good food, good wine--but I try not to confuse my tastes with my politics. Barber misunderstands the phenomenon that he deplores. McDonalds and Coca- Cola and Nike and Disney have become so dominant because during the last hundred years, and especially during the last forty years, the industrialized world has seen a staggering rise in the standard of living of the average person. This means that vast numbers of people now have the time and the money to indulge in what used to be upper-class styles of life and leisure, most notably eating out and shopping. True, they eat and shop at places that Barber would not, but surely that is not the point.

The explosion of wealth and the rise of living standards, in what the Marxist historian E.J. Hobsbawm has called capitalism's "golden age," is among the most important social transformations in history. After thousands of years, more than a tiny percent of the population of these countries have some degree of material well-being. The recent debate over the very real problem of stagnating wages has made us forget how far we have come. A half century of peace and economic growth has created a new revolution of rising expectations. The average American family now consumes twice as many goods and services as in 1950. Then, less than 10 percent of Americans went to college; now, almost 60 percent do. The poorest fifth of the population of the United States consumes more today than the middle fifth did in 1955.

It is easy to demean the rise of mass consumption, as Barber does, mocking the individual "choice" that is reflected in the range of toppings on a baked potato or the variety of cereals in a supermarket. But this trivializes a remarkable phenomenon. Rising standards of living mean rising levels of hygiene, health and comfort. John Kenneth Galbraith, hardly a free-market ideologue, explained in 1967 that "no hungry man who is also sober can be persuaded to use his last dollar for anything but food. But a well-fed, well- clad, well-sheltered and otherwise well-tended person can be persuaded as between an electric razor and an electric toothbrush." When a middle-class person thinks of a house today, it has two bathrooms with heat and air conditioning in every room. This would have been considered prohibitively luxurious in 1950. Even measuring from 1973, when real wages began stagnating, standards of living have kept moving up. And the benefits are not mainly in the variety of cereal brands available. The number of cases of measles in America in 1974 was 22,094; it is now 312. A rising standard of living is not a form of corruption. It often represents an increase in the dignity of daily life.

McDonalds does look tawdry when compared to a Parisian bistro, but most of the customers at McDonalds, even at McDonalds in Paris, probably did not eat much in bistros before cheap fast-food restaurants appeared. Two generations ago, eating out was a luxury; today the average American eats out four times a week. (A weekly Big Mac is a fine expression of family values.) McDonalds and its look-alikes became successful because they offered ordinary people the convenience of eating out often and cheaply in sanitary (OK, antiseptic) conditions. And the rise of fast food has not exactly brought about the demise of fine dining. The world Barber likes is alive and well, but it is no longer central to society. Madonna looms larger in the general culture than Jessye Norman because more people listen to her sing; and in a democratic society it matters more how many listen than who listens. Indeed, Jihad vs. McWorld can be read as a compendium of the social changes that a rising middle class has wrought on national cultures that were heretofore shaped by upper-class rituals and symbols.

A large part of Barber's discomfort with "McWorld" seems to stem from his discomfort with capitalism. This shows itself in two interesting ways. First, he litters his book with the usual paeans to civil society, by which he (like everyone else) means not all private groups, but the private groups he likes. Thus, conspicuously absent from his account of civil society are private firms. In fact, he sees corporations as actively hostile to civil society. " Who will get the private sector off the backs of civil society?"

As a professor of political theory, Barber must know that the concept of civil society emerged in Europe in the eighteenth century in part to describe private business activity. From Adam Ferguson and Adam Smith to Bernard Mandeville and David Hume, the philosophers who developed this idea spoke of the unintended good to society that results from selfish economic activity. In Mandeville's famous phrase, "private vice is public virtue." And leaving aside the matter of intellectual pedigree, how can one speak about organizations that provide individuals with personal autonomy and personal dignity, and shield them from the whims of the state, without mentioning private enterprise?

Second, individual choice that is exercised in a private economic sphere is, for Barber, somehow false. He celebrates the average person's hasty choice at the ballot box as genuine, but he scorns the careful decisions that the same person makes about where to work and live, what house or car to buy. These latter decisions, he implies, are forced on the unsuspecting consumer by omnipotent corporations. His book is sprinkled with calls for "real choice" and "genuine choice," but this is patronizing and unconvincing; he really means choices like his. The truth is that companies usually succeed when they cater to people's choices; and when they try to create people's choices, they often fail. Remember New Coke? Barber has his own nightmare backwards: it is the people of France, not the evil multinationals, who are abandoning French culture. If more Frenchmen ate in bistros and watched Louis Malle than eat at McDonalds and watch Arnold Schwarzenegger, there would be no slippage of French culture.

There is no denying that "McWorld" is not a pretty sight. The rise of a mass consumption society produces political, economic and cultural side effects that are troubling. But surely the criticism of this world, and of the liberal capitalism which created it, must first recognize its accomplishments. The political and economic changes that have created McWorld are, on the whole, admirable ones. Giving people the ability to live longer, to move where they want, own a house, to enjoy such pleasures as vacations and restaurants and shopping is good, even noble. And there is something distinctly unbecoming about an American intellectual disparaging the spread of American blandishments across the world. We like higher standards of living for ourselves, but we worry about their effects on others.

It is particularly strange to find that Barber, a man of the left, is so worried. After all, the left has been in favor of the goal of rising standards of living for the average person for centuries. In the pursuit of this goal it often made serious arguments against capitalism, questioning whether it was the right path. Some of these criticisms have proven wrong. (Communism, Lenin explained, would outproduce capitalism.) And some of these criticisms--relating to, say, income inequality--are important questions to this day. But Barber's book reflects a stubborn kind of leftism that has despaired of political and economic argument and, as a last resort, takes refuge in an aesthetic criticism of the market. This is the same leftism that produced Norman Mailer's one specific political position: tax plastic.

Barber's own work has been filled with paeans to ordinary people. He has championed measures that would give them greater autonomy and freedom of choice. But now that he is confronted by "the people's" actual--that is to say, tacky--choices, Barber wants them to choose differently. Indeed, he seems to desire what he has always denounced: elites, and the mediating institutions that try to cushion society from the direct effects of democracy while at the same time working to elevate people's judgments. Maybe Barber has discovered that there is something to be said, after all, for cultural leadership, for constraints on individual choice.

Sixty-three years ago, Ortega y Gasset, in The Revolt of the Masses, made a more intellectually honest argument against democratic capitalism, against the consequences of rampant and unfettered choice. He spoke directly to the Barbers of his time. "You want the ordinary man to be master," he wrote. " Well, do not be surprised if he acts for himself, if he demands all form of enjoyment, if he firmly asserts his will ... if he considers his own person and his own leisure, if he is careful as to dress.... Was it not this that it was hoped to do, namely, that the average man should feel himself master, lord and ruler of himself and of his life? Well, that is now accomplished. Why then these complaints of the liberals, the democrats, the progressives of thirty years ago? Or is it that like children they want something, but not the consequences of that something?"