Jihad vs. McWorld Read Online Free Page A

Jihadic fundamentalism spreads its antimodern message, sowing fear and nurturing chaos, hoping to bring both democracy and capitalism to their knees. The war between Jihad and McWorld takes no prisoners. It cannot serve democracy, however it turns out.
    The democratic project is to globalize democracy as we have globalized the economy—to democratize the globalism that has been so efficiently marketized. The issue is no longer the utopian longing for global democracy against the siren call of consumerism or the passionate war cries of Jihad; it is the securing of safety. Following September 11, global governance has become a sober mandate of political realism.
    Mandate or not, it will not be easy for America to overcome the reassuring myth of national independence and innocence with which it has lived so comfortably for two hundred years. Before it began to trade in the international currency of McWorld that made it the global merchandiser, America had invented a simpler story about itself. In the Puritan myth of the city on the hill, in the Enlightenment conceit of a tabula rasa on which a new people would inscribe a fresh history, Americans embraced Tom Paine’s quaint and revolutionary notion that on the new continent humankind could literally go back and start over again, as if at “the beginning of the world.” Europe’s cruel torments, its ancient prejudices and religious persecutions, would be left behind. Safeguarded by two immense oceans, at home on a bountiful and empty continent (the native inhabitants were part of the new world’s flora and fauna), Americans would devise a new and experimental science of government, establish a new constitution fortified by rights, and with the innocence of a newborn people write a new history. Slavery, a great civil war, two world conflagrations, and totalitarian regimes abroadcould not dissuade America from its precious self-definition. Even as the oceans became mere streams that could be crossed in an instant by invisible adversaries, even as the pressures of an impinging world grew too complex to yield to simplicity, America imagined that it could safeguard its autonomy, deploying its vaunted technology to re-create virtual oceans, fantasizing a magic missile shield that would ward off foreign evil.
    Was America ever really a safe haven in the tainted streams of world history? Was it ever any more innocent than the children of every nation are innocent? Human nature is everywhere morally ambivalent, the better angels cooing into one ear, their demonic cousins crowing into the other. Americans know no evil, even when they do it. To others their claim to innocence is an assertion of hypocrisy—among the deadliest of sins for Muslims and others who watch America demonize others and exonerate itself.
    Terrorism has brought the age of innocence, if there ever really was one, to a close. How could the myth of independence survive September 11? The Declaration of Independence, which announced a new coming, a new kind of society, has achieved its task of nation building. To build the new world that is now required calls for a new Declaration of Interdependence, a declaration recognizing the interdependence of a human race that can no longer survive in fragments—whether the pieces are called nations, tribes, peoples, or markets. There are no oceans wide enough to protect a nation from a tainted atmosphere or a spreading plague, no walls high enough to defend a people against a corrupt ideology or a vengeful prophet, no security strict enough to keep a determined martyr from his sacrificial rounds. Nor is any nation ever again likely to experience untroubled prosperity and plenty unless others are given the same opportunity. Suffering too has been democratized, and those most likely to experience it will find a way to compel those most remote from it to share the pain. If there cannot be equity of justice, there will be equity of injustice; if all cannot partake of plenty,