Jihad vs. McWorld (35 page)

Nevertheless, democracy has always found a way to accommodate religion, and Jihad’s war has been less with democracy than with McWorld. In the 1920s, Hasan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, was railing against “the wave of atheism and lewdness” engulfing Egypt, a wave that “started the devastation of religion and morality on the pretext of individual and intellectual freedom.”
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Al-Banna could be reproaching Rupert Murdoch or Barry Diller when he assailed Westerners for importing “their half-naked women into these regions, together with their liquors, their theaters, their dance halls, their amusements, their stories, their newspapers, their novels, their whims, their silly games, and their vices.” He had taken the measure of McWorld long before McWorld had jelled sufficiently to take the measure of itself. Grasping the superior corrosiveness of knowledge over arms and of communications over armies, he warned in the 1920s that the culture of the West “was more dangerous than the political and military campaigns by far.” Where colonial empires failed, he seemed to prophesy, McWorld would succeed.

Al-Banna’s indignation goes to the very heart of Jihad’s campaign against the modern, the secular, and the cosmopolitan. It captures the essence of fundamentalism as it has existed since the seventeenth century, growing up alongside the devil modernity to which it has
played angel’s advocate for Puritans and Muslims, Buddhists and born-again Baptists alike. Compare al-Banna’s fiery rhetoric with the mad sermonizing of the British Puritan Prynne. In his nearly hysterical genealogy of theatrical vices called “Histriomastix,” Prynne condemns stage plays as “the very pompes of the Divell which we renounce in Baptisme … sinfull, heathenish, lewde, ungodly spectacles, and most pernicious Corruptions,” and then goes on to asperse as “wicked, unChristian pasttimes” a host of modern pursuits including “effeminate mixt dancing, Dicing, lascivious pictures, wanton Fashions, face-painting, health-drinking, long haire, love-lockes, Periwigs, womens curling, pouldering and cutting of their hair, Bone-Fires, New-yeares gifts, Maygames, amorous Pastoralls, lascivious effeminate Musicke, excessive laughter, luxurious disorderly Christmas keeping …” and a dozen other amusements that together compose a catalog of McWorld’s progenitors.
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Is there a single item here a fervent mullah could not also condemn? We can also hear al-Banna’s outrage in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s calculated rant against capital cities as coffins of true justice and morals, cities full of scheming, idle people without religion or principle.
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Rousseau’s complaints are the complaints of Provence peasants against effete Parisian courtiers and modernizing Parisian Jacobins; they are the bitter remonstrances of Alabama farmers against the cultural elites in Hollywood and New York and the out-of-touch “pols” playing special-interest games “inside the beltway.” For the revolt against modernity is a rebellion against cosmopolitanism and its urban culture and urbane entertainments. Not without good reason, the anticosmopolitan animus that drives all fundamentalist reaction has come to distrust Enlightenment: for economic growth brings burgeoning worldly needs and an obsession with gratification while the arts and sciences undermine simplicity and the natural faith of simple women and men. Enlightenment breeds secularism and secularism destroys not just formal religion but the morals on which it is based and thus the social fabric that holds communities together.

Finally, al-Banna is not so far from Pat Robertson and Pat Buchanan and the Christian Right’s campaign for a return to nineteenth-century family values—family values understood as direct emanations of church going, school prayer, and a Protestant Christian America. As the Muslim Brotherhood saw in Christianity a crusading
corruptor, Know-Nothing American Protestants back in the 1880s saw in Mediterranean Catholic immigrants a grave peril to the American Republic, just as nervous Californians today worry about illegal Latino immigrants as a burden not only on their pocketbooks but on the moral order of their unraveling communities. To Americans, Jihad is often taken to be a foreign phenomenon, a feature of Middle Eastern politics and the Holy War between Muslim diaspora and Zionist settlers mutually obsessed with holy turf. But we can today also speak of an American Jihad. Not the American Jihad promulgated by the media focused on the World Trade Center bombers or on Arab-American supporters of Hamas—the American Jihad about which Stephen Barboza wrote his recent book.
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The American Jihad that counts is rather the antiestablishmentarian fundamentalism of the Christian Right, the Jihad of profoundly antimodern fundamentalist Protestants who rebel against the culture of disbelief generated by the McWorld that is in their midst;
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the McWorld they unearth on their prime-time television programming and rebury on their talk-radio rants; and in the secular public square where despised “liberal” politicians undermine their belief systems with textbooks that preach evolution and schools that bar prayer.

Modernity has enemies other than Islamic Holy War, then, some of them on McWorld’s own American home turf. At least since the 1730s, when America experienced its first “Great Awakening” in Protestant fundamentalism, this country has periodically felt the zeal of reactive religion. Mainstream Christian Coalition leaders today offer what is relatively speaking a moderate version of Jihad. Jerry Falwell, the president of the Moral Majority, thus sermonizes against a Supreme Court that has “raped the Constitution and raped the Christian faith and raped the churches” and implores followers to “fight against those radical minorities who are trying to remove God from our textbooks, Christ from our nation. We must never allow our children to forget that this is a Christian nation. We must take back what is rightfully ours.”
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Pat Buchanan tells the Republican National Convention in 1992 that the country faces a cultural war for its very survival and victorious Republicans following the 1994 elections accuse President Clinton of countercultural and un-American attitudes. Less conventional warriors such as Randall Terry, the antiabortion crusader, are far more blunt: “I want you to just let a
wave of intolerance wash over you. I want you to let a wave of hatred wash over you. Yes, hate is good…. Our goal is a Christian nation. We have a biblical duty, we are called by God, to conquer this country.”
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These Christian soldiers bring to their ardent campaign against time and the modern world all the indignation, all the impatience with moral slackness, all the purifying hatred, of the zealots in Teheran and Cairo. They indulge McWorld only in order to use its high-tech communications to organize voters or its rock music to sugar-coat salvation lyrics. Groups like Gospel Gangstas and A.S.W.I.F.T. press drive-by shootings into the service of Jesus:

They may not be angels,
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these pious gospel cowboys, but they are not madmen either: they are winning local elections and helped win Congress for the Republicans in 1994, and they are continuing to push the Republican Party further and further rightward. They raised millions for Colonel Oliver North’s senatorial campaign in Virginia and nearly won. They are astute not merely in their political tactics but in their judgment on McWorld. There is much in McWorld that is sickening, much that outrages elementary justice and morals, much that demeans religion and religious belief, much that belittles both human beings and the larger spirit to which—if they are to feel human—they feel they must belong. The yearning of American suburbanites for the certainties of a literal New Testament are no less ingenuous than the yearning of Arabic martyrs for the certainties of a literal Qur’an. They both want to be born again so as to be born yesterday, born into a former epoch before Nietzsche tried to persuade us that God had died; they want martyrdom before Weber’s prophecy that rational men and bureaucratic governments
will disenchant the world can come true. Some join fundamentalist collectives, others cultivate a pioneer solitude, going “off the grid” to combat the “new world order” they believe is endangering the antimodern values they cherish.
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They may break their heads against time itself, but time has not been a friend to either religion or morals in recent centuries. Even the pragmatists who are prepared to live with what history delivers may seek deliverance from the lives they are bequeathed.

Moreover, there is a new breed of American pragmatist: a fearsome pragmatist of holy war who acts out the rage he has carefully cultured from seeds of deeply felt resentment. He may be a veteran but not necessarily, and he probably belongs not just to the National Rifle Association but to a hate group like the White Aryan Resistance or the Order or one of the rapidly spreading “militias” that are forming in nearly every state in America. He is fascinated by the destructive technology of McWorld—its assault weapons and explosives—even as he identifies McWorld’s globalism with the loss of his own American style “ancient” liberty. His anger reflects a kind of studied perversion of the civil religion. To him, the constitution means the second amendment (the right to bear arms), liberty means the law stops where his property begins (federal officers are agents of totalitarianism), and government is a demon “it” fronting for communists and the United Nations against which a defensive war must be organized and waged to prevent it from taking over the country. As befits the paranoid style, his heroes are driven loners like Robert Jay Matthews, a leader of the Order who back in 1984 murdered Denver talk show host Alan Berg and was himself killed in a subsequent firefight; Randy Weaver, a white supremacist whose wife and son were killed in a shootout with the authorities in 1992; David Koresh, the Davidian “martyr” whose immolation in Waco in the 1993 government raid has become a call to vengeance for thousands of McWorld castoffs; and Richard Wayne Snell, a self-styled Nazi who murdered a black Arkansas state trooper and was executed on April 19, 1995.

April 19, 1995: that was the same day—exactly two years after the Waco tragedy—a handful of zealots “honoring” these predecessors blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City in what was the most costly terrorist episode in American history. The authorities immediately
suspected Jihad. They were right, although mistakenly they thought Jihad meant foreign: Islamic or Arab or Iranian. But Jihad had come home to America in all its native ferocity. Home-grown, it stalks the heartland.

If McWorld in its most elemental negative form is a kind of animal greed—one that is achieved by an aggressive and irresistible energy, Jihad in its most elemental negative form is a kind of animal fear propelled by anxiety in the face of uncertainty and relieved by self-sacrificing zealotry—an escape out of history.
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Because history has been a history of individuation, acquisitiveness, secularization, aggressiveness, atomization, and immoralism it becomes in the eyes of Jihad’s disciples the temporal chariot of wickedness, a carrier of corruption that, along with time itself, must be rejected. Moral preservationists, whether in America, Israel, Iran, or India, have no choice but to make war on the present to secure a future more like the past: depluralized, monocultured, unskepticized, reenchanted. Homogenous values by which women and men live orderly and simple lives were once nurtured under such conditions. Today, our lives have become pulp fiction and
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as novel, as movie, or as life promises no miracles. McWorld is meager fare for hungry moralists and shows only passing interest in the spirit. However outrageous the deeds associated with Jihad, the revolt the deeds manifest is reactive to changes that are themselves outrageous.

This survey of the moral topography of Jihad suggests that McWorld—the spiritual poverty of markets—may bear a portion of the blame for the excesses of the holy war against the modern; and that Jihad as a form of negation reveals Jihad as a form of affirmation. Jihad tends the soul that McWorld abjures and strives for the moral well-being that McWorld, busy with the consumer choices it mistakes for freedom, disdains. Jihad thus goes to war with McWorld and, because each worries the other will obstruct and ultimately thwart the realization of its ends, the war between them becomes a holy war. The lines here are drawn not in sand but in stone. The language of hate is not easily subjected to compromise; the “other” as enemy cannot easily be turned into an interlocutor. But as McWorld is “other” to Jihad, so Jihad is “other” to McWorld. Reasoned communication between the two is problematic when for the partisans of Jihad both reason and communication appear as seductive instrumentalities
of the devil, while for the partisans of McWorld both are seductive instrumentalities of consumerism. For all their dialectical interplay with respect to democracy, Jihad and McWorld are moral antinomies. There is no room in the mosque for Nintendo, no place on the Internet for Jesus—however rapidly “religious” channels are multiplying. Life cannot be both play and in earnest, cannot stand for the lesser gratification of a needy body and simultaneously for the greater glory of a selfless soul. Either the Qur’an speaks the Truth, or Truth is a television quiz show. History has given us Jihad as a counterpoint to McWorld and made them inextricable; but individuals cannot live in both domains at once and are compelled to choose. Sadly, it is not obvious that the choice, whatever it is, holds out much promise to democrats in search of a free civil society.

Should would-be democrats take their chances then with McWorld, with which they have shared the road to modernity but that has shown so little interest in them? Or try to reach an accommodation with Jihad, whose high moral purpose serves democracy’s seriousness yet leaves but precious little space for its liberties? As it turns out, neither Jihad nor McWorld—and certainly not the quarrel between them—allows democracy much room.