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May 15, 2007
Benjamin Barber's Tanner Lecture on Human Values was given in 2002 and it was entitled Democratic Alternatives to the Mullahs and the Malls: Citizenship in an Age of Global Anarchy. He opens the lecture thus by saying that this is a time of particular urgency for the democratic and civic values we cherish in America.
We are confronted not only by the obvious challenge of terrorism but by the far more subtle perils of a pervasive consumerism rooted in privatization and the seemingly unstoppable spread of a neoliberal ideology. While we remain wedded to democracy in theory, we often seem to regard marketization as the alternative to fundamentalism. Faced with Jihadic terror last fall, our government recommended shopping as an antidote. But consumers are not the same thing as citizens any more than true believers are the same thing as citizens. If our only significant choice is to between the mullahs and the malls, we may lose our liberty no matter who wins the battle between Jihad and what I have called McWorld.
Nope. Citizens are not consumers. The former refers to democracy whilst the latter refers to the market. These are two different kinds of institutions in a nation-state.
Barber then challenges the claim by the national security state that the sovereignty of liberal democracy is just threatened by the terrorists after 9/1. It sis the 'just' that is questioned thus:
For not only the terrorists pursuing their fundamentalist Jihad but the ardent market advocates of what I have called McWorld have been engaged in systematically undermining the sovereignty of nation states, dismantling
the democratic institutions that have been their finest achievement, without showing the way to extend democracy either downward to the subnational religious and ethnic entities that now lay claim to people’s loyalty or upward to the international sector in which Mc- World’s pop culture and commercial markets along with criminals and terrorists operate without sovereign restraints.
Thus we have this argument:
Terrorism turns out to be a depraved version of globalization no less vigorous in its pursuit of its own special interests than are global markets, no less wedded to anarchist disorder than are speculators, no less averse to violence when it serves their ends than marketers are averse to inequality and injustice when they represent the “costs of doing business.”
It kinda makes sense doesn't it.
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