Jihad vs. McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism are Reshaping the World

Jihad vs. McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism are Reshaping the World is a book by Benjamin Barber, which examines not only the economic, but cultural and religious aspects of globalization. He proposes one current of "a current narrowly conceived faiths against against every form of interdependence...against modernity itself as well as the future in which modernity issues. The second paints that future in shimmering pastels, a busy portrait of onrushing economic, technological, and ecological forces that demand integration and uniformity and and mesmerize people everywhere with fast music — MTV, Macintosh and McDonald's — pressing together into one homegeneous theme park....caught between Babel and Disneyland, the planet is falling precipitously apart and coming reluctantly together only at the very same moment.

Part I: the New World of McWorld

Virtual corporations are not just trite phrases but a real model, in which the ideal virtual labor is a robot. Full employment may be a national good, but it is not a corporate good. Business efficiency calls for downsizing, replacing permanent workers with temporary workers, robots, and subcontractors.

While firing permanent worker with benefits may have long-term negative benefits in reducing the consumer base, and short-term impacts on government and other sources of social services, most corporations have a short-term focus, and, if cost-cutting makes them more "lean and mean", their leaderships are rewarded.

Workforce cuts, however, are not completely irrational if technology, management methods, and economies of scale make individual workers more productive. Corporations, especially multinational, are simply not part of a social contract.

Part II. The Old World of Jihad

Essential Jihad

While this chapter is actually titled "Essential Jihad: Islam and Fundamentalism", it soon draws parallels between [[Hasan al-Bana[[ and the Muslim Brotherhood, and the cries of Pat Robertson, Pat Buchanan, and the U.S. Christian Right's campaign for a "return to nineteenth century family values — family values understood as direct emanation of church going, school prayer, and a Protestant Christian America." Where the Muslim Brotherhood saw Christian threats, Americans of the 1880s' Know-Nothing movement threats in Mediterranean Catholic immigrants.

Indeed, even the Muslim Brotherhood does not necessarily insist on going back to the 11th to 13th century traditions more attractive to the Taliban.

"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."

Certain Christian Zionist (e.g., Christians United for Israel) groups wage what might be called an indirect jihad, forming Greater Israel in the interest of their beliefs that a United Israel will bring the coming of Jesus Christ.

Returning to a Muslim context, however, Taliban, some strict Wahhabists do desire cultures before the eighteenth century.