Benjamin Barber (1939–2017)

When in the course of reading a book it becomes necessary to put aside a bad book in favor of a good book, I think that's the right choice. No questions asked. If the author of a book advocating for less control of the populace and their mind, less groupthink, and more freedom to make choices independently without conforming to a dominant culture points to the Puritans as his example of that ideal culture, you really have to ask yourself - did this guy do any research at all? Does he really show more think this is the exemplar of a society we should strive to emulate? If it's the first, you have to question all the other information in the book, because it might have been researched in the same lackadaisical, unprofessional manner. If the second, you have to question his sanity. Either way, finishing the book was beyond my capacity, as I could not accept his assumptions long enough to suspend my disbelief and enter into the meat of his argument (if his argument had any meat; by the third chapter, he had still just made groundless assumptions without putting forth too much to support them). Also, a man who presents the idea of sex without reproduction as a bad thing is hopelessly out of touch with problems of overpopulation, issues of personal autonomy, the findings of biology, and the realities of secular society. show less

This is a set of four vaguely linked essays on social criticism, linked by the themes of freedom and social change. The first essay is a criticism of Anarchy, detailing its stupidity and vacuity – how it doesn’t really deliver anything specific that anyone really wants. It accuses it of being more of an aesthetic position, an empty posture, which does not take into account any social realities. This is all fine, but it seems a bit redundant as no serious people consider anarchy to be a show more valid option anyway. Maybe they did when this book was written.

The second essay gets more interesting, as it looks further into the concept of freedom. It discusses the almost paradoxical question of whether you can force someone to be free. This is interesting from a philosophical viewpoint – whether it can be done, as well as from a moral point -whether it should be done, and from a social viewpoint – what would happen to society if it was done. What it comes down to is whether you can you make people take more responsibility for their actions. Are you letting them have more freedom by allowing them to relapse into outwardly conditioned behavior (the state most people are currently in, seemingly by choice), where their actions are subject to co-ercive forces, prompted by governmental and corporate nudges, advertising, and socially ingrained behaviours (See Vance Packard’s The Hidden Pursuaders). Or whether they can awaken from this and determine their own course. This is where the difficulty lies in the idea of forcing people to be free- it requires an individual acquisition of consciousness of a person’s own situation, an effort at self education, where we learn to understand the consequences of our behavior and improve our ability to make decisions so we can work toward our own personal goals (not the default ones given to us). Without this, we are not necessarily particularly free as agents, we just follow what everyone else is doing. This is the sort of thing that other books such as Marcuse’s One Dimensional man are about, however this essay is somewhat more succinct and coherent.

The third essay is also quite good, and particularly relevant to current times. It talks about the tolerance of intolerance. It makes the astute point that there can never be absolute tolerance. Tolerance of any one given thing is usually intolerance of something else which is counter to it, or mutually exclusive to it. So we must decide upon a set of moral values in order to determine what is given preference in the dishing out of tolerance. For example, there are some mild forms of intolerance that we are better allowing in society, than forcing everyone to be tolerant of everything, which is linked to current trends in political correctness. This ties in quite well with JS Mill’s On Liberty. That it is necessary for a healthy society to contain people who disagree with each other and have opposite values, to avoid the group-think mind police state that we end up with in 1984 and the whole current “no-platforming” trend. It might sometimes be better to allow people to voice their own wrong and potentially offensive views (within reason), for the sake of preserving our own ability to think critically, than to have everyone’s views decided top down and fed to them, Communist style (with any dissenters imprisoned). Where you draw the boundary is the question.

Essay four is about what is wrong with democracy in America. It makes some very valid points about people not having a real mental involvement in it, but rather being passive consumers of the whole game show. Where the spoils go to the team with the biggest marketing budget that can afford the most effective brainwashing operation. It makes that point that this society is stable because people perceive that they are in a democracy, and that a rebellion would be therefore against themselves. That the current situation where those with money rule the country, is kept in place because the remaining majority of the country is split into groups that have opposite objectives to one another (left/right; race divisions etc), and therefore don’t perceive the real oppressors.

In all, a good thought-provoking book that deals with some politically and socially important issues, but you can probably skip the first and last essays and just read the ones on freedom and tolerance. show less

"Jihad vs. McWorld" isn't perfect, but this book has a couple of good ideas that seem more relevant than ever fifteen years after it was published. Barber reminds us that the various fundamentalisms we see around the globe don't belong to the past, but to the present. They are reactions to, and, indeed, impossible to imagine without, the modernity that they rebel against. He also makes the point that the global culture of consumption typified by American fast-food chains is not show more "culture-neutral" and that those seeking to preserve traditional modes of life are right to be unsettled by the lowering of global trade barriers. Barber's also very good about sensing the limits of his own argument. He doesn't seek an overarching theory of "Jihad" and "McWorld" but merely seeks to illustrate a dialectic. He remains aware that every country and movement as a unique case, a clash of old and new ideas and diverging economic interests that must be evaluated on its own merits. He's also careful not to demonize capitalism or globalism outright, something I suspect many of his critics conveniently skipped over.

Barber is, as another reviewer noted, too fond of trying to coin neologisms, and the book is probably a bit too long for its own good. Also, Barber, like many lefties, seems dismayed that the Western world, though enjoying an unprecedented level of economic prosperity, seems to produce so much trash culture and shallow entertainment, but I'm not sure that there's ever been an era where popular culture was ever anything but disposable, and simply wishing people would make better choices doesn't really get you anywhere. Also, Barber's analysis of the reunification of East and West Germany seems shockingly wrongheaded. While he seems to mourn the fact that East Germans didn't choose a "third way" between capitalism and socialism, I'm pretty sure that most impoverished East Germans were pretty eager to join Western Europe's richest democracy – McDonalds be damned – after fifty years of living in a dysfunctional Soviet satellite state. Still, the complicated set of relationships between modernization, modernity, tribalism and democracy is still far from clear, and Barber's book provides a good illustration of some of their confusing, and at times contradictory, interactions. show less

This book looks at the world from what is supposed to be a sophisticated global perspective on our complex world, but is actually based on superficial impressions, and an almost panicky mood of urgency. Barber worked hard on it, and he clipped a whole lot of articles, but the result is not anything you can rely on. This book only deserves attention because it received so much attention in our squirrel-brained media.

The cover snapshot is appropriate to the book: It's a perfectly banal scene show more of a woman dressed in a chador drinking a Pepsi, but it is presented as if it should shock us. (It probably does shock people who still imagine Arabs brandishing curved swords as they charge across the sands on their camels.) The text is much like the photo: Both convey a vague sense of threat from the non-Western peoples of the world: nations who supposedly "define themselves by the slaughter of tribal neighbors" and are liable to destroy democracy and modernity (a word Barber never pauses to define) if "McWorld" doesn't get there first.

One would expect a more insightful, less parochial understanding of foreign nations and conflicts from a Rutgers professor of political science. But this book is as crude as the silly choice of the word "jihad," with its Islamic associations, to represent "tribalism." Barber halfway apologizes for the choice in his introduction to the second edition.

In a way, Jihad vs. McWorld is merely a product of the phenomenon it tries to comprehend. Barber composes little sermons about the insufficiency of the "McWorld" culture of entertainment and marketing — but he can't resist putting cute bravura touches on his own presentation, to the detriment of his analysis. He loves to coin new terms, some of them quite silly ("infotainment telesector"), then he misuses perfectly good terms by attaching bizarre meanings to them — like "faction" to mean "factual fiction," and "passion play" to mean a sexually charged serial drama. Does the man not know that these words already have other definitions? (He's like a character from Lewis Carroll's nonsense books: When he uses a word, it means whatever he wants it to mean. Now that I think about it, this book bears a certain overall resemblance to Through the Looking-Glass, except it's not as much fun to read.)

I'm sure Professor Barber gives very entertaining classroom lectures. As for his book, it bears the imprint of a great deal of thought — but it is panicky, parochial thought. show less