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sometimes subsidize and redistribute—not because it does them particularly well, but because they are public things for which only we, the public, can be held accountable. These res publicae (literally, “public things”) include education, culture, incarceration, transportation, defense, health care, social justice, and, yes, the human genome. They include the war on terrorism. And they include the construction of a fair and equitable international order that offers every person and every group equal access and equal opportunity. Put simply, the struggle against Jihad (which some claim it to be a holy struggle against us) can succeed only if it is also a struggle on behalf of genuine transnational public goods against the private interests manifest in McWorld.
    Capitalism is an extraordinarily productive system. There is no better way to organize human labor for productivity than mobilizing a billion private wills motivated by self-interest. Capitalism fails miserably at distribution and hence at safety and justice, however, which are necessarily the objects of our public institutions, motivated by the search for common ground and ways to overcome the conflicts and inequalities that arise out of private production. Domestically, most nation-states have struck the balance that is the meaning of democratic capitalism. Internationally, there is only a raging asymmetry that is the first and last cause of an anarchism in which terror flourishes and terrorists make their perverse arguments about death to young men and women who have lost hope in the possibilities of life.
    This book depicts a war then between Jihad and McWorld that cannot be won. Only a struggle of democracy against not solely Jihad but also against McWorld can achieve a just victory for the planet. A just, diverse, democratic world will put commerce and consumerism back in their place and make space for civil societyreligion; it will combat the terrors of Jihad not only by making war on it but by creating a world in which the practice of religion is as secure as the practice of consumption and the defense of cultural values is not in tension with the defense of liberty but part of how liberty is defined (the true meaning of multiculturalism). Terror feeds off the parasitic dialectics of Jihad and McWorld. In a democratic world order, there will be no need for militant Jihad because belief will have a significant place without the aid of self-serving warriors; and there will be no advantage to McWorld because cultural variety will confront it on every television station and at every mall the world over. When Jihad and McWorld have vanished as primary categories, terror may not wholly disappear (it is lodged in a small but impregnable crevice in the dark regions of the human soul), but we can hope it will become less relevant to the hopes and aspirations of women and men who will have learned to love life too much to confuse religion with the courtship of death.
Notes
    1 Pope John Paul’s Apostolic Exhortation, cited in the
New York Times
, January 24, 1999.
    2 James D. Wolfensohn, cited by Jim Hoagland, “Richer and Poorer,”
Washington Post National Weekly Edition
, May 3, 1999, p. 5.
    3 “The Code of Life,”
Newsweek
.

PART   I

The New World of McWorld

2
The Resource Imperative: The Passing
of Autarky and the Fall of the West
    T RADE IN NATURAL resources and the fruits of the land, whether animal, vegetable, or mineral, is among the oldest and most prosperous and profitable sectors of the economy, dating back to the beginning of economic time. Slave/master societies as well as agricultural and feudal societies were grounded in the discovery, processing, and use of these primary goods. Agriculture and trade in natural resources represents the first rung on the economic ladder, and in the modern economy they have been the Third World’s principal door to development. It is here we find those dozen or so corporations on the southern side of the