Future Shock

In the wake of Sept. 11, rage is the order of the day. The avalanche of daily news provides riveting, if sketchy, details, but the historical and contextual frame that might offer genuine insight is largely missing or shattered. Pundits offer sound-bite pronunciamentos, shedding little light; the politics of hysteria banish sobriety. Wisdom is scarce. The specter of war looms. Questions abound: Why was such slaughter visited upon us, by whom and to what purpose? How did we come to this place? And where is it going to lead?

What is certain is that the end of the Cold War has unleashed a host of furies: renewed nationalisms, messianic cults, the need for scapegoats, deeper divisions between rich and poor. The old geopolitical order is vanished, supplanted by a still-inchoate new order that bears little resemblance to the familiar world of the last half of the 20th century.

For some years now, our best writers and reporters and thinkers have sought to understand the forces shaping this strange new world. They have tried to give us a more truthful sense of things, a more nuanced sense of the world we inhabit. They oppose simplification and mystification. They are interested in complex readings informed by history. Their books may help us to understand what, for many, eludes understanding.

Taken together, these works, written with an exceptional combination of erudition, intelligence and empathy, but also with an abiding commitment to democratic values, may help to illuminate the present in a time of dizzying transformations, cynical manipulations and malleable geopolitical realities. They offer both a theoretical template to apprehend the forces that give rise to rage and an excavation of specific policies and alliances gone awry.

Benjamin R. Barber’s “Jihad vs. McWorld,” first published six years ago, is a coruscating and lucid look at what he insists is the underlying conflict of our times: religious and tribal fundamentalism versus secular consumerist capitalism. It offers a lens through which to understand the chaotic events of the post-Cold War world.

Barber believes the world is simultaneously coming together and falling apart. On the one hand, corporate mergers are steadily weaving the globe into a single international market, challenging traditional notions of national sovereignty. On the other hand, the world is increasingly riven by fratricide, civil war and the breakup of nations. He argues that what capitalism and fundamentalism have in common is a distaste for democracy. Both, in different ways, lay siege to the nation-state itself--until now the only guarantor of conditions that have permitted democracy to flourish.

Democracy, Barber suggests, may fall victim to a twin-pronged attack: by a global capitalism run rampant, whose essential driving force destroys traditional values as it seeks to maximize profit-taking at virtually any moral or religious or spiritual cost; and by religious, tribal and ethnic fanatics whose various creeds are stamped by intolerance and a rage against the “other.”

Barber gives us two scenarios which he fleshes out in considerable detail. The first holds out the grim prospect of a retribalization of large parts of humanity by war and bloodshed, a threatened balkanization of nation-states in which culture is pitted against culture--”a Jihad in the name of a hundred narrowly conceived faiths against every kind of interdependence, every kind of artificial social cooperation and mutuality: against technology, against pop culture, against integrated markets; against modernity itself.”

The second scenario paints the future in primary colors, a portrait of seemingly irresistible economic, technological and corporate forces that demand integration and uniformity and that mesmerize people everywhere with “fast music, fast computers, and fast food--with MTV, Macintosh [computers], and McDonald’s, pressing nations into one commercially homogenous theme park: one McWorld tied together by communications, information, entertainment and commerce.”

The paradox, Barber contends, is that the tendencies of both Jihad and McWorld are at work, both visible sometimes in the same country at the same instant. Jihad pursues a bloody politics of identity, while McWorld seeks a bloodless economics of profit. Belonging by default to McWorld, everyone is compelled to enroll in Jihad. But no one is any longer a citizen, and, without citizens, asks Barber, how can there be democracy?

In 1991, Jacques Attali, a French novelist, essayist and former advisor to French President Francois Mitterrand, was president of the newly founded European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. He published a small and largely prescient essay, titled “Millennium: Winners and Losers in the Coming World Order.” While he badly misjudged how well the European Union would knit itself together, both politically and monetarily, and he sorely underestimated the ability of the United States to balance its budget and reduce its deficit, he judged all too well how the privileged preside, from the relative safety of their technological perches, over a world that has embraced a common ideology of consumerism but is divided between rich and poor, girdled by a dense network of airport metropolises for travel and commerce, and wired for instant communication.

His vision is one in which, as he writes, “Marx’s ‘Das Kapital’ or Adam Smith’s ‘Wealth of Nations’ may be less useful than Ridley Scott’s celluloid fantasy ‘Blade Runner’ ....” It is a world of high-tech economies that render national borders irrelevant, in which privileged elites are surrounded by a sea of impoverished nomads--boat people on a planetary scale--who are condemned to ply the planet in search of sustenance and shelter. Desperately hoping to shift from what Alvin Toffler calls the slow world to the fast world, they will live, Attali predicts, the life of the living dead.

Attali worries over what he calls “millennial losers,” those for whom the prosperity of the fast world will be both a permanent lure and a constant insult. Millions, he writes, will migrate seeking a decent life elsewhere, perhaps to Paris or London or New York or Los Angeles, which for them “will be oases of hope, emerald cities of plenty and high-tech magic.” Or, he concludes, they will “redefine hope in fundamentalist terms altogether outside modernity.”

In particular, the Middle East will be a cauldron of resentment. After all, “the peoples of this region suffer from the terrible trauma of repeated defeats inflicted upon it by the West. These defeats have inspired both secular and religious fanaticism, characterized by paranoia and defiance, anxiety and frustration .... This dynamic threatens true world war of a new type, of terrorism that can suddenly rip the vulnerable fabric of complex systems.”

Ahmed Rashid is a correspondent for the Far Eastern Economic Review and the Daily Telegraph. For more than 20 years, he has reported on Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia. His book, “Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia,” was published last year by Yale University Press. It is virtually the only informed work on the men who, since 1994, have ruled almost all of Afghanistan. (The other necessary book is Michael Griffin’s “Reaping the Whirlwind: The Taliban Movement in Afghanistan,” a meticulous dissection of the limits of power in a violently sectarian society.)

Rashid covered the ferocious civil war that ruined that already-ravaged nation. He traveled and lived with the Taliban and has interviewed most of their leaders. Their meteoric rise and rigid theocratic beliefs compelled him to write their story as another bloody chapter in the continuing saga of Afghanistan’s long history of torment and turmoil.

How the Afghans and their country were historically turned into an object of power politics by the Persians, the Mongols, the British, the Soviets and the Pakistanis, is the subject of his indispensable book. Rashid also examines how American attitudes changed toward the Taliban, from early support to belated opposition. He does so against the backdrop of intense rivalry among Western countries and companies to build oil and gas pipelines from Central Asia to Western and Asian markets. His chapter, “Global Jihad: The Arab-Afghans and Osama Bin Laden,” is especially incisive, detailing how the United States enlisted thousands of foreign Muslim recruits to help end the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

The multiple contradictions inherent in American Cold War policy which for decades saw the world split between the godless Evil Empire of Communism and the god-fearing Free World is explored in two books published last year: Chalmers Johnson’s “Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire” and John K. Cooley’s “Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism.” Johnson is the highly regarded scholar of China, Japan and East Asia, a former director of UC Berkeley’s Center for Chinese Studies and the author of the standard work on Japanese industrial policy. The book’s title is a term used by the CIA to describe the often unintended consequences of actions that the Agency itself has committed. It refers to the reactions that its own skulduggery sparks in the form of protest, riots, violence and terrorism in the nations it targets. A good example would be the Cubans trained and sent to overthrow Fidel Castro at the Bay of Pigs and who, years later, would turn up implicated in the Watergate burglary. Johnson is persuaded that American global expansion--what is now known as “globalization”--has prompted an extraordinary backlash, much of it paradoxically impelled by U.S. policies themselves. Blowback does not end at the nation’s borders, he concludes; it reaches into America itself.

Few have more thoroughly plumbed the implications and consequences of these dismal policies than John K. Cooley, whose firsthand familiarity with both the Middle East and Central Asia is nearly unrivaled. A reporter for the Christian Science Monitor since 1965 and a long-time correspondent for ABC News, he is the author of numerous books, including the first biography of Kadafi and books on the rise of the PLO.

“Unholy Wars” tells the story of how three American administrations promoted a bipartisan policy that bankrolled and trained an estimated 35,000 militants from 40 Islamic countries to take part in what was commonly called the Afghan Jihad, or holy war, against the Soviets in the early 1980s that would eventually turn its wrath on its U.S. paymasters. This legion of rogue mercenaries spread across a great arc, from the Russian Caucasus and the former Soviet republics in Central Asia southward to India’s Kashmir province.

Cooley describes how these militants made common cause with disaffected Muslims in western China, Egypt and Algeria. Across the sea in New York, the World Trade Center was bombed in 1993. Caught and convicted, the culprits proved to be adepts of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, a recent and celebrated visitor to Afghan training camps in Peshawar, whose U.S. visa had been approved by the CIA. Cooley’s book investigates what he calls “a strange love-affair that went disastrously wrong,” the curious and largely unexamined alliance between America and “some of the most conservative and fanatical followers of Islam.”

Americans suffer from a persistent collective historical amnesia. Our politics are hobbled by our refusal to understand the manifold ways in which history, as was once so famously said, weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. Americans have cleaved to the conceit that history, insofar as it was deemed important at all, was more hindrance than help in our presumed unstoppable march to the munificent future. Optimistic, pragmatic, impatient, inventive, generous, Americans have refused to be held hostage to history, believing America to have burst its bounds. The cost of such myopia is large. It enfeebles understanding, promotes nostrums of all kinds, licenses the infantilization of public debate.

For too long we have let our romance with distance and escape and denial define our culture and our politics. As Michael Wood suggests in his stimulating book, “America in the Movies,” there is in our country “a dream of freedom which appears in many places and many forms, which lies somewhere at the back of several varieties of isolationism .... It is a dream of freedom from others; it is a fear ... of entanglement. It is what we mean when we say, in our familiar phrase, that we don’t want to get involved.” There is, however, no hiatus from history, no reprieve from reality.