The moral distance is great between smashing the window of a McDonald's restaurant to protest globalization and smashing airliners into skyscrapers to express distaste for Western values. The former is vandalism. The latter is murder. In fact, there would be no reason to examine antiglobalization mischief in the context of anti-Western murder if the antiglobalization crowd itself hadn't provided one.
Several thousand protestors showed up in Washington, DC, in September's last weekend even though the target of their mobilization had been canceled. They had planned demonstrations against joint annual meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. When those events gave way to security concerns following the Sept. 11 massacres in the World Trade Center and Pentagon, protest sponsors decided to demonstrate anyway with a different message. Instead of excoriating international commerce, they denounced violence and war.
Extreme circumstances
All sensible people oppose violence and war, of course. Yet most overcome their revulsion in ex- treme circumstances. Indeed, most now seem to believe that the orchestrated, suicidal murders of nearly 7,000 individuals signal extreme circumstances necessitating responses likely to include violence and war. Murderers started the violence. The rest is self-defense.
Healthy dispute over how far to take pacifism shouldn't obscure the easy transfiguration of the protest target in Washington, DC, from interna- tional investment to military preparation. The antiglobalists have a violent fringe but are predominantly averse to random killing. By resisting American defense, they nevertheless aligned-though not necessarily allied-their politics with terrorism. And their agenda overlaps that of anti-Western terrorists in an important way.
Anti-Western terrorists and antiglobalists share a motivating disdain for what the rest of the world calls progress. They prefer conditions of the past-as they perceive them to have been-to those of the present and future. And they feel compelled to impose those preferences on others.
In the case of the Saudi exile believed to have masterminded the Sept. 11 bombings-Osama bin Laden-the object of disdain is the presence of progress-minded Americans and other Westerners in a homeland dominated by a traditionalist version of Sunni Muslim faith. Unlike most Saudis and most Muslims, bin Laden insanely responds to this intrusion into an idealized past by killing people.
While most antiglobalists do not share that evil reflex, they do predicate a range of less-serious misbehavior-often illegal-on revulsion toward trends of modern life. Their alternative ideals are less focused than bin Laden's Muslim puritanism. But they tend similarly to look backward. Many pursue visions of an environment devoid of human imprint. Some stretch rugged individualism into anarchy. Some uphold agrarianism or other systems of life thought to be under threat from global institutions and investment.
By forcing attention to these comparisons in troubled times, the antiglobalists have in no way advanced their discordant cause. But they have added perspective to a conflict likely soon to regenerate violence. The conflict relates less to ethnicity or religion than to personal orientation toward the complex dynamic of modern life.
That dynamic involves accelerating interactions between peoples of divergent backgrounds and belief. It involves CNN, MSNBC, BBC, cell phones, and the internet. It involves large and rapid movements of money across international boundaries. It involves change of natural landscapes.
The dynamic's economic dimension sometimes pollutes yet provides the means of clean-up. It sometimes disrupts lives yet delivers more necessities and more comfort to more people than ever before.
To some people the modern dynamic repre- sents threat, to others life, to others hope.
What's progress?
The new war will be fought over this intellectual ground. It's a clash over modern human existence, a choice whether to move forward or back along a route called progress, and a dispute over what "progress" means.
The first order of business in this war is to neutralize the terrorist threat. The next order of business should be to find new ways to reconcile the inevitability of progress with the inevitability of discomfort over progress, however defined-without alienating the uncomfortable to the point of kicking in restaurant windows or worse.
