ABSTRACT
Human beings are so psychologically needy, so dependent on community, so full of yearning for the blood brotherhood that commercial consumption disallows, so inclined to a sisterhood that the requisites of personhood cannot tolerate, that McWorld has no choice but to service, package, and market Jihad. McWorld cannot, then, do without Jihad: it needs cultural parochialism to feed its endless appetites. Jihad is not only McWorld's adversary, it is its child. Benedict Anderson gets it exactly right when he conceives of that driving engine of Jihad, the nation, as "an imagined political community." Which brings to the crucial question of nationalism, and its role in the struggle of Jihad versus McWorld. As a moment in the antimodern life of Jihad, nationalism suggests narrowness, antagonism, and divisiveness and seems to exist in a primarily negative form-ethnic and cultural particularism that aims at busting up the nationstate and flinging aside multicultural wholes in the name of monocultural fragments.
