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Mc World Mc World is the onrush of economic and ecological forces that demand integration, uniformity, and that mesmerize the world with fast music, fast computers, and fast food, with MTV, Macintosh, and McDonalds, pressing nations into one commercially homogenous global network. The force of Mc World is driven by universalizing markets; it makes national borders porous from without. Four imperatives make up the dynamic of Mc World: a market imperative, a resource imperative, an information-technology imperative, and an ecological imperative. By shrinking the world and diminishing the salience of national borders, these imperatives have achieved in combination a considerable victory over factiousness and particularism, and not least of all over their most virulent traditional form nationalism.
It is the realists who are now Europeans, the utopians who dream nostalgically of a resurgent England or Germany, perhaps even a resurgent Wales or Saxony. Yesterdays wishful cry for one world has yielded to the reality of Mc World. The most vivid example of Mc World is certainly McDonalds. I have recently heard that McDonald's had just celebrated opening its 8000 th establishment... in Germany. People are really worried about the modern phenomenon that the political science brethren like to call Mc World: global homogenization under the flag and the culture of the United States of America.
How does it then affect all the people around the globe? Because the most valuable aspects of America the ones the majority cherish the most cannot be exported. Unfortunately, this is not what the United States exports, simply because it cannot. What it can export, and does through American foreign and trade policy, is Mc World: a soulless, consumerist, dog-eat-dog philosophy that represents absolutely the worst that American culture has to offer.
That destroys the traditions in other countries: those indigenous institutions that are responsible for countering materialism and alienating individualism. I am not talking about anything radical here, just churches, mosques, hospitals, schools, social security, labor unions, youth groups all of which are feeling like they are under the axe in the name of neo-liberalism. There is something scary about the assumption in economics that something only has value if a price or cost is ascribed to it. While Mc World is not the fault of the economists, it is the intense preoccupation on resource allocation and thus resource hoarding that leads to a slow moral death. America's ideological exports are not suited to any other country: American democracy and American capitalism are far from universal in their successful applicability.
In fact, I do not think they are suited to America itself either, and I feel that America is being hurt by a monster of its own creation. Mc World is breeding a culture of indifference all over the globe, but this is especially true in the United States. Everyone is becoming far too preoccupied with winning the pole position in the rat race to worry about the rules of the game. When was the last time you heard anyone saying, I'm genuinely afraid of the state of modern society outside of Trotter or Papazian? When did we stop having philosophers out there, not just in here in the academy? In some senses, I think that is one of the central problems in American foreign policy.
When did we stop caring enough to discuss sanctions on Iraq or the abuses of the School of the Americas? When did we cede all moral authority to people only marginally more knowledgeable than ourselves and probably a lot less concerned? I feel it is our responsibility to care, because we have to create the spiritual impetus to counter Mc World. Mc World is some way can be compared to classic liberalism of Locke and Smith, however, with the flow of time things change so drastically that it will be quite hard to find similarities of liberalism of Mc World and of liberalism of the 19 th century.
Liberalism is essentially a 19 th century political viewpoint or ideology associated with strong support for a broad interpretation of civil liberties for freedom of expression and religious toleration, for widespread popular participation in the political process, and for the repeal of protectionist legal restrictions inhibiting the operation of a capitalist free market economy. In the 20 th century US, the term has come to describe an ideology with similar views on civil liberties and personal freedom issues but now supporting a much stronger role for government in regulating and manipulating the private economy and providing public support for the economically and socially disadvantaged, though still stopping well short of full socialism. In its purest form, it is not for the collective to decide what is good for all under liberalism; on the contrary, it is up to the individual to decide what is best for him / herself and do what best fills these needs. To understand classic liberalism we must focus on Locke's idea of political power and his political model as well as his economic model.
Locke defines political power as A right of making laws with penalties of Death, and consequently all less penalties, for regulating and preserving property, and of employing the force of the community, in the execution of such laws, and in the defense of the common-wealth from foreign injury, and all this only for the Public Good. This pattern of thought explains on the conceptual level Locke's main idea in the Second Treatise of Government, that everything is best for the individual rather than for the community. Locke believed that liberalism is the ideology of the middle class. They wanted to liberate individual economic activity and establish large trading areas that expanded to the nation-state and that there would be established a relationship between entrepreneurs, consumers, and the working class that produced the goods. In theory, this created a kind of perfect relationship, a society that could never cheat any of its members because they were all dependant upon one another. In practice however, this relationship was skewed, with the entrepreneurs and the producers taking advantage of the workers in order to provide goods to the consumer and edge out their competition.
Mc World matches all the requirements of the classic meaning of liberalism as of the ideology of middle class. Locke states that man must reside in the community to reap the benefits. If a man opposes this, then he faces the dilemma of giving up power for safety. In leaving the community of humankind in order to form smaller associates of civil societies, natural man gives up the power of preserving himself and humankind, giving that power to the civil society to be regulated by laws made by society. In the same way, the move into civil society requires each man to give up his right to punish or kill as an individual. Liberalism is supposed to be the theory of the middle class, but it has found itself to be most advantageous to the upper classes, just as Adam Smith had predicted a long time ago.
Upper classes have manipulated it to give themselves an even larger portion of Americas wealth. Those at the bottom favor the true application of individual rights and enlightened self-interest. Adam Smiths belief that enjoying smaller pleasures in order to maintain a fairly pleasurable existence shows enlightenment reveals current popular attitude among people towards Mc World. Moreover, that if the public act[s] in terms of enlightened self-interest, they may consider concessions to other social groups or classes rather than risk the loss of all they have. This works in a true liberalist society because there would always be the threat of upheaval by the lower classes if they were being oppressed and abused.
However, too many members of the lower class, there is no practical alternative to the situation they find themselves in now and will not partake in a revolution to overthrow a liberalist society. These groups all believe in one thing, the primacy of individuals. They still believe in the cores of liberalism and the principles upon which it was founded, especially the principle of popular sovereignty, it is just that they also believe that somewhere along the way these principles were skewed by people who knew that eventually these minority interest groups would one day speak up for equal freedoms and civil liberties. To prevent anything from coming of it, these people changed liberalism to suit them and to keep the others in a state of social inferiority. The reformists feel that individuals make the political society in which we all live, and they can change it, which would be certainly beneficial to all the parties.
It is possible to conclude that liberalism is significantly changed by Mc World. Classic liberalism of Adam Smith and John Locke undertook major changes on the level of initial logic and function of liberalism. Modern world does not function anymore in the way it should have been and we all need to realize this before taking some actions. As long as the individual believes in the society in which he is present and is willing to use those beliefs to make it better, there is always hope. Liberalism does not appear to be able to solve the biases it has let loose upon the public now, but as one President said, There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be fixed by what is right with America. Sources: Wooten, David.
Modern Political Thought: Readings from Machiavelli to Nietzsche, Indianapolis, Hacker, 1996. Neville, James. Locke and His Theories of Government, Penguin, 1995 Keith Rankin. Adam Smith and the Ethics of Economic Liberalism, 1998.
On the misuse of the invisible hand passage web web R. W. Grant. John Locke's Liberalism, 1987
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Research essay sample on 19 Th Century Civil Liberties
