Uncontrollable Passion. - Review - book review

Reason, May, 2000 by Loren Lomasky

Barber's understanding of rights is no less revisionary than his take on freedom.

How can someone who isn't free be characterized coherently as enjoying rights of privacy, property, and individuality? Privacy rights incorporate, among other things, a freedom to determine who will have access to intimate aspects of one's life; property rights entail the freedom to appropriate and trade things; and whatever individuality may be, it surely includes a liberty within broad boundaries to steer one's own course rather than have it prescribed by others--including those others who happen to hold prestigious professorships at elite universities.

This confusion may not disturb Barber much, though, because rights are of derivative importance in his system. Rather than serving to constrain the scope of majoritarian decision making so as to preclude tyranny and usurpation, rights in his telling are whatever the people in their democratic assemblies determine they shall be. Strong democracy, then, is not only direct but also omnipotent. It countenances no checks set by original and inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That is why the evocations of Jefferson in these pages, although reverential and oft-repeated, ring hollow.

Barber's populism lacks a core. He exalts The People in the abstract but exhibits smug disdain for real men and women. Because they don't possess what he will deign to recognize as freedom, their choices and preferred modes of life are inauthentic and thus do not merit respect. His 1995 book Jihad vs. McWorld is largely given over to excoriations of McDonald's, not because that corporation fails to meet the demands of consumers in America and throughout the world but precisely because it does. (Barber there lets us know that his own tastes run to the superior ambience of out-of-the-way bistros.) He is similarly dismissive of the "free" market --scare quotes come with the territory-- in ideas and entertainments because its favored commodities are homogenized and declasse.

As proof that nominal freedom of entry and consumer sovereignty are illusory, Barber offers this observation: "I have a home page on the net just like Bill Gates and the Disney Corporation.[ldots]But does anyone really believe that the common capacity to produce a home page is the same thing as the common power to affect the world?" This is perhaps the most revealing depiction of strong democracy offered in these books: It is a social order in which Benjamin Barber is among the prime movers and shakers of the world!

I don't mean to suggest that Barber is dissembling when he declares a passion for democracy. Just the reverse: He is passionate to a fault. Love is elevated and ennobling but, as we all know, it can be blind. In the throes of passion one is inclined to see the beloved object as one wishes it to be, not as it really is. Love frequently is possessive, demanding reciprocation and exclusivity. When spurned it lashes out vindictively. Benjamin Barber courts an electorate that persistently rejects his embrace and instead obdurately holds onto its own affections. It thereby shows itself unworthy to be the object of devotion of so ardent a lover. But rather than acquiesce in rejection and give up the chase, the swain will turn the tables, transform the drab voter-consumer into beauteous citizen, and once and for all win her favors--if not through seduction then by rape.