LONDON -- The glories of globalization are taking on the specious glitter of a Faustian pact. We human beings have been promised that capitalism will never die; the threats of crashes, revolution and depression have been banished by vigorous free markets and judicious state interventions, all held in check by the same array of global rules. In return, we have offered up our political souls. No longer do we have passions about public life. We don't vote; we don't go to meetings, join political parties, or trade unions. We despise politicians, and have poisoned with our cynicism the efforts of the few who still love political life.
If this were only a simple pact -- political spirit in exchange for free markets -- then perhaps fewer people would be perturbed by it. But it's not. As we have learned, free trade can be in just about anything: children, guns, women, nuclear weapons, embryos, drugs, anthrax, body organs, explosives. Remove morality from state institutions, remove authority from state officials, and it's a jungle out there in which those with the most money and guns are the kings. That is, the stable liberal democracy that in theory accompanies capitalism excludes the majority of citizens and harbors increasingly powerful and secretive forms of surveillance by state-licensed commercial operatives. And Britain now appears more than willing to license more surveillance, more restriction of its citizens in the name of controlling Islamic terrorists. For the country was shocked to discover that Richard Reid, the "shoe bomber," is British.
There is one line of argument that has been used since Iran's revolution: Islam is simply following the ordained pattern of religious and economic development that Christianity followed a few centuries earlier. Capitalism and its necessary social relationships allow no serious deviations. In time, all societies will succumb to the mix of secularism, equal rights, universal suffrage and the dominance of the market. We in the first capitalist countries can't bad-mouth the mullahs of Iran or Afghanistan, their restrictions on women and education and free speech, because we had the repressive Catholic Church, slave-owning elites and the Spanish Inquisition.