rain and the rhinoceros

The McDonald’s hamburger is the first ‘universal’ food, but the people — be they from La Paz, Bombay, Cairo or Brisbane — who eat the McDonald’s hamburger also consume the American way of life with it. Equally, the adherents of the ‘world ecumenism’ canvassed by the religious ‘pluralists’ align themselves with a movement that is ‘universal’, but they too ‘consume’ a certain way of life. Not quite the American way of life itself (though it is no accident that Cantwell Smith, a Canadian, and Hick and Ninian Smart, both Englishmen, have largely based themselves in the United States), but a single, overarching way of life which has become so pervasive that ‘the American way of life’ is today simply its most prominent and developed manifestation; namely, the ‘life’ of a world administered by global media and information networks, international agencies and multi- national corporations. The dominant ideology of this new world reality declares that nations, cultures, religions, and so forth, are simply obsolete if they are maintained in their old forms as fixed and intractable ‘particularities’. It is this new world reality and its ideological concomitants (e.g. the ‘global gaze’) which both makes the McDonald’s hamburger into a ‘universal’ food and sustains the ‘world ecumenism’ advocated by the exponents of religious ‘pluralism’. It creates the episteme or ‘paradigm’ which renders both sets of phenomena intelligible.

Kenneth Surin, “A Certain ‘Politics of Speech’: ‘Religious Pluralism’ in the Age of the McDonald’s Hamburger,” Modern Theology 7:1 (October 1990) 96-98.