The Meaning of 08/08/08

Anthony Mansueto

Dean, Communications and Humanities, Collin College

and

President, Seeking Wisdom

The games of the 29^th Olympiad of the Modern Era have begun, without a real truce, but with a public liturgy which may, centuries from now, be remembered as marking the end of modernity and of North Atlantic hegemony and the beginning of a new era in which the great spiritual traditions of the axial age are once again taken as the foundation for human civilizational progress and spiritual development.

What made this liturgy so distinctive? There was, first of all, the fact that the People’s Republic of China, led by its Communist Party, publicly owned as the foundation of its civilizational identity the three great Chinese postaxial religious traditions: Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism. This gives a content, which was previously lacking, to the party’s aim of building a harmonious society and a socialist spiritual civilization. Whatever else it may have been in the past, and still be, the Chinese Communist Party has claimed for itself the status of interpreter of these traditions and, at the same time (whether it likes it or not) made itself accountable to them for the veracity and fidelity of its interpretations –and the actions founded on those interpretations.

Second, while at the least the portions of the liturgy which received coverage in the United States seemed to simply skip over not only the most controversial periods of Chinese history (not only the tragic Cultural Revolution, but also the heroic struggle for national liberation and socialism as such), an omission which, if not simply a feature of US coverage, was shocking and strains credibility, the liturgy was deeply self-critical in a more profound way, a way which reflects both China’s status as the only mother civilization to remain a great power and the best traditions of the Chinese Communist Party. Here the critical moment was the image of a single ornately dressed woman dancing on a silk cloth above a mass of more plainly dressed performers. Our US commentators glossed this as a didactic vignette intended to convey a simple socialist principle: that the achievements of great individuals depend on the contributions of the many ordinary workers who support them. But there was much more to the vignette than a basic lesson in socialist ethics. It represents the recognition on the part of an old civilization of the tragedy inherent in the human civilizational project as such: that only a few ever rise to the commanding heights necessary to appreciate the real significance of their work, as well as an acknowledgement on the part of a mature Communist Party that socialism, however much it may have ameliorated the conditions of ordinary workers, has not really changed this ancient reality, and has thus fallen short of the hopes of the founders of the movement, who looked forward to a society in which a worker might fish in the morning, paint in the afternoon, and write “critique” (philosophy) in the evening. Humanity, capitalist and socialist, modern and postmodern, is still very far from achieving this goal and those of us who do rise to the commanding heights, and who claim understand even partially the “conditions, line of march, and ultimate general result” of the cosmohistorical evolutionary process, whether by means of modern dialectics or an ancient wisdom, bear a great responsibility to use that knowledge for the good of humanity and of the universe as a whole. Seek Wisdom and Do Justice; Pursue Enlightenment and Ripen Being.

Third, China defined for us in a way only it could the real significance of the new technologies of information and communication which have so transformed our world in the past 25 years. The liturgy we witnessed unfolded against the backdrop of the world’s largest LCD screen –a screen which was also in the form of an ancient scroll. At one point, as the dancers moved, then inscribed on the screen Chinese characters, blending the ancient art of calligraphy with postmodern information technology. All of the many different ways of encoding and conveying meaning: spoken language, images, music, dance—were formally subordinated to and ultimately transformed into a means of writing. It is in the written word that wisdom and the civilizational traditions it organizes ultimately subsist. The Chinese are in a unique position to understand this: with at least eight mutually incomprehensible variants of “Chinese” and many minority languages spoken in the Middle Kingdom, China has been united by a common written language and a common literary tradition. And of course it is written language, mediated by the new technologies of information and communication, which increasingly define our own civilization.

All this took place in a stadium which, while it has come popularly to be known as “the bird’s nest,” was originally conceived by its architects on the model of a Chinese sacrificial cauldron. This liturgy was China’s offering to the world, but also to Heaven, whose mandate it seeks in its struggle for global leadership.

A more complete interpretation of this liturgy will have to await additional information. I cannot say with precision what the ceremonies mean until I know for sure whether or not the Chinese actually omitted their modern revolutionary history. And there is of course the question of the interaction of this liturgy with its larger context: what actually transpires during the games (both politically and athletically), the tone of the closing ceremonies, and the political dynamics surrounding China’s points of moral weakness: the Three Gorges, Xinjiang, Tibet, Burma, Darfur.

But one need not be perfect to be a lead intellectually and morally –to lead spiritually. And we need not mute our criticism of China’s failures to acknowledge her return, step by step, to her historic position of global leadership, spiritual and civilizational. And so it is with deep respect for China and for the Communist Party that we congratulate them on this critical step towards global leadership and this extraordinary and beautiful contribution to humanity’s ongoing deliberation regarding fundamental questions of meaning and value. Let us pray for China as she struggles to live up to the ideal she has articulated. Can we, in the West, work a comparable alchemy, recasting our identity in a way which melds our own postaxial spiritual traditions: Dialectics, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam with the genuine contributions of scientific-technological and humanistic modernity? Can we live up to such an ideal? Can China and the West and India and all of humanity’s other civilizational centers work this alchemy together and lay the groundwork for the next steps of the human civilizational project in the context of an authentic global deliberation around fundamental questions of meaning and value? Can we leave behind the geopolitical-theological conjuncture marked by the numbers 9/11/01 and enter a new one marked by the numbers 08/08/08?

Last night, at least, I believed this was possible.