The 80 percent on 08.08.08

China waited for 16 years to unfurl the best of its national banners in science, technology and culture in last night’s opening of the Olympiad XIX Beijing 2008 extravaganza. China-appropriated world science and contemporary technologies are on display for the next two weeks, from the communications gadgetries, “The Nest” national stadium, “The Water Cube” aquatic sports arena, the spanking new international airport and an equally out-of-the-box metro transport system.

Ninety percent of CO-belching vehicles will be off the streets and in strategic places around the sporting event venues are camouflaged mobile ground-to-air missile launchers, in case a wayward unidentified flying object insists on intruding into the Olympic air space.

The dramaturgy on opening night is the media’s grist of admiration and criticism, awe and despair, for the next week. With famed Chinese film director Zhang Yimou orchestrating the high-profile opening festivities, the global response has been more on the side of awe and admiration.

China has this notion of its industrial development that if incoming investment can engage and impact 20 percent of the population affected by its entry that the investment would be worth incurring and protecting. It is the challenge to the socialist system to figure out how the remaining 80 percent downstream of the investment impact would benefit from ancillary industries and collected fees and revenues from the protected investment.

The classic laissez-faire capitalism of the West would just let market forces determine where and when profit and loss occur, though this is hardly practiced by any of the G-8 nations anymore. In fact, the U.S. no longer hesitates to “bail out” threatened and collapsed industries when it deems doing so necessary to serve the national interests.

It is with those 80 percent in mind that Beijing 2008 occasions a self-conscious assessment of the global landscape, now that we have finally included the Chinese and the Indians, more than a fourth of the human race, into active communion to the common weal and into the communal physiology and psychology of the global habitat.

Among people who take the shifting global paradigms seriously, there appear to be, at least, four basic perspectives, or four fundamental political positions.

First, there are those who are merely on a maintenance mood and mode; they would prefer to just extend current efforts and expend additional energies to save the current civilization and its trends—the civilization being the empire-building traditions that began with Sargon of Akkad in Mesopotamia to George W. Bush and his Dallas cohorts. They tend to be the elite of any social unit; the aristocratic, energetic and productive 20% of any given society that, at best, sustains the social process, or, at worst, exploits the 80% of the population who survive at the droppings from the elite’s advantage. They are resistant to change, protective of their achieved prerogatives, and tend to conserve conditions that preserve the status quo rather than venture into unknown and untested territories. Where the best offense is the entrenched defense, they depend on the superiority of armaments and the priority of law to stabilize the social order. Hope resides on the resilience of the status quo.

Second, there are those who think that it is already too late to save the human species. On both extremes of the political spectrum are those who either inherited a belief in Armageddon that spells the predestination of a society gone awry, or are sophisticated doomsayers who cold-bloodedly look at the ecological disasters created by 6,000 years of civilization, have mastered the art and discipline of warfare as the only mode of settling social conflicts, and have relied heavily on nonrenewable fuel to maintain its energy needs. On the latter, conflict methodologies are strategically and systematically employed to make sure that the 20 percent can access and control the remaining known and still to be discovered fossil fuels. This embraces the politics of despair, expects an imminent collapse of the industrial civilization, and waits with glee for the remnants among fittest who will survive.

Third, there are those who begin by holding the first and second positions, each recognizing of virtue of small units, opting to build high-tech tribal societies whose gated neighborhoods are urban ghettoes in any metropolitan region across the planet. Some of them recognize the virtue of clean, swift, autocratic decision-making processes, and either out of charity or efficient management, organize society on an intentional class warfare between the 20 percent privileged (the haves) and the 80 percent outsiders (the have-nots) who are subject to physical coercion, at worst, or mental manipulation, at best. In any case, this proposes a return to exclusive tribalism under parochial definitions of ethnicity, culture, geography, ideology, or just arbitrary whim and fancy.

A fourth position is an open-ended invitation to create a heretofore untested post-civilization alternative. This position trades on the fresh currency of the courage to care for Gaia, the audacity of hope clearly beyond Obama, the resurgence of the spirit of ecumené, and the effectivity of practical but strategic logistics. Beholden to the virtue and the promise of participatory democracy, this position globalizes economics, localizes politics and celebrates all cultures. It represents an emerging group, albeit, a minority that recognizes the gifts of 100,000 years of tribal identity and existence, but also recognizes the new state of interdependence and a vocation of cooperation and collaboration of a world shrunk small by the miniaturization and standardization of tools and products.

This is not an attempt to create straw creatures just so one can take pot shots at them to promote another propped-up ideological dummy. The first three positions depict naive hope and sheer hopelessness, but the fourth is fraught with complexity and formidable challenge. The maintenance of the status quo anywhere in the world is no longer tenable, and to hope so is just wishful thinking. The willingness of those holding position two to allow for the demise of a substantial number of the population is criminal. To opt for the romanticized tribal native, or the heavily defended survivor in the concrete jungle is unethical.

China on display this week provides the world an opportunity to think of the Olympic theme: “One world, one dream.” It is a time to point to a new age, of Ecozoic democracy that sees the planet belonging to all the people, that holds everyone accountable to all the decisions of human history as a responsibility of all the people, and dares to celebrate humanness as a heritage of all the people.

On the auspicious 08.08.08 in Beijing, with the 80 percent of Zhong Guo Ren (Chinese people) pathetically looking in from the outside, and 80 percent of the world population either oblivious, indifferent or angry enough to upset the gravy cart, individual and corporate reflections on the current state of the global habitat are in order, and deciding one’s fundamental perspective on the State of the World has become today’s moral imperative. Our identity in our time is already given: we are citizens of the global village. Deciding our vocation, beyond dreams of gold medals in Beijing2008, is what is finally at stake, and that race involves and engages all of us.