The curious and the heroic

Conservative commentators David Brooks and George Will had strikingly different reactions to the Olympic opening ceremony in Beijing. For Brooks, the demonstrations of large groups working in synchronicity evoked a sort of scientific curiosity about how a society like China's and one like ours might be fundamentally different, and what that might mean for the future of geopolitics:

The world can be divided in many ways — rich and poor, democratic and authoritarian — but one of the most striking is the divide between the societies with an individualist mentality and the ones with a collectivist mentality.

This is a divide that goes deeper than economics into the way people perceive the world.

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...experiments have been done over and over again, and the results reveal the same underlying pattern. Americans usually see individuals; Chinese and other Asians see contexts....Americans are more likely to see categories. Asians are more likely to see relationships.

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...what happens if collectivist societies snap out of their economic stagnation? What happens if collectivist societies, especially those in Asia, rise economically and come to rival the West? A new sort of global conversation develops.

The opening ceremony...was part of China’s assertion that development doesn’t come only through Western, liberal means, but also through Eastern and collective ones.

For George Will, on the other hand, the ceremonies brought to mind a more straightforward analogy to--what else?--Nazi Germany:

For only the third time in 72 years (Berlin 1936, Moscow 1980), the Games are being hosted by a tyrannical regime, the mind of which was displayed in the opening ceremonies featuring thousands of drummers, each face contorted with the same grotesquely frozen grin. It was a tableau of the miniaturization of the individual and the subordination of individuality to the collective. Not since the Nazi's 1934 Nuremberg rally, which Leni Riefenstahl turned into the film "Triumph of the Will," has tyranny been so brazenly tarted up as art.

A worldwide audience of billions swooned over the Beijing ceremony. Who remembers 1934? Or anything.

Both Brooks and Will are interested in the same basic question: the question of the threat of Chinese collectivism. But their attitudes are very different. Brooks looks to empirical research to try to understand Chinese society, and regards it as something that is historically new under the sun, an alternative--and perhaps distinctly Chinese--route to development. Will, on the other hand, is all too ready to understand China as a 21st century reincarnation of 20th century Nazi Germany. Zhang Yimou is Leni Riefenstahl; Beijing is Berlin; 2008 is 1934.

Brooks casts himself as the curious commentator who believes that the world can be understood via empirical research at the sociological and neuro-psychological level; Will casts himself as the heroic voice in the wilderness who believes that the world is best understood via historical analogies.

I'm not sure if one approach is categorically better than the other, or if there might be a third kind of sensibility that is a better choice than these two. But personally I find the Brooks outlook more prudent and more open to new possibilities--and therefore, in a world that is difficult to divine, more sound.