Peking University, November 7, 2024: The text of the Beijing Forum Consensus 2024 has now been formulated and released. This document remembers the mission statement of the first Beijing Forum in 2004 as it was captured in the Beijing Forum Declaration 2004 that articulated the raison d'être for, and the desired outcomes of, this key platform for international exchange and collaboration. Having now concluded the twenty-first iteration in this forum series, the Beijing Forum Consensus gives us a moment to reflect back on the commitment we share and the impact this series of academic congresses is having in guiding our world to a better future.
To begin with, the Beijing Forum from the outset has been an innovation among our important academic events in several different ways. First of all, as a deep and more capacious civilizational dialogue, it has moved the discussion away from the fragmenting language of international relations and its realpolitik by focusing the conversation instead on values, shared histories, ways of thinking and living, and culture in its broadest sense. Having moved the discussion from a geopolitical discourse that is usually framed in terms of often contentious economic and political issues to a civilizational dialogue, the geocultural conversation while allowing for legitimate differences has been focused on our shared humanity and the real possibility of coming together to find consensus on a common and viable sense of planetary order, a consensus on what in the classical Chinese canons is captured in the expression “seeing the world as a world” (以天下观天下). The challenge and the charge to us who have participated in the Beijing Forum over the years has been to find a pathway to global flourishing within a shared, continuous, and diverse planetary order.
Such planetary thinking is fundamentally ecological, beginning from the continuing and continuous experience of radically embedded and relationally constituted persons who in all of the economic, political, and cultural dimensions of their interpenetrating lives transverse any ostensive borders that would separate and contain them. Indeed, enriching possibilities become available in both local communal life and at a civilizational level by appreciating the fact that all boundaries are at the same time malleable horizons that conjoin as well as divide us. This is but to say that the world’s people live shared lives, imbricated as they are in all of their various interpenetrating activities: politics, economics, culture, technologies, environment, religion, security, health, and so on. In this civilizational thinking grounded as it is in the daily lives of people and thus in the nature of life itself, normativity in its broadest sense is simply optimizing the conditions for growth.
This pursuit of an optimizing symbiosis among world cultures is itself an expression of the Confucian mantra, “seeking superlative harmony rather than sameness” (he’erbutong 和而不同). In other words, in a dynamic interactive environment, harmony is brought about when each particular component unfolds itself in its unique way and to an appropriate degree such that “each shines more brilliantly in the other’s company” (xiangdeyizhang 相得益彰). An optimizing harmony, understood in these Confucian terms, serves the ultimate goal of civilizing the human experience.
Although the Forum has not focused on economic and political order, its outcomes do have immediate relevance to promoting an inclusive pluralism captured in the core values of relational equity and achieved diversity: that is, in its discourse it has advocated for a “superlative and inclusive harmony out of difference” (he 和). At the same time, it eschews the kind of “homogenizing uniformity” (tong 同) we would associate with some transcendental universalism in which the “many” reduce to a dominant and thus hegemonic “one.” Tianxia as “seeing the world as a world” assumes the primacy of vital relationality, thus relegating the nation state as a discrete, sovereign entity, to the status of a second-order abstraction from the unbounded, organic, and fluid relations that in fact constitute our world. When applied to the relations that obtain among nation states, intra-national relations within the organic, global whole, an inside without an outside, reference a radical contextuality that can be characterized in the cosmological language of contemporary philosopher Tang Junyi (唐君毅) as the inseparability of the many focal aspects from the one planetary order (yiduobufenguan 一多不分观). It describes a manifold of unique nation states within the political organism, with each state being only one among them, and with each of them construing the intra-national order from its own particular perspective. What this means for any viable conception of planetary order is that, in any particular domain, be it economic, political, or cultural, this continuity can only be constituted by the unsummed totality of those particular orders that come to constitute it. The one is many, the many one.
The dynamic of this global ecology then is the emergence of an always provisional and resolutely unsummed totality of all orders constituted by just these particular orders themselves. Said another way, absent in this model is any single, privileged, and dominant order that would override its others. The identity of each focal, holographic state emerges from its unique pattern of relations within the vital functioning of the world organism, and the living, unbounded global ecology itself is the holistic and inclusive aesthetic order (rather than a reductionistic, rationalized order) engendered by the mutual accommodation of these unique focal states.
In this civilizational and ecological mode of thinking, the inclusive pursuit of relational equity and an achieved diversity in first-order, constitutive relations allows for the continuing diversification of qualities and propensities that grow our differences into resources for mutual enrichment. Simple variety among equals stands in stark contrast to the complex diversity that can only be achieved by fully activating and appreciating the important differences we have from each other. That is, we need to acknowledge not only that we differ from each other, but that we must in fact be able to actively differ for each other, and in so doing, allow our differences to make a real difference.
When we scale these civilizational values up from personal to cultural identities, an exclusive monochrome culture existing within its own parameters has little to offer its inhabitants other than stability and continuity. Indeed, when cultural differences within a community are merely tolerated but do not produce growth, the community has variety perhaps, but very little diversity. But when in the same community and among our many different world cultures there is relational equity in their cultural identities and all of them in their differences are included and treated fairly, there is a mutual accommodation among their different ways of living and thinking in which the cultural differences interact with each other to generate novel meaning and a robust diversity.
Human beings arise above their animality not by virtue of some ontological claim about human exceptionalism, but by their historical role as innovative meaning-makers. In any ecology, not only humans, but all, always unique life forms internalize the generosity of their environments as their resource for growth. One increasingly important theme in the Beijing Forum has been to pursue social and economic development that is consistent with our need to protect our home on earth. Corollary to focusing the discussion on real environmental concerns has been the promotion of a dialogue among the youth to inspire the next generation of humankind to think in terms of long-term sustainability and to accept our shared responsibility for future generations.
One important way in which the Beijing Forum has evolved over these two decades is an increasing awareness of the potential of our advanced technologies to introduce grand transformations in the human experience. We live at a historical moment in which robots and what is being called their “artificial” intelligence or AI is on the cusp of occasioning a seismic change in the way in which we human beings live our lives. The role of robots in society is rapidly being extended from their now familiar industrial function on the factory floor to areas such as education, healthcare, transportation, security, and family life itself. Given this present trajectory, it seems clear that as robots are increasingly integrated into our lives, they are destined to become close collaborators with us in all dimensions of the human experience. While the application of such new technologies is a global phenomenon that will in some manner affect every person on the planet, the issue of how this immediate and accelerating transformation of our human narrative is going to be assimilated, interpreted, and responded to, will depend in important degree upon the specificities of different cultural contexts. That is, different ways of thinking about the meaning and ends of human life within particular cultural traditions is a significant variable in any particular population’s attitude toward this innovation, and will set the affordances and the constraints on how they deploy robots and robotic technologies. But in taking advantage of these new technologies, what we share in common as human beings is the responsibility to align our innovations with the values made available through a careful study of the humanities in such a way that these new conveniences advance the shared moral imperatives that govern the human world and its cosmic context.
The root of the Beijing Forum was set in 2004 and over the ensuing two decades it has grown therefrom. The civilizing of the human experience promoted by the Beijing Forum expressed across the disciplines as aesthetics, education, family life, morality, politics, religion, and so on lies in always situated and thus unique patterns of growth in relations, and the shared making of meaning as the product of such growth. That is, all that is beautiful, intelligent, loving, good, just, and sacred in the human experience returns us to nothing more than those modalities of human conduct that strengthen the root and conduce to growth in all of our familial, communal, cultural, and ecological relations.
Roger T. Amesis a Canadian-born philosopher and Humanities Chair Professor at Peking University, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at University of Hawaii at Manoa.
Written by: Roger T. Ames
Edited by: Zhang Jiang
